indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 32 instagram use to enhance ability in writing descriptive texts soviyah universitas ahmad dahlan, indonesia e-mail: soviyah@pbi.uad.ac.id diana rahayu etikaningsih universitas ahmad dahlan, indonesia e-mail: dianarahayuetikaningsih@gmail.com apa citation: soviyah, s., & etikaningsih, d. r. (2018). instagram use to enhance ability in writing descriptive texts. indonesian efl journal, 4(2), 32-38. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v4i2.1373. received: 15-03-2018 accepted: 29-05-2018 published: 01-07-2018 abstract: technology is changing the world we live in. it affects the way people see, think, and learn their environment and communicate with others. in the educational field, there have been previous studies revealing the positive attitudes toward the use of mobile devices and applications. however, the empirical studies of the practice of how to use a specific mobile device and application effectively are done in a limited scale. taking the experimental research method, this study investigated the effectiveness of the use of instagram application on the students’ performance in writing descriptive texts. the main research question was centred around whether there was significant difference in the ability of writing descriptive text between students who were taught using instagram and those who aren’t. involving random sampling technique, this study involved 50 students of a private high school in yogyakarta as the research sample. the empirical data were collected through pre and post tests. the data were analyzed quantitatively applying t-test computation and descriptive analysis. results of the study indicate that there is significant difference in students writing score between those taught using instagram and those who aren’t. in conclusion, teaching students writing by using instagram pictures are more effective than teaching without using instagram pictures. in other words, the use of instagram is effective in teaching writing descriptive texts. keywords: technology; instagram; experimental research; writing descriptive text. introduction english becomes one of the languages that has a big role in the world. it is known as the language of international communication. due to this status, people have been learning and trying to acquire it so that they are able to communicate with more people worldwide and use it in their daily lives as well. in indonesia, english is one of the subjects taught in schools. it’s a compulsory subject in junior and senior high schools with an annual national exam tested nationally. in elementary school level, english used to be a local content subject. now, it belongs into an extracurricular subjects group together with scouting, art, and music. in terms of the materials given, schools students are given the four skills based english material, i.e. listening, speaking, reading, and speaking. these four skills are presented in balance, meaning that no skill is given more attention than the others. talking about writing skill, it’s been long said that among the four skills taught, writing is considered the most important skill. it’s said so as it helps develop student's critical thinking skills and helps them understand and communicate complicated ideas (allyn, 2015). dantes (2013) states that writing becomes one of the most important aspects of the language skills since it helps students expand the other language macro skills without them being aware of doing it. during a writing process, in addition to having discussion with friends and or teachers, students usually need to explore their ideas by reading some articles, journals or books. the students do these activities https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v4i2.1370 soviyah & diana rahayu etikaningsih instagram use to enhance ability in writing descriptive texts 33 altogether intensively. in other words, they practice listening, speaking and reading at the same time. this illustrates how writing can help improve the other skills. besides the language macro skills learned through writing, a writing process has also been recognized as the effective way of learning english micro such as idioms, grammar and structure, pronunciation and vocabulary (sattayatham and rafanapinyowong in aryanti (2016). in sum, writing is beneficial and effective tool to learn both language macro and micro skills. unfortunately, even though writing takes an important role and becomes a fundamental skill for students’ academic life, learners commonly find it as the most difficult skill to acquire. they have difficulties in mastering it because of some factors such as vocabulary and grammar. as we know, in its process, writing demands learners to have ample vocabulary mastery, as with limited vocabulary, a learner will express only very limited ideas in her writing. it’s the same case with grammar aspect. bad grammar competency will make the writing process feel difficult to learners. based on the explanation, it can be said that vocabulary and grammar together hold a vital role in a writing process and make a writing process successful. and thus, limited mastery of the two will cause writing process troublesome. another writing difficulty faced by the students is related with the language gap between english and indonesian. the differences english and indonesian have in most of their aspects have become the source of writing mistakes among the indonesian students who are foreigners to english. not always being fully aware of the differences, majority of the students in indonesia usually make mistakes in writing because they do mixing the grammar blindly and translating the words directly. they do not pay much attention to the differences between english and indonesian when writing, however in fact, english and indonesian are a lot different in terms of structural, grammatical, terms and styles. this research began when the researcher got involved in the english learning process in a private high school in yogyakarta. during the involvement, the researcher noticed that the students found difficulties in learning writing, especially writing descriptive text, which becomes the main type of text tenth graders of high school level are supposed to acquire. to dig out the students’ problems in writing, in addition to an informal interview, the researcher made a classroom observation. the classroom observation results revealed that during the lesson the learning situation felt boring and unattractive and failed to make the students participate actively. when asked to write, the students showed reluctance and unwillingness. the learning method used was also conventional with the english textbook playing the main role. all these series of situations resulted in the quite low average score of the students’ writing test, which was under 70. meanwhile, the results of the interview complemented the classroom observation results. from the interview, it was found out that the students felt confused when writing because they did not know how to start writing and how to express their ideas. furthermore, they said they were short of motivation. they complained of the process of learning writing which they perceived as dull and boring with repeated similar ways of learning. also, they tended to fail finding the relevance of learning writing with their real lives. furthermore, they said that they wanted something new and refreshing during the learning process of writing. in spite of the apparent problems and difficulties, there was an interesting finding during the observation. it was when the researcher found out that nearly all of the students seemed to have their own hand phones. even though they did not use them all the time, especially when the lesson was running, whenever there was a chance, they used the hand phones to catch up with the up dated news and information about their friends. during the interview, when asked what application they used the most, all of the respondents said instagram, whatsapp and line. furthermore, when asked to choose one favorit application among these three, they chose instagram and agreed that they liked it more because they could show and see their friends’ photos through it. based on this indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 34 finding, the researcher tried to get the two points connected, i.e. students’ writing problems and instagram application. thus this study aims at finding out the effectiveness of instagram use in enhancing the students’ ability in writing descriptive texts. instagram literally, instagram is a portmanteau word of instant camera and telegram. these two words blend the sounds and combine the meanings into instagram. instagram is a fun and quick way to share people’s life with their friends through a series of pictures. instagram is a relatively new form of communication where users can easily share their updates by taking photos or videos (yuheng hu, 2014). using a mobile phone, instagram allows users to snap a picture and share it to others. users only need to snap a photo, then choose a filter to transform the image and keep it around forever as a memory (instagram , 2017). in addition, users can also add text to give information about the pictures or videos shared. in terms of who use it and for what function, instagram can be used by everyone all over the world in order to post any updates or information, share photos or videos, and chat or argue with other instagram users. historically, instagram was founded by duo kevin systrom and mike krieger. it was first meant to help kevin systrom work with some coding activities. together with mike krieger, it was then developed into an open, and user friendly application possibly and easily used by public. in its development, instagram had undergone various stages. officially made into public in october 2010, instagram was at first introduced as application software only for iphones. however, in april 2012, it welcomed the android world to join in. in the same year, precisely in september 2012 the gigantic facebook bought it for one billion dollars. in terms of number of the users, instagram has attracted many users and obtained fame worldwide. less than two years from its launch date, there had been over 100 million active users as of april 2012. it got more popularity as there were over 600 million as of april 2017. currently, instagram has 90 million active users monthly. seen from features it offers, based on ascpl (2014), instagram provides several features for users as to upload photos to multiple social media networks instantly such as facebook, twitter, etc; follow special interest groups like fishing, beauty, cars, sports, etc.; follow other members such as celebrities and friends; and highlight and share important events in life through photography. instagram and language learning as previously explained, instagram is interesting and appealing with its features to support people’s communication needs. moreover, instagram and its supporting features can also be used as a medium in learning process related activities (listiani, 2016). among other features of instagram that can be used to support language learning process are: 1) photo and video sharing instagram enables users to take pictures or videos using the application or to use photos/videos already existing in the user’s camera album. in addition, users can add a caption in the form of words, sentences or paragraphs in their photo/video. the caption itself can give information about what is actually going on in relation to the uploaded photo/video. if it is used in a language learning process, this feature of uploading and captioning pictures/videos is especially very relevant to help language learners learn how to write effectively in a language. in other words, intagram is useful to help learners learn writing. 2) social network instagram, like any other social network, is based on social life just like having friends or it’s called followers in instagram. in instagram, users can be friends with others by ‘following' them. through this feature, users can interact with other people trough loving and leaving comments to other users using icons provided. besides, users can also communicate using direct message feature. in addition to communication between a user-to-user based, users of instagram can also make a community. under community based setting, instagram users gather and share pictures, information and knowledge with other users who have the same passion and soviyah & diana rahayu etikaningsih instagram use to enhance ability in writing descriptive texts 35 interest, such as travelling, craft, food, sports, automobiles, and other examples of hobbies and leisure. these users of the same interest communicate constantly. this way, instagram is very possibly providing service for language educational purpose since it facilitates learners to learn how to chat and talk and speak in a language effectively. in sum, the two main features of instagram (photo and video sharing and social networking) are surely a good resource to make use of in a teaching and learning setting, particularly in learning writing. it is due to the fact that by writing captions of their uploaded pictures or videos and direct or chat messages during the instagram communication taking place, users learn to think and communicate in the form of writing their feelings and opinions to other people in an effective and systematic way. this way, it’s apparent how features of instagram have made it possible to use in the learning process of writing. method with the aim of finding out the effectiveness of using instagram to teach students writing descriptive text, this study was categorized into an experimental research. the research setting was in a private high school in yogyakarta and done in late of 2017. this research involved 6 classes of level x students who were divided into two groups namely experimental and control groups. each group consisted of 25 students. in choosing the groups, it was done randomly using random sampling technique. for the research variables, there were two variables used, namely the independent variable and dependent variable. in this case, using instagram to teach writing was the independent variable (x) and students’ writing mastery was the dependent variable (y). this research used a writing test as the data collecting technique. there were two writing tests given, i.e. a pre test and a post test. the writing test was also serving as the research instrument. meanwhile for the data analysis, it was done quantitatively by applying the descriptive analysis, and inferential analysis. to test the hypothesis, that there was significant different in students’ writing ability between those who taught by using instagram and those who taught without using instagram, it was done a t-test. as an experimental research, this study involved two groups, namely experimental and control groups. the two groups were given different treatment. the experimental group was taught by using instagram while the control group was taught without instagram. however, the material given to both experimental and control groups were the same. in term of test, prior to the treatment, both groups were given the same pre test. after the treatment, a post test of the same test instrument was given to the two groups. the results of the pre test and post test were compared to each other to find whether there was significant difference or not. in addition to two meetings as the pre-test and post-test sessions, the treatment was given four times starting from on 15th september 2017 to 13th october 2017. the learning material was based on the school syllabus, which was descriptive text. the instagram used as the learning media in which the researcher took some pictures from instagram to use during the lesson. in meeting 1 and 2 the pictures taken were related to places, while in meeting 3 and 4 the pictures used were about people and friends. the researcher acted as the teacher. she did the teaching by following the lesson plan written beforehand. after being given enough explanation about the material, the students of the experimental group were asked to do and submit the writing exercises and tasks based on the pictures taken from instagram accounts. the researcher assessed and gave feedback to the submitted writing works. the complete schedule of the treatment was presented in the following table: table 1. schedule of the treatment meeting time material group 1st friday, 15th september 2017 descriptive text experimental group 2 nd friday, 22th september 2017 descriptive text experimental group 3 th friday, 29th september 2017 descriptive text experimental group indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 36 4 th friday, 6thoctober 2017 descriptive text experimental group the pre-test and post test were given to both experimental and control groups. in both tests, the students from the two groups were asked to make a descriptive text. the text consisted of three short paragraphs. the writing works were assessed using a writing rubric results and discussion based on the research results and analysis, it was found out that there was significant difference in the writing skill between the students taught using instagram and the students taught without instagram. the following tables show the results of the research. table 2. descriptive analysis of pre-test and post-test of experimental group and control group table 2 shows difference as well as improvement of the mean score between the experimental and control groups. the experimental group’s mean score increases 16.90 points, whereas the mean of the control group increases lesser with 11.92 points. other differences are obviously found in the standard deviation score, the minimum score, and the maximum score gained. for the standard deviation, the experimental group decreases 4.04 points and the control group decreases 3.38. the minimum score in the experimental group improves 20 points and 16 points in the control group. the last, the experimental group gained 10 points for its maximum score while the control group could only reach 7 points. from these descriptive analysis results data, it can be concluded that compared to control group, the students of the experimental group have better improvement. this can be seen from the mean differences of the experimental group which is 4.98 points higher than that of the control group’s mean. besides descriptive analysis, an inferential analysis was done as well. this is done in order to know whether the distribution of the data is normal or not. in this research, the kolmogorov-smirnov method was used to test the data completed with spss 24. the inferential analysis of the experimental group show that on significance level of 0,05, the pre-test results, the probability (sig.) of the data pre-test in the experimental group is higher (0.242 > 0.05). the post-test also show the same results in which it is higher at the score of 0.782 > 0.05. thus, it can be said that the distribution data of pre test and post test in the experimental group are normal. the complete data of the inferential analysis results of the experimental group are shown through the table below. table 3. normality test of the experimental group test of normalitty group kolmogorov-smirnov decision statistic df sig. pre-test of experiment 1.027 25 .242 normal post-test of experiment .656 25 .782 normal description group experimental control pre-test post-test pre-test post-test mean 63.08 80.04 64.76 76.68 median 66.00 80.00 66.00 76.00 standard deviation 13.70 9.66 13.04 9.66 minimum score 40.00 60.00 40.00 56.00 maximum score 83.00 93.00 86.00 93.00 mean differences 16.90 11.92 soviyah & diana rahayu etikaningsih instagram use to enhance ability in writing descriptive texts 37 table 4. normality test of the control group test of normalitty group kolmogorov-smirnov decision statistic df sig. pre-test of control .612 25 .848 normal post-test of control 1.040 25 .229 normal table 4 displays the results of the normality test of the control group. based on the data displayed, it’s obvious that the distribution data of both pre test and post test in the control group are normal. this can be seen from the increase in the gained score of both tests, which is (0.848 > 0.05) and (0.229 > 0.05) respectively. another inferential analysis done is homogeneity test, which is done in order to know whether or not the score of one group has the homogeneous variance with the score of the other group’s score. the group is called to be homogeneous if the value of the fobserved (f0) is lower than f-table (ft). the result of the homogeneity test of the research is illustrated through the following table. table 5. test of homogeneity variable f0 ft interpretation pre-test 1,104 1,984 homogeneous post-test 1,001 1,984 homogeneous based on the table 5, it is found that the value of f0 is lower than ft for both variables. the value of f0 for the pre test is 1,104 and the value of f0 for the post test is 1,001. both values are lower than the value of ft, that is1.984. thus, it can be concluded that the sample of variance is homogenous. table 6. test of hypothesis t0 ttable interpretation writing score 2.24 2.01 hypothesis accepted table 6 shows results of the hypothesis testing. the t value of the observation (t0) is compared with the t value of the table (tt) in the significance level of 5%. the t value of the table is found from the degree of freedom (df). in this research, the df of the two tests were found by subtracting the number of cases (n) of the two tests by 2. after that, it is checked with the table at the significance level of 5%, which then came to the df48 value of 2.01. in finding out the value of the t0, the researcher used calculation as follow: based on the calculation results, it can be seen that the t value of the test is 2.24 and the t value of the table is 2.0. it means that the t0>tt (2.24 > 2.01). therefore, the proposed hypothesis is accepted. in other words, there’s a significant difference in the students’ writing ability between those taught using instagram and those taught without instagram. in general, indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 38 the students’ scores of experimental group were higher than that of the students’ scores of control group. it is proved by the post-test mean score of experimental group which was higher than the post-test mean score of control group at the point of 80.04 and 76.68. therefore, it can be concluded that that the use of instagram is effective in teaching students’ writing descriptive texts. conclusion in sum, instagram is an effective and suitable strategy to use in an english as a foreign language learning setting, particularly in learning writing descriptive texts. the attained outcomes of this research illustrate that after being taught using instagram, the experimental students who got the treatment of instagram media outperformed those from the control class who were treated without instagram use. references allyn, p. (2015). top 5 reasons writing is important for kids on nbc’s education nation. aryanti. (2016). the teaching of efl writing in indonesia. e-journal of graduate program of pendidikan ganesha university, 16(2). dantes, et al. (2013). the investigation of the teaching of writing at the tenth grade of senior high school (sman) 1 aikmel in east lombok. e-journal of graduate program of pendidikan ganesha university, 1. kearney, m. s. (2012). viewing mobile learning from a pedagogical perspective. research in educational technology, 20(1), 1-17. listiani, g. (2016). the effectiveness of instagram writing compared to teacher centered writing to teach recount text to students with high and low motivation (the case of eight grade students in smp kesatrian 1 semarang in the academic year of 2015/2016). journal of english language teaching. viberg, o. (2013). cross cultural analysis of users’ attitudes toward the use of mobile devices in second and foreign language learning in higher education: a case from sweden and china. computers & education, 69, 169 – 180. kearney, m. s. (2012). viewing mobile learning from a pedagogical perspective. research in educational technology, 20(1), 1-17. viberg, o. (2013). cross cultural analysis of users’ attitudes toward the use of mobile devices in second and foreign language learning in higher education: a case from sweden and china. computers & education, 69, 169 – 180. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 141 the translation acceptability of complain responding turn in shopaholic to the rescue setia adi nugraha linguistics study program, postgraduate, sebelas maret university, indonesia email: nugraha.setia.adi@gmail.com mangatur nababan linguistics study program, postgraduate, sebelas maret university, indonesia email: amantaradja@yahoo.com djatmika linguistics study program, postgradutae, sebelas maret university, indonesia email: djatmika@uns.ac.id apa citation: nugraha, s. a., nababan, m., & djatmika, d. (2019). the translation acceptability of complain responding turn in shopaholic to the rescue. indonesian efl journal, 5(2), 143-150. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v5i2.1733. received: 20-03-2019 accepted: 27-05-2019 published: 01-07-2019 abstract: the purpose of this research was to know the translations techniques, the accuracy as well as the acceptability of the translations. it was a descriptive-qualitative research with an embedded case study by using pragmatics approach. this research was done by listing the conversations between characters in the shopaholic to the rescue novel which contains turns that respond to complaining speech act. here, the source language and target language were compared to identify the translation techniques. then, the researcher and the raters assessed the acceptability of the translations by conducting focus group discussion (fgd). the result showed that there are 14 techniques used by the translator, such as established equivalent, variation, pure borrowing, modulation, explicitation, implicitation, addition, transposition, reduction, linguistic compression, literal, generalization, discursive creation, and linguistic amplification. moreover, the average rate of the acceptability is 2.94 out of 3 which means it is prevalent, in line with the norm as well as the rule of the target language. keywords: acceptability; complain responding turn; translation techniques. introduction novel, as one of literature works, usually has cultural values which the writer or the author intends to deliver to the readers. through its words and language(s), the author tries to communicate and bring the culture alive in the reader’s mind. the novel itself does not only come from the locals, but also from foreign countries. it means that the language as well as the culture are completely different. translating the words or terms related to the culture especially in literary works such as novel will be more difficult since novel, especially foreign novel, has cultural differences. hence, in order to make the target readers understand the meaning of the source text, good translation is needed. larsson (1998) said that translation is a changing and the changing itself happens in its language. according to nababan (1997), one of translator’s jobs is finding the equivalent words from the source text to the target text. novel has several items which are interesting to be selected as research items, such as communication and interaction in the novel. communication and interaction between the characters in the novel do not only consist of words, phrases, or sentences, but also consists of culture, norms, and grammar. nababan (2003) stated that although it is just a word, but it may have social or cultural meaning in a particular society. speech act as a part of pragmatics is interesting to be studied. according to yule setia adi nugraha, mangatur nababan, & djatmika the translation acceptability of complain responding turn in shopaholic to the rescue 142 (1996), speech act is an action performed through utterances. since speech act does not only have interactive values, but speech act also has cultural, norms, and grammatical structure. moreover, there are a lot of speech acts in pragmatics in which one of them is complaining speech act. this research tries to relate between the turn of complaining speech act and translations. turn, as mentioned by sacks (in mey, 2001), is the basic unit in conversation as well as a shift of direction in speaking. there are some previous studies conducted in this field. nuraeni (2008), for example, tried to compare between the translations of complaining speech act of bad boys ii movie in the vcd version and its translation in the television version. nuraeni’s research is different from this research since nuraeni (2008) focused on comparing the translations, while this study tries to know the translations quality of the turn(s) responding to the complaining speech act. another related study is written by mahesti (2016) that tried to analyze the types of complaining strategies and its translations technique. her research is different from this research because although she used a novel as the source of data and also translations as the scope of the study, but she did not focus on the turn and only concern in the complaining strategies. further, nurhasanah (2010) focused on the analysis of complaining speech act in japanese, not in english. although those research were talking about complaining speech act, but they do not focus on the translation of the responding turn of complaining speech act, its translation techniques used by the translator, and also the quality of the translation. this research uses pragmatics especially speech act theory in order to help to limit the data. moreover, this research also uses translation techniques proposed by molina and albir (2002) and translation quality assessment instrument by nababan, nuraeni, and sumardiono (2012) which consists of three aspects, namely accuracy, acceptability, and readability. yet, this research only focuses on the acceptability since this research wants to find out whether the translation is accepted or not by the target reader. here, acceptability belongs to the norm, culture, and rule of target language. method this research is categorized as descriptivequalitative research with embedded case study. it is categorized as descriptivequalitative since this research is not only collecting the data, but also interpreting the data (surrakhmand in abdurrahman & soejono, 1992). besides, this research also uses table to interpret the data (santosa, 2014). this research focuses on analyzing the use of translation techniques in translating the responding turns of complaining speech act in the shopaholic to the rescue as well as the quality of the translation, namely the acceptability. since this research focuses on the translation techniques and related to the translation of the target language, this research is called as translation research which is focused on the product (nababan, 2007). as mentioned before, the purpose of this research is to find out the translation techniques as well as the translation quality of the responding turn of complaining speech act from the shopaholic to the rescue novel. there are two data in this research, namely primary and secondary data. the primary data consists of responding turn of complaining speech acts in the shopaholic to the rescue in terms of words, phrases, or sentences. meanwhile, the secondary data are the previous related research. yet, the secondary data are not included and directly used in this research because the secondary data are only used as the references and comparison. moreover, this research uses content analysis. according to yin (in sutopo, 2006), content analysis technique is a technique used by the researcher in order to get various information in completing the research. the data, in the form of words, phrases or sentences are collected and listed. then, it is used to identify the translation techniques. the techniques can be identified by indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 143 comparing the source text and the target text. in order to know the translation quality, this study uses focus group discussion (fgd) as a method to collect the data and also give discussion facility between the raters and the researcher. the raters involved in the fgd have master degree in the translation and also expert in assessing translation qualities. during fgd, the raters and the researcher give the score on the translation according to the acceptability assessment instrument proposed by nababan, nuraeni, and sumardiono (2012). the assessment instrument has three levels of qualitative parameter. it is from 1 to 3. if the score is one, it means that the translation is not acceptable. if it is two, the translation feels natural, but few grammatical problems are detected. then, if the score is three, it means that the translation is acceptable and accepted in the target language. after that, the raters and the researcher try to identify the translation techniques, calculate the scores, and find the average score of the assessment. finally, the researchers try to find the relation between the identified translation techniques and the impact of the techniques to the acceptability of the translation. results and discussion following the translation theory proposed by molina and albir (2002), it was found that there are 14 translation techniques used by the translator in translating the responding turns. they are established equivalent, variation, pure borrowing, modulation, explicitation, implicitation, addition, transposition, reduction, compensation, literal, discursive creation, generalization, and amplification. here, the raters give the score of acceptability for each translation in which the score range is one to three. the score indicates that the translation is acceptable (3), less acceptable (2), or not acceptable (1). translation techniques used in the novel established equivalent established equivalent becomes the most dominant translation technique used in shopaholic to the rescue novel. this technique uses correct translation(s) in the dictionary. thus, it is easily found in the daily life of target language reader, such as the word ‘know’ becomes ‘tahu (verb)’, ‘well’ becomes ‘yah’, and ‘come on,’ becomes ‘ayo.’ some examples of established equivalent are presented in table 1. table 1. examples of established equivalent source text target text ‘i know,’ i say humbly. ‘i’m sorry.’ ‘aku tahu,’ kataku merendah. ‘maaf.’ ‘well, i don’t know,’ i say confused. ‘yah, aku tidak tahu,’ kataku bingung. ‘come on, minnie,’ i say, trying to sound lighthearted. ‘ayo minnie,’ kataku, berusaha terdengar ceria. variation variation, is the second most dominant technique found in in shopaholic to the rescue novel. the use of variation technique gives an impact on the translation result because variation itself is a technique of changing the linguistics element(s) which affect(s) the linguistics varieties. on the examples presented in table 2, the translator changes the meaning of the word ‘you’ becomes ‘kau’ and ‘i’ becomes ‘-ku’. table 2. examples of variation source text target text ‘but you didn’t even tell mum what you were doing! you just disappeared!’ ‘tapi kau bahkan tidak memberitahu mum apa yang sedang kaulakukan! kau menghilang begitu saja!’ ‘i don’t think dad’s running through the family fortune.’ i say warily. ‘menurutku dad tidak sedang menghabiskan kekayaan keluarga,’ kataku berhati-hati. ‘you can’t refuse refunds!’ objects the denim-clad woman. ‘kau tidak boleh menolak permintaan uang kembali’ protes wanita berbalut denim itu. setia adi nugraha, mangatur nababan, & djatmika the translation acceptability of complain responding turn in shopaholic to the rescue 144 pure borrowing pure borrowing is a technique used by the translator to borrow term(s) from the source text and put it into the target language. this technique is used to overcome translator’s obstacle in translating name of the character, city, or expressive reaction(s). in table 3, the translator puts the names of the characters on the novel in the target text without any changes, such as “suze” (st) becomes ‘suze” in the target text, becky as well as minnie. there is no addition, no changes, or reduction found on those examples. table 3. examples of pure borrowing source text target text ‘who, suze?’ luke gives a little wince. ‘siapa, suze?’ luke meringis kecil. ‘becky, this is not all your fault,’ counters luke firmly. ‘becky, ini bukan seluruhnya salahmu,’ timpal luke tegas. ‘er… minnie has no idea what it is,’ i say carefully. ‘mm… minnie tidak tahu itu apa,’ kataku berhatihati. modulation this technique is used by the translator in order to change the point of view, its focus, and/or the cognitive aspect lexically or in its structure. as it can be seen on the examples of modulation presented in table 4, the translator tries to change the point of view from the source text into the target text, such as “i don’t think” into “menurutku”, and then “are you suffering” into “membuatmu menderita ya?” table 4. examples of modulation source text target text ‘there was the sunbed in our garage,’ points out janice. ‘mesin pencokelat kulit di garasi kami,’ kata janice. ‘i don’t think dad’s running through the family fortune.’ i say warily. ‘menurutku dad tidak sedang menghabiskan kekayaan keluarga,’ kataku berhati-hati. ‘are you suffering?’ luke grins. ‘membuatmu menderita ya?’ luke menyeringai. explicitation explicitation is used to make clear an information from the source text which is still implicit in its context or situation. as it can be seen on the examples of modulation presented in table 5, on the st, there is only “did you eat anything?” while in the tt “kalian sempat makan sesuatu?” means there is an addition “sempat” which is used to help the reader knows the information on the source text clearer. table 5. examples of explicitation source text target text ‘did you drink any water? did you eat anything?’ ‘kalian minum air, tidak? kalian sempat makan sesuatu?’ ‘this is big stuff. it’s hard.’ ‘ini masalah besar. sulit.’ implicitation different from the explicitation, implicitation is a technique where the translator is trying to allow the situation indicates the information which is available in the text. in table 6, there is “it’s hard” which is translated into “sulit” and “but he’ll tell tarkie!” which is translated into “tapi nanti dia memberitahu tarkie!”. in the first example, only “hard” is translated and in the second example, “he’ll…” the “will (‘ll’)” is not found in the tt. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 145 table 6. examples of implicitation source text target text ‘this is big stuff. it’s hard.’ ‘ini masalah besar. sulit.’ ‘but he’ll tell tarkie!’ tears start pouring down suze’s face. ‘tapi nanti dia memberitahu tarkie!’ air mata mulai meleleh di wajah suze. addition addition is a technique included in amplification. addition itself has function to add more information in order to help delivering the message as well as the meaning to the target reader. in table 7, in the first example, “i’d noticed” is translated into “kuperhatikan begitu” which means there is an addition, “begitu” in the tt. moreover, in the second example, there is “kan” which is not found in the st. these additions will help the readers gain better understanding and meaning from what they read. table 7. examples of addition source text target text ‘who, suze?’ luke gives a little wince. ‘i’d noticed.’ ‘siapa, suze?’ luke meringis kecil. ‘kuperhatikan begitu.’ ‘you realize that alicia’s trying to psych you out?’ says luke, and he sounds so sure that i lift my head in astonishment. ‘kau sadar, kan, alicia berusaha mengintimidasimu,’ kata luke, dan dia terdengar begitu yakin sampai kuangkat kepalaku saking takjubnya. transposition this technique changes the grammatical part on the source text (st), such as noun in the source text becomes verb in the target text and vice versa. as it can be seen in the example below, the word “drink” changes from noun becomes “minum” in tt as verb. table 8. example of transposition source text target text ‘let’s get a drink.’ i check my phone and see a new text. luke’s on his way. ‘ayo kita minum.’ kuperiksa ponselku dan melihat pesan baru. luke sedang menuju ke sini. reduction reduction is different from implicitation because reduction itself means make it simple, decrease the word(s), or condense the words, but it does not decrease the information from the source text. as it can be seen in the example below, ‘yes, i can’, is translated as ‘tentu bisa’, which is the ‘yes’ and ‘i’ are removed. although the translator deleted several words in the target text, that is acceptable because the translation itself is common in the target reader. table 9. example of reduction source text target text ‘yes, i can. that was my strategy.’ ‘tentu bisa. itu strategiku ‘yes and one day she’ll focus properly and see exactly who and what alicia is,’ says luke dryly as he jabs the elevator button. ‘ya, dan pada suatu hari nanti matanya akan fokus dan melihat siapa dan seperti apa persisnya alicia itu,’ kata luke datar sambil memencet tombol lift. linguistic compression linguistic compression is a technique focused on condensing the linguistic elements in the target text. although this technique is usually used in interpreting or sub-titling, but sometimes translator uses it in translating a text. as it can be seen in the example below, ‘no, he’s not!’ is synthesized to be ‘tidak’ and it is understandable and also accepted in the target text reader. setia adi nugraha, mangatur nababan, & djatmika the translation acceptability of complain responding turn in shopaholic to the rescue 146 table 10. examples of linguistic compression source text target text ‘no, he’s not!’ ‘tidak’ ‘maybe you are.’ she glowers back at me. ‘mungkin begitu.’ dia balas memelototiku. literal literal is a technique used to translate the source text by translating it word by word. as it can be seen in the example below, ‘research’ in the source text is translated into ‘risetku’, and ‘for’ is translated into ‘untuk.’ table 11. examples of literal source text target text ‘i’m doing my own research.’ ‘aku sedang melakukan risetku sendiri.’ ‘we’re here for a reason, raymond, so you’d better give us what we need.’ ‘kami datang untuk suatu alasan, raymond, jadi lebih baik kau member yang kami butuhkan.’ generalization translator uses generalization to translate ‘guy’ in the source text which is translated into ‘pria’ in the target text. generalization is used if the translator is trying to express the word(s) without losing the meaning of it, but in more general term(s). table 12. example of generalization source text target text ‘guy up at red ranch?’ ‘pria yang tinggal di red ranch?’ discursive creation discursive creation can be called as a technique for translating the target text, but it is out of context. sometimes, it is used by the translator in order to catch the reader’s attention. as it can be seen in the example below, the target text of ‘melakukan apa?’ has different meaning with the source text, ‘for what?’. it is definitely out of context. table 13. example of discursive creation source text target text ‘for what?’ ‘melakukan apa?’ linguistic amplification linguistic amplification is the opposite of linguistic compression in which in the linguistic amplification, the translator adds linguistic element(s) which is not available in the source text, but appears in the target text. as it can be seen in the example below, ‘you are’ is translated into ‘kau temanku.’ table 14. example of linguistic amplification source text target text ‘you are’ ‘kau temanku’ translation acceptability acceptability is the second aspect from the three aspects of translation quality assessment proposed by nababan, nuraeni, and sumardiono (2012). in assessing the acceptability aspect, there are three range of scores, 3 for acceptable, 2 is less acceptable, and 1 for not acceptable. based on the fgd results, from 134 data and 14 translation techniques found during the research, 124 data are acceptable, 10 less acceptable, and none of them is not acceptable. techniques used by the translator bring such huge impact in the assessment. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 147 table 15. example of acceptable translation source text target text ‘she’s using it as a dolly plate.’ ‘dia menggunakannya sebagai piring boneka.’ the example above shows that the translator is able to transfer the meaning without any grammatical errors and accepted by the target reader because it feels natural, prevalent, familiar, and fulfills the norm, rules, and culture in the target reader. there are some techniques used by the translator to produce the highest score of acceptability, such as established equivalent, modulation, variation, addition, implicitation, transposition, explicitation, generalization, linguistic compression, linguistic amplification, discursive creation, and reduction. table 16. example of less acceptable source text target text ‘she’s using it as a dolly plate.’ ‘dia menggunakannya sebagai piring boneka.’ meanwhile, some techniques make the translation results get less acceptable, such as pure borrowing and literal because the translator still uses the foreign term in translating the words, phrases, clauses, or sentences. although the translation generally feels natural, but some of the words or terms used in the target text do not suit with the norm or culture in the target reader. conclusion based on the analysis, it can be concluded that there are fourteen (14) techniques found in the translation of shopaholic to the rescue novel, such as established equivalent, variation, modulation, pure borrowing, literal, discursive creation, addition, explicitation, implicitation, transposition, reduction, generalization, linguistic amplification, and linguistic compression. moreover, the most used technique is established equivalent since this technique uses terms or words based on the dictionary and prevalent with the target reader. furthermore, based on the data, the score of acceptability of the translations is 2.94 which is categorized as acceptable. this score is considered high because the highest score of acceptability is 3. based on the results, the translations of the complaining responding turn in the novel of ‘shopaholic to the rescue’ are claimed as acceptable and follow the norms as well as the rule of the target language. acknowledgement this study is supported, helped, and assisted by the research advisors, mr. mangatur nababan and mr. djatmika in order to achieve master degree in linguistics program at sebelas maret university. references abdurrahman, h., & soedjono. (1999). metode penelitian deskriptif. jakarta: rineka cipta. larsson, m. l. (1998). meaning based translation: a guide to cross language equivalence. lanham & new york: university press of america. mahesti, a. d. (2016). analisis terjemahan tuturan yang merepresentasikan tindak tutur mengeluh dalam novel little women. surakarta: universitas sebelas maret. mey, j. l. (2001). pragmatics: an introduction. oxford: blackwell. molina, l., & albir, h. a. (2002). translation techniques revisited: a dynamic and functionalist approach. meta: translators’ journal, 47(4), 498. retrieved from: http://doi.org/10/7202/008033ar. nababan, m. r. (1997). aspek teori penerjemahan dan pengalihbahasaan. surakarta: universitas sebelas maret. nababan, m. r. (2003). teori menerjemah bahasa inggris. yogyakarta: pustaka pelajar. nababan, m. r. (2007). aspek genetik, objektif dan afektif dalam penelitian penerjemahan. linguistika, 14(26), 15-23. nababan, m. r., nuraerni, a., & sumardiono. (2012). pengembangan model penilaian kualitas terjemahan. kajian linguistik dan sastra, 24(1), 39-57. nuraeni, a. (2008). perbandingan terjemahan tindak tutur mengeluh dalam film bad boys ii yang ditayangkan di stasiun televisi dan vcd (kajian strategi penerjemahan, kesepadanan makna dan http://doi.org/10/7202/008033ar setia adi nugraha, mangatur nababan, & djatmika the translation acceptability of complain responding turn in shopaholic to the rescue 148 keberterimaan). surakarta: universitas sebelas maret. nurhasanah, g. (2010). tindak tutur mengeluh dalam bahasa jepang. depok: universitas indonesia. santosa, r. (2014). metode penelitian kualitatif. surakarta: universitas sebelas maret. sutopo, h. b. (2002) metode penelitian kualitatif: dasar teori dan terapannya dalam penelitian (qualitative research methodology: basic theories and their application to research). surakarta: sebelas maret university press. yule, g. (1996). pragmatics. cambridge: cambridge university press. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 37 exploring low and high students’ perception on engaging e-dictionary in mastering vocabulary: cross-sectional survey gilang nugraha english department program, faculty of teacher training and education galuh university ciamis, indonesia e-mail: gilangnugrah24@gmail.com ratnawati english department program, faculty of teacher training and education galuh university ciamis, indonesia e-mail: ratnawatienglisheducation@yahoo.com am. surachmat english department program, faculty of teacher training and education galuh university ciamis, indonesia e-mail: surachmat08@gmail.com apa citation: nugraha, g., ratnawati, & surachmat, am. (2018). exploring low and high students’ perception on engaging e-dictionary in mastering vocabulary: cross-sectional survey. indonesian efl journal, 5(1), 37-44. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v5i1.1609. received: 24-09-2018 accepted: 26-11-2018 published: 01-01-2019 abstract: this paper is a survey study that aims at investigating low and high achievement students’ perception on engaging electronic dictionary in enhancing their vocabulary mastery. there were 30 students involved in this study consisting of 16 students as the high achievement students and 14 students as the low achievement students. they were considered as high and low students based on the result of their last examination score. questionnaire and interview were used to collect the data. the results of the study showed that low achievement students have positive perception on the use of electronic dictionary especially google translate. most of them agreed that the use of google translate helped them in improving their english vocabulary mastery because google translate is easy to use and fast in translating meaning of words. moreover, most of the high achievement students also have positive perception on the use of google translate because it is easy to use and free, it can be accessed by using their smartphones. nevertheless, the problems also found in the use of electronic dictionary especially google translate, including bad internet connection which affected the performance of google translate. it can be conluded that there are almost similar perception between low and high achievement students on the use of electronic dictionary especially google translate. keywords: electronic dictionary; google translate; low and high achievement students; perception; vocabulary mastery. introduction in recent years, technology has been used to both assist and enhance language learning. teachers have incorporated various forms of technology to support their teaching and learning process. technology enhanced language learning (tell) deals with the impact of technology on teaching and learning a foreign language. it provides a lot more flexibility and more learning styles of the learners, it can be used alongside textbooks for much more in depth learning experience, it turns the classroom into a student centred environment, and it improves motivation and develops better attitudes in students towards learning. technology continues to grow in importance gilang nugraha, ratnawati, & am. surachmat exploring low and high students’ perception on engaging e-dictionary in mastering vocabulary: cross-sectional survey 38 as a tool to assist teachers of foreign languages in facilitating and mediating language learning for their students (boonyopakorn, 2016). nowdays, technological developments with the adoption of mobile devices and applications have translated into huge opportunities for english as a foreign language (efl) especially in students’ vocabulary mastery. as a matter of fact, mobile language learning without no doubt plays an important role in enhancing students’ skills (thornton & houser, 2005). learning vocabularies via mobile device has become one of the useful ways. the emergence of new technologies, especially the internet, has resulted in a major transition in terms of business, education, science, and technological progress, all of which demand high proficiency in english. besides, the implementation of the 2013 curriculum of the 21st century in several schools requires teachers to follow the development of technology in teaching and learning process. electronic dictionary has become an important instrument for learning a language, especially for learning english vocabulary. the searching process for a word in an electronic dictionary is greatly shortened by the mobile device advantage of speed. it is better than paper dictionary which takes longer time in searching a word. looking up a word in a paper dictionary is a process of switches, first switching from a reading material to dictionary and then from the dictionary to the reading material. it is a disruptive process. now, with the help of electronic dictionaries, learners’ thought flow is no longer disrupted as much as before, especially with the function of instantly obtaining the explanation of a word. according to amiran and heshmatifar (2013, p. 36-37), an electronic dictionary is “an electronic aid that offers immediate access to reference information with a clear and direct return path to the target information”. electronic dictionary can potentially contribute to language learning and instruction. over and above the fact, electronic dictionaries play a significant role in vocabulary learning. vocabulary is an important thing to be mastered by the students in learning a foreign language, because it is a foundation for other language components such as pronunciation, spelling, meaning, and grammar. thornbury (2002, p. 16) stated that without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed. in other words, the first thing that has to be mastered by language learners in learning a language is vocabulary. in addition, students’ vocabulary mastery academically is needed in language learning, because it is essential to be successfully in reading, listening, speaking and writing. furthermore, cameron (2001, p. 72) believes that building a useful vocabulary is central to the learning of a foreign language at primary level. building vocabulary means both understanding the meanings of words and learning to decode those words. the larger the students master vocabulary, the better they perform their language. by having limited vocabulary, the students will find difficulties in mastering reading and other skills. the success of the learner in learning a language depends on not only the size of vocabulary but also vocabulary building. moreover, robbins and judge (2013, p. 166) state that perception is a process by which individuals organize and interpret their sensory impressions in order to give meaning to their environment. perception can also be seen as a cognitive process that enables us to interpret and understand our surroundings. in other words, perception basically refers to the manner in which people organize, interpret and experience ideas and use stimulus materials in the environment so that they satisfy their needs. this study is underpinned by some previous studies. the first previous study is conducted by murnani and salehi (2015). the study focused on investigating the impacts of using an electronic dictionary in learning a second language collocation. the second previous study is conducted by indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 39 rezaei and davoudi (2016). this study focused on investigating the influence of electronic dictionaries and paper dictionaries on vocabulary learning and retention of iranian efl learners. then, the third previous study is conducted by grami and hashemian (2017). the purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of paper and electronic dictionaries on iranian intermediate learners’ reading comprehension. unfortunately, research on investigating the perception onn the use of electronic dictionary is rarely found. therefore, this present study attemps to fill the gap by conducting research on investigating students’ perceptions on the use of electronic dictionary. it aims to understand whether they are interested in using electronic dictionary or not. here, the writers focus on investigating students’ perception especially low and high achievement students’ perception on the use of electronic dictionary, especially the use of google translate, in enhancing their vocabulary mastery. besides, the writers also attempt to identify problems that are commonly faced while using electronic dictionary. method this study was conducted in survey study approach. according to fink (2002, p. 1), survey is a system for collecting information from or about people to describe, compare, or explain their knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. the writer applied cross-sectional survey because the information is collected at one point in time (creswell, 2012, p. 377). this study involved 30 students of the tenth grade consisting of 16 high achievement students and 14 low achievement students. of the 30 students, 6 students involved in interview session, consisting of 3 students as the high achievement students and 3 students as the low achievement students. the students’ level of achievement was determined based on their last examination marks. students who got mark higher than classroom average marks in the last examination were taken as high achievement students and those who got mark lower than classroom average marks were taken as low achievement students. the writer chose one of prestigious senior high school in ciamis as the place of the research for some reasons. first, this school is allowed the students to use electronic dictionaries in mobile phone as a tool of learning. second, there is free wi-fi in this school that allows students to access the internet freely, so they can access sites that can help them in learning process. in conducting the study, the writers used two instruments as data collecting technique, namely questionnaire and interview. according to creswell (2012, p. 382), “questionnaire is a form used in a survey design that population in a study complete and return to the researcher”. in this study, the writer gave a closed-ended questionnaire in likert scale to the students. the closedended questionnaire in likert scale allowed the respondents to choose optional agreement choice from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree” by marking it (dornyei, 2002, pp. 36-37). beside questionnaire, the writers also used interview to collect the data. a qualitative interview occurs when the writer ask one or more participants general, openended questions and record the answers (creswell, 2012, p. 217). in this study, the writers used semi-structured interviews to allow the participant to talk in some depth, choosing their own words to help the writer develop a real sense of person’s understanding of a situation. the writers used interview to make sure and to strengthen their opinion about the use of electronic dictionary in enhancing their vocabulary mastery. the interview itself consisted of 5 questions. to analyze the questionnaire data, each section of the questionnaire was described by using frequency and percentage tables. in calculating the percentage, the writers used the formula by hatch and larazation (1991, p. 136). after calculating the frequency and the percentage, the data were then described gilang nugraha, ratnawati, & am. surachmat exploring low and high students’ perception on engaging e-dictionary in mastering vocabulary: cross-sectional survey 40 and evaluated by connecting it with the literature. last, the writer concluded the result of the questionnaire analysis. conversely, in analyzing the interview data, the writers used some components of the data analysis. those are data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing. data reduction is used to verify the important and the less important data. it is the important component of analyzing the data because the less important data will reduce the validity of the findings. the other component is data display. data display is used to interpret the data gathered. the data from the interview can be displayed with words. the data were then described and evaluated by connecting it with the literature. last, the writer concluded the result of the interview analysis. results and discussion in this part, the data from questionnaire and interview were analyzed to answer the research questions. the questionnaire consisted of 7 statements and the interview consisted of 5. the first research question focused on low achievement students’ perceptions on engaging electronic dictionary in enhancing their vocabulary mastery. the result from questionnaire showed that the first statement showed 2 respondents or 14.29% answered strongly agree that they motivated to learn english by using google translate. the second agreement chosen by the respondents was the agreement of agree. it shown by 5 respondents or 35.71% answered agree that they motivated to learn english by using google translate. the third agreement chosen by the respondents was the agreement of neutral with 6 respondents or 42.86% answered neither agree nor agree with the first statement. the last agreement chosen by 1 or 7.14% respondent was the agreement of disagree that they motivated to learn english by using google translate. the second statement showed 5 or 35.71% respondents answered agreement that they strongly agree got more english vocabularies through the use of google translate. the second agreement chosen by the respondents was the agreement of agree. it shown by 8 or 57.15% respondents chose this item. the third agreement chosen by the respondents was the agreement of neutral with 1 or 7.14% respondent chose it. the third statement showed that 2 or 14.29% respondents chose the first item “strongly agree”, 7 or 50% respondents of them chose the second item “agree”, and 5 or 35.71% respondents also gave “neutral” that google translate improved their vocabulary mastery. the fourth statement showed 4 or 28.57% respondents answered agreement of strongly agree that google translate make them easier in mastering english vocabulary. the second agreement chosen by the respondents was the agreement of agree. it shown by 5 or 35.71% respondents chose this item. the third agreement of neutral, 3 or 21.43% respondents answered neither agree nor disagree that the use of google translate makes them mastered english vocabulary easier. the last agreement chosen by 1 or 7.14% respondent was the agreement of disagree that the use of google translate make them mastered english vocabulary easier. the fifth statment showed 6 or 42.86% repondents expressed on the agreement that they strongly agree about the statement number 5. the second agreement chosen by the respondent was the agreement of agree. it shown by 8 or 57.14% repondents chose this item. the sixth statement showed 8 or 57.14% repondents answered agreement of strongly agree, and 6 or 42.86% respondents chose this item. the last statement showed that 5 or 35.71% repondents expressed on the agreement that they strongly agree about the statement number 5. the second agreement chosen by the respondent was the agreement of agree. it shown by 7 or 50% repondents chose this item. the third, item of neutral with 2 or 14.29% repondents chose this item, it means that they are neither agree nor disagree google translate can replace paper dictionary. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 41 from the percentage data, it can be said that the low achievement students have postive perception on the use of google translate as a learning tool. most of them agreed that the use of google translate helped them in improving their english vocabulary mastery because google translate is easy to use and fast in translating meaning of words. besides, they also agreed that google translate can replace paper dictionary. in addition, the writers also used interview to strengthen the data from questionnaire which involved 6 students; 3 students as low achievement students and 3 students as the high achievement students. the data from the first question “does the use of google translate allow you to master the english vocabulary easier? give your reason!”. it showed that low achievement students got more english vocabulary because google translate provided bilingual dictionary which help them to translate words in english to bahasa, so it makes them easier in mastering english vocabulary. from the second question “why do you chose google translate ?”. it showed that low achievement students used google translate because they can translate not only one words, but they can translate one sentence all at once. google translate also provides immediate access in translating words or sentences and easy to use. from the third question “what are the problems that you usually found while using google translate in the learning process?”. it showed that they got some problems, such as bad internet connection which affected the performance of google translate in translating words. besides, sometimes the translation in google translate is not appropriate. thus, it makes them to find appropriate words in other sources. the data from fourth question “if yes, how do you overcome the difficulties?” the data showed that they overcome the problems by asking their teacher if there is a mistake in grammar or in translating the meaning of the words. besides, they sometimes look for it by using other sources, such as offline dictionary or paper dictionary. moreover, the data from the last question “in your opinion, can google translate replace the paper dictionary?” showed that the low achievement students agreed that google translate can replace the paper dictionary because the use of google translate is very easy and provides immediate access in translating words or sentences. furthermore, they still need other sources to cover the shortcomings of google translate. the second research question focused on high achievement students’ perception on engaging electronic dictionary in enhancing their vocabulary mastery. the results from the questionnaire found that the first statement showed that 3 or 18.75% repondents answered agreement of strongly agree. the second agreement chosen by the respondents was the agreement of agree. it shown by 7 or 43.75% repondents chose this item. the third agreement of neutral, 4 or 25% repondents answered neither agree nor disagree that they are motivated in learning english by using of google translate. the last agreement chosen by 2 or 12.5% respondent was the agreement of disagree. the second statement showed 4 or 25% respondents chose the first item “strongly agree”, 10 or 62.5% respondents chose the second item “agree”, and 2 or 12.5% respondents also gave “neutral” that they got more english vocabulary by using google translate. the third statement showed that 5 respondents or 31.25% chose the first item “strongly agree”, 6 or 37.5% of them chose the second item “agree”, and 5 or 31.25% respondents also gave “neutral” that google translate can improve their vocabulary mastery. the fourth statement showed 5 respondents or 31.25% answered agreement of strongly agree that google translate make them easier in mastering english vocabulary. the second agreement chosen by the respondents was the agreement of agree. it shown by 7 respondents or 43.75% chose this item. the third agreement of neutral, 4 respondents or 25% answered neither agree nor disagree gilang nugraha, ratnawati, & am. surachmat exploring low and high students’ perception on engaging e-dictionary in mastering vocabulary: cross-sectional survey 42 that the use of google translate make them mastered english vocabulary easier. the fifth statement showed 9 or 42.86% respondents expressed on the agreement that they strongly agree about the statement above. the second agreement chosen by the respondent was the agreement of agree. it shown by 7 or 57.14% respondents chose this item. in brief, most of the low achievement students agree to the statement above. the sixth statement showed 10 or 62.5% respondents answered agreement of strongly agree, and 6 respondents or 37.5% respondents chose the agreement of agree. the last statement showed that 8 or 35.71% respondents expressed on the agreement that they strongly agree about the statement number 5. the second agreement chosen by the respondent was the agreement of agree. it shown by 6 or 37.5% chose this item. the third agreement of neutral with 2 respondents or 12.5% neither agree nor disagree that google translate can replace paper dictionary. based on the percentage data, the writer concluded that both low achievement students and high achievement students have postive responds on the use of google translate. they chose the google translate because google translate was easy to use and provided immediate access in translating words or sentences. it helped the students in learning english, especially in mastering english vocabulary. in order to strengthen the questionnaire data from high achievement students, the writers also conducted an interview in english and indonesias to answer the second research question. this interview involved 3 high achievement students. the data from the first question “does the use of google translate allow you to master the english vocabulary easier? give your reason!” showed that high achievement students gave positive perception on the use of google translate. it makes them easier in mastering english vocabulary because the use of google translate is very easy and faster in translating words. besides, they should not search the words one by one because in google translate they just wrote down the words that they want to translate. from the second question “why do you chose google translate?”. it showed that high achievement students used google translate because it can translate not only words but also sentences. they do not need to search the words one by one, but they just write down what words that they want to translate. furthermore, the google translate is free and it can be accessed by using their smartphones. that is the reason why they chose google translate. from the third question “what are the problems that you usually faced while using google translate in the learning process?” showed that they got some problems like bad internet connection that affected the translating process and the translation in google translate is not always correct. the data from fourth question “if yes, how do you overcome the difficulties?” showed that they overcome the problems by asking their teacher if there is a mistake in grammar or in translating the meaning of the words. besides, they sometimes look for it by using other sources such as offline dictionary or paper dictionary to make sure the translation. the data from the last question “in your opinion, can google translate replace the paper dictionary?” showed that the high achievement students agreed that google translate can replace the paper dictionary because the use of google translate is very easy, more simple and provides immediate access in translating words or sentences. meanwhile, they still need another sources to cover the shortcomings of google translate in translating words. in addition, the result from the interview showed that there were not significant differences regarding the perception between the low achievement students and high achievement students. both of them had positive perception about electronic dictionary especially the use of google translate. they agreed that the use of google translate could improve their vocabulary mastery because google translate is easy to use and provides indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 43 immediate access in tranlsating words or sentences. they just wrote down the words or sentences that they want to translate as simple as that. nevertheless, the writer also found that there were some problems in using google translate. based on the interview data from the third question “what are the problems that you usually find while using google translate in the learning process?” showed that bad internet connection is one of the problems that are usually found while usinng google tranlate. it affected the performance of google translate in translating words or sentences slower. besides, sometimes the translation in google translate is not always correct. yet, they could overcome it by asking their english teacher, and found out the answer from other sources such as offline dictionary or paper dictionary. the writer believes that from the finding, using electronic dictionary makes both low and high achievement students improve their english vocabulary mastery because of the advantages of electronic dictionary especially google translate that is easy to use and fast in translating words and sentences. besides, they got more english vocabulary by using this kind of dictionary. nevertheless, there are some problems while using google translate for examples bad internet connection and the translation in google translate which is not always correct. yet, they can overcome it by asking their english teacher or they open other sources. conclusion based on analysis, it can be concluded that there is a same perception between low and high achievement students on the use of electronic dictionary, especially google translate. most of them agreed that the use of google translate helped them in improving their english vocabulary mastery because google translate is easy to use and fast in translating meaning of words. besides, there are some problems faced by the students while using electronic dictionary. google translate is one of the online dictionary and it has to be connected to good internet connection. here, bad internet connection affected the performance of google translate which then makes the google translate translate the words slower. moreover, the google translate is not always correct in translating words or sentences and it also has a problem in grammar. yet, they can overcome the problems by asking their english teacher or they tried to find the answer from other sources, such as paper dictionary and offline dictionary. finally, due to the weakness of this study, the writer just investigating the students’ perception on the use of electronic dictionary in enhancing students’ vocabulary mastery, not in another subject. thus, it is recommended for other researchers to conduct better research in term of using various instruments, sample, and data. references cameron, l. (2001). teaching languages to young learners. cambridge: cambridge university press. creswell, w, j. (2012). educational research planning, conducting, and evaluating quantitative and qualitative research (4th ed.). london: pearson education. dornyei, z. (2003). questionnaires in second language construction, administration, and processing. london: lawrence erlbaum associates. fink, a. (2003). the survey handbook (2nd ed.). sage: sage publication inc. hatch, e., & lazaraton, a. (1991). the research manual design and statistics for applied linguistics. boston: heinle & heinle pub. murnani, z. t., & salehi, h. (2015). effect of electronic dictionary as an ict tool. english collocation learning of efl learners, 3(5), 366–373. rezaei, m., & davoudi, m. (2016). the influence of electronic dictionaries on vocabulary. knowledge extension, 5(3), 139–148. doi: 10.5539/jel.v5n3p139. robbins, p, s., & judge, a, t. (2013). organizational behavior (15th ed.). london: pearson education. thornbury, s. (2002). how to teach vocabulary. london: pearson education. gilang nugraha, ratnawati, & am. surachmat exploring low and high students’ perception on engaging e-dictionary in mastering vocabulary: cross-sectional survey 44 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 51 an analysis of borrowing word in destinasian indonesia magazine muziatun department of english language, faculty of letters and culture, state university of gorontalo, indonesia email: muziatun@ung.ac.id jefriyanto saud department of english language, faculty of letters and culture, state university of gorontalo, indonesia email: jefri.saud@ung.ac.id nurul ain halada department of english language, faculty of letters and culture, state university of gorontalo, indonesia email: haladanurul@gmail.com apa citation: muziatun, saud, j., & halada, n. a. (2021). an analysis of borrowing word in destinasian indonesia magazine. indonesian efl journal. 7(1), 51-58. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i1.3990 received: 29-09-2020 accepted: 27-11-2020 published:31-01-2021 abstract: borrowing word is a word from another language which is adopted by another language as stated by nelson francis (1965). in instances, people in indonesia tends to borrow other language in order to describe a thing or situation. nowadays, the borrowing language can be famous and familiar to others through the use media mass. this fact can influence other in order to use the foreign language than the native language. due to the fact, this research aims to analyze the borrowing language on media mass especially in tourism magazine. the destinasian magazine become the appropriate source of data in order to identified what types of borrowing word that usually occurred in media mass. moreover, the bloomfield theory (1935) become the main theory which to identified the types of borrowing through the sociolinguistics and phonetic perspective. this research uses qualitative method to analyze the data. as the result, there are 425 words which identified as borrowing word from english language in destinasian indonesian magazine. however, after checked the identified loan word in kamus istilah pariwisata there are only 25 words that can be analyze as the data which is 6 words categorized as cultural borrowing, 13 words categorized as intimate borrowing, and 6 words categorized as dialect borrowing. toward the result it can be conclude that the high tendency of using borrowing word from foreign language than the use indonesian language. keywords: borrowing words; types of borrowing word introduction although there are some previous research about the analysis of borrowing words in indonesian text (lorania, 2014; rafli, 2015; devianti, 2016; vitaloka, 2017; fitria, 2019), most of those research are relatively old. this study explores deeply the recent developments analyzing borrowing words in indonesian text. it is focused on english and indonesian language in order to understand how the internationalization of the english language has influenced currently the indonesian text through the use ofborrowings words, and it explores the idea of how english has impacted indonesian language in the era of globalization. indonesian language has been seen as a language that is undergoing rapid change (juliawan, 2017). since it borrows many words from other languages, its vocabulary is constantly developing (muziatun, 2017).the entry of some foreign culture in indonesia historically is also in line with the cultural contact between the indonesian people and other nations. (megasari, 2014). at the very first time the incident of sanskrit language influenced the indonesian language, because of the influx of hinduism in indonesia on before century. in addition, the arabic also language influenced indonesia language because of the existence of religious and trade relations in indonesian from mailto:muziatun@ung.ac.id mailto:jefri.saud@ung.ac.id https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i1.3990 muziatun, jefriyanto saud, & nurul ain halada an analysis of borrowing word in destinasian indonesia magazine 52 fourteenth century. furthermore, the dutch language also influenced indonesian language because of the colonialism they did in indonesia on 1602 century (priambodo, 2014). subsequently, from time to time the word of indonesia language always continues to be changed (fauziah & kwary, 2017). it is because some foreign languages influence indonesian language to be used a new word from some foreign language (defianti, 2016).moreover, the amount of english vocabulary absorbed into indonesian language is because english has been recognized as an international language or world language(peenycook, 2017). moreover, the indonesian society itself has been influenced by english language because of the rise of english as a language for globalization and education in the country (kirkpatrick, 2012). afterwards, veronica abru & caciora (2015) state english is the popular language and widely used by a group of people. it is sometimes borrowed by indonesian. they are thus creating a language or a new term in indonesian. furthemore, the existence of borrowing words from the language will further emphasize the word that people to convey (akmajian, 2017). because today, english is a popular language in the world, automatically it will be absorbed by other languages, particularlynowadays indonesian has been influenced by english language. the impact of english language can be seen in almost all sectors in indonesia. for example, the status of english in education has developed extensively, with english becoming a compulsory subject for indonesian students at almost all levels of education, except in the primary school (marcellino, 2015). this means that, after indonesia language and indonesian local languages, english is the most common language used. apart from this, technological progress, cultural, western economic systems, and educational influences have all impacted on indonesia (da silva, 2014). therefore it is necessary to consider how the national language has been influenced in the current era of globalization. in the other hand, according to sheperd (1995) mass media is the main source for the foreign forms to be borrowed. in addition, mass media is a key area of activities related to globalization (kraidy, 2002). it is because mass media essentially provides the ways that impact globalization, which is moving into people's lives every day. although nowadays media practices in indonesia are changing in existing indonesian society, mass media continues to hand an important role as the primary source information for indonesian citizens (irwansyah, 2011) besides that, mass media is a source of news or inspiration that has a big impact. any information contained in the mass media is fast to be known by people (lorania, 2011). sometimes there are words in the mass media that can not be understood by some people. it is because maybe those words are new words for some people. considering that, the researchers strongly believe that there are lots of borrowing words in the mass media became the cause of people do not understand several vocabularies found to be used by media. futhermore, the example of media mass that can increase the potential of borrowing language is magazine (kraidy, 2002). a lot of other language might be occurred in magazine such as french, mandarin and also english(daulton, 2010). in mentioning certain objects, ideas, or operations, we should use a lexical. linguistically lexical means a word (richard, 2018). the problem has been existed such as when someone uses words are not available in his or her language. concerning that, the information from the technology and culture makes someone realizes that there is still minimal terminologies that are provided in his or her languages. regarding that, this problem can be overcome by borrowing words from other languages. so that, this is called “borrowing word”. as stated by taylor and francis (2016) borrowing word is a word from another language which is adopted by another language. in addition, richard (2018) states borrowing word is also known as lexical borrowing that is the process of getting a word from another language that is adapted and to be used by other community. furthermore, wardhaugh (1972) states borrowing word is a process adding a new vocabulary items in a language. in the same way fauzi (2015) states states lexical borrowing is a word formation process when a word from a particular language is borrowed and used by in another language. moreover, bloomfield (1953) believed that there are three types of borrowing word that occurred in across the world. the three types are cultural, intimate, and dialect borrowing. however, bloomfield (1953) also believed that every https://www.tandfonline.com/author/daulton%2c+frank+e indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 53 borrowing word influence by interaction of people around us. which make the other language become familiar and use it in our speech. in intances, based on pre-reading in destiansian indonesia magazine from edition november/december 2017 and july until september 2018 there are many words that identified as borrowing word from other language especially english language. therefore, the case of borrowing english words in indonesia language become the interesting study to be analyzed due to the foreign language more exist than the native language. the purpose of this researchis to analyze the type of borrowing by using bloomfield (1935) theory which combines the analysis through the sociolinguistics and phonetics study in order to categorize the borrowing words. the study focuses on print media, which is widely used in indonesia, being the main form of mass media consumed by most indonesians. it also has advantages as a written medium in that written text conventions, such as spelling and typography, can provide information about how words are integrated into indonesian media discourse. this phenomenon of rapid change of indonesian language explained earlier needs to be understood further by investigating at the processes occurring in the language and the reason for these evolving, particularly the use of borrowing words. this is the focus of this current study.there is only one main problem dealing with this research which is “ what are the types of the borrowing words found in destinasian indonesia magazine based on bloomfield (1953) theory ?” method this research aims to discover the types of borrowing words that have been found from destinasian indoesian magazine. the data that have been collected from the magazine will be filtered based on kamus istilah pariwisata. therefore, all borrowing words found from the magazine will be the data. after, the researchers filtered the data, the researchers used a qualitative descriptive method in order to help the researchers to reveal analysis through description of data, while the source of collection data will be used corpus method linguistic that proposed by baker (2010). the bloomfield theory also would help the researchers to categorize the borrowing into the three types which are cultural, intimate, and dialect borrowing. the sources of data in this study is taken from destinasian indonesia magazine. the magazine become the appropriate source of data due to several reasons. first, destinasian indonesia magazine is one of popular magazines which used by many people in tourism and business sectors. second, the magazine combines various themes including adventure, culinary, cultural, and artistic that might be there many borrowing words contained in the magazine. third, destinasian indonesia magazine also contains travel videos and actual news from the world of tourism which the higher percentage of borrowing words will found on the magazine. to find out the types of borrowing words that contained in destinasian indonesia magazine, there are several steps chosen as the technique of analyzing the data as follows: the list of words that identified as borrowing words from english will be checked by using kamus istilah pariwisata written by winarno., et all (2003). every word identified in destinasian indonesia magazine which exist in kamus istilah pariwisata will be categorized as the data. after filtering the borrowing words in kamus istilah pariwisata, the researcher will analyze and divided the words into three types of borrowing by using the theory of bloomfield (1935) which are cultural borrowing, imitate borrowing, and dialect borrowin which the criterions as follow: cultural borrowing according to bloomfield (1935) the word can be categorized into the cultural borrowing due to several facts. first, the word is not originally from the native language and has related to one country or area’s culture. second, the native speaker not only borrow the word but also influence by the culture. moreover, the borrowing word in cultural way usually occurred on food, drink, style, habit, and the other activities that identified as culture from one country. intimate borrowing this type of borrowing can be identified in several evidences as cited in bloomfield (1935). first, the foreign word is more familiar or act as upper language and mostly used in the society than the native word which act as lower language. muziatun, jefriyanto saud, & nurul ain halada an analysis of borrowing word in destinasian indonesia magazine 54 in the other hand the native speaker just simply used the word as their own language. however, the native speaker have their own language in order to say the mentioned word. second, the spelling of the word both from the country that language borrowed and country that borrowing the word are almost same. dialect borrowing bloomfield (1935) stated on his study that dialect borrowing can be identified when the native speaker borrows the foreign language and there are some changing in spelling and pronunciation which adapted to the native speaker dialect in that area. in addition, the borrowing word has same meaning to the foreign language that the native speaker borrows. next, the researchers would provide the explanation of meaning each word that has been classified into the types in oxford dictionary and kamus besar bahasa indonesia. last step of analyzing the data of this research is make the conclusion of the research’s result. results and discussion the data findings are collected from destinasian indonesia magazine from edition novemberdecember 2017 and july september 2018. the magazine focus to describe the inspiring tourism destinations not only in indonesia but also around the world. through reading the magazine, there are 425 words are found and indicated as borrowing word, there are 287 words found in edition november-december 2017 and there are 138 words found in edition july-september. unfortunately, after filtering and checked on kamus istilah pariwisata there are only 23 words that can categorized as data. however, through classified the data, there are several words repeated more than twice. therefore, this research only takes one word in one sentences of the repeating word to be analyzed. based the analyzed by using the theory of bloomfield (1935), there are 5 words that can categorized as cultural borrowing which display as follows: table 1. cultural borrowing based the analyzed by using the theory of bloomfield (1935), there are 11 words that can categorized as intimate borrowing which display as follows: table 2. intimate borrowing no indonesian english edition julyseptember (times) edition november-december (times) 1. bar bar 1 (page 22) 2 (page 25 and38) 2. bathtub bathtub 1 (page 34) 3. bungalo bungalow 1 (page 71) 4. festival festival 1 (page 51) 1 (page 28) 5. hotel hotel 4 (page 107 and 111) 8 (page 4, 5, 17, 22, 30, 46, 60 and 77 6. media media 1 (page 28) 1 (page 12) no. indonesian english edition july-september (times) edition november-december (times) 1. kasino casino 1 (page 58) 2. koktail cocktail 1 (page 28) 3 (page 19, 25, and 38) 3. kroket croquette 1 (page 42) 4. spa spa 1 (page 95) 5. wine wine 3 (page 28, 38 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 55 no indonesian english edition julyseptember (times) edition november-december (times) 7. menu menu 1 (page 40) 8. poster poster 1 (page 24) 9. resor resort 4 (page 96, 99, 12 (page 27, 32, 34, 35, 36, 37,38, 40, 70, 71, 77, and 79 10. tiket ticket 1 (page 26) 11. transit transit 1 (page 92) 1 (page 101) based the analyzed by using the theory of bloomfield (1935), there are 7 words that can categorized as dialect borrowing which display as follows: table 3. dialect borrowing based on tables above, it seen that there are many words that contain in destinasian indoneisa magazine that categorized as borrowing language from english language. after classified into three types of borrowing by bloomfield (1935), the data show the intimate borrowing has most type that found in magazine. while the cultural only found 6 words and 6 words are found as dialect borrowing. in addition, this data analysis showed the tendency of using borrowing or even pure english language still high on this magazine. however, based on kamus besar bahasa indonesia there are many alternative words that the writer can use in order to replace the borrowing or english word in magazine. in instance the word like ‘agenda’ which borrowing from english language can replace with the word ‘susunan acara’ in indonesian language. another example is the word ‘menu’ in english language can replace with the word ‘daftar makanan’ in indonesian language. however, through the technique of collecting and analyzing the data, the researcher found there are several words that categorized as the cultural borrowing but exclude in tourism dictionary. in instance, the word ‘piza’ borrowing from english ‘pizza’. as cited in oxford dictionary ‘pizza’ is an italian dish consisting of a flat round bread base with cheese, tomatoes, vegetables, meat, etc. this food originally from italia and become popular in indonesia. the spell of this word is quite different both from english and indonesia language. in indonesia the spell is p-i-z-a and in english is p-iz-z-a. hence, both of pronunciation almost same. this word categorized as cultural borrowing because loan the feature from other language. another example is the word ‘rodeo’ borrowing from english ‘rodeo’. both of indonesian and english language has same spelling and pronunciation. rodeo is a public competition, especially in the us, in which people show their skill at riding wild horses and catching cattle with ropes as cited in oxford dictionary. towards the definition by oxford dictionary, it can conclude that this word borrowed the feature from other language which define as cultural borrowing. however, there is no explanation in kamus besar bahasa indonesia regarding to the definition of ‘rodeo’ which means no. indonesian english edition july-september (times) edition novemberdecember (times) 1. diskon discount 1 (page 63) 1 (page 11) 2. fasilitas facility 1 (page 52) 3. porsi portion 1 (page 51) 4. resepsionis receptionist 1 (page 64) 5. rute route 2 (page 56, 68) 2 (page 14 and 26) 6. servis service 2 (page 67) 7. teksture texture 1 (page 52) muziatun, jefriyanto saud, & nurul ain halada an analysis of borrowing word in destinasian indonesia magazine 56 this word is purely imitate from other country language. furthermore, ‘steik’ also one example cultural borrowing but exclude form tourism dictionary which borrowing from english ‘steak’. a steak (from old norse steik, “roast”) is a cut of meat (usually beef). most steaks are cut perpendicular to the muscle fibers, improving the perceived tenderness of the meat. steak is originally from america, which means in indonesia steak become the foreign food that influence by culture. this word has different spelling. in indonesia the spelling is s-t-e-i-k while in english language is s-t-e-a-k. in addition, the pronunciation also different. in indonesia the phonetic change which blend with dialect language. although, this word categorized as cultural borrowing word due to the loan of other language feature. the several words of examples as cultural borrowing above can be categorized as term of tourism. which can be explain through the history and identity in a country. therefore, the consideration to put several words which categorized as cultural borrowing based on theory of bloomfield (1935) also needed to improve indonesian tourism dictionary. in conclude, the percentage of using borrowing word from english language in indonesia environment still high especially in media printed. moreover, the using borrowing or english language in indonesia media printed can be decrease through the maintenance of indonesian language. in instance, the regulation from government to use indonesian language based on ejaan yang disempurnakan especially for media printed. conclusion after analyzing the types of borrowing by using bloomfield (1935) theory, it can be concluded that there are 425 words which identified as borrowing word from english language in destinasian indonesian magazine. however, after checking the identified loan word in kamus istilah pariwisata there are only 23 words that can be analyzed as the data. moreover, the data has been classified into three types of borrowing by bloomfield (1935). as the final result, there are 5 words categorized as cultural borrowing, 11 words categorized as intimate borrowing, and 7 words categorized as dialect borrowing. the three types of borrowing analyze through the sociology and phonetic perspective. through the analyzing the data, it can explain that the borrowing word happens not only when it loans from the other language but it also can be a name of situation which adapted from other language can also categorized as borrowing. in instance, the cultural borrowing which happen because we not only borrow the word but also the culture and the traditional way of a thing from other country. moreover, this situation also called as acculturation which types of social changing in society. acculturation is the changing of culture, which happen through different culture interaction where a culture can be received by other culture. however, this situation will not erase the original culture before. furthermore, the borrowing also can be happened through the influence of famous and familiar foreign words that used by the people of the country. the foreign language will become the upper language, when the society feel better to use it than the native language. as the result, the people do not realize they just borrow the word from foreign country. this situation categorized as intimate borrowing which bloomfield (1953) explained on his theory. besides, the borrowing also might be happened when the words is too familiar in the area. however, the pronunciation has little bit different than the real word. usually the pronunciation change by influence the way of people speak on that area or dialect. the word has same meaning but has a little bit pronunciation. bloomfield called this fact as dialect borrowing were people imitate the word but the way to pronounce influence by their own dialect. furthermost, three types of borrowing might be 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(2016). the investigation of nonverbal communication towards an autism child. indonesian efl journal, 2(2), 127-135 received: 19-05-2016 accepted: 21-06-2016 published: 01-07-2016 abstract: this research purposes to investigate the types of nonverbal communication used by an autism child during his activity in pusat layanan autis jati kersa and home, and to describe the meanings of those nonverbal communication. nonverbal communication is a communication form that delivers the message without word, written or spoken, but uses body language including facial expression, gesture, posture, eye contact, touching, clothing, space, and paralanguage. autism is developmental disorder especially in the brain that causes autism people are difficult to communicate and interact. the research employed a qualitative method to collect and analyze the data. this research involved an autism child in low function level. the data were collected through observation and interview. the result of this research shows that an autism child uses several nonverbal communication types such as body movement; gesture, posture, eye contact, and facial expression; paralanguage; and personal presentation; touching (haptics) as well. then, the meanings of nonverbal communication used by the autism child are various. each nonverbal communication used by him has its own meaning. key words: communication, nonverbal communication, autism introduction nowadays, the term of autism is commonly talked by many people in the world without exception in indonesia. according to rodriguez (2011), the numbers of autism children have increased every year. unfortunately, there are many people who are still unable to treat children suffering autism because they do not know how to treat them well. one of their problems faced by them is how to create good communication with autisms. language as the tool of communication is something that we can never stop learning. as human, we use language to communicate and exchange our thoughts, ideas, feelings, knowledge, and assumption (brown, 2000). by communication, we share information to other people and make our knowledge wider. human communication consists of two types, namely verbal communication and nonverbal communication (dodd, 2005). verbal communication is a form of communication in which the information is delivered by words, either orally or in a written form. nayab (2015) explained that “verbal communication entails the use of words in delivering the intended message. the two major forms of verbal communication include written and oral communication.” in contrast, nonverbal communication is a communication form in which the information is expressed through body language, such as gestures, facial expressions, eye contact, and posture. as stated by devito (2002, p. 134) that “nonverbal communication is communication without words.” communication will not be separated from disruption. an example ega rahayu the investigation of nonverbal communication towards an autism child 128 of disruption is caused by neurodevelopmental disorder namely autism (dodd, 2005). autism is not a disease but a developmental disorder resulting disruption to communicate and interact. this statement is supported by ernspberger (as cited in simmons, 2006, p. 4) who argued that “autism refers to neurologic disorders involving serious impairment of abilities to interact and communicate socially, and repetitive and restricted interests and activities.” actually, autism children have the ability to communicate in both verbal and nonverbal, but it is different from normal children. according to dodd (2005, p. 24), “children with autism usually demonstrate an uneven pattern of development with verbal and nonverbal communication skills and social skills being limited but visual spatial skills a relative strength.” thus, it can be concluded that autism children basically have skill to communicate in both verbal, nonverbal, and social interaction, but their ability are obviously limited. autism children are more interested in visual spatial skills. nonverbal communication is an important communication form for autism people because they are difficult to communicate each other orally. furthermore, nonverbal communication can be an alternative for them to send their messages to the others (the national autistic society, 2016). therefore, this research is aimed to analyze the types of nonverbal communication used by an autism child, and the meanings of those nonverbal communication. method this research applies a qualitative method. lodico, spaulding, dan vogetle (2010) said that qualitative research is a research method to get the data through observing, reading, and so on. here, the researcher tries to be the observer to get the data. in selecting the participant, the writer uses purposeful sampling technique. it is a sampling technique in which the writer selects individual and site based on her judgment that the participant can give relevant information needed by the writer to conduct the research. this statement supported by lodico et al. (2010, p. 34) who argued that “purposeful sampling involves the selection of participants who have key knowledge or information related to the purpose of the research.” this research conducted in pusat layanan autis jati kersa, located in sadamantra village, jalaksana district, kuningan-west java. it is the only autism service center in west java (situs resmi pemerintah kabupaten kuningan, 2014). in addition, the writer observed the autism child at his home located in bandorasa kulon village, cilimus district, kuningan-west java because the writer needs to get the data more accurately. the participant in this research is an 8 years old autism child (c) in low functioning level. low functioning level is a level of autism characterized by having iq below 70, rather use nonverbal in communication than verbal because the autism child in this level is difficult to use word in communication (miller & wilson). the writer chooses this level because the autism child has difficulty in conducting verbal communication at the time. the data in this research is taken through observation and interview. the first method is observation. observation is one of the methods to get the information in the real setting by observing the object directly. as stated by creswell (2012, p. 213) that “observation is the process of gathering open-ended, firsthand information by observing people and places at a research site” (creswell, 2012, p. 213). in indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(2) july 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 129 this research, the writer observes the nonverbal communication used by an autism child during his activity in the autism service center and his home. nonparticipant observer role is used by the writer in conducting the observation. nonparticipant observer is an observer who observes the participants through visiting a site and recording note without doing the participants’ activities (creswell, 2012). the field notes proposed by creswell (2012) was used by the writer in doing this observation. the field notes is shown below. table 1. observational field notes observational field notes setting : observer : role of observer : time : length of observation: name of participant : no. types of nonverbal communication behavior 1. body movement gesture -- posture -- facial expression -- eye contact -- 2. paralanguage -- 3. personal presentation clothing -- grooming -- touching/haptics -- 4. proxemics -- the second method in collecting the data is interview. gay et al. (2012, p. 386) explained that “an interview is a purposeful interaction in which one person obtains information from another.” here, the writer asks some questions about the meanings of nonverbal behavior in a communication of autism to the teacher in autism service center and autism child’s parents. unstructured interview is employed in this research. gay et al. (2012, p. 386) described that “unstructured interview is little more than a casual conversation that allows the qualitative researcher to inquire into something that has presented itself as an opportunity to learn about something at the research setting.” moreover, the writer uses oneon-one interview type in conducting the interview. it is a process to collect the data through asking some questions to the only one participant and recording it (creswell, 2012). the examples of question asked to the interviewee are suggested by royal college of psychiatrist (2011). those questions are as follows: table 2. interview questions by royal college of psychiatrist (2011) 1. how do <name’s> feelings show in his/her expression and gesture? not just angry/frightened but also shy, puzzled? 2. what is his/her usual facial expression-across the range from a poker-face to one that is vivacious and expressive? 3. how far does s(he) uses his/her eyes to give messages? 4. how much does s(he) use gesture (especially to describe actions/things)? 5. what are the meanings of nonverbal communication (smiling, laughing, pointing, etc.) used by him/ her? ega rahayu the investigation of nonverbal communication towards an autism child 130 in analyzing the data, there are several stages done by the writer in this research (miles & huberman, 1994), including reduce the observation result based on the research questions, classify the observation result based on the appropriate types, transcribe interview result from audiotape recording into text data, translate the interview data, and describe the result of interview with the observation result. results and discussion as stated previously, observation and interview were used by the researcher to collect the data needed. observation conducted for 12 times; 8 times in pusat layanan autis jati kersa, and 4 times in autism child’s home. the activities done by the participant at pusat layanan autis jati kersa are conducted in three days a week (monday, wednesday, and friday) and took an hour for each session (1 p.m to 2 p.m). these activities done in different rooms, namely behavioral therapy room and sensory therapy room. behavioral therapy room is a room where the participant learns, such as arranging puzzle, matching colors, matching shapes, etc. on the other hand, sensory therapy room is a room where the participant trains their sensory by doing several fun activities, such as swing, playing football, etc. regarding the types of nonverbal communication used by an autism child during his activity in pusat layanan autis jati kersa and his home, the writer found three types of nonverbal communication used by the participant, namely body movement, paralanguage, and personal presentation. besides, the writer also found the meaning of each type of nonverbal communication as explained below. 1. body movement a. gesture the gestures used by the participant (c) to express his feeling and the meaning of those gestures are explained below. clap hands clap hands indicates that the participant is happy. clap hands occurs when the participant successfully does a task given by the teacher, puts the ball to the right place, or arranges the puzzle well. besides, it can also show autism characteristic. the participant always claps his hand when playing at home. point swing point swing indicates that the participant wants to play it. this gesture is used when the participant is going to play the swing in sensory therapy room. hold the head hold the head occurs when the participant learns. it indicates that he feels bored. hit the table hit the table indicates that the participant is happy. this gesture happens when the participant finishes the task given by the teacher. besides, hitting the table also indicates that he is not patient. clap a pen this gesture demonstrates one of autism characteristics. the participant always claps anything that he holds, including pen. high five the high five demonstrates a reward because he finishes the task successfully. slap forehead slap forehead is shown by the participant when he does the task from the teacher. it indicates that he feels bored. indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(2) july 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 131 clap a drawing book it shows one of autism characteristics. this gesture occurs when he learns and holds a drawing book. this gesture always used by him every time he holds a drawing book. pointing the toes this gesture demonstrates that his toes are sick. it shows after the participant plays swing. wave hands wave hands demonstrate that the participant says good bye. it is used by the participant when he will go home. put his palm on his cheek this gesture indicates that the participant tries to think. it occurs when he puts the color cylinders to the place. move his hands to his face this gesture shows that the participant is enthusiastic. it occurs when he learns in behavioral therapy room. push a fish picture the participant pushes a fish picture when the teacher gives the picture to him. it indicates that he refuses it since he does not like it. it usually happens because he knows that it is one of difficult pictures to be arranged by him. push the teacher’s hands push the teacher’s hands indicates that he refuses the teacher’s action. this gesture occurs when he plays the teacher’s hand phone and the teacher will take it or when the teacher tries to take a guitar played by him. push the squares the participant pushes the squares when he finished arranging them. it indicates that he realizes that he has finished arranging it. close the big jar this gesture occurs when the teacher takes some balls from the jar. it indicates that he does not like it. he wants the teacher only focuses on him. clap a plastic glass this gesture is one of autism characteristics. he always claps anything that he holds. the participant claps the plastic glass after he drank it. give milk to the observer this gesture indicates that the participant asks for help to open the milk. he gives the milk to the observer when he will drink it. stick the thumb and index finger this gesture shows a punishment for naughty children. the participant sticks his thumb and index finger when his grandmother scolds him. give a snack to the observer this gesture indicates that the participant asks for help to open the snack. it occurs when the participant will eat the snack. push the observer’s friend push the observer’s friend demonstrates that the participant refuses the observer friend’s action. this gesture shows when she tries to take his color pencil. clap his chest and mouth clap his chest and mouth indicates that the participant feels sad. this gesture used by the participant when he watches television. clap a hanger it shows one of autism characteristics. the participant claps a hanger when he holds it. clap a pillow ega rahayu the investigation of nonverbal communication towards an autism child 132 this gesture shows one of autism characteristics. it occurs when the participant lies on a chair. b. posture the postures used by the participant (c) to express his feeling and the meaning of those postures are explained below. shake head shake head indicates one of autism characteristics or bad habit of the participant. the participant often uses this posture in his activities, such as when he learns, prays, and plays. besides, shaking head indicates that the participant does not understand yet about the instruction. walk on tiptoe walk on tiptoe as one of autism characteristics indicates bad habit of the participant. this gesture is often used by the participant when he walks both of in autism service center and his home. lean forward posture learn forward posture shows that the participant pays attention. this posture occurs when the participant prays with the teacher before going home and when his grandmother gives suggestions to him. c. facial expression the facial expressions used by the participant (c) to express his feeling and the meaning of those facial expressions are explained below. smile smile used by the participant indicates that he is happy. this facial expression occurs when the participant finishes his task from the teacher, operates the teacher’s hand phone, arranges the puzzle, plays a guitar, drinks milk, does high five, and when the teacher says that the participant is smart. close the eyes close the eyes indicates that the participant feels annoyed. the participant closes his eyes when he wants to go home, but the time is not over yet. besides, it can also indicate that he feels shy. it occurs when he realizes that he is noticed by the observer. hide his face by his hand while screaming or laughing this facial expression shows that the participant feels shy. it occurs when he realizes that he is noticed by the observer. close the eyes and bite his teeth while screaming and hitting his chin it indicates that the participant feels annoyed or angry because his wish is not fulfilled. it occurs when he wants to play, but he is asked to learn by the teacher. hide his face by his hand while laughing hide the face while laughing indicates that he feels shy. this facial expression shows when he realizes that he is noticed by the observer. d. eye contact look at the teacher this eye contact indicates that the participant responses the teacher’s instruction. the participant looks at the teacher when his named is called and when the teacher shows something such as picture, squares, etc. look aside look aside shows one of autism characteristics. the participant indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(2) july 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 133 always looks aside when he looks something such as looks at the observer and watches television. 2. paralanguage the paralanguage used by the participant (c) to express his feeling and the meaning of those paralanguage are explained below. raving raving shows one of autism characteristics. this paralanguage used by the participant in his activities, such as when he learns, prays, plays, and when he is asked to sit in another swing. raving with high volume raving with high volume indicates that the participant feels annoyed or does not like the teacher’s action. the participant uses this paralanguage when he wants to go home but the time is not over yet, when the teacher asks him to put the squares in the right place, when the toy is taken by the teacher, and when the teacher gives the color cards. raving while pushing the teacher raving while pushing the teacher indicates that he refuses the teacher. this paralanguage occurs when the teacher sits beside him in swing. the teacher should not sit beside him. scream scream indicates that the participant feels excited or happy. it occurs when he plays swing and when he sees cars. besides, it also indicates that the participant does not like something or refuses. it occurs when the teacher takes another pictures, when the toys is taken by the teacher, when the teacher gives many squares that should be arranged by him, when he takes the squares from the teacher, and before he starts to learn because he still want to play. scream while hitting his chin scream while hitting his chin demonstrates that the participant is angry or feels annoyed. this behavior happens when the toy is taken by the teacher because he should learn. laugh laugh indicates that the participant is happy. it occurs when the participant plays swing and when he hits the piece of wood by hammer. cry cry indicates that the participant feels sad. it occurs when his grandmother says that he will be sent to bandung. when his grandmother says it, he will remember about his mother who lives in bandung. 3. personal presentation a. touching (haptics) take the teacher’s hands take the teacher’s hands indicates that the participant asks for help. he takes the teacher’s hands when he plays swing, arranges the puzzle, and sees a puzzle that fall. besides, it indicates that the participant asks to pray. at the autism service center, the teacher teaches that they should pray before and after learning. this touching occurs when the participant starts to learn or wants to go home. hug the observer this touching shows that the participant is happy and feels comfort. the participant hugs the observer when she helps him to wear his jacket. shake hands ega rahayu the investigation of nonverbal communication towards an autism child 134 this touching indicates that the participant is farewell. the participant always shakes hands when he will go to home. based on the result stated above, it was clear that the participant uses many nonverbal behaviors in communication. those nonverbal behaviors are included into three types of nonverbal communication, namely body movement, paralanguage, and personal presentation (fujishin, 2009). then, the meanings of nonverbal communication used by him are various since each nonverbal communication has its own meaning. the body movement used by the participant consists of gesture, posture, facial expression, and eye contact. as stated by fujishin (2009) that body movement consists of gesture, posture, facial expression, and eye contact. the examples of body movement used by the participant are when he refuses something he will push it, when he feels angry he will close his eyes, and bite his teeth while screaming and hitting his chin, etc. on the other hand, there are some body movements used by the participant that show autism characteristic such as shaking head, walking on tiptoe, clapping hands, clapping thing that he holds, and looking aside (shore & rastelli, 2006; john, 2015). the participant shows that he has been good enough in eye contact such as when his name is called by the teacher or his grandmother, he will look at him or her. besides, the participant has understood how to use expression. he can express his feeling or emotion through expression and gesture, such as when he is happy he will smile, when he feels shy he will close his face, and when he is angry he will scream. the participant also used paralanguage type, such as raving, scream, laughing, and crying. raving indicates autism characteristic because he is difficult to speak and it is repetitive behavior (shore &rastelli, 2006; john, 2015). so, it does not have meaning. but, sometimes his raving has meanings such as raving with high volume indicates that he is angry or annoyed, and raving while smiling indicates that he is happy. then, the personal presentation used by the participant is touching (haptics). the touching that is often used by the participant is taking the people’s hand indicating that he needs help. furthermore, there are some nonverbal communication used by the participant that have different meaning from normal, such as hitting the table demonstrates that the participant is happy and impatience, slapping forehead indicates that he feels bored, moving his hands to his face demonstrates that he is enthusiastic, stick the thumb and index finger demonstrates a punishment, clapping his chest and mouth indicates that he feels sad, closing the eyes indicates that he feels annoyed, hiding the face by the hands while screaming and laughing indicates that he feels shy, closing the eyes and biting his teeth while screaming and hitting his chin indicates that he feels annoyed or angry, screaming while hitting his chin indicates that he is angry or feels annoyed, etc. conclusion basically, autism child is a child who has a developmental disorder in terms of communication and interaction. the participant in this research is an autism child in low function level. so, he rather does nonverbal communication than verbal because he is difficult to communicate orally. based on the result of this research, the autism child uses several nonverbal communication types such as body movement; gesture, indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(2) july 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 135 posture, eye contact, and facial expression; paralanguage; and personal presentation; touching (haptics) well. the nonverbal behaviors shown by him are the form of desire to interact with us. then, the meanings of nonverbal communication used by an autism child are various. each nonverbal communication used by him has its own meaning. references brown, h. d. 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(2020). teacher talk in young learners’ classroom interaction. indonesian efl journal, 6(1), 89-96. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v6i1.2651. received: 19-03-2019 accepted: 21-06-2019 published: 01-01-2020 abstract: in english foreign language (efl) class, learners are not familiar with english in daily conversation, except several learners who have background in using english in their home or environment. therefore, teacher plays a significant role as facilitator to introduce them into the language. this study aims to describe teacher talk and students talk as well as the way teacher talk is realized in young learners’ classroom interaction by applying a descriptive method. the fifth grade classroom interaction at a primary school in majalengka was recorded as the sample of the analysis. the data gained through observation was in the form of transcribed interaction. besides, interview was also used to collect the data. to analyze the data, this study employed flanders interaction analyzed categories. upon analyzing the data, the following findings are identified; 1) accepting feeings (2 occuraces); 2) encouragement (17 occuraces); 3) accepting or using ideas of learners (54 occuraces); 4) asking questions (142 occuraces); 5) lecturing (49 occuraces); 6) giving directions (53 occuraces); 7) criticizing learners behaviour (9 occuraces); 8) learners-response (151 occuraces); 9) learners-initiation (7 occuraces); and 10) period of silence or confusion (8 occuraces). finally, the use of similar activity for too long will make young learners feel bored, therefore, teacher needs to provide variety and more meaningful activities. in this case, teacher can use various techniques to stimulate learners’ response. besides, creating group discussion will give more opportunity to the learners to talk and learn from their peers. keywords: teaching speaking; teacher talk; students talk; young learners. introduction as mandated in act no. 19 of 2005, teaching english to young learners shall be incorporated into the elementary school curriculum as local content from grade 6. in indonesia, english is taught as a foreign language. in english foreign language (efl) class, learners are not familiar with english in daily conversation, except several learners who have background in using english in their home or environment. therefore, teacher plays a significant role as facilitator to introduce them into new language. to teach english to young learners optimally, teacher needs to create an interactive teaching strategies in language classroom. interaction is one of the important factors for language teachers. interaction in language class is different from other interactions. in language classroom, interaction is a process of learning language (husnaini, 2005). the interaction in the form of communication and language helps young learners to become competent and effective learners. this view is generally emphasized on childhood education. thus, most of the teachers consider talking to and with young learners as an important part of their works. brown (2001) says that a teacher-centered or teacher-fronted classroom is appropriate for some of classroom time. teacher responsibility is to keep the interaction flowing smoothly and efficiently. not surprisingly, classroom observation has revealed that teachers tend to do most of the talking. nunan (1989) explains that in some language classroom, it has been shown that the teachers talk up to 89 percent of the available time, it is more dominant than learners talk. those statements means that learners talk is less than teacher talk. it provides learners with less opportunity to speak. realizing that teacher domination in english foreign language class is not very good for improving learners’s ability to talk in the targets language, teachers has to silpia rahayu & trisnendri syahrizal teacher talk in young learners’ classroom interaction 90 manage their talk into appropriate proportion. it means that they have to make learners talk more. learners talk can be influenced by kinds of teachers questions. learners will probably say “yes” or ”no” if teacher does most displayed questions so that the learners will not be supported by the teacher to talk in english. young learners’ classroom interaction young learners’ classroom in this study refers to the classroom where the learners are in the age between 5-11 years old. in young learners’ classroom, the interaction cannot be predicted by teachers because they have special characteristics. cameron (2001) states children are often more enthusiastic and lively as learners. if the instruction cannot be understood by them, they may become so much silent or, in contrast, they can also become chaotic. they will have got an activity even when they do not really understand why and how. however, they also lost interest more quickly and are less able to keep themselves motivated on the task they find difficult. teachers have to manage young learners classroom more than adult learners classroom. they have to try to build intimate relation with them so the students feel that their teacher are friendly. however, teachers have to make them dicipline, to make them know that they must follow the rules. they try to use the target language to talk and to teach as well as praise them. it is in line with wood (1986) who says in some classrooms, children scemed relatively active and responsive. they talked a good deal, asked questions and contributed to discussions. in others, children seemed rather shy, unwilling to tell something and ignore, and do not want to give information to the teacher. they spoke little and often in short phrases or even monosyllables. therefore, children who are familiar with classroom values and practices tend to be more confident in their interaction with others in the classroom. teacher talk teacher talk is a kind of language used by the teacher for instructions in the classroom. ellis (1986) explains that teacher talk is a special language that teachers used when addressing l2 learners in the classroom.. ellis (1986) also says that the language the teachers address to l2 learner is treated as a register, with its own specific formal and linguistic properties. referring to the description, it can be concluded that teacher talk is a special language used by teacher for instructions in the classroom with its own specific formal and linguistic properties. teacher has many roles in young learners classroom; the teacher’s speech occupies a special place in the language classroom. for example, teacher plans activities designed to facilitate learners’ acquisition and use of the target language. at the same time, however, teachers use the target language as the principal means for giving instruction and directions, modeling target language patterns and giving feedback on learners’ performance. method descriptive qualitative approach was applied in this study. according to moleong (2002), qualitative research is aimed at understanding the phenomena of what is experienced by the subject of research, such as behavior, perception, motivation, holistic actions, qualitatively using words and language in natural contexts by using various scientific methods. in this study, the teacher’s perception as the subject of study was investigated to know how her teaching and learning process in her class. as stated by creswell (2012), qualitative is used to understand a phenomenon by focusing on the total picture rather than breaking it into variable. results and discussion this section presents the results of the study dealing with the data taken from the observation. the results cover the percentage of teacher talk and learner talk as well as the way teacher talk is realized in young learners classroom interaction. table 1. observation result steps taken by the teacher steps taken by the students  good morning students!  how are you today?  what day is today?  what month is it?  ok, now continue the lesson. about what? about will, will apa itu will?  good morning mam!  i’m fine thank you, and you?  monday  july  akan indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 91  subject itu apa aja?  kalau akan, akan udah dikerjain belum?  tomorrow itu apa?  next week, apa lagi?  any questions?  jadi tinggal hanya menambah apa?  ok, what does it means? shinta shall not go to the mosque tomorrow  do you understand?  ok, please interrogative itu apa? kalimat?  apa aja public places kemarin?  my favourite food apa?  can you do that?  apa birthday?  apa artinya give?  apa movie?  can you do that?  are you sure? do you understand?  i, you, we, they, she, he, it  belum  besok  next year, next month, next day  no  not  shinta tidak akan pergi ke mesjid besok  yes  tanya  mosque, parking lot, school, church  makanan kesukaan  yes  ulang tahun  memberi  film  yes  yes teacher talk teacher talk was categorized into seven steps, namely accepting feeling, encouragement, accepting or using ideas of student, asking questions, lecturing, giving directions, and criticizing. accepting feeling this category occured when teacher responded learners’ act, accepted and clarified learners’ behaviour or attitude with non-threatening manner. in the observation, the teacher used this act when learners did negative behaviour, seemed uncomfort, and moved from one seat to another seat. teacher accepted their attitude with nonthreatening manner by humourous way. the activity was realized as many as two occuraces. encouragement there are many ways in giving the rewards for learners, for example by saying good, great, that is right, and excellent. those are categorized as immediate reward. in this context, the teacher liked to give immediate verbal praises to the learners who can answer the given questions, such as ok, good, and great. based on paul (2001), it is best to make comments that are directed at the work itself rather than at the child. teachers can be warm to the learners and show an interest in what they have said, written, or drawn, rather than saying “well done!”. it can be seen in the observation that teacher also used this way when she gave a comment for one of the learners that have written something as a good example for her classmate. the teacher also used nonverbal praise, such as giving applause to encourage learners. encouragement can also be used to motivate learners when they are ashame to answer question. it was shown in the observation when teacher tried to motivate learners with humourous way. the teacher used praise verbally and nonverbally. verbally, the teacher used words, such as good and great. non-verbally, the teacher gave applause to the learners. young learners, especially in the lower grade, like to be given reward. it will motivate them to learn. the activity was rated 17 tallies. accepting or using ideas of the students by accepting or using ideas of the learners, teacher clarified, built, interpreted, summarized, rephrased, and developed ideas suggested by learners. when teacher rephrased the learners’ ideas, the ideas are still recognized as being learners’ contributions. accepting or using ideas of the students was rated 54 tallies. from the observation, it can be analyzed that the learners imitated the teacher’s words as a response to the teacher’s initiation. asking questions there are two types of teacher’s questions which were investigated in this study, referential and display questions (long & sato as cited in xiou yan, 2006). referential questions refered to the quetions which the teacher did not know the answers and could gain various subjective information, while display questions refered to the ones that teacher knows the answer. it was silpia rahayu & trisnendri syahrizal teacher talk in young learners’ classroom interaction 92 aimed to bring learners to think about the subject under discussion. such questions that the teacher asked usually for comprehension checks, confirmation checks, or clarification type based on observation transcript. the activity was realized in young learners classroom interaction as many as 142 occuraces. the types of question asked by the teacher are presented in table 2. table 2. question types question types acts total displays 5, 7,9, 13, 17, 21, 25, 27, 33, 39, 41, 43, 45, 47, 49, 51, 53, 58, 62, 64, 70, 74, 78, 80, 82, 86, 88, 90, 98, 102, 104, 106, 108, 110, 112, 114, 116, 118, 120, 124, 126, 130, 132, 134, 136, 138, 142, 146, 148, 150, 152, 154, 156, 158, 160, 162, 164, 167, 169, 171, 174, 176, 178, 181, 184, 186, 190, 192, 194, 196, 198, 200, 204, 208, 212, 214, 216, 218, 220, 222, 224, 228, 230, 232, 236, 238, 241, 246, 251, 253, 255, 272, 274, 276, 278, 286, 288, 294, 300, 302, 306, 308, 310, 314, 317, 321, 325, 331, 335, 337, 339, 341, 343, 347, 349, 357, 359, 365, 371, 373, 375, 377, 379, 382, 388, 390, 392, 394, 396, 398 132 referential 66, 76, 94, 118, 128, 210, 262, 296, 367, 386 10 total 142 lecturing in lecturing, the teacher gave facts or opinions about the contents or procedures, expressed her own ideas, and gave her own explanation about something related to the content of the lesson. in this case, the learners were recognized as young learners, so the teacher used as much as new language as possible to provide language input. this was the way teacher lecturing learners. teacher sometimes pre-teachers structures that would be studied later or simply offers learners more opportunities to learn new expressions in context. this was used to increase their own vocabulary based on the topic discussed. the activity was realized as many as 49 tallies. the classroom activities tried to make a routine to the learners to use english as the instructions and language classroom. the teacher usually used songs to introduce the context and the topic that will to be taught. actually, game can also support learning, however, the teacher used asking-answer questions as a game because of the big number of learners. it made the learners interested in involving in the learning activity. in addition, the teacher sometimes used role play, for example between the aplicant and the manager, asking for biodata and spelling name. giving direction the teacher plays many roles in the class. the first role is as a director in the classroom setting, while teacher’s direction is very important to keep the teaching and learning process flowing smoothy and efficiently. this category was mostly used by teacher in the lesson. in the observation transcript, negotiation and repair played a part in the classroom interaction. the teacher tried to make her directions more understanable by using repitition. the teacher chose more common words, simple grammar structure and short sentences to make the learners involved to the material context. giving direction was realized as many as 53 tallies. (obs. 25/07/19, acts no. 45, 64, 80, 84, 106, 126, 140, 150, 158, 160, 167, 169, 171, 180, 181, 184, 196, 204, 220, 238, 259, 262, 266, 296, 300, 302, 304, 306, 321, 325, 341, 353, 355, 357, 363, 367, and 379). besides, the teacher also directed the learners to manage the class by using intructions. (obs. 25/07/19, acts no. 96, 152, 162, 206, 212, 230, 243, 250, 345, 359, 361, 379, 384, and 400). criticizing there are two types of criticizing, namely criticizing the learners’ behaviour and criticizing unacceptable learners’ response. the teacher criticized learners’ behaviour, such as rejecting learners’ behaviour, trying to change the nonacceptable behavior, communicating anger, displeasure, and annoyance with what the learners are doing (obs. 25/07/19, acts no. 68, 132, 136, 202, 272, and 329). the teacher also criticized some unacceptable learners’ response; corrected learners’ pronunciation (obs. 25/07/19, acts no. 255 and 317). the teacher used humourous way to criticize so that learners did not feel unmotivated. as shown in the transcript (obs. 25/07/19, acts no. 351), the teacher criticized a learner who wanted to answer question which was indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 93 always the same and asked other learners to involve in the discussion “jangan miras ah, bosen (smiling), coba yang lainnya, reza, no 1, kalo kamu bisa no 1, pr itu gampang, nilainya seratus.” the activity was rated as many as 9 tallies. the realization of teacher talk in young learners’ classroom interaction is summarized in table 3. table 3. the realization of teacher talk in young learners classroom interaction category tallies total accepting feelings ii 2 encouragement iiii iiii iiii ii 17 accepting or using ideas of learners iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii 54 asking questions iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii ii 142 lecturing iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii 49 giving directions iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iii 53 criticizing learners behaviour iiii iiii 9 period of silence or confusion iiii iii 8 total 326 learner talk in addition to teacher talk, the category of flanders interaction analysis also includes learner talk. based on fiac, the category of learner talk can be divided into two, response and initiation. learners-response response is the first category of learners talk. the learners usually responded the teacher in a limited or available previously shaped answer. it can be identified from the analysis that the learners usually answered the teacher’s questions or responded to the teacher’s directions by imitating what the teacher has said in chorus. the language produced by the learners was simple sentence or one-word response, except several learners who were asked individually by the teacher to make a sentence. the activity was realized as many as 151 occuraces. obs. 25/07/19, acts no. 6, 8, 10, 12, 18, 20, 22, 24, 28, 30, 31, 32, 34, 36, 38, 40, 42, 44, 48, 50, 52, 54, 59, 61, 62, 63, 65, 67, 71, 73, 75, 79, 81, 83, 85, 87, 91, 99, 103, 105, 107, 109, 111, 113, 117, 121, 123, 125, 127, 135, 137, 143, 145, 147, 149, 151, 153, 155, 157, 161, 170, 175, 177, 179, 185, 187, 189, 191, 193, 195, 199, 203, 205, 209, 213, 215, 217, 219, 221, 223, 225, 227, 229, 231, 235, 237, 239, 240, 242, 247, 252, 256, 258, 263, 265, 267, 269, 271, 273, 275, 277, 279, 281, 283, 285, 287, 289, 291, 293, 297, 299, 303, 305, 307, 309, 313, 315, 316, 318, 320, 324, 326, 332, 334, 336, 338, 340, 342, 344, 346, 348, 358, 360, 366, 368, 370, 372, 374, 376, 378, 380, 383, 387, 389, 391, 393, 395, 397, 399, and 401. learner-initiation initiation is another category of learners talk. it occurs when the learners respond to the teacher’s direction with learner’s own ideas, opinion, reactions and feeling. after the observation, it can be concluded that the learners did some initiation, such as when they wanted to get the teacher’s permission to go somewhere and when the learners gave opinion about the topic discussed. same as learner-response, the languages which were produced in the initiation also one-word or just simple sentence. (obs. 25/07/19, acts no. 56, 57, 132, 245, 260, 261, and 381). the activity was rated 7 tallies. the realization of teacher talk in young learners’ classroom interaction is summarized in table 4. silpia rahayu & trisnendri syahrizal teacher talk in young learners’ classroom interaction 94 table 4. the realization of learners talk in young learners classroom interaction the precentages of teacher talk and learner talk the total precentage of teacher talk that has been observed was 66% of the classtime. it means that the teacher did most of the talking during the lesson. the teacher used more indirect influence (accepting feeling, encouragement, accepting or using ideas of the learners, and asking questions) than direct influence (lecturing, giving directions, and criticizing). it was 44,6% and 21,4%. meanwhile, the percentage of learner talk was about 32%. the learners mostly did response than initiation. based on the proportion of teacher talk time, it can be inferred that teacher’s domination emerged on the lesson. it occured because the learners as young language learners very depended on the teacher as the model of language. in other words, the teaching and learning process was still teacher-centered. the distribution of teacher talk influenced learner talk. the proportion of 66% and 32% may not be an ideal proportion. however, the teacher always gave an opportunities for learners to talk by giving questions or directions. therefore, the learners could explain or produce some words orally related to the topic discussed. it could reduce teacher talk time. the teacher gave opportunity to the learners to talk by asking questions. he asked easier questions first then followed by more difficult questions. in addition, the teacher also gave directions to the learners to mention simple sentence based on the given topic. based on the transcript, it was found that the teacher did her best to build an interactive classroom interaction. the teacher encouraged learners to talk by using various ways. it can be concluded that the teacher categorized as an interactive teacher. the teacher was not totally used english to teach children. she scaffolded them to the pattern being taught by translating new word and speaking slowly. she also tried to give routine so that they can directly respond to the teacher by using english at least in the english class. based on those description, it can be inferred that generally, the teacher applied the principle of interactive class. the use of concrete things and songs to introduce new material was meaningful for young learners and engage them to the context being taught. she also supported her teaching by humourous way, both in criticizing and explaining the material. it was done by the teacher because she wanted to create intimate relation with the learners, supported the learners to respond, and also created warm and friendly environment so that children can enjoy the learning process and involved in the classroom interaction. as previously mentioned, this study conducted tallying and calculating procedures to get the percentage of teacher talk and learners talk. the total tallies are drawn in table 5. category tallies total learners-response iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii i 151 learners-initiation iiii ii 7 total 158 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 95 table 5. number of tallies for each category teacher talk learners talk category tallies total category tallies total accepting feelings ii 2 learnersresponse iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii i 151 encouragement iiii iiii iiii ii 17 learnersinitiation iiii ii 7 accepting or using ideas of learners iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii 54 asking questions iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii ii 142 lecturing iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii 49 giving directions iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iiii iii 53 criticizing learners behavior iiii iiii 9 period of silence or confusion iiii iii 8 total 326 158 conclusion the realization of teacher talk in young learners’ classroom interaction was identified as follows; 1) accepting feeings (2 occuraces); 2) encouragement (17 occuraces); 3) accepting or using ideas of learners (54 occuraces); 4) asking questions (142 occuraces); 5) lecturing (49 occuraces); 6) giving directions (53 occuraces); 7) criticizing learners behaviour (9 occuraces); 8) learners-response (151 occuraces); 9) learnersinitiation (7 occuraces); and 10) period of silence or confusion (8 occuraces). the proportional of teacher talk and learner talk is 66% : 32%. it means that the teacher did most of the talking on the lesson. here, the learners mostly used response than initiation because the teacher usually initiated the interaction. references brown, h. d. (2001). teaching by principle: an interactive approach to language pedagogy. london. prentice hall. silpia rahayu & trisnendri syahrizal teacher talk in young learners’ classroom interaction 96 cameron, l. (2001). teaching languages to young learners. cambridge: cambridge university press. creswell, j. w. (2012). educational research: planning, conducting and evaluating quantitative and qualitative research. new york: pearson. ellis, r. (1986). understanding second language acquisition. oxford: oxford university press. husnaini. (2005). teacher talk and learner talk in classroom interaction: an interaction analysis to an english language class at smpn 29 bandung. unpublished thesis. state islamic university of sunan gunung djati bandung. nunan, d. (1989). understanding language classroom: a guide for teacher initiated action. london: prentice hall international. paul, d. (2001). teaching english to children in asia. longman asia elt. wood, d., & wood, h. (1986). teaching and talking with deaf children. london: john wiley and sons ltd. xiou-yan. (2006). teacher talk and efl in university classroom. retrieved from www.asean-efljournal.com/thesis_ma_xiou.pdf. http://www.asean-efl-journal.com/thesis_ma_xiou.pdf http://www.asean-efl-journal.com/thesis_ma_xiou.pdf indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 121 exploring efl teachers’ understanding and beliefs in intercultural communicative competence in indonesian context nisa hasanah department of english education, school of postgraduates, indonesia university of education, bandung, indonesia email: nisahasanah17@upi.edu wawan gunawan department of english education, school of postgraduates, indonesia university of education, bandung, indonesia email: aawagun@gmail.com apa citation: hasanah, n., & gunawan, w. (2020). exploring efl teachers‟ understanding and beliefs in intercultural communicative competence in indonesian context. indonesian efl journal, 6(2), 121-126. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v6i2.3380. received: 09-02-2020 accepted: 01-03-2020 published: 01-07-2020 abstract: as the result of globalization, the english language teaching goals in many countries have shifted from communicative competence to intercultural communicative competence (icc). however, among the small number of studies on icc in indonesia, most of them focus on icc in the tertiary level which shows there is a gap of work in the secondary level of education. thus, this article attempts to seek the truth about senior high school teachers‟ understanding and beliefs as well as revealing their attempts in promoting icc in the classroom. the case study was employed with two novice teachers as participants through interview and document analysis. the finding shows some interesting facts that both teachers viewed concept of icc similarly as cross-cultural understanding in a way both to overcome misunderstanding and culture shock. both teachers believed that language is culture bound, yet, only a very small trace of cultural aspects were shown in the documents; and as they viewed culture as dynamic, yet, the content being taught mainly covered static domain of culture. keywords: byram’s five savoirs; culture education; intercultural communicative competence. introduction responding to the world demands, english language teaching goals in many countries have shifted to intercultural communicative competence henceforth known as icc (abdullah & lulita 2018). there are myriad of studies addressing the issue of icc in english language teaching all over the world. however, in indonesia, among the very limited number of works in icc, mainly the studies focus on tertiary level of education such as in widodo & kusumaningputri (2018), abdullah & lulita (2018), and tedjakusuma (2013). hence, it indicates that there is an absent of work in icc especially primary and secondary level of education. therefore, this study attempts to gain insight and explores efl secondary teachers‟ understanding and beliefs towards the concept of icc in indonesian context. grounded from byram‟s theory (1997), intercultural communicative competence in the context of english for foreign language classroom is the students‟ potentiality to scrutinize cultural knowledge/perspectives, practice/behaviors, artifacts of native speakers and non-native speakers‟ group, and how to deal with them in a non-judgmental way. in this way, the icc takes up intercultural knowledge, attitudes, and skills that can assist students in directing, examining, associating, interpreting, and evaluating cultural matters represented through social practices and artifacts from various perspectives (kusumaningputri & widodo, 2018). in similar stance, icc is also conceptualized as the communicative ability to understand and accommodate the communication between/among people of different cultures in a way that it bridges them both linguistically and culturally with the capacity of relating to others effectively (mirzaei & forouzandeh, 2013; deardoff, 2006). byram (1997) described intercultural competence in terms of several savoirs. there are five savoirs, which also known as intercultural competence model in which he identified knowledge, skills, and attitudesessential for successful communication across cultural mailto:nisahasanah17@upi.edu nisa hasanah & wawan gunawan exploring efl teachers’ understanding and beliefs in intercultural communicative competence in indonesian context 122 boundaries. those savoirs are savoir (expert knowledge), savoir etre (intercultural attitudes and beliefs), avoir-apprendre/faire (intercultural discovery and interaction), savoir-comprendre (skills of interpreting and relating), and savoir s’engager (critical cultural awareness). within the context of icc in the foreign language learning, the learning goals is not at the level of native speaker of the target language, instead, the students should follow the norm of „intercultural speaker‟ (byram, 1997; kramsch, 1993; risager, 1998). in other words, icc pushes students to go beyond their own culture and the target language culture and open them to the various cultures to prepare them to live and to communicate in global world (kiss, 2017). method this study aims to answer to the following research questions: 1) what do efl teachers understand about icc? 2) what are teachers‟ beliefs about the concept of intercultural communicative competences in the context of english for foreign language in indonesia? 3) what are the teachers attempts to promote intercultural communicative competences in their classroom teaching practice? this study employs the qualitative case study since the data is in form of words, phrases, and sentences. it is also because the qualitative case study is descriptive in nature and related to human behavior of how people behave, feel, think (gillham, 2000), in this case are related to teachers‟ cognition. the participants of this study were efl teachers of senior high school. in order to gather the data, a semi-structured interview and document analysis are conducted. prior to data collection, the teachers were handed the consent form to verify their willingness to participate in the study. the data of interview were analyzed based on the qualitative data analysis of interview model (merriam, 2009; cohen, manion, morrison 2001; gillham, 2000). upon the completion of the data collection, the interview data from the participants were transcribed and coded based on several themes. all the coded data were then read repeatedly and the data relevant were formulated to answers the three proposed research questions. as for the document analysis, the data were used to complement and support the findings in the interview and to prove whether the teachers‟ sayings are in line or contradicted with the evidence from formal document. results and discussion the findings and discussion are presented consecutively and organized based on its relevance with the research question. therefore, they will be broken down into three parts following three research questions. what do efl teachers understand about icc? in order to collect teachers‟ understanding about icc, the teachers were asked several questions. in addition, to engage teachers to the topic, the interview questions were preceded by several questions about culture content in english language education. those questions including the teachers‟ view of the way culture and language related, the teachers‟ view about the importance of culture in english language education, and the way teachers view icc in english curriculum in indonesia. in response to these questions, the teachers nearly had similar responses. they both knew that culture is related to language teaching in a way that language is a product of culture and that the foreign status of english in indonesia makes it necessary for students to know how to use the language in cultural context. they also contended that culture is important in language teaching to prepare their students for future needs such as studying abroad, travelling, or even working in foreign company. the teachers were aware that cultural content was there in government‟s curriculum, although one of them said it was there in textbook while she did not really aware of it in curriculum document. being asked about icc, surprisingly both teachers had one voice. both teachers defined icc exactly the same as “cross cultural understanding” or ccu. ccu was what came to their mind since it was one of the culture-related subjects being taught in english teacher training program even though they were graduated from different college. one of the teachers said that: “… icc may be still unfamiliar to me, however when i was studying in the college, i have learned about cross cultural understanding which may be similar to what my lecturer taught me so that culture shock and misunderstanding can be avoided. …. cross cultural is across culture, it is something about introducing and understanding cross culture…” when the teachers said icc was ccu, it was partially true because those two words of intercultural and cross cultural are sometimes used interchangeably as they both address the indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 123 same issues such as overcoming misunderstanding in communication as well as overcoming cultural shock. however, both terms are not similar in nature as they were delivered from different perspectives. lustig and coester (1993) had identified the distinction between two terms. intercultural competence, they said, is interpersonal communication across culture. further, they stated that it is “a symbolic, interpretative, transactional, contextual process” which indicated the engagement people with culturally different background. meanwhile, cross culture was defined as the study of ideas or concepts within many cultures for the purpose of comparing one culture to another and comparing interaction among people with similar cultural background to those from another culture (lustig & coester, 1993). as for the teachers, from their answers, both teachers did not seem to familiar with and know about icc. however, they did know something about the topic, and they found it necessary in language teaching. these findings are approved and harmonious with what bektas-centikaya and celik (2013) found in turkish efl preservice teacher that they did not have adequate knowledge about icc as it was not included in their teaching preparation program. it is also in phase with finding of atay, kurt, camlibel, ersin, & kaslioglu (2009) from 503 teacher participants which stated that teachers in turkey are aware of the importance of culture in language teaching even though not many of them directly integrate culture into their teaching practice. thus, in both turkey and indonesia as non-english speaking country, icc is seemed rather unfamiliar in concept yet important in meaning, at least to these two teachers. what are teachers’ beliefs about teaching intercultural communicative competences in the context of english for foreign language in indonesia? this question aims to dig deeper into the teachers‟ beliefs about icc and developing students‟ icc. these teachers‟ beliefs are important because belief is operated as filters and affect the way teacher view his/her new teaching situation so that teacher can shape teaching goals covering the needs of new situation (pajares, 1992). in this part, the questions were ranging from the way teachers see culture, what culture to teach, what do teachers emphasize in culture teaching, what are their goals in teaching culture, how do they set their students position and their roles in the classroom, their views about possibilities in putting icc as language learning goals, and how do icc is reflected in their beliefs and their document such as syllabus, lesson plans, textbook, and teaching materials. answering to the question about the view of cultures, the teachers agreed that culture is dynamic, and that language is the product of culture. therefore, language and culture are seen inseparable. this statement is in line with kiss & weninger (kiss & weninger, 2013, 2017; weninger & kiss, 2013) which view culture changes over time. from this point of view, it is such disagreement when culture is taught only in form of facts without giving students certain skills to overcome those changing facts. regarding the question of what cultural contents they teach, the teachers have different perspectives along with their different reasonings. the first teacher focus on teaching students several cultural facts such as typical foods and habits of people from english speaking country. in addition, cultural difference is also taught in form of comparing west culture and east culture in essence that students should appreciate those differences. “…for example, about european countries or other country aside from indonesia, what are their favorite foods, their favorite activities which might be different from indonesians.” “…so as teacher we should teach and show students which are western culture, which are eastern culture, and which are indonesian culture ….this is the way to prevent students from being discriminative when confronting differences, we should respect and bear in mind that those are other people’s cultures.” the first teacher‟s domain of teaching culture revolved around cultural knowledge and facts. the teacher saying about teaching culture in form of cultural facts conceptualized as the savoir of byram (1997), that is the students‟ knowledge about culture. however, even though the teacher stating about appreciating differences, it cannot be categorized as the next savoir because the activity that the teacher used to illustrate are only about the activities of sharing knowledge and facts such as knowledge inquiry about certain topic of culture through presentation method. yet, if we compare this statement with kiss & weninger (kiss & weninger, 2013, 2017; weninger & kiss, 2013), this kind of culture teaching is actually not regarded as icc for it contradicts the dynamic culture trait. when the first teacher was asked to clarify about her focus of culture teaching, the teacher nisa hasanah & wawan gunawan exploring efl teachers’ understanding and beliefs in intercultural communicative competence in indonesian context 124 reformulated her answer that she focused on british, american, and australian culture, and later indonesia. the teacher also contended that language teaching goals was non-other than native speaker‟s alike and it is the undeniable fact. this statement is contradicted with the icc‟s principal in which the goal of icc is not to accomplish native speaker alike because there have been bias whether in order to communicate with people from other culture one needs the level of native speaker alike in terms of accent and fluency. it is because what is emphasized in icc is how the communication can bridge people of different culture to communicate effectively and to vanish the barrier between them (byram, 1997). later, in the document, it was found that the teacher‟ goals of teaching were purely about linguistic competence and national examination preparation. there was no trace of cultural aspects mentioned in both syllabus and lesson plan. thus, we can say that the teacher takes culture in english language teaching as something additional and unofficial rather than full awareness of culture importance in language teaching. from here, the inconsistencies in between statements were found where the first teacher‟s statement was disproved with her earlier statement about the importance of culture in efl teaching for students. in setting the students‟ position and teacher‟s position in the classroom, both teachers viewed that learning should be student-centered and that they take roles as facilitators. their views are supported by their illustration of classroom activities where students are mostly assigned to work in group to do some cooperative learning activities such as two stay two stray, etc. this view somehow is one of the characteristics of icc learning where teacher role is not as the sole source of knowledge. instead, students should actively engage in learning activities and in knowledge inquiry. on the other hand, the findings in the second teacher indicate that she has rather different perspective with the first teacher in some parts. she believes that in teaching culture, what should be emphasized is the students‟ own culture. because lately, students tend to be more devoted to other culture and tend to have no pride over their identities. the teacher believes that her students are more knowledgeable in other culture because of their exposure through internet and travelling. “as the technology is getting more and more modern and advanced, sometimes students know more about other cultures, but they forget about their own culture. so, for me, i have to implanted the local culture…so that they will understand that learning english does not always mean the students have to focus on the target language culture, but they have to be aware that they have their own culture and they should not put their own culture aside.” she also added that in addition to two cultures being taught, she also teaches the other culture apart from local and target language culture. this way, she tried to engage the students more to the world and directed their focus not only to the target language culture. this is also in harmony with the principal of icc according to byram (1997) which states that in icc, students are not only taught the target language culture, but also culture of their own, and culture other than target language culture. in addition, the second teacher‟s goals in culture teaching accentuates on moral, local wisdom, how to put oneself appropriately in various culture, and how to become an openminded person when facing differences. her goals of culture teaching were supported by the syllabus and lesson plan which stated not only linguistic competence as the sole goals but also shaping the students‟ way of thinking, values, and selfesteem. in shaping the students‟ way of thinking the goals consist of becoming open minded, learning to see things from different perspectives, and exploring hidden message. in shaping the students‟ values, the goals consist of learning from other culture and appreciating creative solution. finally, in shaping the students‟ selfesteem, the learning goals are being able to be diplomatic and being proud of who they are. these goals stated in the syllabus and lesson plan become the documented prove that she integrated icc into her teaching practice. in the possibility of making icc as the fundamental aim of language teaching, both teachers were agreed that it is possible with certain conditions. the first teacher opined that it is possible if the students‟ linguistic competencies are adequate. while the second teacher, contended that it is possible if given additional time for teaching english and possible if the students‟ linguistic competencies are adequate. she also added that cultural topic is interesting because it gives her more to discuss with students in the classroom. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 125 what are the teachers attempts to promote intercultural communicative competences in their classroom teaching practice? the last part of the findings and discussion is about to answer the last research question. in this part, the findings were not obtained through observation even though the question is implied to the teachers‟ practice. by incorporating into teaching means that it is about what teachers said about what they did with cultural content, how do they accommodate cultural learning, what kind of activities to do with cultural content, and how often the culture is being taught. the first teacher explained one of activity that she had with her students. "for example, the topic is about the tour guide. i divide students into several groups. each group will be given a different theme to be explored. for instance, i gave the uk as the topic for the first group, they should gather information regarding the uk….as for the tour guide, the information needed such as local foods in the uk and interesting facts about uk….from there, students should write about the uk, and they should present their group works." this activity reflects the teacher‟s firmness with her statement in student-centered learning. however, in ideal icc stance, learning culture should not stop there on students' discovery, the teacher should also mediate students to make meanings through discussions and relate students' culture with the culture being learned (norton, 2000). being asked how often she involved culture into her teaching, she honestly confessed that she did not do cultural teaching so often. she will discuss culture only if the topic or material is really related to the culture such as tour guide topic, traveling topic, and studying abroad topic. it seems that the teacher still treat culture separately from the language learning. this finding is parallel to byram's finding in 2013. he found that even though many teachers aware of culture are inseparable, many of them still treat culture as an extra skill apart from reading, listening, writing, and speaking (byram, 2013). as for the second teacher, she explained that her ways of culture teaching are through assigning students in different tasks such as creating video content about culture, writing articles about certain issues regarding the culture, making cultural artworks and scrapbook, and inserting cultural content into four skills activities and other topic discussions. “sometimes, i assign students to do speaking task in form of creating video content or vlog. the video content should be about culture, for example describing the historical building and comparing the historical building in indonesia with other countries….i assign them to write an article about culture. they came up with immigrants in america or gap perspective between parents and children in indonesia…..i also assign them to make artwork in form of a scrapbook or 3d wall magazine about culture……sometimes discussing culture in europe and comparing with indonesian culture…" from the transcription, it shows that the second teacher has brought cultural teaching to the next level. she did a variation in her teaching. she has integrated culture in many of her teaching activities. the activities include knowledge inquiry which is the focus of the first savoir, comparing, contrasting, and relating which indicate savoir-comprendre, criticizing and synthesizing in article writing indicating savoir s’engager, additionally, in syllabus the value shaping of being open-minded and curious is reflecting the savoir etre. in conclusion, the second teacher teach almost all skills that byram proposed even though it might only cover a small number of the whole part in each skill. moreover, by integrating cultural aspect into the teaching of four skills, it means that this teacher, regardless of her inability to explain appropriately what icc was, she has put icc into her regular teaching practice. conclusion this study represents the teachers‟ understanding and beliefs about intercultural communicative competence in english language teaching and teachers‟ attempts to promote icc in their teaching practices. based on the findings, it shows that both teachers have relatively trivial knowledge about the concept of icc; however, when given the context of culture in language learning both teachers can elaborate further about the concept in their frame of views and show concerns about the importance of icc in language learning at different level. in addition, teachers have certain beliefs regarding the teaching of intercultural communicative competences which some are in line with the intercultural competences framework and supported by the findings in previous studies while others are on the contrary. meanwhile, the teachers‟ attempts in promoting icc are varied to certain degrees. the inconsistencies are also found in between each teacher‟s statements, that one and another statement are not approved and supported each other and in between statement and what was nisa hasanah & wawan gunawan exploring efl teachers’ understanding and beliefs in intercultural communicative competence in indonesian context 126 found in the documents. nevertheless, the teachers cannot be judged for not putting culture discernibly into syllabus or lesson plan; this occurrence may happen due to the teacher‟s vision is not in line with the school‟s vision that she cannot put what she thinks into practice or that teachers may not have sufficient time to spare for their main goals are dictated by the national examination which are not discussed in this study. acknowledgement we would like to thank everyone who have involved in this study, particularly the participants of the study, and those who have helped and supported while we are completing this study. references abdullah, f., lulita. (2018). social actors in an intercultural communication classroom: a discursive lens of intercultural education. indonesian journal of english language teaching, 13(1), 31-51. atay, d., kurt, g., camlibel, z., ersin, p., & kaslioglu, o. (2009). the role of intercultural competence in foreign language teaching. inonu university journal of the faculty of education, 10 (3), 123-135. bektas-centinkaya, y., & celik, s. (2013). perceptions of turkish efl candidates on their level of intercultural competence. in h. arslan & g. rata (eds.), multicultural education: from theory to practice (345-362). newcastle: cambridge scholar press. byram, m. (2013). intercultural communicative competence in foreign language education: question of theory, practice and research. the language learning journal, 41(3), 251-253. byram, m. (1997). teaching and assessing intercultural communicative competence. clevedon: multilingual matters. byram, m. (2006). language teaching for intercultural citizenship: the european situation. paper presented at the nzalt conference, university of auckland. cohen, l., manion, l., & morrison, k. (2007). research methods in education sixth edition. new york: taylor-francis. deardorff, d. k. (2006). identification and assessment of intercultural competence as a student outcome of internationalization. journal of studies in international education, 10(3), 241-266. gillham, b. (2000). case study research methods. new york: continuum. kiss, t. (2017). developing intercultural communicative competence: an example of the new college english textbook series. indonesia journal of english language teaching, 12(1), 7999. kiss, t., & weninger, c. (2017). cultural learning in the efl classroom: the role of visuals. elt journal, 71, 186-196. doi: 10.1093/elt/ccw072. kiss, t., & weninger, c. (2013). exploring cultural potential in efl textbooks: fostering cultural reflexivity in the classroom. malaysian journal of elt research, 9(1), 19-28. kramsch, c. (1993). context and culture in language teaching. oxford: oxford university press. kusumaningputri, r., & widodo, h.p. (2018). promoting indonesian university students' critical intercultural awareness in tertiary eal classrooms: the use of digital photographmediated intercultural tasks. system, 72, 49-61. lustig, m. w., & koester, j. (1993). intercultural competence: interpersonal communication across cultures. new york: harper collins college publishers. merriam, b. s. (2009). qualitative research: a guide to design and implementation. san francisco: jossey-bass. mirzaei, a., & forouzandeh, f. (2013). relationship between intercultural communicative competence and l2-learning motivation of iranian efl learners. journal of intercultural communication research, 42(3), 300-318. norton, b. (2000). identity and language learning: gender, ethnicity, and educational change. london: longman. reid, e. (2015). techniques developing intercultural communicative competences in english language lesson. proceedia, 186, 939-943. doi: 10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.04.01. risager, k. (1998). language teaching and the process of european integration. in m.b.m. fleming (ed.), language learning in intercultural perspective. approaches through drama and ethnography. cambridge: cambridge university press. pajares, m. f. (1992) teachers‟ beliefs and education research: cleaning up a messy construct, review of educational research, 63, 307–332. tedjakusuma, h. j. h. (2013). teaching culture to adult indonesian students in english classrooms: a mutual understanding approach. magister scientiae, 34, 194-202. thanasoulas, d. (2001). the importance of teaching culture in the foreign language classroom.” radical pedagogy. retrieved june 14, 2020 .http://radicalpedagogy.icaap.org/content/issue3_ 3/7thanasoulas.html. weninger, c., & kiss, t. (2013). culture in english as a foreign language (efl) textbooks: a semiotic approach. tesol quarterly, 47(4), 694-716. widodo, h. p., wood, a., & gupta, d. (eds.). (2017). asian english language classrooms: where theory and practice meet. new york: routledge. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.04.01 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.04.01 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 85 junior high school students’ lived experiences of learning english using busuu vinindita citrayasa universitas atma jaya yogyakarta, indonesia e-mail: vinindita.citrayasa@uajy.ac.id apa citation: citrayasa, v. (2019). junior high school students’ lived experiences of learning english using busuu. indonesian efl journal, 5(2), 85-92. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v5i2.1900. received: 14-03-2019 accepted: 23-05-2019 published: 01-07-2019 abstract: researches on mall mostly focus on how learning by using mobile phones gives significant effect on second/ foreign language skills. however, only few which focus on their lived-experiences of learning english using their smart phones anywhere outside their class and anytime outside their school time that can reveal meanings related to their awareness, beliefs, and actions. this research is then aimed at describing and interpreting the students’ lived experience of using a mobile application namely bussu for learning english. the study is a hermeneutic phenomenology study which focuses on the description and interpretation of the students’ lived experiences of using busuu to learn english. there were two participants interviewed using in-depth interviews and the data was in the form of texts. the result shows the participants’ lived experiences showed some empirical meanings: ubiquitous learning, fun learning, and useful english learning assistant. this study also reveals the finding of transcendent meaning that busuu encouraged them to become more autonomous learners. keywords: busuu; english learning; junior high school students; lived experiences; mall. introduction technology has been developing and producing many devices that are helpful in assisting learners to learn english. smart phone is one technology product designed with new and smart functions such as educational application. there are many applications for language learning that are designed and developed (godwin-jones, 2011; chang & hsu, 2011; chen & chung, 2008; fallahkhair, pemberton & griffiths, 2007; huang, huang, huang, & lin, 2012). its portability gives effect to a new way of learning: ubiquitous and personal learning. the users can download and install many language learning applications (both free and purchased) such as language courses, flash cards, and dictionaries which are designed by third part apps companies: android and apple from google play store. the learning process then happens not only inside classroom but also outside classroom; not only in school hours, but also in their spare time (cilesiz, 2011; kukulska-hulmes, 2012; brick, 2015). there are positive results studies on how mall (mobile assisted language learning) gives positive results and significant effect on second/foreign language skills such as vocabulary learning (başoğlu & akdemir, 2010; agca & özdemir, 2013; liu, 2014), extensive reading (lin, 2014), reading development of young learners (lan, sung, & chang, 2013), grammar accuracy (baleghizadeh & oladrostam, 2010; guerrero, ochoa, & collazos, 2010; nah, 2010), listening (demouy & kukulskahulme, 2010; azar & nasiri, 2014), pronunciation (segaran, ali & hoe, 2014), and mobile dictionary integration (rahimi & miri, 2014). mobile learning can engage the language classroom (zhang, 2013). the researches or studies mentioned previously are done to measure the students’ achievement in using mall for their improvement in learning, however only few which focus on their lived-experiences which can reveal meanings related to their awareness, beliefs, and actions. the concept of experience in phenomenology and suggestion of experience with technology as a construct for educational technology research is proposed as important research to be done (cilezis, 2011). the purpose of the mailto:vinindita.citrayasa@uajy.ac.id vinindita citrayasa junior high school students’ lived experiences of learning english using busuu 86 inquiry is to increase the understanding of technology’s influence on individuals, societies, and education and to contribute to unlocking potentials for research at the core of educational technology as well as to help create new lines of inquiry. it attempts to highlight several potential research areas in educational technology that would benefit from building on a phenomenological concept of experience and utilizing phenomenology as the theoretical and methodological framework since phenomenology is concerned with uncovering and describing the essence of human experiences. it has potential to offer valuable insights about the use of technology in teaching and learning. the goal of this research is to describe and interpret the junior high school students’ meaningful experiences in using one of language learning application, busuu, to assist them learning english. the description and the interpretation will lead to another goal which is to improve higher efficiency and better understanding of the value got from the participants lived experience. through this hermeneutic phenomenology research, the junior high school students’ experiences are going to be unveiled, described and interpreted in order to discover the meaning of learning english with busuu to students. method this study implemented a phenomenological study which is a qualitative research concerning more about the verbal data of description and interpretation. its setting is a real world setting which is observed in order to gather the participants’ view of their meaningful lived experiences. in this study, there are two students of junior high school who used an english learning mobile application downloaded from google play. the in-depth interviews were done and the obtained data which was in the form of texts was transcribed and interpreted to seek the meaning of their experiences towards the phenomenon. the interview was a snowballing interview, which questions of the interview were developed naturally following the directions of the interview. the questions were not totally set but they came up as the results of the interviewees’ previous answers. the data was analyzed using six steps proposed by creswell (2012). there were six steps done in analyzing the data of this study. the first step was preparing and organizing the data for analysis. the data from the indepth interviews were transcribed from the recorded interview. the second step was exploring and coding the texts. the purpose of coding was to seek and to build themes and the themes were categorized. the data was then described and interpreted to develop the understanding of learning english using busuu. results and discussion the following is the discussion of meanings interpretation of the participants’ lived experiences of learning english using busuu. the interpretations below were bracketed under the pre-figured themes: empirical meanings consisting three themes and transcendent meaning. the themes are ubiquitous learning, useful english learning assistant, and fun learning assistant. the explanation for each theme is discussed below. ubiquitous english learning the study revealed that students were aware that they experienced learning with technology which took place not only inside classroom. the technology created a chance for them to experience the process of learning outside of their classroom and out of his english class hours. the participants of this research mostly experienced the type of learning inside class room during school hours and learning with their private english teachers at home. the notion “anytime” mentioned by the participants is not referred to only his hours outside of school hours but also his spare time when the students have no other options to spend the time besides gaming. there is a change of learning action when he uses busuu. he interacts with his smart phone for playing games anymore but he indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 87 plays with busuu for learning. that moment has developed a new situation of learning english. the core attraction of mall is the potential to turn such dead time into using time. dead time here is defined as time you have when you have nothing to do. the possibility of learning in your free time may happen at your free time when you can use that time to study with your smart-phone. the point to emphasize is that learners have more opportunities to use their time outside classroom to study (brick & cervi-wilson, 2015). fun english learning “busuu is fun!” that was the statement that both participants said when they were asked to tell about their feelings when they interact with the application. they sound excited to tell their experiences oh how fun busuu was. the learning could be that fun since busuu offers motivating features such as game combined with social networking, garden or language courses and materials, berries and study reminders. there are 150 various topics that learners can choose to learn in this application. besides the various types of materials, there are various and fun quizzes to accomplish. the other features such as pictures and various types of learning materials and tasks or activities and berries (as the learning rewards) are the interesting parts that made them happy to keep learning. the features trigger and engage his desire and excitement to learn and play with it. besides vocabulary task, there is listening task, matching task, and completing dialogue tasks. wherever they finished their tasks, they would get berries. the participants mostly considered the rewards as motivating and fun features. these made them experienced the feeling of an enjoyment in learning english as this kind of learning method is different with other learning methods. various types of materials, types of learning activities, and the berries reward, there are other features such as the app’s interface, pictures and animation that create fun and entertaining learning shows a change type of learning nowadays. this kind of situation of learning is a typical shift of learning in the digital age of using technology where learning as torture becomes learning as fun (tapscott, 2009). learning as fun encourages learners to be more motivated (looi et al., 2010). the feeling of enjoyment engages and fosters the participants keep learning until getting 10,000 berries. the experience of fun learning with busuu created a personal preference over it. one participant stated that he preferred to learn english with busuu than to learn from books for he considered that learning with books is less interesting and books are more expensive. useful english learning assistant busuu means a helpful assistance for learning. it helped the students a lot to improve their english skills especially when their teachers are not around. both students had the same intention of enriching their knowledge and improving their english skills. their intention and expectation meets with the features of english skills learning that busuu offers. the students experienced the assistants to learn the basics of english vocabulary, listening, speaking, pronunciation and writing. they experienced an improvement in listening, pronunciation, and word spelling. the improvement itself is shown as a result as busuu facilitates the students with the activities and quizzes to memorize words and words spelling. it was also so helpful in helping students to more focus on learning. one student stated that it was important to be focused on what he was learning that it would be easier for him to understand. pertained to the pronunciation skill improvement, busuu was perceived helping students effectively. when using translator machine, the students got the meaning only. however, busuu provides both meaning and how to pronounce it well. mobile learners perceived more and preferred learning with mobile phones compared with paper and computer-based lessons to learn vocabulary (thornton & houser, 2005 in kim & kwon, 2012). in the computer era, education has been reconceptualized around the construction of knowledge through information processing, vinindita citrayasa junior high school students’ lived experiences of learning english using busuu 88 modeling, and interaction (sharples, 2006). besides, busuu is helpful in providing space for students to learn directly from native speakers. the students are exposed to interact, to be exposed and to be involved in authentic tasks in learning speaking with native speakers. it allows rapid development of speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills through the individualized language learning activities synchronously (happening right now) and/asynchronously. through more opportunities to learn which busuu creates various topics provided there, the students gained more access and time again and again to revisit his understanding in different contexts and ways of learning. furthermore, the students got more time and chances to experience learning repetition which empower them to learn better and to understand better. this is in line with a study stating that the mobile application enables learners to learn on the move which means the students can learn across the time, revisiting knowledge that was gained earlier in a different context, and more broadly (vavoula & sharples, 2002). transcendent meaning the meaning of learning english with busuu for the participants was not merely perceived only empirically in the themes of ubiquitous, fun, and useful learning that could them to develop their english skills but also transcendentally which related to their autonomous character. since the students got more chances to learn individually, they got more opportunities to deal with situations which require them to make decision and to take charge of any possible responsibility. one decision that both had made was related to their actions to choose to study or to play games. they had freedom to choose moreover they had a total freedom in the time and situation when they were not required to study. when learners are positioned in the situation where they do self study with the help of their mobile phones, they take charge of their own learning responsibilities, choices, and decisions. therefore, the assistance or the help of mobile learning triggers the learners’ autonomy in learning language which means that the learners accepts responsibility for his/ her learning (chang, 2007). being aware of the importance of learning english, the students chose to make use busuu as a learning resource which is believed able to role as a facility to learn english since they realize that google translator is not enough to improve his english language skills. the student positioned himself as a centre of learning where he took a decision by his own initiative to make use busuu as a learning resource. the learners become the center of learning, since they are able to make use their devices to get the resources for learning (macaskill & taylor, 2010). that shows a characteristic of autonomous learners. as stated by paul & elder (2008), autonomy is the freedom and ability to manage one’s own affairs, which entails the right to make decisions as well. there are learners’ actions to direct and control their thinking, author their beliefs, values, and ways of thinking. another characteristic of autonomy reflected on the experiences of using busuu is that the students are able to be more aware of their language learning process and progress. nation & macalister (2010) states that independent and effective learner that they show their capabilities to know how to learn language, to monitor, and to be aware of their language learning process and progress. the experience of learning using that technology can be interpreted showing the students’ independence in learning while the teachers are not around instructing to learn with busuu continually. the feeling of enjoyment in learning itself triggers the autonomous character in him. his independence in learning reflects one character of autonomy which a learner shows an action of learning without any instruction or guidance of anyone around him such as teacher who are not always able to be around the learners (nosratinia & zaker, 2013). other characteristic of an autonomous learner which the students develop during his learning process with busuu is persistency. myartawan & suharmantoet (2013) indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 89 characterizes persistency as an action of moving on continuously on despite the problems and challenges that learners face without waiting for helps from others. a study reveals that learning with smart phones encourages students to have more effort in their private learning, in terms of the length of time they spent studying (leis et al., 2015). for the participant, the efforts and desire to learn should be encouraged. he felt of being challenged by busuu in a way that the application could encourage to keep trying and to not easily give up. continuously moving on despite the problems and challenges without waiting for helps from others is a sign of one character of autonomy which is persistency (myartawan, 2013). the students experienced the various types of moments of ups and downs in learning with busuu, when he faced a type of learning which was not easy. he dealt with difficult tasks and quizzes, especially when started to level up to intermediate level. the interview revealed the participant’s story when he felt of being challenged instead of being discouraged. the students were aware of the importance of english learning. before using busuu, he used his free time for being updated on his social media accounts and playing games in his computer and smart phone. his daily schedule for his free time changed after using busuu. since he considered that learning with busuu was more important than playing games, he chose to open the application and used his free time to learn instead of dealing with something which could be considered as more fun. his action reflects another character of autonomy which is resourceful. resourcefulness is related to the intention to make decision and action in order to solve problems. learners are able to make learning as the main priority over the other activities which are considered more fun (myartawan et al., 2013). the other changes in the students which happen after using busuu did not only happen in their activity at their free time but also in the mindset change. to choose other activities over to keep learning english using busuu was also a free was a free decision to choose. based on the participant’s story, he experienced an ability to reflect his freedom, power, and change over his life. taking control over learning management means they are able to plan, to organize, and to evaluate their learning and he states that those are observable through their behavior (benson, 2001). it can be noted that learning with busuu heightens the learners’ autonomy through various resources and tools for language learning (cho, 2009; lee, 2010; kim & kwon, 2012). using busuu as a resource for learning causes a tendency of being autonomous. conclusion this study attempts to reveal the meanings of english learning using busuu to junior high school grade vii. two participants shared their lived experiences of using busuu to learn english and assigned some meanings. based on the participants’ lived experience, it can be noted that busuu has some benefits for learning english which can take place not only in classroom as they experience so far, but also at their free time outside of their learning schedule. busuu could facilitate learners to turn their dead time and free time to a kind of fun circumstance for learning. the less tensed learning can encourage students to learn more. through their lived experiences, it can be noticed busuu provides tasks and quizzes which are able to facilitate students to improve their language skills and one of the participant stated that he got better score. further, an experimental research can be done to reveal the further implication of learning english with busuu to improve their language skills. references agca, r. k., & özdemir, s. 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(2002). kleos: a personal, mobile, knowledge, and learning organization system. in m. milrad, u. hoppe, & k. kinshuk (eds.), proceedings of the ieee international workshop on mobile and wireless technologies in education (pp. 152-156). zhang, l. (2013). mobile phone technology engagement in efl classroom. international conference on software engineering and computer science. retrieved on march 30, 2019 from http.jstor.org/stable/41414955. vinindita citrayasa junior high school students’ lived experiences of learning english using busuu 92 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 189 abstract: the aim of this research is to find out the types of morphological interference on students' english writing. through qualitative research method applying a design of the case study, twenty of university students were chosen. data were collected from written tests and classified based on the politzer and ramires (1973) on theory of linguistic category. the results revealed that, whilst it is inevitable that the english morphology features governed by the distinctive rules and systems have been the potential target for interference taking place, bahasa indonesia, which stands as the official language, becomes the source of transfer. from six types of morphological interference based on polizter and ramirez’ (1973), in this study the writer only found three of them. these types encompass of the morphological properties from the use of article, plural marker and simple past tense. furthermore, there are 40 morphological mistakes in total, in which four mistakes represent the intralingual transfer and 36 data describe the interference. in terms of the mistakes made as a result mostly from the interference transfer. this study makes a significant contribution to the teaching and learning process of linguistic interference. keywords: linguistic interference; morphology; students’ writing. morphological interference on student’s writing muziatun department of english language, faculty of letters and culture, state university of gorontalo, indonesia email: muziatun@ung.ac.id indri wirahmi bay department of english language, faculty of letters and culture, state university of gorontalo, indonesia email: indri_wirahmi@yahoo.com sitti maryam department of english language, faculy of letters and culture, state university of gorontalo, indonesia email: sittimaryam249@gmail.com apa citation: muziatun, m., bay, i. w., & maryam, s. (2020). morphological interference on student’s writing. indonesian efl journal, 6(2), 189-196. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v6i2.3425. received: 12-04-2019 accepted: 14-06-2019 published: 01-07-2020 introduction in foreign language learning, english foreign language (efl) students will always confront some difficultiess in mastering english (misbah, 2017). when they are learning english, they regularly make mistakes whether in their speaking or writing. therefore, in learning english as a foreign language, learners need to learn about the system and rules of writing well, because the system and the rules for both english and indonesian are different (raissah & aziz, 2020; sari, 2016; septiana, 2020). the difference may cause errors or mistakes. based on samingan (2016), in his research foreign language learners sometimes get difficulty in mastering english. it happens because of the interference of first language learning (fll) into english. furthermore, what they have found when studying english will depend on the degree and ability of what they have obtained in english. it means when a learner can understand english well, the possibility of mistakes in writing english will be less compared to a learner who has not fully understood english. many factors influence students in mastering english skills, one of them is because of the interference of first language learning (budiharto, 2019). interference is the exchange of language systems used in other elements of language which is viewed as a mistake because it deviates from the rules of the language used (jafaroya, 2017; syaputri, 2019). interference is the deviation of language norm in usage as the effect of multilingual toward some other languages (irmalia, 2016; qomariana & rahayuni, 2019; alkhudiry, 2020). interference happens when the students using the target language (english) and ones that are interfered with the target language is the first language learning (lao, 2017; bacala, 2017). indonesia and english are different in some language features, one such difference are the construction of noun and verb. for instance, when an indonesian language student uses the word “go”, it’s not a mistake he uses one word go but when using it in a simple sentence in the indonesian language “dia pergi” instead of” he goes” or “she goes”. a student who learns english might say “he go”. this is caused of no system of agreement or concord between noun and verb mailto:muziatun@ung.ac.id muziatun, indri wirahmi bay & sitti maryam morphological interference on student’s writing 190 (subject and predicate) in the indonesian language; all the subjects are followed by the same predicate (verb) such as “i go”, ”she go”, “they go” (mu’in, 2008, p. 7). however, when indonesian students who are lack of practice in english, they often make mistakes in the form of interference from the first language (fll) and they do not even realize the differences. based on the lecturer of the participants, researcher’s preliminary visit, when she gave an examination to the participant, the lecturer said that the students had some difficulties to write paragraphs, especially the paragraphs that describe past event, because of the alteration of verb/auxiliary verb from present to past tense. furthermore, the students said it was hard to choose the types of verb when making paragraphs in past event, such as describe an experiment that happened in the past. in general, mostly students feel writing is a complicated skill. (karademir & gorgoz, 2019; setyowati & sukmawan, 2016; mantra & widiastuti, 2019; ximenes, guterres, & pereira, 2019), therefore, it can b concluded that morphological interference become a serious problem in learning writing especially for the foreign language learners such as twenty students of c class of english department state university of gorontalo. by seeing this fact, an analysis is needed to know what are the types of morphological interference that made by the students. method this study aim to answer the following research question: what are the types of morphological interference committed by the students in the fifth semester of the english department state university of gorontalo academic year of 20192020 in their english writing? this study employs the qualitative case study since the data is in form of words, phrases, and sentences. it is also because the qualitative case study is descriptive in nature and related to human behavior of how people behave, feel, and think (gammelgaard, 2017). the participants of this study were the fifthsemester students. the number of students in class c of the english department of the fifth semester was 20 students. it consists of 15 female students and 5 male students. in order to gather the data, twenty of document analysis is conducted. the data of document were analyzed based on the qualitative data analysis of document model by harding (2018); identifying the interference in starting the process of data analysis, the researcher identified the mistake that is found in determining the morphological types. in doing this process, the writer also provided suggested constructions of the mistake so that it would be clear that a particular deviant form in the words or even sentences is considered as a mistake. since this case study had been one to spot the morphological interference in english writing, all data from the text were underlined on which the interlingual transfer is based and classified for further analysis. classifying the interference after identifying the interference into morphological interference as determining the interference types, the writer, then, classified the mistake into some specific categories based on morphological types. linguistics category taxonomies, by using politzer and ramirez’s model taxonomy. based on this model of taxonomies, morphological interference in this research is classified into six categories which are indefinite article, possessive, plural marker, simple past, past participle, comparative adjectives, or adverbs. additionally, surface taxonomy of dulay, et al.as cited in rusmiati (2019) was applied as the scheme to support the categorized or location of the interference fall that made by the participants. explanation of the interference in this step, the writer explained how and why the sentences called to be interference. this step consists of the phenomena that happen regarding the interference, how the interference could happen, why the data called to be interference, how the previous study dealt with this phenomena, and the theories that could strengthen the data. this step has been explained in the discussion part. conclusion drawing a conclusion from the explanation of the data, in the form of answering the research question is to achieve the objectivity of this research. results and discussion the findings and discussion are presented consecutively and organized based on its relevance with the research question. the finding of the study was dealing with the theory of interference in chapter ii, and several related studies. to best categorize the data into the type of morphological interference, this study employs indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 191 the theory by politzer and ramirez as cited in andre (2018) which were indefinite articles, possessive, plural marker, simple past, past participle, comparative adjective or adverb. the results show that there were only three types of morphological interference occur in students’ writing (descriptive text). they were an article, plural marker, and simple past tense. dealing with the process of foreign language learning, the influence of fll behavior still dominates students’ cognitive process in selecting the morphological interference on students’ english writing. the data were presented and categorize based on the types of morphological interference those are organized based on the frequency of occurrences. in order to visualize the types, was depicted in the following tables: table 1. indefinite article of morphological interference occurrence on students’ english writing indefinite article no. identified of the interference nt de reconstruction 1. we immediately built *tent and cooked  we immediately built a tent and cooked 2. after i got an permission from my parents to .....  after i got a permission from my parents to ..... 3. i had a amazing experience when .....  i had an amazing experience when ..... table 2. plural marker of morphological interference occurrence on students’ english writing plural marker no. identified of the interference nt de reconstruction 1. i had some creepy experience  i had some creepy experiences 2. i could meet them again after six month.  i could meet them again after six months. 3. after two week, i should back to my dormitory.  after two weeks, i should back to my dormitory. 4. i took some photograph of the bridge.  i took some photographs of the bridge. 5. i climbed mount ambang three month ago.  i climbed mount ambang three months ago. 6. we took some picture.  we took some pictures. 7. i went to the market and bought some seasoning at there.  i went to the market and bought some seasonings at there. 8. we spent holiday by visiting some favorite place in my home town.  we spent holiday by visiting some favorite places in my home town. 9. we took some photo with the beautiful view of twins tower.  we took some photos with the beautiful view of twins tower. 10. i was so happy, but there were some correction that he gave to me.  i was so happy, but there were some corrections that he gave to me. 11. we met many friends from other province, they were so kind and friendly.  we met many friends from other provincies, they were so kind and friendly. 12. it is one of the beautiful mountain in gorontalo  it is one of the beautiful mountains in gorontalo table 3. simple past tense of morphological interference occurrence on students’ english writing simple past tense no. identified of the interference nt de reconstruction 1. in my holiday last year, i visited my aunt’s house and stay for two weeks there.  in my holiday last year, i visited my aunt’s house and stayed for two weeks there. 2. last week, i was cooking in my room when my mother call  last week, i was cooking in my room when my mother called muziatun, indri wirahmi bay & sitti maryam morphological interference on student’s writing 192 me. me. 3. last year, for the first time i celebrate my birthday without my parents.  last year, for the first time i celebrated my birthday without my parents. 4. my friend said he would paid my food.  my friend said he would pay my food. 5. a few minutes later, finally i could moved my body and opened my eyes.  a few minutes later, finally i could move my body and opened my eyes. 6. i had a little problem that i could not forgot.  i had a little problem that i could not forget. table 4. type and number of errors in each category made by the students no. types of morphology cases nt de 1. plural marker 18 18 0 2. past tense 14 10 4 3. article 3 0 3 4. possessive ‘s 0 0 0 5. past particple ing/ed 0 0 0 6. comparative/superlative adjective 0 0 0 as follows from several tables above, it has been found that there were therty five features that indicate as morphological interference. the dominant types of occurrences were plural marker, past tense, and article. the table above provides the results of the written tests obtained from the participants that illustrate the mistakes in the order of words. it is apparent from this table that mistakes arising under those tables were mostly affected by interference. research question: kinds of morphological interference in english writing the question of this study sought to find out the types of morphological features that contain interference in students’ english writing. previous studies into the types of morphological interference in students’ english writing have revealed that the interference occurring within the field of morphology are adequate rampant in the analysis of the learners’ english written production. those interference comprise mainly of the uses those mistakes comprise mainly of the uses indefinite article, possessive case, plural marker, simple past tense, past participle and comparative, and the last, adjective/adverb (hamzah, 2012; & indri, 2018). yet, to address the research question this present study anchored to the linguistic taxonomy of politzer and ramirez (1973) as the main conceptual theoretical framework by which the morphological interference in all participants’ writing was coded. moreover, to better recognize the alteration to english morphological form, surface taxonomy of dulay, et al. (1982) was applied as the scheme to support the location of the interference made by participants. grounding in the research framework, this study found three kinds of morphological interference in all that contained interference emerging from the test results where these types of morphological interference committed by participants slightly vary with each respondent. these three types encompass the morphological interference from the article, plural marker, and past tense marker. in the following subsections, all these categories of morphological errors are discussed. preceding the analysis is the discussions of the existing categories of politzer and ramirez’s (1973) morphological which will be discussed in isolation. the explanation of morphological interference types has been found, how, and why the sentences called to be interference. this step consists of the phenomena that happened regarding the interference, how the interference could happen, why the data called to be interference, how the previous study dealt with this phenomena, and the theories that could strengthen the data. the types of morphological interference that has been found in this research are explained below; the first morphological interference which is found on students' writing is an identified article. it is the lowest mistake in students writing. it likely occurs because the students' faulty understanding of distinctions of target language items leads to false conceptualization or the students get confused about the concept to identify an article itself. in the element of determiner, the findings indicated that the uses of articles, which include the definite and indefinite article, have been a big deal for the students in this present study so far indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 193 since morphological interference in the noun phrase had mostly been found within this type. mistakes that occurred inside this type were predominantly omission and misformation where a certain particular item of the tl (english) which ought to exist properly based upon its well-formed structure has been left out. a sample representing mistake in this type is as follows: “..., we immediately built * (a) tent and cooked”. as seen in this datum, the participant omitted a necessary item of the definite article that modifies the noun “tent”. for a native speaker, distinguishing and using the articles properly in a sentence need no effort; non-native speakers, by contrast, will have difficulties figuring out their use in a sentence (indri, 2018). regarding this, the omission of mistakes in english articles has been inevitable for participants in this study because articles do not exist in the previous languages of participants. the second interference which is found on students writing is a plural marker. it is the dominant mistake that students produce in this text. plural markers have occurred on omission and addition. the omission of mistakes in plural markers has happened because the students omit the suffix –s at the end of the word noun. in this case, the students make the mistake of nouns that should be followed by a plural noun, but the students do not apply it to their writing. while the addition of mistakes has occurred when an item that should not be appeared in a well-formed of the noun which is there is additional letter or suffix –s at the end that is not necessary on the word. in this case, the students add suffix –s at the end of the word. it might happen because in the indonesian language there is no adding suffix –s in the and of the word noun when it makes plurality. it is supported by hamzah (2012, p.2) states that the mistake may be attributable to the different system of plurality between indonesian language and english where the indonesian only has quantifiers before nouns without an additional affixed plural marker to a noun. moreover, the certain english noun phrase that happened under the omission of mistakes has with the element of number. this element as stated by nani (2019) essentially deals with the singular and plural form of a count noun inside the construction of the noun phrases. accordingly, when these modifiers denote plurality, a noun that precedes one of them then should be in the plural form. conversely, a noun will be in the form of singular when one of these modifiers is in the singular form. in the previous languages of participants, the rule of plurality, however, does not exist, because such a concept in the previous languages of participants is comprehensible through their context. as such, it is unsurprising that mistakes of omission within this type can be found as in “...we took some picture* (pictures)…” the third type is simple past tense. the mistakes occurred when the tenses in writing should be past tense and the students made all of the verbs in the present tense. it happens because both languages have a different structure. in indonesia the verb will not change based on the time, it just had ‘keteranganwaktu’ like sekarang, kemarin, lalu, besok, lusa, and nanti. while in english the verb should be changed based on the time. when the time is a past time then the verb must be added by –ed or changed the word to verb2. in addition, the students do not know after auxilary verb should be followed by verb one, not verb two. in this case, the students produce verb mistake on their documentary because the student does not understand the usage of modal auxiliary and the similar expression of the modal. furthermore, the students put suffix -ed in the end of the word verb after a modal. it also happened because, in indonesian, there is no auxiliary verb. therefore, the student made a mistake in making a sentence in english. they did not insert verb1 after an auxiliary verb. based on the explanation above, those types of morphological interference found on students' text can be concluded that most of the students weak are plural, past tense, and article in morphological interference. in this case, the writer can be seen many students are more interfered with within identified the plural marker. it might happen because in the indonesian language there is no agreement about plurality. moreover, there is no adding suffix –s at the end of the word noun that becomes the symbol of plurality. paying attention to the above analyses, this study indicated that interference in english morphological features commonly occurs in certain patterns which in particular have structural rule distinction between english and indonesian rules. more simply, all the findings as regards the kinds of morphological interference emerged from the participants’ writing indicated that the entire mistakes positively arise by dint of the different systems and rules governing in the languages. with this in mind, it is then clear as to why misformation of english patterns as discovered in this formation (article and past muziatun, indri wirahmi bay & sitti maryam morphological interference on student’s writing 194 tense), the omission of necessary morphological items as found in plural marker and past tense, and addition are likely to be committed by the participants in this study. hamzah (2012) study exposed findings strikingly similar to the results of this present study: students normally committed to excluding english linguistic features, such as plurality markers, and past tense. recently investigators also highlighted that interference in students’ english writing typically takes place in the plural marker, sva, past tense, and progressing –ing and those mistakes arise in studied misuse the linguistic items, misformationon the items, omission to the essential items and even addition redundant items in sentences (samingan, 2016). overall, the result of this writer is different with indri’s finding (2018), in her study that she found, there are six types of morphological interference, such as plurals, tenses, demonstrative, vsa, participle –ing and –ed, and to the infinitive in academic writing of students proposal’s. in addition, another writer, syaputri (2018) who investigated interference made by efl at the university of indonesia has also reported the difference finding regarding morphological interference. in her research, she found that the students produce interference on morphology in the plural, singular, and repeated words in students' descriptive texts. the result of this study reveals from six types of morphological interference. further, there are three types of morphological interference are committed namely plural, past tense, and article. from all the types that have been found, it means that the students do not understand the concepts of using them in a correct sentence. it proofs that the students were lack of knowledge about the morphological differences between first language learning and target language so that they made some mistakes regarding those three points. on the other hand, three types of morphological interference have not been found in the data set. those were of them are possessive (‘s), participle (-ing and –ed), and comparative or superlative (-er or –est). it proofs that the students understood or mastered those types. if the students mastered the rules of morphology and the concepts of writing so that the students will not produce those types of mistakes. as a result, those three types are not taking part in mistakes on students’ descriptive text, but it can be the gap for the next writer who is interested in doing such a study. for that reason, the other mistakes might be showing up on different topics or different writing types on morphological site. conclusion the primary question guiding this present research attempted to address one case which was types of english morphological features in which linguistic interference may take place. overall, the findings of this research revealed that interference in the morphological field mostly occurs within certain morphological elements in which those items bear differences in terms of systems and rules governing in the languages and that constitute grounds for linguistic interference. from six types of morphological interference based on politzer and ramirez’ theory, the writer only found three of them. these types encompass the morphological properties from the use of an article, plural marker, and simple past tense. from those types that have been found, it means that the students were lack understanding. moreover, three types that have not been found were possessive, participle, and comparative or superlative adjectives. significantly the students were mastering those types. therefore, the mistake will not be committed by the students in their writing. references alkhudiry, r. i., al-ahdal, a. a. m. h., & alkhudiry, r. 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(2019, march). first language morphological interference of english language learners (efl). in seventh international conference on languages and arts (icla 2018). atlantis press. ximenes, l. p., guterres, c. f., & pereira, s. (2019). a study on the ability of 4th semester students’ writing skill of english study program in the academic year 2018. isce: journal of innovative studies on character and education, 3(1), 155-164. https://english.fkip.ulm.ac.id/2008/10/18/interference-and-integration/ https://english.fkip.ulm.ac.id/2008/10/18/interference-and-integration/ https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed073879.pdf muziatun, indri wirahmi bay & sitti maryam morphological interference on student’s writing 196 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 55 participants of material processes in grammatical metaphors involving the verbs make and take dede ismail politeknik komputer niaga lpkia, indonesia email: ismailando@yahoo.com apa citation: ismail, d. (2020). participants of material processes in grammatical metaphors involving the verbs make and take. indonesian efl journal, 6(1), 55-62. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v6i1.2638. received: 13-09-2019 accepted: 18-11-2019 published: 01-01-2020 abstract: this article, based on the transitivity system in a systemic functional linguistic study, is focused on the participants of material processes in grammatical metaphors involving the verbs make and take. the objective of this study is to analyze how the participants play a significant role in determining the processes of grammatical metaphors in the clauses. the data were taken from the corpus of contemporary american english from 2015 to 2017. the qualitative method was employed since the data were in the form of words rather than numbers. the result of this research showed that the participants of material processes are actors and scopes rather than actors and goals as they commonly occur in material processes. scopes are represented in the clause since the processes of doing are expressed only by the participants. however, in the congruent forms, the participants of material processes are actors and goals since their participants are expressed as ‘things’ rather than expressing the process of doing as they occur in the non-congruent forms termed as grammatical metaphors. keywords: grammatical metaphor; congruent; non-congruent; material processes; participant; goal; scope. introduction some expressions such as made a promise, had a dinner, or took a look can be frequently found in contemporary literature on english. in a traditional way, they are termed as “light verbs” (jesperson, 1942, p. 117) where the meaning of the expressions are represented by the nominal groups rather than the verbs. in a systemic functional linguistics, such construction is categorized as “grammatical metaphor” (bloor & bloor, 2004, p. 126). a grammatical metaphor occurs to the nominalization coupled with a verb which is semantically almost empty. the nominalized form itself is designated noncongruent. “in the driver looked at whisper, the form looked has been chosen; however, the author might have used the non-congruent grammatical forms took a look or had a look, but not to” (bloor & bloor, 2004, p. 127). meanwhile, the term congruent occurs when the meaning of the process is normally realized by the verb rather than nominal group as in the driver looked at whisper. they are actually variant ways of saying the same thing. in a transitivity system, halliday and matthiessen (2014, p. 241) argue that the nominal group following the verb in grammatical metaphor functions as “scope”. scope is a “participant” of “material process”. material process is one of the processes in the transitivity system. these processes are realized by the verbs, while participants are the entities involved in the process themselves (bloor & bloor, 2004, p. 109). according to gerrot and wignell (1995, p. 61), the incumbent participant in material process is commonly represented by “goal” as in he [actor] took [material process] two cases [goal]. the participant in material process, however, is scope when the grammatical metaphor occurs as in he [actor] took [material process] a shower [scope] (bloor & bloor, 2004, p. 114). for this reason, the writer, based on a systemic functional linguistics study, focuses the research on the following formulations: 1) how can the participants of material process be the scopes in grammatical metaphors? and 2) what participants are represented in material processes when the congruent forms? a number of research studies on the expressions consisting of verb plus nominal groups have been conducted. the studies may vary such as translation, syntax, and semantic. one of them was accomplished by wittenberg and piñango (2011). they focus the research on linguistic architecture, cross-modal lexical decision, argument structure, syntactic composition, and semantic composition. they argue that in light verb constructions, such as henry gave elsa a kiss, henry is represented as the kisser and elsa is the ‘kiss-ee’, although the main verbal predicate is give, not kiss. in these constructions, argument linking results from joint predication between give and a kiss evoke dede ismail participants of material processes in grammatical metaphors involving the verbs make and take 56 mismatching syntactic and semantic structures. they also illustrate the comparison between a non-light sentence and a light verb construction. in a non-light sentence henry gives elsa a rose, henry is the ‘giver’ (the agent), elsa is the recipient, and a rose is the entity that undergoes transfer (the theme). in the light verb construction henry gives elsa an order, the noun complement contributes additional semantic roles: henry is the ordered, and thus the agent of ordering, and elsa is the person ordered to do something. however, the order, in addition to being a participant in the event representation of the sentence, is part of a complex predicate that licenses semantic roles to the other participants in the sentence. the second research examines the complementation of light verb constructions with the deverbal noun laugh (giparaitė, 2016). the deverbal noun laugh is analyzed in combination with high frequency light verbs have, get, give, make, and do in terms of frequency and complementation patterns in twenty english varieties: new zealand, canadian, singaporean, new zealand, pakistani, bangladeshi, philippine, ghanaian, kenyan, south african, north american, jamaican, tanzanian, hong kong, malaysian, nigerian, british, australian, irish, and american english. each of country, in fact, uses different light verbs corresponding to the deverbal noun laugh. the present study differs from the previous ones since it is an effort to analyze the data, which are termed as grammatical metaphor instead of being traditionally termed as light verb, based on a systemic functional linguistics. meanwhile, grammatical metaphor is to refer to meaning transference in the grammar (halliday, 1985, p. 321). this implies that the meaning is transferred from somewhere to somewhere else (garrot & wignell, 1995, pp. 147-148). the grammatically metaphorical nature of the written is largely the result of nominalization, turning processes into nouns. according to thompson (2014, pp. 238-243), the key phenomenon of grammatical metaphor is nominalization – the use of a nominal form to express a process meaning. we can usually recognize nominalizations by the fact that the nominal form is derived from a verbal form. nominalizations are frequently found in some expressions as in take a bath, have a look, and so on (bloor & bloor, 2004, p. 126). they argue that the expression involving nominalizations are indentified as the examples of grammatical metaphor. in essence, they perceive bathing as ‘doing’ rather than ‘a thing’. according to heyvaert (2013, p. 66), a systemic functional linguistics on nominalization is closely tied up with the concept of grammatical metaphor: nominalization is presented as a major resource for the creation of ‘metaphorical’ rather than ‘typical’ lexicogrammatical realizations of semantic categories. nominalization allows a process, more obviously realized as a verb, to be realized as a noun and hence to become a participant in a further process. in addition, nominalizations can be found when they are coupled with a verb which semantically almost empty in this context, usually take or have. either i dined before i came or, nominalizing, i had dinner before i came are acceptable (bloor & bloor, 2004, p. 114). in grammatical metaphors, the term noncongruent is used to refer to the nominalized verbs. this term, as previously mentioned, may occur to the nominalization coupled with a verb which is semantically almost empty as in take a bath (bloor & bloor, 2004, p. 127). in the driver looked at whisper, the form looked has been chosen; the author might have used the noncongruent grammatical forms took a look or had a look, but not to. on the contrary, it is termed as congruent when the meaning of the process is normally realized by the verb as in i bathed rather than i took a bath. the usual way of encoding such phenomena in english is to opt for ‘material process’ with an actor. this choice, where the process matches our perception of bathing as ‘doing’ rather than ‘a thing’, is said to be congruent (bloor & bloor, 2004, p. 127). material processes are processes of material doing in a transitivity system. processes are central of transitivity (gerot & wignell, 1995, p. 54). transitivity generally refers to how the meaning represented in a clause. it means that the clause is the simultaneous realization of ideational, interpersonal and textual meanings. transitivity is also defined as ‘grammar of the clause,’ as a ‘structural units,’ for expressing a particular range of ideational meanings (halliday, 1985, p. 42). there are three components of what halliday calls a ‘transitivity process’: 1. process: realized by verbal groups. 2. participants: realized by nominal groups. 3. circumstances: realized by adverbial groups and prepositional phrases. most material processes could reasonably be said to involve ‘doing-words’ (gerot & wignell, 1995, p. 55; bloor & bloor, 2004, p. 110). they indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 57 express the nation that some entity physically does something which may be done to some other entity. physical actions in the real world and their participants are actor: the one who does the action, goal: the one who is affected by the action, recipient: the one who receives something, and beneficiary: the one for whom something is done. the examples are given as follows: (1) he kicked the ball participant process participant actor material goal (2) i gave my love a ring actor material recipient goal (3) i made my love a cake actor material beneficiary goal there are actually six different process types in a transitivity system: material, behavioral, mental, verbal, relational, and existential. however, to limit the research, the writer only focuses on material processes since they are mostly found in contemporary literatures on english which apply the expressions categorized as grammatical metaphors. instead of goal, recipient, and beneficiary in material process, there is one more participant which may be incumbent on material processes called ‘scope’ (sujatna, 2013, p. 37), or it is termed as ‘range’ by gerot and wignell (1995, p. 57). scope is unique because it is a participant derived from nominalization of the verb in the material process. the following are the examples: (4) she took a bath actor material scope/range (5) she made a leap actor material scope/range the examples above describe took a bath and made a leap, whereas a bath and a leap are nominalizations of the verb, can be changed into she bathed and she leapt. both of the nominalizations, a bath and a leap, are called ‘scope’. the scope of a material clause is not in any way affected by the performance of the process. this pattern has given a rise to a form expression that is very common in modern english, exemplified by have a bath, do some work, make a mistake, take a rest. here, the verb is lexically general; the process of the clause is expressed only by the noun functioning as scope or range (halliday & matthiessen, 2014). english (together with some together with some other languages) has tendency to nominalize certain events which might be seen as essentially process and which often have a nonnominal synonym. sometimes these nominalizations are coupled with a verb which has little lexical meaning, a verb which semantically almost empty in this context, usually take or have. such verbs are sometimes said to be delexicalized because they lost their full lexical content and become almost ‘dummies’. thus, as previously mentioned, we can say i dined before i came or, nominalizing, i had dinner before i came, and in informal conversation we would usually prefer the second expression (bloor & bloor, 2004, p. 114). the term used in systemic functional linguistics for items like a bath in i took a bath is range or scope. the last component in material processes, which is realized by adverbial groups and prepositional phrases, is called ‘circumstance’. according to gerot and wignell (1995, p. 52), circumstances answer the question as when, where, why, how, how many and as what. bloor and bloor (2004, p. 132) argue that circumstances fall into nine types: extent, location, manner, cause, contingency, accompaniment, role, matter and angle. meanwhile, gerot and wignell (1995, p. 52) assert that circumstances realize meanings about: time, place, manner, cause, accompaniment, matter, and role. method the method applied to study the data is qualitative since the data collected is descriptive, concerned with the process rather than with products, used logical analysis, and it is in the form of words rather than a number (bogdan & biklen, 1992, p. 29). due to that, several steps are taken to conduct this research: data collection techniques and data analysis techniques. the data collecting in this research applies two techniques. first, the writer listed some text containing the grammatical metaphors which involve the verbs make and take in the corpus of contemporary american english from 2015 to 2017. finally, the grammatical metaphors involving these two verbs are sorted. they have to be transitive verbs both in the non-congruent and in the congruent form. consequently, the difference between the two forms can be described in a transitivity system. after collecting and sorting the data, the writer (1) analyzed, based on a systemic functional linguistic study, the participants of material processes in the grammatical metaphors which involve the verbs make and take, and (2) dede ismail participants of material processes in grammatical metaphors involving the verbs make and take 58 analyzed what participants which may be represented when the congruent forms occur. results and discussion based on systemic functional linguistics study, this section describes (1) how the participants of material processes in grammatical metaphors, which involve the verb make and take, may be the scopes in the grammatical metaphors, termed as ‘non-congruent forms’, and (2) what participants are represented in the congruent forms. as previously mentioned, the findings are taken from the corpus of contemporary american english from 2015 to 2017. a tenfinding discussion is divided into two parts: verbs make involved and verbs take involved. verbs make involved data 1: “my birds make a mess of their water in no time” (mag: mother earth news, apr/may2015 issue 269, p. 89-91. 3p). my birds make a mess of their water in no time. actor material scope circumstance in a systemic functional linguistics, the nominal group a mess of their water involving the verb make is grammatical metaphor. it occurs since the nominal group represents the process of doing rather than a thing. meanwhile, the verb make is semantically empty. the verb make is categorized as material process because a mess, as the head of the nominal group, is basically a nominalization of the verb mess which is, in transitivity system, categorized as material process. due to the nominalization, the participant in the material process is scope rather than goal as it commonly occurs in transitivity system. since mess is a nominalization of the verb in material process, my birds make a mess of their water in no time can be changed into my birds mess their water in no time. it can be argued that a new participant is represented when the congruent form occurs. in the non-congruent form, the participants of material process are actor and scope; however, the participants represented in the congruent form are actor and goal. the illustration is given as follows: non-congruent: my birds make a mess of their water in no time. actor material scope circumstance congruent: my birds mess their water in no time. actor material goal circumstance data 2: “9 students made a gain of more than one level” (news: washington post, 5 february 2015). 9 students made a gain of more than one level. actor material scope the above data also shows that the nominal group a gain of more than one level involving the verb make is grammatical metaphor since the nominal group represents the process of doing rather than a thing. the verb make is also semantically empty in this context and categorized as material process since gain is a nominalization of the verb gain which is categorized as material process. the nominal group is also categorized as scope because of nominalization and the process of doing is expressed by only the nominal group. since gain is a nominalization of the verb in material process, 9 students made a gain of more than one level can be changed into 9 students gained more than one level. here, the noncongruent form represents actor and scope; however, the congruent form represents actor and goal as the new participant. a new participant is represented in the congruent form as given in the following illustration: non-congruent: 9 students made a gain of more than one level. actor material scope congruent: 9 students gained more than one level. actor material goal indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 59 data 3: “one could make an argument of gender nonconformity” (mag: salon, 17 april 2017). one could make an argument of gender nonconformity. actor material scope the nominal group an argument of gender nonconformity involving the verb make is grammatical metaphor since the nominal group represents the process of doing rather than a thing. the verb make is semantically empty and categorized as material process in the transitivity system since the head of nominal group argument is a nominalization of the verb argue. the nominal group functions as scope due to the nominalization and it expresses the process of doing in the clause. since argument is a nominalization of the verb in material process, one could make an argument of gender nonconformity can be changed into one could argue gender nonconformity. a new participant of material process is represented when the congruent form occurs. the non-congruent form represents actor and scope; nevertheless, the congruent form represents actor and goal as the new participant. consider in the following illustration: non-congruent: one could make an argument of gender nonconformity. actor material scope congruent: one could argue gender nonconformity. actor material goal data 4: “the administration will make an assertion of executive privilege” (acad: brigham young university law review, provo vol. 2017, iss. 2, (2017): 225-329). the administration will make an assertion of executive privilege. actor material scope the nominal group an assertion of executive privilege involving the verb make is grammatical metaphor since the nominal group represents the process of doing rather than a thing. the verb make is semantically empty and categorized as material process in the transitivity system since an assertion is a nominalization of the verb assert. the nominal group functions as scope due to the nominalization or because it expresses the process of doing in the clause. since assertion is a nominalization of the verb in material process, the administration will make an assertion of executive privilege can be changed into the administration will assert executive privilege. the non-congruent form represents actor and scope; nevertheless, the incumbent participants in the congruent form are actor and goal. a new participant of material process is represented when the congruent form occurs as follows: non-congruent: the administration will make an assertion of executive privilege. actor material scope congruent: the administration will assert executive privilege. actor material goal data 5: “the island made a payment on the interest of about $628,000” (news: new york times, section b; column 0; business/financial desk; pg. 1, 2015). the island made a payment on the interest of about $628,000. actor material scope the nominal group a payment on the interest of about $628,000 involving the verb made is grammatical metaphor because the nominal group represents the process of doing rather than a thing. in a transitivity system, the verb made is a material process because a payment is a dede ismail participants of material processes in grammatical metaphors involving the verbs make and take 60 nominalization of the verb pay which is categorized as material process. the participant of this material process is the nominal group a payment on the interest of about $628,000 which is categorized as scope. it is scope since it expresses the process of doing in the clause. since payment is a nominalization of the verb in material process, the island made a payment on the interest of about $628,000 can be changed into the island paid the interest of about $628,000. here, the non-congruent form represents actor and scope; nevertheless, the incumbent participants in the congruent form are actor and goal. the congruent form represents a different participant as illustrated in the following comparison: non-congruent: the island made a payment on the interest of about $628,000. actor material scope congruent: the island paid the interest of about $628,000.. actor material goal verbs take involved data 6: “they take a ride on a roller coaster at luna park” (mag: people, 9/7/2015, vol. 84 issue 10, p12-20. 6p. 24 color photographs). they take a ride on a roller coaster at luna park. actor material scope circumstance in a systemic functional linguistics, the nominal group a ride on a roller coaster involving the verb take is grammatical metaphor. it occurs since the nominal group represents the process of doing rather than a thing and the verb take is semantically almost empty. the verb take, in a transitivity system, is material process because ride, as the head of the nominal group, is basically a nominalization of the verb ride which is categorized as material process. the participant in this material process is scope since the process of the clause is expressed by only the nominal group. since ride is a nominalization of the verb in material process, they take a ride on a roller coaster at luna park can be changed into they ride a roller coaster at luna park. it can be argued that when the congruent form occurs, a new participant is represented in the clause. the non-congruent form represents actor they and scope a ride on a roller coaster; nevertheless, the incumbent participants in the congruent form are actor they and goal a roller coaster. the illustration is given as follows: non-congruent: they take a ride on a roller coaster at luna park. actor material scope circumstance congruent: they ride a roller coaster at luna park. actor material goal circumstance data 7: “i take a sip of my fanta” (fic: kenyon review, christle & michele, 2015). i take a sip of my fanta. actor material scope in a systemic functional linguistics, the nominal group a sip of my fanta involving the verb take is grammatical metaphor. it occurs since the nominal group represents the process of doing rather than a thing, and the verb take is semantically almost empty. the verb take, in a transitivity system, is material process because sip, as the head of the nominal group, is basically a nominalization of the verb sip which is categorized as material process. the participant in this material process is scope since the process of the clause is expressed by only the nominal group. since sip is a nominalization of the verb in material process, i take a sip of my fanta can be changed into i sip my fanta. when the congruent indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 61 form occurs, a new participant is represented in the clause. the non-congruent form represents actor i and scope a sip of my fanta; nevertheless, the incumbent participants in the congruent form are actor i and goal my fanta. the following illustration shows the comparison: non-congruent: i take a sip of my fanta. actor material scope congruent: i sip my fanta. actor material goal data 8: “she took an inventory of body parts” (fic: the scottie barked at midnight, 2017). she took an inventory of body parts. actor material scope in a systemic functional linguistics, the nominal group an inventory of body parts involving the verb take is grammatical metaphor. it occurs since the nominal group represents the process of doing rather than a thing and the verb take is semantically almost empty. the verb take, in transitivity system, is material process because inventory, as the head of the nominal group, is basically a nominalization of the verb inventory which is categorized as material process. the participant in this material process is scope since the process of the clause is expressed by only the nominal group. since inventory is a nominalization of the verb in material process, she took an inventory of body parts can be changed into she inventoried body parts. it can be argued that when the congruent form occurs, a new participant is represented in the clause. here, the non-congruent form represents actor she and scope an inventory of body parts; nevertheless, the incumbent participants in the congruent form are actor she and goal body parts. the following illustration shows the difference: non-congruent: she took an inventory of body parts. actor material scope congruent: she inventoried body parts. actor material goal data 9: “scarsella took a punch to the cheek” (news: minneapolis star tribune, 30 january 2017). scarsella took a punch to the cheek. actor material scope in a systemic functional linguistics, the nominal group a punch to the cheek involving the verb took is grammatical metaphor. it occurs since the nominal group represents the process of doing rather than a thing and the verb took is semantically almost empty. the verb took, in transitivity system, is material process because punch, as the head of the nominal group, is basically a nominalization of the verb punch which is categorized as material process. the participant in this material process is scope because of nominalization and the process of the clause is expressed by only the nominal group. since a punch is a nominalization of the verb in material process, scarsella took a punch to the cheek can be changed into scarsella punched the cheek. it can be argued that when the congruent form occurs, a new participant is represented in the clause. here, the non-congruent form represents actor scarsella and scope a punch to the cheek; nevertheless, the incumbent participants in the congruent form are actor she and goal the cheek. the following illustration shows the difference: non-congruent: scarsella took a punch to the cheek. actor material scope congruent: scarsella punched the cheek. actor material goal dede ismail participants of material processes in grammatical metaphors involving the verbs make and take 62 data 10: “i took a bite of my rhubarb pie” (news: minneapolis star tribune, 30 january 2017). i took a bite of my rhubarb pie. actor material scope in a systemic functional linguistics, the nominal group a bite of my rhubarb pie involving the verb took is grammatical metaphor. it occurs since the nominal group represents the process of doing rather than a thing and the verb took is semantically almost empty. the verb took, in a transitivity system, is material process because bite, as the head of the nominal group, is basically a nominalization of the verb bite which is categorized as material process. the participant in this material process is scope because of nominalization and the process of the clause is expressed by only the nominal group. since bite is a nominalization of the verb in material process, i took a bite of my rhubarb pie can be changed into i bit my rhubarb pie. it can be argued that when the congruent form occurs, a new participant is represented in the clause. here, the non-congruent form represents actor i and scope a bite of my rhubarb pie; nevertheless, the incumbent participants in the congruent form are actor i and goal my rhubarb pie. the following illustration shows the difference: non-congruent: i took a bite of my rhubarb pie. actor material scope congruent: i bit my rhubarb pie. actor material goal conclusion based on the analysis, it can be concluded that the participants of material processes in grammatical metaphors are actors and scopes since the head of nominal groups functioning as scopes are nominalized. thus, the nominal groups play significant role in expressing the meaning of the clause rather than being regarded as ‘things’. consequently, the verbs become lexically empty. however, when the congruent forms occur, there are no more participants functioning as scopes. this commonly occurs to material processes. the nominal groups, as the participants in the congruent forms, are goals since the meanings of the clauses are realized by the verbs, and the nominal groups are literally regarded as ‘things’. in addition, the congruent forms also prove that the grammatical metaphors are in this case categorized as material processes. acknowledgement i feel so blessed to have friends and family supporting me to complete this research. since this research is a part of my thesis, i also would like to express my gratitude to my late advisor, prof. dr. eva tuckyta sari sujatna, m.hum., who helped me find a solution in unique ways when all i could see was self-doubt. references bloor, t., & bloor, m. (2004). the functional analysis of english. london: arnold. bogdan, r., & biklen, s. (1992). qualitative research for education: an introduction to theory and methods. boston: allyn and bacon. gerot, l., & wignel, p. (1994). making sense of functional grammar. sydney: educational enterprise. giparaitė, j. (2016). complementation of light verb constructions in world englishness: a corpusbased study. žmogus ir žodis , 18(3), 19-39. halliday, m. (1985). an introduction to functional grammar. london: edward arnold. halliday, m., & matthiessen, c. (2014). an introduction to functional grammar. london: routledge. heyvaert, l. (2013). nonimalization as grammatical metaphor: on the need for a radically systemic and metafunctional approach. in m. travenier, & j. r. raveli, nominalization as grammatical metaphor: views form systemic functional linguistics (p. 66). john benjamins publishing company. jesperson, o. (1942). a modern english grammar on historical principles. copenhagen: ejnan munksgaard. sujatna, e. t. (2013). understanding systemic funtional linguistics. bandung: unpad press. thompson, g. (2014). introducing functional grammar. oxon: routledge. wittenberg, e., & piñango, m. m. (2011). processing light verb constructions. the mental lexicon, 6(3), 393-413. indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 48 the varieties of homework given by english teachers of vocational schools dinar martia azizah department of primary teacher education, faculty of teacher training and education, university of sarjanawiyata tamansiswa, indonesia email: dinar.azizah@ustjogja.ac.id apa citation: azizah, d. m. (2018). the varieties of homework given by english teachers of vocational schools. indonesian efl journal, 4(2), 48-55. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v4i2.1375. received: 19-03-2018 accepted: 25-05-2018 published: 01-07-2018 abstract: learning inside the classroom is never enough because there are various limitations, so it needs the non-school hour assignment called homework. this research aims to find out the varieties of homework given by english teachers of vocational schools. this research uses a qualitative descriptive method by involving eight english teachers of vocational schools in yogyakarta. open-ended questionnaires, interview, and document analysis are used to collect the data. in analyzing the obtained data, the researcher does three steps, namely data condensation, data display, and conclusion drawing. the research results showed that homework varieties given by english teachers serve three main objectives. those objectives are to broaden knowledge, sharpen skills, and inculcate values. it is concluded that formal education in schools requires homework that improve students' english proficiency. besides, the existence of state examination is regarded as a special thing that effects on learning process. keywords: homework; broaden knowledge; sharpen skills; inculcate values; english proficiency. introduction teachers, as one of learning components, wherever and whenever hope to get the best result in teaching. they do various efforts and activities. one of the common efforts and activities that teachers do for any learning, including english, is using homework to support learning outside classrooms. homework is any task assigned by school teachers intended for students to carry out during non-school hours (cooper, robinson, & patall, 2006). homework probably involves complex interaction (sharp, keys, & benefield, 2001). it implies that homework involves interaction of various components of learning. homework is seen as one of rituals (that is practices prescribed by custom) in schools (trowbridge, 2010; o’connor, 2009). homework is a long-standing education tradition that, until recently, has seldom been questioned. it can be concluded that the existence of homework is seen as an integral part of education for long time (votterott, 2009). yet, it is still possibly used by many teachers around the world until now. every teacher has a different effort to develop a variety of homework. teachers’ homework practices vary in quality. they may apply best practice standards, assign too difficult homework, or collect homework without providing feedback (protheroe, 2009). there are teachers who effectively use homework to meet the needs of students with their strengths and make up the weakness of the learning components. in other case, some teachers use homework as a series of learning without considering the follow-up activities for the homework and their benefits for students. homework is viewed as one of several strategies that teachers can use to show children that learning takes place everywhere (cooper, 2001). homework can also be seen as one of the learning methods applied by teachers. there are three various possibilities of using homework as the learning strategies, namely: 1) material review – practice the https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v4i2.1370 dinar martia azizah the varieties of homework given by english teachers of vocational schools 49 material that has already been presented in class (becker & epstein, 1982; cooper, robinson, & patall, 2006); 2) preparation assignments – introduce new material (cooper, robinson, & patall, 2006); and 3) extension homework – transfer the previously learned skills to new situations (lee & pruitt, 1979; cooper, robinson, & patall, 2006). teachers may apply homework, as a learning strategy, for various purposes, such as reviewing the material, introducing new materials and correlating new material to the previous ones. based on these goals, the function of material review is the most frequent reason why homework is given by teachers (becker & epstein, 1982; cooper, robinson & patall, 2006). in other words, the most common instructional purpose of homework is to provide the students an opportunity to practice the material that has been taught. here, the researcher has her own reasons for choosing the topic. first, the researcher chooses a topic of homework varieties because learning inside a classroom is never enough due to various limitations, so it needs the nonschool hour assignment that is called homework. second, the reason for choosing vocational school is that it trains the students to become human resources that may be able to use english in more practical ways than students of senior high schools. the results of this study are expected to be inspiring and can be input for the parties in education in general, and english teachers in particular. method this research employs a qualitative descriptive method. the data are collected through open ended questionnaires, interview, and document analysis. the questionnaires are given to eight english teachers of vocational schools in yogyakarta. the teachers are then interviewed to get information about the reasons of giving homework. in addition, the researcher also conducts document analysis toward syllabus, state examination passing standards, and state examination item bank. in analyzing the obtained data, the researcher does three steps, namely data condensation, data display, and conclusion drawing (miles, huberman & saldana, 2014). firstly, data from questionnaires, document, and interview are selected and transcribed. then, the researcher organizes and describes the data. finally, the researcher draws the conclusion and verifies it. results and discussion based on data analysis, it is concluded that homework given teachers serves three main purposes. those purposes are to broaden knowledge, sharpen skills, and inculcate values. broaden knowledge homework, that are aimed to broaden knowledge, are used for preparing upcoming lesson, preparing strategy of state examination, collecting materials of state examination, doing state examination exercises, learning vocabulary, learning grammar, learning language function, comprehending text, and discussing materials. the data are described below. homework for preparing upcoming lesson teachers ask students to read the material before teaching-learning process. here are the statements given by english teachers through the interviews. i ask students to read learning material for the next meeting (teacher b). reading for the next material to reinforce the upcoming learning process (teacher d). data show that preparing the upcoming lesson through a homework is done by teachers in order to make the students understand the material for the next meeting. a theory claims that preparation, one of homework purposes, is to introduce material to help students obtain the maximum benefit when the new material is covered in class (cooper, robinson, & patall, 2006). homework for preparing strategy of state examination data in this category show that homework is given by teachers to introduce their students some strategies to prepare for the state examination. this is evident in the questionnaire and interview excerpts below. they analyze a listening, an error recognition, a reading comprehension, an incomplete sentence, indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 50 and a close test based on passing criteria standard of state examination (teacher c). identifying kinds of expression found in listening test of state examination and analyzing kinds of expression used in dialogues of state examination item bank (teacher f). students translate downloaded state examination materials in order to be more easily understood. they also translate state examination item bank (texts, dialogues, e.tc) that have been taught (teacher h). the data in this category show that some english teachers give homework that focus on state examination. the teachers hope that students deeply understand types of test and materials of state examination to make them successfully answer the test. they ask students to identify and analyze materials on passing criteria standard and state examination item bank. therefore, students will memorize sequence of test. another teacher gives homework that requires students to translate state examination materials. students have to download the materials on the internet that will be translated. they also translate the problems found on state examination item bank. the teacher thinks that the translated materials will be more easily understood by the students. passing standards and state examination item bank are used to become references to determine homework topics and materials in order to prepare the test. this conclusion is in line with a research conducted on a survey of 1000 american teachers which focused on issues related to homework. it shows that 86% of u.s. public school teachers reported frequently assigning homework to help students prepare for tests (metlife, 2007). homework for collecting materials of state examination teachers ask students to browse kinds of text and download other materials based on passing standards of state examination from internet and other sources. teachers also ask students to make clipping of texts and dialogue of state examination item bank. data in this category show that homework is given by teachers to motivate students to deeply understand various text materials that are usually tested in state examination. downloading all materials based on passing criteria standard of state examination from other sources (recount, procedure text, etc.) (teacher h). students browse a report, an announcement, and a procedure text. they also have to find grammar materials to get more state examination materials (teacher f). students make a paper/clipping of short functional text based on passing criteria standard of state examination: memo, invitation, schedule, and dialogues found in state examination item bank (teacher c). the conclusion of this category is that homework can be used to lead students to be more autonomous by finding and collecting various texts tested in state examination on the internet and other resources. the conclusion is in line with a theory explaining that self-directed learning can be enhanced with homework by requiring students to use outside resources like libraries, the internet and various reference materials (booth, 2010). homework for doing state examination exercises data in this category show that teachers give students homework that require them to complete state examination exercises. those are making a short dialogue based on given situation, making a subjunctive sentence, making a conditional sentence, using various expressions to make a dialogue, and answering multiple choice questions. homework require students to learn about language function but they do not learn all language function and grammar rules. here are the statements from teachers. students complete sentences by using various expressions and make a short dialogue which usually found in state examination based on given situation, e.g. giving suggestion that is performed in pairs (teacher f). i ask students to write a reservation dialogue, a complaint dialogue, an application letter, a subjunctive sentence, and conditional sentence to deepen state examination materials (teacher c). using various expressions to make a dialogue and answering multiple choice questions to do exercise state examination (teacher h). students are focused on learning certain materials that are usually tested in state examination. they also hope that by giving dinar martia azizah the varieties of homework given by english teachers of vocational schools 51 homework, students will be familiar to the kinds of problem that are usually found in state examination so that they can answer the test correctly. the conclusion is in line with a theory claims that one of homework types is for study. it implies that if the homework assignment is to study for the test, teachers should encourage students to organize notes, answer test, or study with a partner (vatterott, 2010). homework for learning vocabulary teachers give homework that require students to complete vocabulary exercises. below are the results of questionnaires and interviews with teachers. students find/look for a word in a passage (it can be a difficult word, adjective word, etc. related to the topic discussed) and matching a word with its synonym and definition to improve students’ vocabulary mastery (teacher a). filling in the blank of a sentence, a text, and a dialogue with the most appropriate word (teacher e). the exercises are matching a word to another word having similar meaning, choosing words that are appropriate to sentence context, and introducing new words found in a text that has been read before. teachers hope that the exercises can improve students’ vocabulary mastery. it is in line with a research conducted by emami (2014) which showed that students who received homework had a better understanding of the vocabulary that was taught. homework for learning grammar homework is given by teachers to review grammar materials that have been learned by using various exercises. here are the statements from teachers. they have to write a sentence based on grammar discussed (teacher b). students change verbs in parentheses into right form (tenses), change an active into passive voice, and make other sentences by applying tenses learned (teacher d). making a sentence based on example of tenses given and recognizing errors on sentences (analyzing grammatical errors) (teacher a). filling in the blank by using a correct grammar rule (teacher g). students should change words or sentences to other forms and make new sentences based on grammatical rules learned. teacher also asks students to analyze some grammatical errors to understand more about grammar. homework can be a filling in the blank type. it aims to support students in understanding the verb changes based on sentences context. data in this category are in line with a theory showing that one of homework’s purposes is to reinforce materials that has already been presented in class (paulu, 1998). another theory that supports this conclusion explains that teacher should give homework and exercises to force students to practice and revise the new structure (foppoli, 2008). homework for learning language function teachers give students homework to apply and integrate language function concept on a dialogue and a sentence context. below are the results of interview with teachers. students make a dialogue by using certain expression and arrange a jumbled expression to become a good dialogue (teacher b) i ask students to answer some questions of language function material, such as filling in the blank of a dialogue by using certain expression, choosing correct expressions then arrange them to become a good dialogue based on picture sequence, etc. (teacher a) data in this category show that homework requires students to understand kinds of expression to arrange a good dialogue and answer language function exercises. it is in line with a theory that teachers should create homework that challenge students to apply and integrate a concept, information or ideas (paulu, 1998). homework for comprehending text teachers give students homework that requires students to find important information of a text in various ways. this is evident in the interview excerpts below. they read the text, then make a conclusion and summary (teacher b). reading text, finding main idea of each paragraph and other information of a text (teacher d). students answer some questions based on a text to find important information (teacher e). these ways are making a conclusion, making summary, reading, finding and combining main idea of each paragraph, and indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 52 answering questions based on a text. data in this category is in line with a theory showing that homework reinforces and helps learners to retain information (darn, 2007). homework for discussing materials homework can be an out-class-discussion activity that requires students to discuss certain learning materials in order to support their language proficiency. here are the statements from teachers. homework requires them to explore some information by discussing the recent issues (teacher g). i also ask them to discuss a topic in a group that has been learned in class and the conclusion is presented on the next meeting (teacher d). the conclusion of this category is that an out-class-discussion enables students to negotiate their knowledge, skills, and belief with others in order to deepen their learning materials. this conclusion is in line with two theories. first theory is that students take responsibility for their learning when they participate in out-of-class activities and discuss with others what they are learning in classes to apply it to other aspects (kuh, 1994). the second theory is that students discuss, explain, re-examine concepts, thereby reinforcing their learning, question and discuss complex concepts with each other (college board, 2010; booth, 2010). sharpen skills one of homework purposes is for increasing students’ language proficiency (northwest regional educational laboratory, 2005) in blazer (2009). in learning english, the skills include listening, speaking, reading, and writing. homework for supporting listening skill the obtained data show that listening skill can be learned through outclass individual exercises that are convenient to students’ own interest, such as students’ favorite videos and songs. below are some of their statements in the interviews. listening an english video on youtube and making its transcript (teacher h) students make a transcript of favorite english song to learn listening skill (teacher g) listening skills, reading, communicating ideas, taking notes, problem solving, planning and prioritizing are skills that are often reinforced through homework assignments (booth, 2010). furthermore, listening to a song at home and watching a short video are great idea for students to learn listening outclass (trowbridge, 2010). homework for supporting speaking skill data show that kinds of speaking exercise are making an english video, performing a drama, making a spoken daily conversation, discussing a topic that have been mentioned in class and the result is presented on the next meeting, presenting problem solving of a problem, performing self-introduction, and orating an english speech. here are some of their statements. my students make an english video in group to practice speaking (teacher h). writing a drama with daily life topic and performing it in a group. i also ask them to discuss a topic in a group that have been learned in class and the conclusion is presented in the next meeting (teacher d). asking all students to present an opinion, presenting problem solving of a problem, writing and orating an english speech (teacher a). making a daily conversation (spoken and written dialogue) in a pairs and performing selfintroduction (teacher f) it means that homework can be given to support speaking skill through group and individual exercises. this conclusion is supported by a theory that one of requirements of effective speaking homework may be assigned to different ability groups. individual learning styles should be taken into account (darn, 2007). a study conducted by provenzano and yue (2011) show that oral english homework given to students of a university in japan make the speaking activity more enjoyable. these assignments require certain strategies to make can be beneficial for their speaking skills. homework for supporting reading comprehension teachers ask students to read and find information of texts. they are also required to answer some questions based on the text. dinar martia azizah the varieties of homework given by english teachers of vocational schools 53 read a text, then make an application letter, some informal texts, etc. (teacher e). ask them to read an example of menu list, english expressions, and other information on the internet (teacher b). reading an example of text owned by students, finding information of a text, and aswering questions based on a text (teacher a). the teacher hopes that by doing homework, students’ reading comprehension will be improved. this conclusion is in line with a theory mentions that homework can improve your child’s general knowledge, and his grades improve but your child would also increase mastery of basic academic skills, such as reading, writing, and spelling (goldstein & zentall, 1999). homework for supporting formal text writing data in this category show that teachers give homework that require students to write various formal texts such as a paper, a biography of an inspiring person, an application letter, a formal invitation letter, a formal announcement, dialog in a formal situation, and an english speech. below are some statements taken from interviews and questionnaires. asking students to write a formal invitation letter, a formal announcement (at school, airport), paper/ portfolio, dialog in a formal situation (teacher b). read a text, then make an application letter (teacher e). making a text with a serious topic, e.g. a biography of an inspired figure, writing and orating an english speech (teacher a) the conclusion of this category is that teachers regard that various kinds of formal writing are important to be introduced to students through homeworks. it is in line with a theory claims that homework tends to focus on a formal written product (darn, 2007). homework for supporting informal text writing data show that teachers ask students to write a daily conversation, list of students’ daily activities, a receipt/procedure to make student’s favorite food, student’s own story in the past, and other informal texts. below are some statements taken from interviews and questionnaires. making a students’ daily activities list, writing about student’s own story in the past (teacher e) students write a recipt/procedure to make student’s favourite food and other informal texts (teacher g) writing a drama with a daily life topic and performing in a group, an informal descriptive, recount, and procedure text (teacher d). making a daily conversation (spoken and written dialogue) in a pairs (teacher f) the conclusion of this category is that homework requires students to write an informal text with a topic related to students’ life. this conclusion is supported by a theory that as with extensive tasks, it is important for learners to share their experiences, and perhaps to collect them in an informal writing (darn, 2007). homework for supporting writing a translation data in this category show that homework require students to translate english writing into indonesian such as an english song, movie, etc. below is the data obtained from interviews and questionnaires. translating an advertisement, a letter, an announcement, some paragraphs of a text to make students easily understand the information (teacher a). they translate an english text into indonesian (teacher b). students translate an english song, movies, products, etc (teacher g). teacher believes that by translating an english text, students will easily understand the information in the text. this conclusion is in line with two theories. translation can be a support for the writing process, especially at lower levels (kaye, 2009). the second theory is also explained by kaye (2009) who conducts a research that has shown that learners seem able to access more information in their own l1, which they can then translate. inculcate values homework aims to inculcate values that include individual and social values. those are described below. homework for inculcating individual value the given homework aims to inculcate a positive value on each student. teachers give homework to inculcate value by relating learning material to students own interest and indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 54 experiences in their lives. here are some of their statements. writing about student’s own story in the past, making a students’ daily activities list (teacher e) asking all students to present an opinion, presenting problem solving of a problem, making a text with a serious topic, e.g. a biography of an inspired figure (teacher a). students make a transcript of favorite english song to learn listening, make a recipe/procedure to make student’s favorite food (teacher g). it is in line with a theory that homework enable students to use their abilities to produce individualized and creative work products (horowitz, 2005; corno, 2000; nuzum, 1998; doyle & barber, 1990; blazer, 2009). moreover, homework help students develop good attitude, such as self-discipline and responsibility (paulu, 1998). homework for inculcating social value teachers ask students to complete both oral and written homework that require cooperation among students and orient students’ care toward everything that happens in their environment. below are some statements taken from interviews and questionnaires. homeworks require them to explore some information by discussing the recent issues (teacher g). they write a drama with daily life topic and performing it in a group. i also ask them to discuss a topic in a group that have been learned in class and the conclusion is presented in the next meeting (teacher d). making an english video in group to practice speaking (teacher h) making a daily conversation (spoken and written dialogue) in pairs (teacher f) data show that teachers give students homework that enable them to maintain social relationship among students. it is in line with a theory showing that the planning of cooperative groups or suggesting and encouraging study groups are beneficial (kagan, 1994). conclusion the overall literature review and results of this research have explained that the existence of homework cannot be separated to various components of learning. in fact, every school has different learning components. these varieties are possibly making teachers require various homeworks to adjust the conformity among the learning component varieties. in other words, the entire discussion shows that the varieties of homework are systematically determined by various components. this study aims to describe a variety of homework given by english teachers of vocational schools in yogyakarta. the data are categorized into three major categories, namely broaden knowledge, sharpen skills, and inculcate values. the researcher classifies categories of broaden knowledge into homework for preparing upcoming lesson, preparing strategy of state examination, collecting materials of state examination, doing state examination exercises, learning vocabulary, learning grammar, learning language function, comprehending text, and discussing materials. the second major category is sharpen skills. those item are homework for supporting listening skill, speaking skill, reading comprehension, formal text writing, informal text writing, and writing a translation. the last category is inculcate values that can be classified into homework for inculcating individual value and social value. based on the data, it is concluded that formal education in schools requires homework that improve students’ english proficiency. besides, the existence of state examination is regarded as a special thing that effects on learning process. some english teachers use state examination passing standards and state examination item bank as homework material references. state examination preparation causes some english teachers to give homework as a strategy for doing a test, collecting additional materials, and doing the exercises. references blazer, c. (2009). literature review homework. florida: miami-dade county public schools. booth, g. i. (2010). the effects of homework assessment on student motivation and achievement. washington: central washington university. cooper, h., robinson, j. c., & patall, e. a. (2006). does homework improve academic achievement? a synthesis of research 1987–2003. journal of education, 76(1), 1-62. dinar martia azizah the varieties of homework given by english teachers of vocational schools 55 cooper, h. (2001). the battle over homework. california: corwin press. darn, s. (2007). gme: homework. retrieved from http://www.stevedarn.com/?writings:publications: gme%3a_homework. emami, a. (2014). extension homework and classroom assignments. journal of novel applied sciences, 3(1), 29-39. foppoli, j. (2008). is grammar really important for a second language learner? retrieved from http://www.eslbase.org/articles/grammar. goldstein, s., & zentall, s. (1999). seven steps to homework success: a family guide for solving common homework problems. new south wales: specialty press, inc. kagan, s. (1994). cooperative learning. california: kagan publishing. kaye, p. (2009). translation activities in the language classroom. retrieved from http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/translati on-activities-language-classroom. kuh, g. d. (1994). student learning outside the classroom: transcending artificial boundaries. retrieved from http://www.learn2study.org/teachers /outside_classroom.htm. metlife. (2007). the metlife survey of the american teacher. us: metlife, inc. miles, m. b., huberman, a. m., & saldana. (2014). qualitative data analysis: a methods sourcebook (3rd ed.). los angeles: sage. o’connor, k. (2009). how to grade for learning k-12 (3rd ed.). california: corwin. paulu, n. (1998). helping your students with homework: a guide for teachers. washington, d.c: u.s. department of education. protheroe, n. (2009). good homework policy. retrieved from www.naesp.org. provenzano, c., & yue, s. (2011). take it outside! speaking homework for english communication classes. intercultural communication studies, 20 (2), 220-238. sharp, c., keys, w., & benefield, p. (2001). homework: a review of recent research. berkshire: nfer. trowbridge, s. (2010). kids and homework. retrieved from http://www.teaching english.org.uk/teachingkids/kids-homework. vatterott, c. (2010). five hallmarks of good homework. educational leadership, 68(1), 10-15. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 13 students' perspectives of online language learning during corona pandemic: benefits and challenges jomana s. zboun english department, faculty of arts hebron university, palestine email: jomanazboun@hotmail.com mohammed farrah english department, faculty of arts hebron university, palestine email: mfarrah@hebron.edu apa citation: zboun, j.s. & farrah, m. (2021). students’ perspectives of online language learning during corona pandemic: benefits and challenges. indonesian efl journal, 7(1), 13-20. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i1.3986 received: 23-11-2020 accepted: 15-01-2021 published: 31-01-2021 introduction technology has impacted every small aspect in our life, and language learning process is no exception. in the previous years, using technology in language learning has developed and grown. many researchers and theories start studying using computers as assisted tools in language learning, which is called call (daud & farrah, 2013). according to beatty (2003) call changed nature and the process in which learners utilize computers and internet resources and, consequently, enhance their competence. so, the call process was the first step in using technology besides the traditional classroom learning (farrah, 2006). it was used to prompt and facilitate the development of language learning use. nowadays, the use of technology has expanded to reach a new term which is called online learning. according to arroyo, berrocoso, cevallos and videla (2020), said that pandemic covid, technology-mediated learning has a significant impact on the educational process. recently, it became one of the key research concepts. before covid19 outbreak, many educational institutions, schools and universities were using partially online classes just to facilitate the process of language learning (farrah & al-bakri, 2020; abu safiyeh, & farrah, 2020). however, nowadays, all of the schools and universities transmitted to fully online classes in which all of the learning and teaching activities are carried online. online learning and teaching is carried now at hebron university with fully online classes. nowadays, all of the students are taking fully online classes where they are supposed to attend the classes online, take quizzes, and do all of their activities online by using apps like, zoom, google meet and others. accordingly, there is a need to conduct a study to explore the advantages and challenges of online learning. stages of elearning over the previous decades online learning has experienced many different stages; the first stage is call system which started in some universities in 1980. call was defined as computers and additional softwares to supplement language teaching in such as cd rom, and online abstract: this study aimed to elicit students' perspectives towards benefits and challenges of fully online classes at hebron university. the researchers examined both advantages and challenges of online classes from students' point of view. also, they explored some suggestions for improving online classes which could play an important role in improving the online learning and teaching process. the researchers employed quantitative methods. they distributed a questionnaire to collect data. eighty two students from two different english intensive courses were asked to fill a 5 point likert scale questionnaire and answer four open-ended questions. the researchers used the survey planet app to facilitate the process of distributing and collecting data. the finding of this study showed that students faced some challenges with online learning; they preferred face to face classes. the disadvantages of online classes from their perspectives are more than the advantages. the weak internet connectivity, poor interaction, less motivation, less participation and less understanding are the most challenges of online learning. however, they find online classes easy to access, convenient and easy to be reviewed for exams. keywords: online learning; advantages; challenges mailto:jomanazboun@hotmail.com mailto:mfarrah@hebron.edu https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i1.3986 jomana s. zboun & mohammed farrah cohesion and coherence in written texts of health medical laboratory students 14 conferences … online grade books (pennington, 1996). with the rapid development of call system, many instructors and institutions tried to blend technology inside and outside the classrooms with the aim of having both traditional learning and certain forms of online learning to promote the teaching learning process (singh, 2003; farrah, 2006; daud & farrah, 2013). according to richard and haya (2009), technological devices become among the essential tools in the teaching learning process. learners can use the internet to share and access information. similarly, oblinger and hawkins (2005) pointed out that technology facilitated the transmission process towards fully-online courses. likewise, the european commission (2001 as cited in arkorful, abaidoo, 2014) described e-learning as utilizing new technologies and the internet to improve quality of learning by providing accessibility to facilities and services and promoting exchanges and collaboration. moreover singh and thurman (2019) clarified that learners experience synchronous and asynchronous online learning environments and utilize varied technological devices along with internet access. learners can access information anywhere and interact with faculty members and other students. nowadays, after the pandemic situation of covid19, most of the academic institutions are giving synchronous online classes. according to carey (2020 as cited in dahwan, 2020), the crucial issue is responding to the pandemic and most importantly providing quality online education and the mechanism of transmission from traditional learning to online learning. benefits and limitations of online learning many researchers throughout these years discussed the benefits and the challenges of online learning. brewer et al. (2001) stated that technology plays a significant role in the teaching learning process. however, there is a necessity for appropriate integration of technological tools. they warned that if such learning technologies used wrongly, they are likely to undermine the role technology and thus the failure of the learning process. according to hsboula (2009), online learning has the potential to improve access to education and training as well as the quality of teaching and learning. he emphasized the role of technology in improving the teaching and learning process and pointed out that such online educational programs should be available to students at a reasonable cost. likewise, fedynich (2014) noted the potential benefits of online learning and emphasized that technology should be cost-effective and instructors or students should have easy access online resources and proper training. khalil (2018) examined the perceptions of six efl university students taking a grammar i course at palestine ahliya university, palestine towards utilizing google docs and google classroom as online collaborative tools in learning grammar. she found integrating the flipped classroom in teaching grammar can improve learners grammar skills. according to arora (2019) poor integration of online learning may yield unwanted challenges ranging from poor communication, sense of isolation, to a sense of frustration. additionally, aminullah et al. (2019) reported that teachers held positive attitudes towards ict in the process of teaching and learning english. in 2020, many researchers have questioned the validity and the obstacles of fully-fledged online classes and the following are some related studies that discussed the same issue: adnan and anwar (2020) examined the attitudes of pakistani higher education students towards online learning amid (covid-19). they found that online learning can not yields the intended results in countries like pakistan because students and instructors do not have proper access to the internet and they lack both adequate training and the financial resources. likewise, aminullah et al. (2019) observed that though some teachers held positive attitudes towards ict, others still faced many problems such as lack of support from institution, lack of ict equipment, and also lack of adequate training. however, in a study conducted in india different results was shown. nambiar (2020) conducted an online survey regarding eliciting instructors and students’ attitudes towards online classes during (covid 19). the participants were 407 students and 70 instructors from different colleges and universities in bangalore city. the findings show that there is a need for quality and timely interaction between student and professor, the availability of technical support. moreover, the study emphasized the need to create “a structured and userfriendly environment for online mode of education.” finally the study concluded with the importance of offering adequate technological training to teachers about method of conducting online classes” (792). likewise, baber (2020) examined students’ attitudes towards online learning during covid19 pandemic in india and south korea. he found that students held positive perception towards online learning aspects such as interaction, motivation, course structure, instructor knowledge, and https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0047239520934018 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0047239520934018 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 15 facilitation. accordingly, they perceived they were satisfied with the learning outcome. in a study conducted in palestine, farrah and albakry (2020) explored the attitudes of efl students in six palestinian universities towards online learning during the covid-19 pandemic. the researchers reported that students found some benefits for online learning and they pointed out some challenges that encountered the students during the transmission process towards online learning. finally, they offered some suggestions to improve the implementation of online learning in the educational process such as improving the technological infrastructure and providing both instructors and students with the necessary that facilitate the learning teaching process in the online environment. similarly, itmeizeh, & farrah. (2021) examined the extent to which the online applications utilized in palestine ahliya university and hebron university in palestine met ihep benchmarks (teaching process, student support, evaluation and assessment, faculty support) for online learning. moreover, they examined the attitudes of efl instructors' and students towards online education and the challenges that both of them may face. findings revealed that efl learners' and instructors' expressed their concerns towards the availability of student support and faculty support. this is the first time experience of hebron university students being exposed to fully synchronous classes. this study will explore the benefits and challenges of online learning from the perspectives of first year students at hebron university. moreover, students will provide suggestions of how to overcome the main difficulties of online classes. so, it will present a detailed image of students within the online learning environment, prompt deep understanding of how student's look or see the fully online learning according to their present experience. also, it will offer some recommendations to have effective online classes that can improve and overcome the challenges of online learning. so, this study will be very beneficial for instructors, students, as well as the educational institutions and universities; as it sheds light on one of the most important factors of the educational learning system which is the student. the research questions in this research are: (1) what are the major benefits and challenges of fully online classes according to hebron university students? (2) what are the students' recommendations to overcome the challenges of online learning? method the researchers, in this paper, used both quantitative and qualitative research methods. this study was conducted during the fall semester of the academic year 2020/2021. in order to gain a better insight into the students' perspectives of online learning and the possibilities for improving it at hebron university, the researchers distributed questionnaires to 114 students from two service english courses (english intensive 2 and english intensive 1). eighty two students from both courses voluntarily agreed to fill in the posted online questionnaire. all of the students are first year students who are experiencing the fully online classes for the first time. a questionnaire was chosen for this research because it is a reliable and quick method to collect information from multiple respondents in an efficient and timely manner. it aimed to elicit relevant information concerning student's perspectives of online classes. the questionnaire combined 5point likert scale and open-ended questions (see appendix). the content of the instrument was developed and utilized to discover the advantages and disadvantages of online learning from students' point of view. the questionnaire has two sections, the first section is to elicit students' preferable learning method and collect the perceptions of the students about challenges and benefits of online learning through 32 items of 5 point likert scale. questions of 5point likert scale offering respondents the possibility to choose and rate among several options from 1 (strongly agree) to 5 (strongly disagree). in the second section, there were four open-ended questions (see appendix). according to the limited time of the researchers during both lectures of (intensive 1 and 2), researchers chose to collect the data through online tools and by using the students' classroom app. also, the researchers used the surveyplanet app to facilitate the process of distributing it. after validating the questionnaire, the researchers posted it on students' classroom stream. the researchers informed the participants that this questionnaire is conducted for hebron university research paper and that any information obtained in connection with this study will remain confidential. then, the researchers collected eligible data from 82 collected questionnaires. after collecting data, it was analyzed statistically using spss. the researchers examined the questionnaire reliability and they found that the overall cronbach alpha coefficient of the questionnaire was (r=.71), indicating an acceptable degree of internal consistency. this jomana s. zboun & mohammed farrah cohesion and coherence in written texts of health medical laboratory students 16 means that the questionnaire was a reliable instrument for the purpose of the current research. results and discussion the researchers used the statistical package for social sciences (spss) (version 24) to analyze the collected date and the advantages and disadvantages of online learning from students' perspectives. the mean and standard deviation (sds) were calculated for 32 likert scale items. the results of the study revealed that most participants strongly agreed on one item which is items 19. this item shows that most of the students strongly agreed that the internet connection is very poor. the mean of this item was 4.27 (see table1). the mean and standard deviation (sds) were calculated for 32 likert scale items. the results of the study revealed that most participants strongly agreed on one item which is items 19. table 1. the means and sds of the items the participants strongly agreed upon. no. statements mean sd 19 internet connection is very week 1.73 1.11 note. if the mean is less than 1.80, this means that participants strongly agree. as table 1 show, most students strongly agreed that the internet connection at hebron university is very poor (m=1.73). most of the participants have rated the following nine items with agree (see table 2). the means of these items were less than 2.60. item10, item14, item20, item 25 and item 32 were items related to disadvantages of online classrooms. for example, most of the students agreed that interaction with instructors in online classes is less than interaction in face to face classes with a mean of 2.02. also, they believe that instructors talk most of the time in the online classes with a mean of 2.59. most of them agreed that instructors and students need training for online classes (see items 20, 25 in table 2). most of the students get bored in the online classes with a mean of 2.5 and std 1.33. moreover, most of the students agreed on 3 items which are about the advantages of face to face classes. most of the students prefer traditional classes and participate in it more than online classes. also, they are accepting feedback from each other more in the face to face classes with a mean 2.15 and a std of .85. table 2. the means and sds of the items the participants agreed upon no. statements mean sd 2 i prefer traditional ( face to face) classes 1.82 1.08 5 i participate more in face to face classes 2.04 1.02 10 interaction with teacher in online classes is less than interaction in face to face classes 2.02 1.09 14 teacher talk most of the time in the online classes 2.59 1.2 17 i am able to receive feedback from others in face to face classes 2.15 0.85 20 students are not trained enough to learn through online classes 2.48 1.26 24 i would recommend face to face learning 2.11 1.26 25 instructors and students need training courses to make online courses more beneficial 2.39 1.2 32 i get bored in the online classes 2.5 1.33 note. if the mean is less than 2.60, this means that participants agreed. table 2 shows that most of the students have preferences for face to face classes as they interact more and they were able to receive immediate feedback. however, they do not like the online classes as instructors talk most of the time which makes them bored. they believe both students and instructors need training. therefore, they recommend the traditional classroom. moreover, there are 17 items that were rated with neutral as shown in table 3. table 3. the means and sds of the items the participants were rated with neutral no. statements mean sd 1 i prefer online classes 3.33 1.33 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 17 3 i spend less time and effort in online classes 2.80 1.27 4 i participate more in online classes 3.33 1.26 6 i don’t have good internet connection 2.65 1.35 8 i prefer submitting my assignment via online 2.88 1.47 9 i feel relaxed in the online classes 3.11 1.33 11 online classes make me less anxious 3 1.27 12 i feel stress if i did mistake in the online classes 2.87 1.26 13 i feel stress if i did mistake in the face to face classes 2.93 1.36 15 i am able to work independently in the online classes 2.88 1.29 16 in online classes, i take risk to answer without teacher instruction 2.90 1.28 18 the quality of online learning at hebron university is good 3.13 1.23 21 instructors are not trained enough to teach online classes 3.21 1.15 26 the online classes help me following and reviewing the course easily 2.94 1.22 27 online classes are easy to reach 2.87 1.20 29 it is very difficult to study through online classes for students 2.77 1.11 30 it is frustrating to do task via online 3 1.29 note: if the mean is less than 3.40, this means that participants were neutral table 3 shows the participants were neither agree nor disagree with items about the advantages of online classroom like, i spend less time and effort in online classes, i participate more in online classes, i feel relaxed in the online classes, online classes make me less anxious, and many other advantages of the online classroom like reviewing, or easiness in submitting assignments. so, they didn't see using online classes or technology tools as a benefit either as an obstacle too finally, it seems that most of the students were not satisfied with the online learning experience as shown in table 4. table 4. the means and sds of the items the participants were rated with disagree no. statements mean sd 7 i don’t find difficulty in using google classroom, zoom or other apps 3.82 1.03 22 the student learn and get the same learning from online and face to face classes 3.59 1.18 23 i would recommend online learning 3.59 1.33 28 online classes satisfy my learning needs 3.46 1.12 31 online classes make me more competitive 3.54 1.15 note: if the mean is less than 4.20, this means that participants disagreed table 4 shows most of the students do not recommend the online classes (m=3.95). most of them are not satisfied with learning through online classes. also, they disagreed that they get the same learning from online classes and face to face classes (m=3.59). however, most of the students disagreed on item 7 that they don’t find difficulty in using google meet or other online programs (m=3.8). the results of the openended questions the researchers asked for more elaboration about the advantages and disadvantages of online classes, 90% of the students whether they recommend or do not recommend online classes, they have agreed that online learning saves time, effort and it is easy to be accessed and reached. s26 said "online learning saved my time and my effort too. also, it saves my money for transportation". however, s12 said" there are no positives other than saving time and money". also, 85% of the students agreed that it is better to use the online class for reviewing the material. some of them mentioned other factors like; i feel more comfortable, relaxed and less shy but they are just two students. also, s27 and s28 agreed that they participate in online more without hesitation. also, s3 said, "it is good to get higher grades". most of the students have agreed on three negatives factors in the online classes and they are as the following: (1) 70% of the students refer to the interaction problem between students and the teacher; they said 'the interaction between students and teacher are less than the interaction in the traditional classroom." (2) 90% agreed on the poor internet connection which makes online learning very hard for most of the students. also, they refer to some issues like the limited number of electronic jomana s. zboun & mohammed farrah cohesion and coherence in written texts of health medical laboratory students 18 devices in each home. (3) 50% of the students feel less motivated in the online classes. moreover, most of the students give the same solutions to make online classes more effective as they mentioned increasing the internet speed in the university and for instructors and students. also, they mentioned some ideas to make the students be motivated and participate in the class. s30, s56 and s70 said that instructors should encourage and motivate the students by making slides, powerpoint's, let them watch films and do some interesting activities". in the last open-ended question (see appendix), the researchers asked the student that if we resolve all of the obstacles from having good internet connection, instructors and students are well trained then what type of learning would you choose? 37 students out of 82 choose online classes. however, 45 students choose face to face classes. so, the results showed that most of the students still prefer the traditional classes (face to face classroom) but they think it is good this time because it will protect them from coronavirus nothing more. this study attempted to elicit perceptions of first year students at hebron university towards advantages and disadvantages of online classes. it aimed to show the most efficient methods of learning from their point of view. for the purpose of this study, 82 students from two different english intensive courses have participated in this research. the researchers answered the following research questions according to the students' perspectives. what are the major benefits and challenges of fully online classes according to hebron university students? as the finding showed, most of the students do not recommend online classes. also, they focus on showing the negative side of it more than showing its advantages. for the disadvantages of online classes, students see that they don't interact or be motivated in the online classes. also, they feel bored. s4 said, "it is important to see you physically in the classroom this will make us be motivated and participate more". this finding is in line with (2010) who noted the importance of the instructor’s presence to establish proper patterns of communication, and enhance student motivation. furthermore, most of the students strongly agreed on the poor internet connection at hebron university. this prevents the effectiveness of online classes. s33 said," i can't concentrate in the online classes as the internet disconnects every 5 minutes". this problem is considered the main problem for most of the students. mohammad (2020) found that online learning can't be effective in underdeveloped countries, where a majority can't get access to the internet due to technical as well as economic issues. also, most of the students agreed that "students and instructors are not trained enough to teach or learn in online classes". this makes the results of taking online classes be less satisfied for both students and instructors. because as the result shows, students are not satisfied with online learning and do not see the learning and teaching process being delivered the same as face to face learning; that's why they prefer face to face lectures. s68 said" i don't accept online learning because i don't understand the material well in the online classes. however, when the researchers asked for more illustration in open ended questions, most of the students agreed on the following advantages of the online classroom: (1) easy to be reached and accessed. (2) saves time, effort and money. (3) easy to be reviewed despite the result in the questionnaire, the researchers find that they were neutral. they don't agree nor disagree about these advantages. therefore, further research need to be conducted in this field. according to the student's perspectives, what are the students' recommendations to overcome the challenges and the difficulties of online learning? according to their perspectives, issues of connectivity are matters as 20% will recommend online classes if all of these problems will be solved. also, they recommend training classes for both instructors and students in order to know how to deal with apps and programs like zoom and google meet because most of them find difficulty in using these apps (see table 4). so, after being trained, they may find online classes more effective for them. so it is about the quality of internet connection and the effort that instructors and students give. according to arora (2019) a number of problems may arise due to lack of careful planning from instructors and students as well as implementation of online learning. students may feel a sense of isolation, frustration, stress, in some cases and poor performance. also, 40 % of the students recommend that universities should ask for increasing the speed of internet connection as well as scheduling a number of class training for both instructors and students to facilitate using online and replace it with face to face classes. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 19 conclusion covid-19 has affected the traditional learning method of academic institutions across the whole world. therefore, synchronous online classroom online learning was a fundamental topic that needs to be discussed. according to the survey that was distributed to 82 students, the result shows that students are not satisfied with the online classroom. they prefer and recommend traditional classes more as they participate, interact and be motivated more in it. they assume that online class has negatives more than positive things. however, they recommend contacting the responsible companies to solve the connectivity problem and they recommend training for students as well as instructors to make online learning sufficient. references abu safiyeh, h. & farrah, m. 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(2005). the myth about e-learning. british journal of educational technology. 41(2), 199 – 212. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/j.1467-8535.2008.00910.x https://doi.org/10.1080/08923647.2019.1663082 https://doi.org/10.1080/08923647.2019.1663082 https://doi.org/ https://doi.org/ https://www.researchgate.net/deref/http%3a%2f%2fdx.doi.org%2f10.1007%2fs12528-009-9023-6?_sg%5b0%5d=ut9kzs6ihsbqlsq2nkowudr4_hjoab2ez9mqzxcj_olajfhsi60arwxuwlvaola9cn5zdrsdw4zuq0-byq1ponh-qa.s8epsx5rhund3h34oit8adhfqwgwibenjwgij9lcrakjgkxj5fu8wxnhoctx-1em9jssmcufmvmpetb8lzvzdg https://www.researchgate.net/deref/http%3a%2f%2fdx.doi.org%2f10.1111%2fj.1467-8535.2008.00910.x?_sg%5b0%5d=u-muylgjb_holwfgzr0kdt_ieynvg4muzy-nbzpkhb-gez2xt5xaszh6c0m2xfybssejntlmgk2c2okn3pgiw8_l4q.o99jc4mey1lnuimnqjqubqr2_5srvtj5n8-stsv_ikrtr_hwdadund9cpex8ijizie4ixn_aaay7d9tyvsrwdw https://www.researchgate.net/deref/http%3a%2f%2fdx.doi.org%2f10.1111%2fj.1467-8535.2008.00910.x?_sg%5b0%5d=u-muylgjb_holwfgzr0kdt_ieynvg4muzy-nbzpkhb-gez2xt5xaszh6c0m2xfybssejntlmgk2c2okn3pgiw8_l4q.o99jc4mey1lnuimnqjqubqr2_5srvtj5n8-stsv_ikrtr_hwdadund9cpex8ijizie4ixn_aaay7d9tyvsrwdw indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 67 refusal strategy performed by indonesian efl learner nenden sri rahayu bale bandung university, indonesia e-mail: nendensrirahayu1212@gmail.com apa citation: rahayu, n. s. (2018). refusal strategy performed by indonesian efl learners. indonesian efl journal, 5(1), 67-76. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v5i1.1612. received: 17-09-2018 accepted: 28-11-2018 published: 01-01-2019 abstract: the research investigates the speech act recognition of refusing as made by indonesian learners of english as a foreign language, native indonesian, and native english. it involves three groups: 13 indonesian efl learners (iels), 13 indonesian native speakers (inss), and 13 american native speakers (nss) of english. they were asked to respond to ten different situations, in which they carry out the speech act of refusal. their strategies in refusing were compared one another in order to find out whether the refusal performed by indonesian efl learner (iels) correspond more closely with those of the indonesian native speakers (inss) or with speakers of the target language, the american native speakers (nss). the data, collected from a discourse completion test (dct) which was developed by blum-kulka, were analyzed and categorized based on azis‟s categories (2000). results indicated that although a similar range of refusal strategies were available to the two language groups, cross-cultural variation still exists. the data involved some contextual variables, which include the status of interlocutors (higher, equal, or lower status) and eliciting acts, i.e., requests, invitations, offers, and suggestions. keywords: indonesian efl learners; interlanguage pragmatics; refusal strategy; speech act. introduction to use language is to perform actions or utter what people intend to others in everyday conversation. mcarthur states that the most basic and widespread linguistics means of conducting human affairs is through conversation. in conversation, we usually find out some of language function, such as stating, requesting, inviting, greeting, and promise (finnegan 1993; austin 1962). those language functions are being performed corresponding to the type of attitude being expressed. an utterance that needs an act is called speech act. speech act is performed to receive a respond from the hearer, but sometimes speaker fails to gain the referred respond from the hearer. it happens when the hearer do not realize of what the speaker‟s intention. for example, when you asked someone to accompany you to the market and she refuses to go with you by saying, “sorry, i can‟t go with you.” that utterance is called refusal. we usually realize that it is hard to refuse due to some consideration, i.e. power, familiarity, sex, and age. for example, when your neighbor, who is an old woman, asks you to do something and you are not able to do it. however, you try not to insult her by refusing her request. in this case, you need to make an appropriate refusal to reject her request. in this case, you need to make an appropriate refusal to reject her request in order to save hearer‟s face. it will be different when you have to refuse your close friend, you might say the truth or give her a simple excuse that you cannot fulfill his/her request. refusal and rejection can be defined as a disapproval of the speaker‟s intention. there are some ways that are usually applied in performing refusal actions in order to reassure the speaker that he/she has an appropriate reason, i.e. refusal strategy. as stated by bardovi-harlig (2001), refusers need to take their own status and the face threatening nature of refusal into nenden sri rahayu refusal strategy performed by indonesian efl learners 68 consideration and employ strategies to maintain the status balance. male and female speak in different way in community. society tends to expect female to have better behavior than male. in certain situation, some forms of words are only used by woman and others use by male (holmes, 2001). since female is considered having secondary role in society, they are expected to use more standard form than male. thus, standard forms claim to be associated with female values and femininity. meanwhile, male prefer using vernacular form to standard language because male considers macho and vernacular forms can show masculinity and toughness. speech acts speech acts refers to an act that one performed when making an utterance, for example, giving order and making promises (austin, 1969). in line with this, some philosophers as cited in blum kulka (1987) mention that linguistic expressions are not the minimal units of human communication, but the performances that contain kinds of acts, namely, making statements, advising, thanking, apologizing, and many more. the performance of several acts that happens at once is speech act. it is distinguished by different aspect of the speaker‟s intention. those are the act of saying something, what one does in saying it, such as requesting, promising, refusing, and how one is trying to affect hearer. producing an utterance in performed actions will consist of three related acts. austin (1969) and yule (1996) explained the three kinds of actions related to utterance: 1) locutionary, simple act of saying something and producing a meaningful linguistic expressions of what you say; 2) illocutionary, producing a meaningful utterance, such as statement, offer, explanation, etc; and 3) perlocutionary, what is done in the act or doing something without intending it to have an effect. refusal theory refusal can be used in response to requests, invitations, offers, and suggestions. refusal is the act that shows one‟s inability or unwillingness to perform the request for some reasons whether it is expected sincerely or not (azis 2000). refusals, as all the other speech acts, occur in all languages. however, not all languages/cultures refuse in the same way nor do they feel comfortable refusing the same invitation or suggestion. the speech act of refusal occur when a speaker directly or indirectly says „no‟ to request or invitation. refusal is a face-threatening act to the listener/requester/inviter, because it contradicts his or her expectations, and is often realized through indirect strategies. thus, it requires a high level of pragmatic competence. chen (1996) used semantic formula to analyze speech act sets of refusal (refusing requests, invitations, offers, and suggestions), and concluded that direct refusal as “no” was not a common strategy for any of the subjects, regardless of their language background. speakers who may be considered fluent in a second language due to their mastery of the grammar and vocabulary of that language may still lack pragmatic competence; in other words, they may still be unable to produce language that is socially and culturally appropriate. in crosscultural communication, refusals are known as „striking points‟ for many non native speakers (beebe, takahashi, & uliz-weltz, 1990). refusals can be tricky speech acts to perform linguistically and psychologically since the possibility of offending the interlocutor is inherent in the act itself (know, 2004). as a face-threatening act, a sensitive pragmatic task and high pragmatic competence concern constructing refusals. as a failure to refuse appropriately can risk the interpersonal relations of the speakers, refusals usually include various strategies to avoid offending one‟s interlocutors. however, the choice of these strategies may vary across languages and cultures. refusal is disapproval of the speaker‟s idea and thus may threat the speaker‟s face. when someone refuses to do something that the speaker expects. it means the speaker indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 69 does not have a successful interaction. while acceptance or agreement tends to use direct language without much delay, mitigation, or explanation, refusal tends to be indirect. refusal contains mitigation, or delayed within the turn or across turns. in addition, refusal often begins with a token agreement or acceptance or with an expression of appreciation or apology and usually includes an explanation. refusal strategies function to reassure the speaker that s/he will accept it but there are appropriate reasons to refuse it. based on beebe et al. (1990), refusals can be classified into two categories, namely direct and indirect categories. those two categories consist of several strategies. the refusal strategy is ways that are usually applied by the speaker in performing refusal actions in order to reassure the speaker that s/he has an appropriate reason. azis (2000) stated that there are 11 strategies of refusing, which considers social factors such as gender, age, setting, distance, power, ranking of imposition, and the seriousness of losing face. these strategies are adopted as the framework of this research. those strategies are: 1. direct no the speaker will say „no‟ directly and it is followed by short explanation this is commonly used by powerful person to person of a lower status. 2. hesitation and lack enthusiasm the speaker doesn‟t utter his/her willingness or inability directly, but she tries to manipulate words of courtesy to save his/her face. 3. offer an alternative both the speaker and the hearer intend to save their face, so the speaker offers an alternative to the speaker who commit to his/her plan. 4. postponement the hearer will have uncertain feeling to make up their mind to accept or refuse the action, because the speaker needs more time to do it. 5. put the blame to third party the speaker will scapegoat a third party to prevent them from fulfilling the hearer‟s request by avoiding consequences like blames, curse, grumbles, etc. 6. general acceptance with excuse expressing the speaker‟s inability to accept the request. the speaker will express his/her feeling of sympathy or giving appreciation that shows. 7. giving reason and explanation this is indirect refusal and it shows vague of the speaker‟s refusal, so the interlocutor has to wait for the explanation 8. complaining and criticizing it is used to avoid using „no‟ and the speaker complains the action. 9. conditional yes this strategy shows intention of the speaker to do the action after they completed the certain conditions. 10. questioning the justification this strategy is employed to ensure of what has been heard and it is also used to avoid of saying no directly. in other words, the speaker pretends not to hear the question clearly. 11. threatening it is considered as blunt refusal since it can be perceived more than refusal. it is likely the requesters would reconsider the request. politeness, relative power and social distance in explaining the use of refusal strategies, politeness plays an important role, as stated by holmes (2001) that politeness involves taking account of the feelings of others. when it comes to refusing, the addressee is the main concern. furthermore, brown and levinson (1987) stated that politeness involves us showing an awareness of other people‟s face wants. the way we refuse to our superior will be quite different with the way we refuse to our close relatives. refusing “involves assessing social relationships along the dimension of social distance and relative power or status” (holmes, 2001). the two dimensions provide the basis for distinguishing two kinds of politeness, namely positive and negative politeness (holmes, 2001). holmes (2001) futher elaborates, “positive politeness is solidarity oriented. it emphasizes shared attitudes and values. by contrast, negative politeness pays nenden sri rahayu refusal strategy performed by indonesian efl learners 70 people respect and avoids intruding on them. negative politeness involves expressing oneself appropriately in terms of social distance and respecting status differences.” maintaining negative politenes means applying relative power differences. as thomas (1995) pointed out that we tend to apply a greater degree of indirectness with people having some power or authority over us than those who do not. in applying it, the social distance is heightened and the relative power or power is recognized. meanwhile, maintaining positive politeness means preserving the positive face of other people (peccei, 1999). she further explaines that when we use positive politeness, we use speech strategies that emphasize our solidarity with the addressee. in other words, relative power is less recognized and the social distance is minimized. it is difficult to draw a clear distinction between relative power or power and social distance and in fact some studies conflate the two. initially, power and social distance were identified as separate dimensions, but in pratice, the distinction was not maintained. thomas (1995) further elaborates the reason why we are so often baffled is that power and social distance very frequently co-occur—we tend to be socially distant from those in power over us, yet this is not always the case. in the context of this research, relative power or power is the main social dimension. this is due to the fact that the dct items were all status-based. social distance was the secondary basis for the dct development. interlanguage pragmatics since one group of the participants is a group of indonesian efl learners (iels), thus, the refusal strategies they apply involve pragmatics transfer from l1 to l2. this calls for the review of interlanguage pragmatics (ilp) in order to explain the refusal strategies of the iels. kasper (in linde, 2009) defines ilp as “the study of nonnative speakers‟ comprehension, production, and acquisition of linguistic action in l2, or put briefly, ilp investigates how to do things with words in a second language.” linde (2009) further stated that learners‟ interlanguage is resulting from three overlapping influences or sources: pragmatic transfer, pragmatic overgeneralization, and teaching induced errors. in the context of this research, it mainly concerns with pragmatic transfer which is refferred to as the use of l1 pragmatic knowledge to understand or carry out linguistic action in the l2. in other words, pragmatic transfer deals with the influence of the first language and the first culture to the production of refusal strategies in l2. kasper (in franch, 1998) further explains that based on the interrelatedness of language and culture, she identifies two different types of pragmatic transfer, namely pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic. pragmalinguistic transfer refers to the process in which the learners choose particular strategies and forms from their l1 to convey to their interlanguage. sociolinguistic transfer is rooted in culturally different perceptions of the importance of context-internal and contextexternal variables (barron in linde, 2009). distinctive manifestations of pragmatic transfer have been reviewed in the literature, i.e. interference or negative transfer and facilitative or positive transfer (franch, 1998). franch further elaborates that the influence of one language to another may resulting in excessive use of one form or function and under-use or avoidance of forms or functions. positive pragmatic transfer derives from the successful extrapolation of l1 sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic knowledge into l2 due to similarities shared by the two languages. rose and kasper (in linde, 2009) suggest that learners may benefit from a corresponding form-function mapping between l1 and l2 if the forms used similar to l2 contexts and effects. meanwhile, negative pragmatic transfer results from the inappropriate projection of first language based sociopragmatic and pragmalinguistic knowledge onto second indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 71 language context, thus leading to sociopragmatic or pragmalinguistic failure (linde, 2009). the present study is aimed at investigating the refusal performed by indonesian native speakers (inss), indonesian efl learners (iels), and american native speakers (nss). thus, the problems raised in this study are formulated into the following questions; 1) what kinds of refusal strategies are employed by native by indonesian native speakers (inss), indonesian efl learners (iels) and american native speakers (nss) of english? and 2) when do indonesian efl learners (iels) perform the speech act of refusal? are their refusal strategies similar to those used by american native speakers (nss) of english? method this study is a case study conducted based on descriptive qualitative method. alwasilah (2002) explained that the objective of qualitative research is to obtain the descriptive data. the participants were 39 people who are divided into three groups; 13 indonesian native speakers (inss), 13 indonesian efl learners (iels), and 13 american native speakers (nss). all of the subjects were asked to fill out a discourse completion test (dct). the dct is a form of questionnaire depicting some natural situations to which the respondents are expected to respond making refusals. this test was originally designed by blum-kulka in 1982 and has been widely used since then in collecting data on speech acts realization both within and across language groups. the written role-playing questionnaire consists of ten situations. the questionnaire on refusal was divided into four categories: refusals to (1) requests, (2) invitations, (3) offers, and (4) suggestions. each type included a status differential: higher, equal, or lower. the responses of the three groups will be compared to each other to find out to what extent the indonesian learners of english manipulate their pragmatic competence of the target language to refuse in english. for the inss, the questionnaire was translated into indonesian with the necessary changes in the names of people and places to make them more familiar with the situations. the data collected through the discourse-completion-test were analyzed based on the categorization employed by azis (2000). the data were then coded based on the order of semantic formulas used in each refusal. the total number of semantic formulas of each kind used for each situation was obtained for each of the three subject groups. then, the writer counted the frequency of each formula for each situation and listed them. finally, the similarities and differences between inss, iels and nss responses were counted and analyzed. results and discussions refusal strategies employed by american native speakers (nss) of english based on the dct, the following data was yielded. as it can be seen in table 1, american nss speak indirectly in refusing. there were some strategies used by them, they mostly conducted the refusal by giving reasons and explanations (26%), applying direct no (22%), applying general acceptance with excuse (17%), offering alternative (13%), applying conditional yes (7%), hesitating (6%), postponing (3%), and complaining and criticizing (2%). table 1. american nss of english refusal strategies in general no. the stategies the occurences of the strategies ∑ % 1. direct no 29 22% 2. hesitation 9 6% 3. offering alternative 17 13% 4. postponement 4 3% 5. put the blame to the third party 1 0.8% nenden sri rahayu refusal strategy performed by indonesian efl learners 72 6. general acceptance with excuse 22 17% 7. giving reason and explanation 34 26% 8. complaining and criticizing 3 2% 9. conditional yes 10 7% 10. questioning the justification 0 0% 11. threatening 1 0.8% refusal strategies employed by indonesian native speakers (inss) in general, indonesian native speakers (inss) applied indirect refusal strategies. based on table 2, the strategies they apply are, among others, giving reason and explanation (32%), direct no (18%), postponement (16%), offering alternative (12%), etc. table 2. inss refusal strategies in general no. the stategies the occurrences of the strategies ∑ % 1. direct no 24 18% 2. hesitation 4 3% 3. offering alternative 16 12% 4. postponement 22 16% 5. put the blame to the third party 4 3% 6. general acceptance with excuse 3 2% 7. giving reason and explanation 42 32% 8. complaining and criticizing 2 1% 9. conditional yes 5 4% 10. questioning the justification 3 2% 11. threatening 5 4% refusal strategies employed by indonesian efl learners (iels) based on the dct with ten situations, table 3 shows the overall result. the data showed that most iels speak indirectly in refusing. there were some strategies used by them, they mostly conducted the refusal by giving reasons and explanations (34%). they offerred alternative (17%), applied the general ecceptance with excuse stategy (14%), applied „direct no‟ (11%), applied postponement (10%), and put the blame to the third party (5%). table 3. iels refusal strategies in general no. the stategies the occurrences of the strategies ∑ % 1. direct no 15 11% 2. hesitation 4 0.3% 3. offering alternative 23 17% 4. postponement 14 10% 5. put the blame to the third party 7 5% 6. general acceptance with excuse 19 14% 7. giving reason and explanation 44 34% 8. complaining and criticizing 1 0.8% 9. conditional yes 2 1% 10. questioning the justification 0 0% 11. threatening 1 0.8% relative power dimension related to status, nss can easily say no directly when their position is lower, equal or higher than the requester, e.g. among friends, from the boss to the servant, etc. it can be seen from all four stimuli, direct no strategy was consistently used. table 4 depicts such use of direct no, as in the indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 73 invitation, all three status, i.e. lower, equal, and higher, applied direct no with the percentage of 15%, 8%, and 31%, subsequently. in the request stimulus, direct no was also used in equal and higher status with the percentage of 31%. furthermore, in the offer stimulus, direct no was also used in the equal and higher status with the percentage of 38% and 62%. table 4. relative power dimension of nss refusal strategies stimulus type refuser status (relative to interlocultor) situation refusal strategies invitation lower 9 giving reason and explanation (62%); general acceptance with excuse (23%); direct no (15%) equal 6 offering altenative (31%); general acceptance with excuse (31%); giving reason and explanation (23%); direct no (8%); postponement (8%) higher 5 direct no (31%); general acceptance with excuse (23%); giving reason and explanation (15%) request lower 2 giving reason and explanation (31%); conditional yes (23%); general acceptance with excuse (15%); offering alternative (15%) equal 4 direct no (31%); offer alternative (31%); giving reason and explanation (23%); conditional yes (15%) higher 10 direct no (31%); offer alternative (31%): giving reason and explanation (23%); conditional yes (15%) offer lower 7 general acceptance with excuse (31%); giving reason and explanation (15%) equal 3 direct no (38%); general acceptance with excuse (23%); giving reason and explanation (15%); complaining and criticizing (15%) higher 1 direct no (62%); giving reason and explanation (23%) suggestion equal 8 hesitation and lack of enthusiasm (46%); giving reason and explanation (31%); conditional yes (15%) such use of direct no also promotes solidarity and less distant social distance. with minimized social distance, the nss are trying to maintain the positive face of the addressee. this is in line with the previous research on nss refusal strategies which was conducted by honglin (2007). he stated that nss value equality, therefore they are not sensitive to social rank. nss may use similar type of refusal speech acts to refuse anyone, regardless of his social status. the more distant the social distance, the more indirect the refusal speech acts. indonesian native speakers (inss) mostly applied indirect refusal strategies in their responses. as depicted in table 5, giving reason and explanation and postponement dominated the strategies applied either in the lower, equal and higher status in all three stimuli. however, in the higher status of the offer stimulus, direct no dominated the strategy with 62%. in the higher status of invitation stimulus, direct no was the second strategy mostly used by the inss with 23%. table 5. relative power dimension of inss refusal strategies stimulus type refuser status (relative to interlocultor) situation refusal strategies invitation lower 9 giving reason and explanation (69%); direct no (23%) equal 6 giving reason and explanation (31%); postponement (31%): nenden sri rahayu refusal strategy performed by indonesian efl learners 74 offering alternative (23%); put the blame to the third party (8%) higher 5 postponement (38%):direct no (23%): giving reason and explanation (15%) request lower 2 giving reason and explanation (54%); put the blame to the third party (15%); hesitation (15%) equal 4 giving reason and explanation (62%); conditional yes (15%) higher 10 postponement (46%); offer alternative (46%) offer lower 7 general acceptance with excuse (23%); direct no (23%): giving reason and explanation (15%): conditional yes (15%): put the blame to the third party (8%); equal 3 giving reason and explanation (46%); direct no (15%); postponement (15%): conditional yes (15%). higher 1 direct no (62%); giving reason and explanation (15%) suggestion equal 8 offer alternative (31%); postponement (15%): direct no (15%); giving reason and explanation (15%);threatening (15%) nss can easily said no directly when their position is equal than the requester. on the other hand, inss tend to use reason and explanation in refusing when their positions are lower than the requester, e.g. the worker to the boss, the student to the professor, etc. furthermore, indonesian mostly offer another alternative or give reason and explanation when their position are equal or higher than the requester, e.g. from the professor to the students, among friends, etc. iels can easily said no directly when their position is higher than the requester, e.g. the boss to the servant. as depicted on table 6, direct no is highly used in the offer stimuli only in higher status with the percentage of 62%. furthermore, they tend to use giving reason and explanation and general acceptance with excuse in refusing when their positions are lower than the requester or equal with them, e.g. the worker to the boss, the student to the professor, among friends etc. table 6. relative power dimension of iels refusal strategies stimulus type refuser status (relative to interlocultor) situation refusal strategies invitation lower 9 giving reason and explanation (69%); general acceptance with excuse (15%); offer alternative (15%) equal 6 offering altenative (31%); giving reason and explanation (31%); postponement (23%) higher 5 general acceptance with excuse (31%); postponement (31%):giving reason and explanation (23%) request lower 2 giving reason and explanation (38%); put the blame to the third party (23%); hesitation (15%) equal 4 giving reason and explanation (46%); general acceptance (23%);offer alternative (15%) higher 10 offer alternative (69%): postponement (15%) offer lower 7 general acceptance with excuse (46%); put the blame to the third party (31%); postponement (15%) equal 3 giving reason and explanation (46%); direct no (23%); general acceptance with excuse (15%) higher 1 direct no (62%); giving reason and explanation (38%) suggestion equal 8 hesitation and lack of enthusiasm (46%); giving reason and explanation (31%); conditional yes (15%) iels also apply a distinctive refusal strategy of their l1, which is put the blame to the third party, when they are in the lower position. table 6 depicts this use in the request stimuli in the lower status with the percentage of 23% an also in the offer indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 75 stimuli in the lower status with the percentage of 31%. thus, based on the strategies iels applied, i.e. the direct no when they are in the higher status, giving reason and explanation and general acceptance when they are in lower or equal status, and the distinctive put the blame to the third party strategy when they are in lower status, conform to the notion of negative pragmatic transfer. in terms of the refusal strategies that can be referred to as pragmalinguistic aspect, they do not apply the strategies of the l2. furthermore, in terms of sociopragmatic aspect, the strategies they applied correspond more closely to the l1 culture. conclusion based on the data, indonesian efl learners (iels) tend to use their native culture in refusing request, offer, invitation, and suggestion. the most different strategy used among the three groups are „directly say no‟ and „put the blame on the third party‟. most nss easily say „no‟ directly when they want to refuse compared to inss and ies. furthermore, most inss and ies used the strategy of „putting the blame on the third party‟ which is rarely used by nss. it means that iels are still influenced more by their native language and culture rather than their target language. in interlanguage pragmatics (ilp), these iels are undergoing negative pragmatic transfer as the refusal strategies they apply conform to their l1 culture. references azis. (2000). refusing in indonesian: strategies and politeness implications. unpublished phd thesis departement of linguistics, monash university. bardovi-harlig, k. (2001). evaluating the empirical evidence: grounds for instruction in pragmatics? in k. r. rose and g. kasper (eds.), pragmatics in language teaching (pp. 13-32). new york: cambridge university press. beebe, l., takahashi, t., & uliss-weltz, r. (1990). pragmatic transfer in esl refusals. in r. scarcella, e. andersen, & s. d. krashen (eds.), the development of communicative competence in a second language (pp. 55-73). new york: newbury house. blum-kulka, s., & olshtain, e. (1986). too many words: length of utterance and pragmatic failure. studies in second language acquisition, 8, 165179. brown, p., & levinson, s. (1987). politeness: some universals in language usage. cambridge: cambridge university press. chen, h. j. (1996). cross-cultural comparison of english and chinese metapragmatics in refusal. indiana university. (eric document reproduction service no. ed 408860). franch, p. b. (1998). on pragmatic transfer. studies in english language and linguistics, 5-20. holmes, j. (2001). an introduction to sociolinguistics. london: longman. honglin, l. (2007). a comparative study of refusal speech acts in chinese and american english. canadian social science, 3(4). linde, a. (2009). how polite can you get?: a comparative analysis of interlanguage pragmatic knowledge in spanish and moroccan efl university students. universidad de granada. porta linguarium, 12, 133-147. peccei, j. s. (1999). pragmatics. london and new york: routledge. thomas, j. (1995). meaning in interaction. new york: longman. nenden sri rahayu refusal strategy performed by indonesian efl learners 76 indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(2) july 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 117 creative process in fiction writing of three indonesian writers iin nuraeni department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia email: ms.iinnuraeni@gmail.com fahrus zaman fadhly department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia email: fahruszf@gmail.com apa citation: nuraeni, i., & fadhly, f. z. (2016). creative process in fiction writing of three indonesian writers. indonesian efl journal, 2(2), 117-126 received: 24-05-2016 accepted: 26-06-2016 published: 01-07-2016 abstract: this research investigates the creative process in fiction writing employed by three writers of different writing genres: short story, novel, and poem. this study applied a qualitative method that involved one male and two female writers in kuningan and majalengka. the data collected from document analysis, observation, and interview were analyzed through descriptive qualitative method. the results of the analysis revealed that there were five creative processes of writing fiction used by the writers in writing fiction, namely preparation, incubation, insight, evaluation, and elaboration. besides, it also revealed that novel writer is more creative than short story and poem writers since he uses all steps of creative process. in addition, the researcher found that there were some ways of exploring imagination in writing fiction, including drawing and deepen characters in the film or theater, making mind mapping to write, developing a shorter text, and expecting that the writing will be read by younger generation. keywords: creative process, writing fiction, fiction writers, imagination process introduction writing is a complex activity. therefore, the writers will need processes of thinking in order to transfer ideas, select interest topic, and arrange words into a product of writing (kane, 2000). in addition, huy (2015, p. 54) mentions that “writing is a complex metacognitive activity that draws on an individual’s knowledge, basic skill, strategies, and ability to coordinate multiple processes.” in this case, the writers should have skills of producing text, the knowledge about writing, process of energizing and motivating participants to write with enthusiasm and act through strategies to archive writing goals. the all process of writing is generally from the process of creative writing or from specific creative process (kaufman & kaufman, 2009). creative process focuses on the processes of generating ideas and idea evaluation to get the high imagination (kaufman & kaufman, 2009). the creativity in writing not only includes good idea, but also the writers’ ability in all process of writing until becoming a writing product. reisman (2013, p. 11) says that “creativity is the ability to come up with a new idea, process, or product.” the ability to come up the idea usually emerge from the unconscious mind, when it comes to creative writing, many people believe that writers have special talent to conduct the all process in writing (kaufman & kaufman). iin nuraeni & fahrus zaman fadhly creative process in fiction writing of three indonesian writers 118 thus, it seemed important to distinguish the process of writing, in general, from the process of creative writing, in particular. the first model of creative process comes from (wallas, 1926) as cited in (pope, 2005) who formalized the four-stage models of the creative process involves preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. therefore, different perspective comes from csikszentmihalyi (1996) who declared that there are five creative processes in writing, namely preparation, incubation, illumination, evaluation, and elaboration. after the writer prepares to arouse curiosity about something, there are four main conditions that are important during this stage. first, the writer should pay attention to develop their work. second, the writer should pay attention to one’s goals whether their work appropriate with their plan or not. third, the writer should keep condition in relation to the domain knowledge such as to use effective techniques in writing supported by the appropriate theory. finally, it is important to listen to colleagues in the field to get a sense that things are moving in the right direction (csikszentmihalyi, 1996). in this point, the writer’s skill should adapt to different condition and manage their writing with whatever is needed to reach their goals. all creative process in writing requires a creative writer. creative writers often started with a small words or images and worked through elaboration and revision to achieve a larger idea (kaufman & kaufman, 2009). the creative process certainly needed in writing, because without it, the writing would not have a progress. therefore, to be a creative writer is not easy. it is something to do with heart, soul and the mind behind the words, because creative writing is the process of inventing or presenting our thoughts, feelings, and emotions to convey information in an appealing way. weldon (2013) claims that “creativity cannot be taught. not if you define creativity as the urge to make something out of nothing.” on the other hand, morley (2007) states that creative writing can be taught most effectively when students have some talent. if a teacher can shape the talent, and the students enjoy the shaping, creative writing will be taught as a craft. but, basically, creativity cannot be taught to all people because the creativity comes from people’s special talent. however the talent of writing is not owned by everyone, but with capacity of knowledge, the creativity can be taught. thus, the talent plays an important role in writing fiction. one kind of genres in writing is fiction. according to milhorn (2006, p. 1), “fiction is literary work whose content is produced by imagination and is not necessarily on fact.” morlay (2007) mentions some kind of fiction such as novel, short story, and flash fiction. in writing a fiction, the writers should explore the imagination to support their fiction writing, which is “imagination is frequently associated with creativityindeed, in one of its uses, imaginative is a near-synonym for creative” (gaut, 2010, p. 1042). therefore, someone who is imaginative would be someone who is good at conjuring up images, such as think up new possibilities, offer fresh perspectives on what is familiar, make fruitful connections between disparate ideas, elaborate original ways of seeing or doing things, project themselves into unusual situations, and so on (beaney, 2005). in short, someone who is imaginative is someone who is creative. from the explanations above, we can see some different perspectives of componential model of creativity. this presents study focuses on analyzing the creative process in fiction writing used by three writers. it is limited in writing indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(2) july 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 119 short story, novel and poem. to analyze the creative process in writing fiction, the researcher uses csikszentmihalyi (1996) theory about five steps on creative process including preparation, incubation, insight, evaluation, and elaboration. based on the background above, the problems of this research are formulated into to research questions as follows: “in terms of the process of creativity, what steps of creative process used by writers in writing fiction?” and “what are the ways of exploring imagination to write fiction writing?” thus, the objectives of this research are to find out the difference creative process used in writing short story, novel and poem, and to find out ways of exploring imagination in writing fiction. method this research used qualitative case study. according to gay, mills and airasian (2012, p. 443), “case study is a qualitative research approach in which researchers focus on a phenomenon, such as a situation or event of study known as a bounded system.” the main objective of this research is to describe the creative processes in fiction writing, especially in novel, short story, and poem. this case study allowed the researcher to obtain data by using indepth interview technique. this case study was conducted in kuningan and majealengka regency of west java provinces by interviewing three fiction writers in indonesia. the research was held in three phases including collecting written fiction product (document), observation, and interview. documents were collected to identify creative process used by the writers. after reading the document, the researcher observed and interviewed the three fiction writers relating to the document. interview session were conducted seven times in different days. all collected data were then analyzed through qualitative procedures. the steps of data analysis involves analyzing written fiction product (documents), transcribing the interview sessions from audiotape recording, reading the transcription and translating it to english, analyzing the answer given from the interview, describing the result of the analysis, and drawing conclusion. results and discussion from the data analysis, the researcher found that the three fiction writers, writer #1 (ns) as short story writer, writer #2 (ph) as novel writer, and writer #3 (irz) as poem writer, used different steps on creative process in different genres, namely preparation, incubation, insight, evaluation, and elaboration. steps on creative process in writing short story the first writer is a female fiction writer (ns) from kuningan. the researcher collected her nine short stories and a novel. her short stories are: nasehat emak, oktober hitam, takdir sang rembulan, tiga butir pengkhianatan, perang takkan pernah usai, negeri yang tak pernah merdeka, bisik-bisik sabit, jendela yang selalu terbuka, and cerita aki iyus, while the novel is entitled kuningan city 2112 faith. after reading all documents, the researcher conducted observation and interview. those processes were held in three times. as result, it could be seen that writer #1 (ns) had hobbies that influence her creative process in writing fiction. her hobbies were watching korean drama and drawing. there are 49 korean drama in her notebook. from some korean drama, there are four favorite korean drama, namely the great queen of seondeok, good doctor, entertainer and mandate of heaven. iin nuraeni & fahrus zaman fadhly creative process in fiction writing of three indonesian writers 120 watching the drama can indirectly give inspiration to the writer to write. one of inspiration comes from “the great queen seondeok” korean drama. the drama gives inspiration to write a short story entitled “takdir sang rembulan.” besides, her drawing hobby is used to create a cover book and make some cartoon characters. dori is one of her favorite cartoon character. she was imagining that dori is a character comes from other dimension and lives in doburi kingdom. meanwhile, dori had task to make everyone happy. from her hobby, she can explore her imagination in writing. furthermore, she had some personal notes or books to make a draft or outline of stories. in personal notes, there are always dori character in many version and the book is made more colorful with stickers. besides, she had many collection of books in her bedroom which seems like library. one of her favorite book is “de wist” by afifah afra and “sebuah janji” by sinta yudisia. she imitates the writing style of her favorite writers. she elaborated stories become a novella entitled “flower knight” through social media, wattpad. in novella, there were chapter to chapter. the novella had five chapters and twelve sub chapters. the first chapter was published on may 19th 2016. she always posts her writing chapter to chapter through wattpad. in observing, the researcher chooses one short story entitled “takdir sang rembulan” to know the creative process in writing short story. the reason in choosing this story is because it has interesting conflict about a tradition of society. table 1 illustrates the creative process in writing short story experienced by writer #1. table 1. list of creative processes in writing short story applied by writer #1 (ns) no steps of the creative process yes no writer’s activities 1. preparation  written two until three stories 2. incubation  writing process that is inspired by local story 3. insight  change the concept of tauhid become tradition of societies 4. evaluation  limitation or not tell the history of the main character because the text must be shorter 5. elaboration  previously, the writer plans to make a long version of the story in novella but it was not yet realized until now the results shown in the table above were gained from document analysis. whereas, the results from the interview session were presented as follows: the first process done was preparation. at this stage, the writer made some short stories to distinguish one story from another and to choose the good story. awalnya cerita ini dibuat untuk tugas mata kuliah apresiasi prosa fiksi. kalau ada tugas bikinnya tidak hanya satu, ada sekitar dua atau tiga, tapi diambil yang paling bagus. (initially, the story was made to fulfill the assignment of prose fiction course. i do not write only one story but two or three stories, then i chose the best story to be submitted) the second process done by writer #1 (ns) was incubation. in this process, the writer developed the stories got from society regarding the tradition, by delivering the message contained in the societies i.e. about the belief of animism and dynamism. takdir sang rembulan terinspirasi dari kisah lokal. kadang masyarakat kita masih terikat dengan adat yang sudah jelas syirik tapi masih indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(2) july 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 121 dilakukan. jadi cerita ini dibuat untuk merubah pola pikir masyarakat yang masih menganut paham animisme dan dinamisme. (“takdir sang rembulan” was inspired from local story. sometimes, our society still believes on the tradition outside our religion. thus, this story was written to change their thinking concept which still in area of animism and dynamism) in creative process, the writer gave new insight. in this process, the writer got new idea to develop and change the initial concept into new concept to complete solution of the problem. awalnya saya ingin membuat konsep tentang tauhid yang kental, namun saya tidak tahu kenapa malah menjadi cerita tentang sebuah tradisi masyarakat. (initially, i want to write about the concept of tauhid but it finlly flows into traditional society story) next, in evaluation process, the writer evaluates the story by deciding which part of story that should be told and not, because the text should be shorter in a short story. thus, the writer evaluates some parts of story. pada awal cerita memang tidak diceritakan bahwa sekar ayu adalah gadis yang tidak menganut agama islam. dia menganggap bahwa paham animisme dan dinamisme itu percaya terhadap tuhan tapi dia tidak tau bahwa tuhan itu allah. ada istilah pasrahkan kepada yang di atas, jadi dia mengambarkan tingginya tuhan sama dengan rembulan, maka dari itu disebut takdir sang rembulan itu adalah takdir dari sang pencipta. (in the beginning of the story, it was not described that sekar ayu is not a moslem. she considers that animism and dynamism believe in god but she did not know that god is allah. there is a terminology about pasrahkan kepada yang diatas, so she describes god as tall as moon. thus, “takdir sang rembulan” means the creator’s fate.) the last creative process is elaboration. in this process, the writer did not elaborate the story. previously, the writer plans to make a long version of the story but it was not yet realized until now. tadinya saya mau bikin versi panjang menjadi novella dari cerita ini. jadi ada karakter protagonis dan antagonis. suranantaka adalah karaker protagonis yang dibuat untuk mengingatkan tokoh antagonis (orang melakukan pesugihan) supaya tidak terikat adat yang tidak benar tersebut. (initially, i want to make long version of the story in novella. so, there are two character namely protagonist and antagonist. suranantaka is the protagonist character who will remind the antagonist character about the “wrong” tradition) based on the result above, writer #1 (ns) only applied four steps of creative process. it could be seen that the creative process of writing a short story starts from preparation until evaluation, the writer did not do elaboration process. the elaboration process will be used by writer, if the writer will make a long version story. the writer will use elaboration process only if she intends to write a novella. steps on creative process in writing novel the second writer is male fiction writer (ph) from kuningan. the interview towards writer #2 was held in two times. here, the researcher collected a novel, short story, and poem created by him. the title of the novel is sebuah wilayah yang tidak ada di google earth (2015). the title of the short story is kurusetra (1998) and the poem is isyarat bunga api (1997). from the three kinds of fiction above, the researcher took a novel entitled sebuah wilayah yang tidak ada di google earth (2015) to know the creative process in writing a novel. fiction writer will not write in a bad mood; when he was writing and then he felt bad, he stopped writing and does another activity. he preferred writing in calm condition and alone, when his family was sleep and there is no one disturbs him. lately, he only writes a novel because novel needs more iin nuraeni & fahrus zaman fadhly creative process in fiction writing of three indonesian writers 122 challenging imagination process than writing other kind of fiction. in his perspective, writing is not used as a routine in everyday life but only as a hobby to know his character through writing. the result of interview towards writer #2 is shown in table 2 illustrating the creative process in writing novel. table 2. list of creative processes in writing novel applied by writer #2 (ph) no steps on the creative process yes no writer’ activities 1. preparation  just rewrite from writer’s experienced 2. incubation  writing process when meet with some people on 2012 until 2015. 3. insight  new inspiration always comes based on writer’s experience and rewrites each event. 4. evaluation  editing the whole of the novel. 5. elaboration  the themes is elaborated from chapter to chapter of the novel the results shown in the table above were gained from document analysis. whereas, the results from the interview session were presented as follows: the creative process of preparation stage usually becomes the interesting one to write because it arouses curiosity about something. thus, the writer writes about what have been seen based on his experiences. kalau saya menuliskan apapun yang saya alami. (i write everything i have experienced) the second stage is incubation process. the process will be used when the writer gets inspiration. the inspiration will change and develop in order to strengthen the characters. writer #2 (ph) wrote this novel from 2012 until 2015. the process was longer because the writer just wrote due to his experience. the incubation process was also used to develop the character and event of the story. iya, saya biarkan dulu di dalam otak tidak langsung saya tulis karena nanti akan muncul sendiri. jadi seperti hukum seleksi alam, inspirasi yang kuat akan mengalahkan yang lainnya dan memaksa saya untuk menulis, terkadang, dalam situasi apapun. (i let the ideas stay in my mind, i did not directly write it because it will appear consciously. it is like a natural selection where the strongest inspiration will hit the others and brings me to write, sometimes, in any situation) the third stage is insight process. after the writer developed the inspiration in incubation process, the new inspiration will emerge to continue the story in insight process. the writer used this process through rewriting each event continuously. it will make the writer imagines about the characters of the story. the writer certainly used this process because novel needs time to complete, since it has many characters and more conflicts. thus, it needs lots of ideas that come from the writer’s experiences to complete the problems involved in this novel. dari yang saya alami, setiap rincian kejadian saya tuliskan, kemudian ada kejadian lagi saya tuliskan kembali, terus menerus saya tuliskan saja dan ternyata cerita tersebut terus berlanjut. saya menulis hal tersebut karena saya ingin memahami dunia termasuk memahami orang lain. (of i experienced, i write each event occurred and there is an event that i indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(2) july 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 123 rewrite more and more until i realize that the story developed continuously. i wrote all those things because i want to understand the world and the other people) the fourth stage is evaluation process. after writing the all stories, the writer will check by reread the story from the beginning until the end. it was done to make sure if the ideas or parts of the story are valuable or even must be changed. setelah selesai menulis baru saya lihat semuanya. selain itu, biasanya ada proses editing yang akan dilakukan oleh penulis dan juga penerbit. (after writing all the stories, i will reread them. after that, there is an editing process done by both the writer and the publisher) the last stage is elaboration, writer #2 (ph) developed the story from chapter to chapter in different themes but in related way. thus, the stories in each chapter change becomes a novel, it is because the writer used elaboration process. dari satu tema diperluas menjadi beberapa tema. temanya beragam, bisa tentang kisah hidup kiara, tentang pelestarian, tentang perlawanan budaya terhadap amerika. bahkan tema dalam setiap bab bisa sangat kompleks karena saya tidak membuat sesuatu yang direncanakan jadi saya tuliskan apa yang saya alami. (a theme is elaborated into several themes. the themes are vary ranging from about kiara lives, about conservation, about cultural resistance to american, even the theme of each chapter can be very complex because i never write anything based on plan, the story will be based on my experience) from the data above, it was found that in writing a novel, writer #2 (ph) used all creative processes. the creative process in writing novel needs high imagination. it is because writing a novel needs time to complete since novel has many characters and the conflict of a novel is more complex. it is the reason why the writer used the all creative processes. steps on creative process in writing poem the third writer is female fiction writer (irz) from majalengka. the researcher conducted observation and interview towards writer #2. those processes were held in two times. writer #3 (irz) can write in any condition because writing is her job, she should send her writing for publication. thus, the writer has consistency and regulation to write five pages in each day. however, the writer had full time job started from 08.00 am – 08.00 pm, but she had to be discipline and had a commitment to write. after writing a poem, she usually posted her writing in social media, such as blog. she likes writing poems because poem always contains hidden meaning. the meaning of each word in poem was not necessarily had the same meaning with one reader or others. it is because a poem used to express the writer’s feeling through writing. here, the researcher collected six poems and two short stories of writer #3. the poems are celotehan hukum, daun kering, dawai di negeri pemimpi, korban kenangan, my smiling general, and tuhan kenapa. while the short stories are dunia tak pernah tahu and terompet usang. the researcher finally chose a poem entitled “dawai di negeri pemimpi” to analyze the creative process in writing poem. table 3 illustrates the creative process in writing poem got from observation towards the selected poem. iin nuraeni & fahrus zaman fadhly creative process in fiction writing of three indonesian writers 124 table 3. list of creative processes in writing poem applied by writer #3 (irz) no steps on the creative process yes no writer’ activities 1. preparation  watching news on television 2. incubation  spontaneity to express feeling in writing. 3. insight  has idea of word sir to represent to government 4. evaluation  5. elaboration  the results shown in the table above were gained from document analysis. whereas, the results from the interview session were showed that writer #3 (irz) only used three creative processes in writing poem. those processes are presented below. the first creative process is preparation. in this first stage, the writer watched news as preparation before writing. next, the writer did incubation process. in this process, the writer wrote her ideas inspired from watching news and expressed her feeling into simple words in a poem. saya mendapat inspirasi dari menonton berita. kalau untuk dawai di negeri mimpi itu lebih condong pada rasa simpati tentang apa yang terjadi. (i got the inspiration by watching news. “dawai di negeri mimpi” poem is written triggered by my sympathy toward what is happening.) next, the writer used insight process. for instance, the writer was inspired by the use of “sir” word to represent government. terdapat kata tuan untuk menunjukan pemerintah, terutama bagi anggota dpr, mpr, dan presiden. (the word “sir” used in this poem to represent government especially to the members of dpr, mpr and president) the fourth creative process is evaluation. the writer did not use evaluation process because the writer wrote this poem spontaneously and she only needs 10 minutes to write. thus, the writer did not use evaluation process. proses pembuatannya sekitar 10 menit juga kurang sih. tidak ada proses mengevaluasi karena itu juga karena sepontan. (the process of writing this poem only needs about ten minutes. there is no evaluation process because i write it spontaneously) besides, the writers did not apply elaboration process because she writes a poem only to express her feeling. thus, writing a poem rarely needs elaboration process. setelah selesai menulis puisi, saya tidak membutuhkan proses elaborasi terhadap puisi tersebut. (after writing the poem, i did not need elaboration process) from the data above, it was found that in writing a poem, writer #3 used three creative processes. the poem is more sublime and free since it expresses the writer’s feeling. thus, the elaboration process did not need in writing a poem. different ways to explore imagination there are some ways to explore writers’ imagination. here, the writers explore the imagination with some conceptions such as drawing, a deepen character in the film or story, demands of the text, the reader which was expected by writer, and make a mind mapping. these facts were got from the interview session towards the three fiction writers. indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(2) july 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 125 writer #1 (ns) said that one of the ways to explore imagination is by drawing and deepen characters in the film or theater even the fiction writers can make animals character or inanimate objects become life character in their writing. it coincides with theory by stevenson (2003) who declares that: the liability to think of something which the subject believes to be real, but which is not real. the ability to think of things as fictional, as opposed to what one believes to be real, or understand of as possibly real. in contrast, writer #2 (ph) had different ways in exploring the imagination process. he observes his daily life to explore his imagination. it coincides also with theory by stevenson (2003) which suggests that: the ability to think of (conceive of, or represent) anything at all. the ability to create works of art that express something deep about the meaning of human life, as opposed to the products of mere fantasy. in contrast, writer #3 (irz)’s ways in exploring her imagination is by making mind mapping. in creating mind mapping, she writes down some events that continue sequentially. it helps imagination process to create an ending and concept of stories. from explanations above, it was revealed that fiction writers explore their imagination differently in their writing process. for instance, the writer explores their imagination by drawing and a deepen character of the story. she thinks that drawing cartoon characters can facilitate her thought to imagine what she got by seeing things. conclusion from the results of data analysis, it was revealed that writing short story and novel were almost the same. the difference only comes from the quantity of the text and conflict involved in both texts. short story is shorter and the novel is longer, the conflict in novel is more complex. besides, there is only one different creative process between writing novel and short story. writer #2 (ph) used elaboration process while writer #1 (ns) did not. in contrast, writer #3 (irz) did not use evaluation and elaboration processes in writing poem. a poem is more sublime and free which is written in simple words that can represent feelings. thus, the evaluation processes are not needed in writing a poem, and usually a poem cannot be elaborated in other version. furthermore, it can be said that the creative process in writing novel had high imagination than short story. the imagination in writing short story was limited because the quantity of the text is shorter and it disrupts the writer’s imagination. besides, writing poem had free imagination and the imagination was not bothered by outline. thus, there were some different ways of exploring imagination in writing fiction. but, those ways can be classified as follows; drawing and deepen characters in the film or theater, making mind mapping to write, and developing a shorter text. references beaney, m. (2005). imagination and creativity. london: the open university. csikszentmihalyi, m. (1996). creativity: flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. new york, ny: harper collins. gaut, b. (2010). the philosophy of creativity. philosophy compass, 9(6), 1034–1046. doi:10.1111/j.17479991.2010.00351.x. gay, l. r., mills, g. e., & airasian, p. w. (2012). educational research: competencies for analysis and applications (10th ed.). boston, ma: pearson education, inc. iin nuraeni & fahrus zaman fadhly creative process in fiction writing of three indonesian writers 126 huy, n. t. (2015). problems affecting learning writing skill of grade 11 at thong linh high school. asian journal of educational research, 3(2), 53-69. retrieved from: http://www.multidisciplinaryjournals. com/wpcontent/uploads/2015/03/p roblems-affecting-learningwriting-skill-of-grade-11.pdf. kane, t. s. (2000). the oxford essential guide to writing. new york, ny: oxford university press, inc page. kaufman, j. c., & kaufman, s. b. (2009). the psychology of creative writing. cambridge: cambridge university press. morley, d. (2007). the cambridge introduction to creative writing. cambridge: cambridge university press. reisman, f. (2013). creativity: concepts, product, process, environment & technology. new york, ny: kie conference book series. pope, r. (2005). creativity: theory, history, practice. new york, ny: routledge. wallas, g. (1926). art of thought. new york, ny: harcout brace & co. weldon, f. (2013). fay weldon speaks up for creative writing. united kingdom: the times higher education. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 103 developing addie model-based esp coursebook luluk iswati faculty of economics and business, universitas muhammadiyah yogyakarta, indonesia e-mail: luluk007@umy.ac.id apa citation: iswati, l. (2019). developing addie model-based esp coursework. indonesian efl journal, 5(2), 103-112. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v5i2.1804. received: 22-03-2019 accepted: 25-05-2019 published: 01-07-2019 abstract: coursebook plays a substantial role in facilitating teaching and learning process, especially for efl (english as a foreign language) learners of english for specific purposes (esp). however, the widely available coursebooks do not always match with the designed program and the learners’ as well as the institution’ needs. to ensure that a coursebook can optimally support the goals of an esp course, developing materials is suggested. this research aimed to develop an esp coursebook using addie (analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation) model. a research and development method was employed in this research in which the data were collected through questionnaire and interview. the questionnaire was distributed to 430 business english 1 students at universitas muhammadiyah yogyakarta. meanwhile, the interview was conducted to 4 english teachers. here, the data were obtained during the first and the last steps of addie model (analysis and evaluation). the data obtained from the analysis phase were used for need analysis, while those obtained from the evaluation phase were used to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the coursebook. the findings showed the coursebook’s elements which cover language, content, tasks, learners, and the learning are good, but the visual elements highly need improvement. keywords: addie; coursebook; esp; materials development; need analysis. introduction the increasing demand of teaching english for specific purposes (esp) for non-english department students have exposed challenges for teachers. generally, teachers teaching esp in non-english departments are not specially trained nor prepared to teach in a particular esp setting. therefore, teachers have to equip themselves with knowledge on the subject matter (content knowledge), lexis, and register. in addition to teachers’ preparedness to teach esp classes, the teaching resources can also be a problem as the available coursebooks do not always match with learners’ needs as well as the institution’s learning goals. some aspects, such as socio-cultural values, task complexity, and linguistic items, may not always be suitable to be applied in a certain learning context. apart from that, economic reason still, to some extent, becomes an issue as not all indonesian learners can afford published coursebooks which are usually costly. thus, if teachers impose the use of a certain course available in the market, it might burden the students, particularly those who consider price as an issue. richards (2001) asserts that textbooks play a crucial role in language programs, so their quality should be ensured as they can contribute to successful language learning. to respond to the conditions mentioned earlier and richards’s (2001) statement, materials to facilitate the language learning can be developed. developing an esp coursebook can offer more benefits as the teacher (as well as the material developer) can perfectly portray the actual needs of the learners and the institution. thus, the content of the designed coursebook will be more suitable for the intended learners in terms of its sociocultural values, task complexity, and prioritised linguistic aspects. developing materials, as richards (2001) suggests, are advantageous as the materials will be relevant for the needs of learners and institution; it gives teachers opportunity to build expertise in materials development, it will result in a reputation of commitment to language teacher, and it offers great flexibility since the materials can be revised when necessary. in a situation where the available coursebooks do not match the luluk iswati developing addie model-based esp coursework 104 course objective, it is highly suggested that teachers adapt or make new materials, although it takes time, efforts, cost, and exeperience (frendo, 2005). this research was aimed at developing an esp coursebook using addie model for students studying business english 1 at universitas muhammadiyah yogyakarta, indonesia. as there are not many research which employs addie model to develop esp courses, there are two benefits that can be taken from this research. theoretically, this research will give insight for future esp teachers, especially business english teachers, and materials designer on how to develop a business english cousebook using addie model. developing teaching materials mcdonough and shaw (2006) argue that developing materials is strongly suggested as the available books, whether provided by the government or recommended by the institution, do not always match with the needs of the learners. additionally, mcdonough and shaw (2006) point out that developing materials is time investment. by investing time to develop materials, it will save teachers’ time for preparation. further, according to graves (2000), materials development is the process of planning in which purposes and aims of the course are embeded in units and tasks. it means that the content of the developed materials should lead to the achievement of the learning goals. once the course objectives are set, the material developers should be able to design activities, select language functions, vocabulary focus, written or spoken texts, and exercises, which accommodate learners to achieve the desired learning goals dispersed in each given unit. in developing materials, teachers do not always have to produce materials from a scratch. as tomlinson (2011) states, material development is not only a process producing materials for language learning, but it can also be an integral process of adapting, designing, producing, exploiting, and researching. furthermore, tomlinson (2011) adds that materials development also involves the study of how to design, implement, and evaluate the materials. it is also a practical undertaking which means that the process of materials development involves not only teachers as the materials developers, but also learners. both of them are the sources of language input as they take part in making use of sources to promote language learning. review of esp previous studies speaking of esp course, dudley-evans and st. john (1998) address three key points. first, the design of esp should meet the specific needs of the intended learners. second, esp applies methodology and activities which are related to the disciplines. third, the focus of esp comprises four aspects, namely language, skills, discourse, and genre. other characteristic of esp marks a fundamental difference of esp from egp. in this sense, romanowski (2016) states that in esp, the teacher is no longer the most knowledgeable person in the classroom in regard with the content knowledge. it is highly likely that the students, having been more familiar with the content related to their field of study, are more knowledgable than the teacher. meanwhile, agustina (2014) suggests that for non-english department students, the role of english is not absolute, but a means to learn a certain field of study. therefore, there should be a balanced proportion of the teaching focus the language aspects and how those aspects are used to communicate ideas in relation to students’ field of study. some studies on esp have revealed some facts that become concerns. a study by kusni (2013) revealed some conditions concerning esp issues in indonesia. here, the study showed that regarding the published esp coursebooks which are available in the market, not many coursebooks were developed based on needs analysis, thus they may not be always suitable to be used. kusni’s (2013) finding indicated that developing esp materials becomes necessary as it will answer the needs of the learners and the respective institution. regarding the needs analysis, a indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 105 study conducted by bachir and alazis (2016) showed the importance of needs analysis, as both teachers and learners are aware that in order to achieve the course objective, needs analysis should be done. conducting needs analysis is not only important for the achievement of the course, but also for learners’ needs. moreover, a study by azaarnoosh and ganji (2014) suggested that a coursebook should accomodate learners’ individual differences and their learning style. regarding esp teaching materials, poedjiastutie (2017) revealed that esp teachers often use inappropriate materials. instead of using materials which are specifically designed for esp learners, teachers tend to use those intended for teaching general english. this can be a problem that can hinder the achievement of the learning objectives. poedjiastutie’s (2017) finding implies that teaching materials in esp becomes a serious issue that needs attention. addie model materials development according to molenda (2015) as cited in hess and greer (2016), addie model is an instructional design which employs processbased approach to develop instructional materials. in their study, wang and hsu (2016) stated that as an instructional design, addie model was adopted so that learners would improve their knowledge and skills. as language teaching contains of a set of instructional materials, materials developers should determine the phases of producing or developing the materials. peterson (2003) proclaims that adopting addie model in a course is beneficial as it is more learner-centred rather than teachercentred. from the very beginning of its stages (analysis and design), learners who will take the course are highly considered. in the development phase, it is also based on learners’ needs. besides, in its implementation and evaluation, learners are highly involved. further, peterson (2003) asserts that addie model can be applied in various teaching contexts which employ instructional design. method this research employed a research and development (r&d) method using addie model. the model consists of 5 steps, namely: 1) analysis, 2) design, 3) development, 4) implementation, and 5) evaluation. the participants involved in this research were 430 students and 4 teachers of management department, universitas muhammadiyah yogyakarta. the students were those taking business english as a compulsory subject. meanwhile, the teachers were those who have taught business english for 1 semester. here, the data were collected by using structured questionnaire and semistructured interviews. the questionnaire was distributed to the students, while the interview was conducted to the teachers. on the questionnaire, there are five options (strongly agree, agree, neutral, disagree, and strongly disagree) that can be chosen by the participants in responding to each statement provided. as this research applied addie model, the research consists of 5 steps, namely analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation. here, the needed data were obtained from the first phase (analysis) and the last phase (evaluation) of addie model. first, in the analysis phase, the researcher conducted needs analysis in order to find out the students’ and the institution’s needs. the needs analysis was conducted by interviewing the head of the management department, faculty of economics and business, universitas muhammadiyah yogyakarta as well as by studying the curriculum to find out the learners’ outcomes and the courses offered as the content of the coursebook would be made in line with the courses of the field of study. second, in the design phase, the course and the materials were designed based on the data from interview and curriculum analysis. the design of the course is reflected in the syllabus which covers several aspects, such as course description, course goals, learning objectives, materials, actvities, and assessment. third, in the development phase, luluk iswati developing addie model-based esp coursework 106 the coursebook was developed after setting the syllabus. there were three major resources used in developing coursebook, including online resources, printed coursebooks, and self-made materials. the online resources and printed coursebooks were adapted by adding, reducing, or changing. next, in the implementation phase, the developed coursebook was implemented to 430 second semester students. finally, the evaluation was done by collecting information concerning the use of the developed coursebook through questionnaire and interviews. the data from the interviews were used to support the questionnaires data as well as to seek suggestions for the improvement of the developed materials. in short, the phases of conducting this research are shown in figure 1. figure 1. the phases of addie model further, the data collected from questionnaire and interview were analyzed differently. here, the data obtained from the questionnaire were analyzed quantitavely using 5 pointlikert scale, while the data obtained from interviewing the teachers were described qualitatively. results and discussion this research reportd the development of an esp coursebook using addie model. therefore, the findings will revolve around how materials were developed by using that model. the findings are categorized based on each step, covering analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation. in the analysis phase in which needs analysis was conducted by interviewing the head of the department and by analysing the curriculum, it can be concluded that in general, the role of english for the students is to equip them with skills and knowledge on how to use language expressions and lexis for oral and written communication in business contexts. this needs analysis is important since esp coursebooks that highly accommodate the learners’ needs are difficult to find, yet esp teachers are obliged to fulfil learners’ needs (al fraidan, 2012). basically, there are many ways to fulfil learners’ needs, one of which is by conducting needs analysis before developing materials. by doing so, what learners actually need can be identified and pre-determined. similarly, widhi (2016) states needs analysis is the first step that should be done because its role is as the guidance for materials development. the design phase involves designing the course program which consists of designing the syllabus and the coursebook. according to graves (2000), the tangible results of materials development process are the course and the coursebook. as the course is intended for beginners, the syllabus contains topics of basic business situations in which useful language expressions and terms are introduced and practiced. the course and materials are outlined in table 1. table 1. the course outline topic 1: occupations & business time allocation: 2 x 100 minutes objective: ss will be able to use expressions and terms of business and occupations to tell about occupations and job responsibilities. analysis design development implementation evaluation indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 107 language function: describing jobs /jobs responsibility vocabulary focus: kinds of jobs, job positions activities: -reading “ department needed to run a business” -listening: occupations & workplace -speaking: roleplaying on occupations topic 2: telephoning time allocation: 2 x 100 minutes objective: ss will be able to use expressions of making & receiving phone calls, leaving & taking a message, and making appointment language function: making and receiving phone calls, and taking and leaving messages vocabulary focus: expressions for telephoning activities: -speaking : roleplaying on telephoning -listening: taking telephone messages topic 3: business meetings time allocation: 2 x 100 minutes objective: ss will be able to use expressions in a business meeting: opening a meeting, summarizing, closing a meeting, giving opinion, interrupting, dealing with interrupton, agreeing/disagreeing, and asking for clarification language function: giving opinions, interrupting, dealing with interruption, agreeing/disagreeing, asking for clarification vocabulary focus: common terms in a business meeting activities: -speaking: roleplaying on organizing a business meeting -listening: identifying meeting agendas topic 4: business letters time allocation: 2 x 100 minutes objective: ss will be able to write and to reply business letters (sales & inquiry letters) language function: writing and replying a business letter vocabulary focus: common terms and expressions in business letters activities: writing: writing & replying a business letter the coursebook was then developed based on the above course outline. as described in table 1, the lessons in the course are focused on using language expressions and specific lexis to equip students to communicate in some basic business settings. the lessons are distributed in 4 (four) units, each of which consists of some sections as described below. table 2. the coursebook content design unit 1: occupations & business unit 3: business meeting a. did you know? b. vocabulary c. conversation d. useful expressions e. listening f. reading g. exercises h. group work a. did you know? b. vocabulary c. conversation d. useful expressions e. exercise f. listening g. roleplay unit 2: telephoning unit 4: business letters a. did you know? b. conversation 1 c. useful expressions d. listening e. roleplay f. conversation 2 g. useful expressions h. listening a. did you know? b. vocabulary c. reading d. useful expressions e. exercise f. writing g. reading h. useful expressions i. writing (roleplaying) luluk iswati developing addie model-based esp coursework 108 it should be noted that the distributions of the language skills in each unit is different since the focus is on what language skills can best accommodate the achievement of the learning objectives. each unit is started with a section named “did you know?” which aims to introduce and familiarize students to the topic. to engage students with the topic of each unit, this section portrays interesting or surprising facts related to the topic. this section also serves as an “eye opener.” since the course focuses on producing learners with sound ability of oral and written communication skills in business settings, the core of each unit lies in its useful expressions. in facts, other sections are made in order to introduce and reinforce the use of the language expressions. here, lexis also becomes important as they are used in written and audio texts. ahmed (2013) claims that as lexis is essential for the process of acquiring a language, the teaching of vocabulary should be contextual. most of the texts are taken, selected, and adapted from existing coursebooks and internet resources. designing listening tasks requires careful selection of audio resources, as things such as speech rate, intelligibility, and language complexity should match with the learners’ proficiency. after developing the designed materials into a coursebook, the product was implemented. in this implementation phase, the coursebook, named as business english 1, was used by all students taking english 2 in the department. here, the coursebook is the main resource of the teaching learning process so that all students were obliged to have the coursebook. although the teachers were allowed and even encouraged to teach using other resources, the coursebook became the main tool to achieve the course objectives. the last phase is evaluation. richards and renandya (2002) assert that materials evaluation is worth doing as it helps us identify the strengths and weaknesses of the developed materials. based on that consideration, the evaluation of the developed coursebook involves the participation of the coursebook users the students and the teachers to gain information related to the use of the developed materials. the main data of this evaluation was taken from the questionnaires distributed to 430 participants. as questionnaire validity is important, the researcher involved an experienced materials developer to check and assess the questionnaire before distributing to the respondents. her judgment about the content of the questionnaire resulted in some changes of the statements in the questionnaire. the questionnaire was then distributed after the course program ended. therefore, it is a postuse evaluation. the questionnaires were distributed in the last meeting since it intends to get evaluation which is based on students’ vivid recall on their use of the developed coursebook. students were to respond each statement in the questionnaire which was categorized into four major areas, namely language, content, tasks, learning and the learners, and visuals. the components of the coursebook evaluation were adapted from graves (2000). the data gained from the questionnaire are presented in table 3. table 3. the results of questionnaire language  79% respondents agree that business english 1 contains enough speaking skill.  83% respondents strongly agree that business english 1 contains adequate listening skill.  83% respondents strongly agree that business english 1 contains adequate reading skill.  80% respondents strongly agree that business english 1 contains adequate writing skill.  86% respondents strongly agree that business english 1 contains adequate vocabulary.  87% respondents agree that business english 1 contains useful expressions related to business settings. content  88% respondents strongly agree that the topics in business english 1 are related to business settings.  99% respondents strongly agree that the situations used to deliver the topics are in line with business indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 109 settings.  84% respondents strongly agree that business english 1 contains business knowledge. tasks  85% respondents strongly agree that the tasks in business english 1 are varied.  82% respondents strongly agree that the tasks are close to real-business settings.  82% respondents strongly agree that the tasks in business english 1 are interesting.  86% respondents strongly agree that the tasks in business english 1 are arranged from easy to difficult. learning and the learners  83% respondents strongly agree that business english 1 has helped them develop a positive attitude towards english.  82% respondents strongly agree that they use business english 1 confidently.  82% respondents strongly agree that business english 1 promotes interaction among learners.  79% respondents agree that they apply learning strategy when using business english 1. visuals  79% respondents agree that images/illustrations in business english 1 are related to business.  79% respondents agree that the images/illustrations in business english 1 help them comprehend the content.  75% respondents agree that the images/illustrations in business english 1 are interesting.  77% respondents agree that the images/illustrations in business english 1 motivate them to learn. in general, table 3 shows that students’ evaluation on the coursebook results in positive feedback as their responses are mostly “strongly agree” and “agree.” the data also indicates that the students are satisfied using the coursebook as it accommodates them to learn the language skills and aspects related to their field of study. as seen in table 3, the evaluation elements are not solely focused on the object being assessed (the coursebook), but also involve the affective and interpersonal relation among the coursebook users. affective factor in learning a foreign language should be taken into account as it determines how much input can be acquired by learners (krashen, 1982; ni, 2012). as it can be seen in table 3, the students developed a positive attitude towards english. they also claimed that they were confident when using the developed coursebook. to a great degree, self confidence affects how learners perform the language skills (ni, 2012). another evaluation was carried out by interviewing four teachers teaching business english 1. to minimize bias which might occur since the researcher was also the materials developer, the interviews were primarily focused on seeking constructive feedbacks and suggestions so that the future coursebook can be well developed. regarding the linguistic aspect, especially the lexis/vocabulary, two teachers commented that although each unit of the module provides glossary which is very helpful for students, it still lacks repetition used in activities or in texts of the related unit or the units that follow. laufer and hulstijn (2001) propose that for successful vocabulary acquisition, learners should frequently encounter and use it in given activities. in other words, the activities or texts provided in the coursebook should contain vocabulary which is repeatedly used. concerning the content, there are two essential findings. first is related to the audio materials. two teachers explained that the audio materials are too difficult for students because the speakers mostly speak with high speech rate. consequently, many students were not successful in accomplishing the listening exercises although the teachers have replayed the audio three or more times. hayati (2010) argues that slow rate of speech will assist learners’ comprehension on the audio being played as they will have adequate time to process the information. especially for learners of basic competence in english, careful selection of audio materials is crucial. in addition, cunningsworth (1995) asserts that it is important to assure that the quality of the audio is good. luluk iswati developing addie model-based esp coursework 110 telling about the topics, one teacher argued that unit 1, which is about occupations, will be better if the examples of occupations being talked in the dialog section is about nowadays job so that it is close to the reality. in fact, many nowadays jobs are related to the use of internet or computer technology, such as graphic designers, online marketer, web designer, etc. speaking of the business situations which are given in the coursebooks, three teachers suggested that in order to cater students with more opportunities to practice using the related vocabulary or language expressions, the coursebook should give more business situations which are reflected in the spoken texts (dialogs). the most essential finding is the visuals of the coursebook. it is contradictory to the data gained from the students that all teachers claimed that the visuals of the coursebook need improvement. it includes the appearance, layout, and illustrations of the coursebook. concerning the layout, one teacher suggested that the layout should be made more attractive. the developed coursebook has not made use the space efficiently so that there is some empty space. concerning the visuals, all respondents commented that the coursebook is not appealing as the coursebook is in black and white print. besides, it lacks illustration and images. as a result, the visual of the developed coursebook could hardly attract learners’ attention. in this sense, tomlinson (2011) points out some important aspects in coursebook evaluation which consist of, among others, the book’s ability to evoke learners’ interest and motivation in using it as a tool for learning. ni (2012) claims that motivation in language learning is significant as it influences learners in their process of acquiring the language. motivation can be generated through a good coursebook which is motivating. one of the ways to present motivating aspect in the coursebook is through visuals. visual elements should be considered especially in efl contexts because students have little exposure of english (hill, 2003; porcaro, 2001; wright & haleem, 1991). the importance of pictures are also confirmed by romney and bell (2012) who point out that the role of pictures are either decorative or instructional. decorative refers to aesthetic value that may generate students’ interest in using the coursebook, while instructional refers to the function of a coursebook which contain sets of instruction to do activities or tasks. conclusion the development of an esp coursebook using addie model has resulted in a product named business english 1. the development of the current coursebook underwent five steps, namely analysis, design, development, implementation, and evaluation. in the process of adopting addie model, the researcher gained data from the stakeholder (the department) and the coursebook users which was carried out in the beginnning phase (analysis) and the last phase (evaluation). the design and development of the coursebook are highly influenced by the result of needs analysis, from which what are to be taught through the coursebook are predetermined. regarding the evaluation, there are interesting findings. despite students’ positive response to the statements in the questionnaire which implies a certain extent of effectiveness of the coursebook, it is crucial to pay attention to the findings in the interview. the teachers claimed that the developed coursebook lack attention concerning its visual elements. to some degree, visual can generate students’ interest in using the coursebook as a means to learn the language. thus, it hints an improvement of the developed coursebook which will be focused on enhancing its visual elements. as there are not many research which study the use of addie model for esp materials development, it is suggested that researchers interested to conduct similar study in esp area explore the application of addie model for esp materials development in depth. it is also strongly suggested that the analysis phase involve not indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 111 only the stakeholders, but also the main users of the future coursebook (students). in addition, to gain more convincing and larger data, interview can also be conducted to students, not only teachers. acknowledgement the writer would like to thank lp3m of universitas muhammadiyah yogyakarta for funding this research. references ahmed, a. o. a. (2013). lexis development: the importance of contextual clues. european scientific journal, 9(3). agustina, t. (2014). english for specific purposes (esp): an approach of english teaching for nonenglish department students. beta jurnal tadris matematika, 7(1), 37-63. al fraidan, a. (2012). evaluation of two esp textbooks. english language teaching, 6, 43-47. bachir, k., & alazis, m. g. (2016). designing esp course: setting objectives for business learners. (unpublished dissertation). department of letters and english language, ourgla university. retrieved on august 15, 2018 from https://bu.univ-ouargla.dz/master/.../kherfigueziz.pdf. cunningsworth, a. (1995). choosing your coursebook. oxford: macmillan heinemann. dudley-evans, t., & st john, m. j. (1998). developments in english for specific purposes: a multidisciplinary approach. cambridge: cambridge university press. frendo, e. (2005). how to teach business english. pearson: longman. graves, k. (2000). designing language courses: a guide for teachers. boston: heinle & heinle publishers. hayati, a. (2010). the effect of speech rate on listening comprehension of efl learners. creative education, 2, 107-114. hess, a. k. n., & greer, k. (2016). designing for engagement: using the addie model to integrate high-impact practices into an online information literacy course. communications in information literacy, 10(2). hill, d.a. (2003). the visual elements in efl coursebooks. in b. tomlinson (ed.), developing materials for language teaching (pp. 174-182). london: continuum press. krashen, s. (1982). principles and practice in second language acquisition. oxford: pergamon press. laufer, b., & hulstijn, j. (2001). incidental vocabulary acquisition in a second language: the construct of task-induced involvement. applied linguistics, 22(1), 126. mcdonough, j. & shaw, c. (2006). materials and methods in elt: a teacher’s guide. oxford: blackwell publishing ni, h. (2012). the effects of affective factors in sla and pedagogical implications. theory and practice in language studies, 2(7), 1508-1513. peterson, c. (2003). bringing addie to life: instructional design at its best. journal of educational multimedia and hypermedia, 12(3), 227-241. poedjiastutie, d. (2017). the pedagogical challenges of english for specific purposes (esp) teaching at the university of muhammadiyah malang, indonesia. academic journals, 12(6), 338-349. porcaro, j. w. (2001). newspaper cartoons. modern english teacher, 10(2), 29-33. richards, j. c. (2001). communicative language teaching today. new york: cambridge university press. richards, j., & renandya, w. (eds.) (2002). methodology in language teaching: an anthology of current practice. cambridge: cambridge university press. romney, c., & bell, l .(2012). the role of graphics in business english textbooks. in k. bradfordwatts, r. chartrand, & e. skier (eds.), the 2011 pan-sig conference proceedings (pp. 210-219). matsumoto: jalt. tomlinson, b. (2011). materials development in language teaching (2nd ed.). cambridge: cambridge university press. wang, s., & hsu, hu-yin. (2009). using the addie model to design second life activities for online learners. techtrend, 53(6), 76 81. widhi, v. s. n. (2016). developing kemp modelbased supplementary esp materials in e-book format for hotel accommodation program students of vocational high school. unpublished master’s thesis. department of language and arts education. universitas lampung. wright, a., & haleem, s. (1991). visuals for the language classroom. harlow: longman. luluk iswati developing addie model-based esp coursework 112 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 1 the effectiveness of flipping classroom model on efl secondary school speaking skills yahya ashour alkhoudary al buraimi university college, al buraimi, the sultanate of oman e-mail: alkhoudary@buc.edu.om jehad ashour alkhoudary al buraimi university college, al buraimi, the sultanate of oman e-mail: alkhoudary@buc.edu.om apa citation: alkhoudary, y. a., & alkhoudary, j. a. (2019). the effectiveness of flipping classroom model on efl secondary school speaking skills. indonesian efl journal, 5(2), 1-10. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v5i2.1811. received: 01-03-2019 accepted: 11-05-2019 published: 01-07-2019 abstract: this study examines the impact of flipped learning on esl students' speaking skills. basically, secondary school students lack out-of-class instruction to review and study teaching materials independently since there is no opportunity to practice speaking skills outside the class. therefore, the availability of the technological device in everyone's hand may help to enhance speaking if they are monitored regularly. the qualitative and quantitative approach is employed. the participants consisting of (40) omani secondary school students, were divided into two groups (20) in the experimental group (e. g) and (20) in the controlled group (c.g). pre-and post-tests were managed to both groups before using flipped classroom (fc) as a scaffolding of teaching speaking to non-native learners. besides, a questionnaire was administered to. the results revealed that e.g excelled in the c.g. also, it showed a positive attitude towards flipping as a learning strategy. keywords: flipped classroom; skills; technological devices; english as a foreign language; traditional class. introduction speaking is the most important among the four language skills since esl learners need using the english language in a virtual context. since graduate students are prepared to join higher education, then to be involved in serving the country, they need to be able to communicate with tourists, visitors and participate in classroom activities. this study aims to look for all possibilities to employ fc in an esl class to explore the effect of this strategy on students' speaking quality. further, the increase focuses on competencybased teaching and learning to boost learner's independent learning. however, non-native learners always find difficulty to participate in classroom activities since english is not their primary language. therefore, teachers work hard to come out with eligible students who can communicate with native speakers in a virtual situation successfully. since technological devices have become a habit among students worldwide, they spend the most time on chatting and accessing websites. so, no doubt integrating technology in teaching has become an important factor to achieve effective learning. this study emerges from the researcher’s experience in esl classes that the teacher is the information provider and students are receivers in boring classes since they cannot discuss debate and participate effectively in the lesson. they lack chances to acquire understandable input and send incomprehensible output. therefore, it is necessary to find out an innovated method to give students enough opportunities to be exposed to english and to improve speaking. so, technology may contribute to enhance learning input since diverse devices are available in everyone's hand. fc is an instructional model that furnishes blended online learning to explore the effect of the flipped model on non-native learners at secondary schools. additionally, educators have to exploit technological devices to yahya ashour alkhoudary the effectiveness of flipping classroom model on efl secondary school speaking skills 2 develop students' speaking competence since it is a means of instruction in universities since traditional education has become ineffective because of the changing needs of students in the era of technology. this study attempts to explore the probability of using fc model in speaking classroom in oman. this paper attempts to examine to what extent e-learning contributes to improving learners' speaking output. thus, the objectives of the study are (1) to investigate the applicability of using fc model in esl class, (2) to check the impact of employing fc on speaking skills, (3) to create a competitive atmosphere of using technology in the classroom, (4) to support further research in the field of teaching esl in oman. the hypotheses in this study are (1) students who are engaged in fc improve their speaking product, (2) fc increases students’ confidence to work independently, and (3) students who are in fc show a positive attitude towards technology. fleming (2001) claims that visual learners prefer seeing (think in pictures; visual aids such as overhead slides, diagrams, handouts, etc.). auditory best learn through listening (lectures, discussions, tapes, etc.). therefore, technology has become a tool to serve as a platform for the instruction of the content. besides, bloom's taxonomy of knowledge and social constructivism will be used in the fc model (brame, 2013: 12). rababah (2003) states that fc shows that students get a first exposure to prescribed material off class. he maintains that arab learners are struggling in speaking skills due to strategies teachers employ in classrooms. berrett (2012) argues that flipping is arranged to give learners enough opportunity to complete lower cognitive thinking outside of the class, whereas the higher one of cognitive is done inside the class-walls. flipped classroom model is based on blended learning studentcentered approach (abeysekera & dawson; 2015, clark, 2015). it also covers some pedagogies focusing on students' engagement in the learning process (lemmer, 2013; prince, 2004). this study attempts to answer several questions, which are (1) to what extent does the fc model affect learners’ speaking output? (2) how can fc make the best use of teaching time in class? (3) does fc change students’ attitudes toward integrating technology in education? (4) is the fc model applicable in esl speaking classroom? traditional classrooms have generated a great number of students who are unable to use english neither in nor outside the classroom. rivero (2013) states that teachers who experimented with this strategy indicate fc is a positive learning experience. avdic & akerblom (2015) argue that fc increases motivation, self-perceived knowledge, and performance. little research has been focusing on fc. so, this study is an attempt to try the model in teaching esl secondary school classrooms. flipping model is a creative way for educators to maximize class time for students' involvement in practice speaking skills. it is known as the reversed instruction and inverted classroom (bergmann & sams, 2012). kikgoz (2011) affirms that fc grants students the flexibility to work willingly at their own pace. the flipped learning helps teachers to reflect on the effectiveness of his teaching strategy and try to avoid a boring daily teaching routine. flipped classes offer chances to diverse learning ways (oxford, 2003, p. 1). brame (2013) suggests that fc includes opportunities for leaner's to get input prior to the class, encouragement to prepare before the class, assess students' progression, and focus on cognitive activities. johnson et al (2014) state that flipping learning as an element of blended learning can be used in teaching and learning since it complies with online and classroom teaching. sams & bergmann (2013) ascertain that fc is considered a new pedagogic model that trains learners to have responsibility for their learning under the guidance of the teacher. they add that teachers can create healthy learning environments in which students have chances to enhance their language skills. flipped classroom model has two stages: (1) learning individually with the indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 3 help of technology of the class, (2) learning occurs inside the class (bishop & verleger, 2013). in this reverse learning, homeassignment in traditional education turns into activities in-class and class activities are conducted at home online. on the one hand, learners who have learned speaking via conventional education resist the new strategy (herreid & schiller, 2013). kirkwood & price (2005) state that students and teachers feel that technology can be an effective tool to enhance learners' language skills. furthermore, engin (2014) ascertain that a flipped classroom model gives students a room to develop their language skills. additionally, nguyen (2013) proposes that a flipping classroom motivate learner autonomy towards learning achievement. the proposed flipped classroom includes (1) opportunities for learners to be exposed to input former the class, (2) encouragement for learners to prepare materials before the class, (3) a way to check students' understanding, (4) instigate cognitive abilities (brame, 2013). flipping give students enough opportunities to improve students' speaking skills since they easily access to their assignment. nguyen, & quyen (2018) state that flipped instruction developed students' speaking since this system effectively and flexibility enables students to watch videos wherever and whenever to enhance their language proficiency. wiginton (2013) indicates that flipped instruction is an education model that employs technology to change the situation of the classroom. additionally, lin (2002) ascertains that students with good listening comprehension abilities help them to immerse in-class activities efficiently. students who use the flipped classroom can get curricular activities outside the class easily at their own pace (alharbi & alshumaimeri, 2016; demski, 2015). interestingly, the online community creates a healthy learning atmosphere that enhances learners' oral speaking quality (wu, chen, & yang, 2017) osgerby (2012) ascertains that students hate group work and lecturing but they prefer blended learning that includes technology in the regular class situation. method to answer the current research questions and to test the proposed hypotheses, an experimental treatment was applied to explore the effectiveness of integrating fc in teaching writing skills. a mixed approach was used to come out with accurate data that confirms the validity of using such a probe among buc students in oman. the sample of this study consisted of (40) students who were selected randomly and divided into two groups e.g (20) and c.g (20) omani female students in the first year who were taking an introductory writing course in the english language at a secondary school. ten esl teachers were included in this study. the participants were asked to do both online and offline speaking activities using the recorded materials downloaded by the teacher on google classroom. they were trained to access using a code and watch recorded guidelines on video-clip at home. the pre-speaking test was administered to both e.g and c.g. to check the effect of employing fc in the esl classroom. a questionnaire was also distributed to e.g. after using the flipping model to determine its effect on speaking quality and to measure students' attitudes towards fc. also, interviews were conducted with e.g and esl teachers after application. the participants in the study were given orientation and training on using google classroom to prepare for the virtual speaking, watching videos, listen to recorded materials, check and use active vocabulary, use the downloaded pictionary. the following diagram displays what activities students were expected to do at both schools and home. a pilot student was conducted on a small group of students to check the reliability of the questionnaire questions since they addressed adults who are of the same age and learned english according to the ministry of education curriculum in oman. yahya ashour alkhoudary the effectiveness of flipping classroom model on efl secondary school speaking skills 4 reliability cronbach's alpha coefficient for the questionnaire is (0.912) which is a high coefficient, which indicates that the questionnaire is highly reliable. to ensure that ex. and cont. g. samples are equivalent in their previous speaking test since the researcher administers the speaking test before incorporating a flipped classroom model. the result of the subjects was recorded and statistically analyzed by using independent sample t-test. table 1 demonstrates the mean and std.d, t. value, pvalue and significant level of each group in english language speaking tests. table 1. mean, st.d, t value, p-value significant level of c and e. g in english speaking pretest category g m s.d. t-v pv sig. fluency & coherence e 3.20 1.94 0.403 0.698 no sig c 3.45 1.99 content / vocabulary e 4.40 2.35 0.405 0.688 no sig c 4.10 2.34 pronunciation/ intonation / stress e 4.65 2.18 0.671 0.506 no sig c 4.15 2.52 posture & eye contact/ enthusiasm e 4.10 2.22 0.336 0.739 no sig c 3.85 2.48 grammatical range accuracy e 4.50 2.59 0.677 0.502 no sig c 4.00 2.05 total e 20.85 5.11 0.785 0.437 no sig ** t, critical value at df 38 and sig level 0.01=2.704 * t, critical value at df 38 sig level 0.05=2.021 table 1 demonstrates that the computed (t) value is lower than the critical (t) value. this result means that there are no statistically significant differences at (α ≤ 0.05) between the mean scores of e. and c.g in the level of speaking-achievement pre-test. this result means that the experimental and control groups are equivalent and homogeneous in their speaking skills level. results and discussion the first hypothesis "there are statistically significant differences at (α ≤ 0.05) in the level of speaking skills between the mean scores of ex. g in the pre-test and post-test." to examine the first hypothesis, the researcher used the paired sample t-test to calculate the differences between the mean scores of e.g in speaking pre-test and posttest. the results were displayed in table 2. table 2. mean, st.d, t value, p-value, the significant level between e.g mean scores of pretest and post-test category g m s.d. t-v pv sig. fluency & coherence e 3.20 1.94 6.240 0.00 0.01 c 4.90 1.68 content / vocabulary e 4.40 2.35 7.310 0.00 0.01 c 5.85 2.01 pronunciation/ intonation /stress e 4.65 2.18 5.715 0.00 0.01 c 6.05 1.85 posture & eye contact/ enthusiasm e 4.10 2.22 3.928 0.00 0.01 c 5.20 2.02 grammatical range accuracy e 4.50 2.59 7.855 0.00 0.01 c 5.95 2.42 total e 20.85 5.11 9.170 0.00 0.01 c 27.95 5.19 ** t, critical value at df 19 and sig level 0.01=2.861 * t, critical value at df 19 sig level 0.05=2.086 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 5 table 2 shows that the computed (t) value is higher than the critical (t) value at the degree of freedom 49 and a significant level (0.01). this result means that there are statistically significant differences at (α ≤ 0.05) in the level of speaking skills between the mean scores of e.g in the pre-test and post-test in favor of the post-test. (this means that using flipped classroom improved speaking skills of the student using fc). the second hypothesis "there are no statistically significant differences at (α ≤ 0.05) in the level of speaking between the mean scores of e.g and c.g in post-test". to examine the 2nd hypothesis, the researcher used the independent sample t-test to determine the differences between the mean scores of e. g and c.g in speaking achievement post-test as shown in table 3. table 3. mean, st.d, t value, p-value significant level between c. and e. g mean scores in speaking post-test category g m s.d. t-v pv sig. fluency & coherence e 4.90 1.68 2.777 0.01 0.01 c 3.35 1.84 content / vocabulary e 5.85 2.01 2.983 0.00 0.01 c 3.90 2.13 pronunciation/ intonation /stress e 6.05 1.85 2.780 0.01 0.01 c 4.15 2.43 posture & eye contact/ enthusiasm e 5.20 2.02 2.378 0.02 0.01 c 3.50 2.48 grammatical range accuracy e 5.95 2.42 2.751 0.01 0.01 c 4.00 2.05 total e 27.95 5.19 6.084 0.00 0.01 c 18.90 4.17 ** t, critical value at df 38 and sig level 0.01=2.704 * t, critical value at df 38 sig level 0.05=2.021 table 3 shows that the computed (t) value is higher than the critical (t) value at a degree of freedom 98 and a significant level (0.01) for speaking skills post-test. this result means that there are statistically significant differences at (α ≤ 0.05) in the level of speaking between the mean scores of e. and c.g in the post-test in favor of e.g. there are differences between the students using flipped classroom models and those learning to speak in conventional classrooms in favor of students using a flipped classroom. were computed to determine the effectiveness of using fc in developing speaking as shown in table 4. table 4. eta square coefficients of the effect size of using fc model on speaking skills category t value (df) η2 effect fluency& coherence 6.240 19 0.672 high content / vocabulary 7.310 19 0.738 high pronunciation/ intonation / stress 5.718 19 0.632 high posture & eye contact/ enthusiasm 3.928 19 0.448 high grammatical range accuracy 7.855 19 0.765 high total 9.170 19 0.816 high table 4 shows that = 0.816 which means that using a flipped classroom in learning the english language has a high effect on developing students’ speaking skills. the result of the 1st. and 2nd hypotheses indicate that the speaking level of the students who use fc is higher than those who learned that skill via traditional yahya ashour alkhoudary the effectiveness of flipping classroom model on efl secondary school speaking skills 6 classroom only. how does technology impact students' attitudes toward flipping learning? means, standard deviation and proportional mean were calculated to determine the e.g attitude towards flipping learning as shown in table 5. table 5. means, st.d and proportional means of e.g after using flipped classroom model no statement m s.d prop m. r 1. fc encourages me to work individually 4.44 0.50 88.80 5 2. recorded materials help me to speak fluently 4.56 0.54 91.20 1 3. fc gives me enough time to train in speaking 4.48 0.54 89.60 4 4. the given recorded materials promote my speaking skills 4.56 0.54 91.20 1 5. fc makes learning speaking more effective 4.50 0.54 90.00 3 6. this style reduces my pronunciation mistakes 3.78 0.91 75.60 9 7. videos, handouts motivate me to practice speaking 4.10 0.84 82.00 6 8. listening to audios helps me to learn correct english 3.92 0.80 78.40 7 9 mini pictionary encourages me to select vocabulary 3.80 0.81 76.00 8 10 assigned topics for the next lesson are prepared perfectly 3.76 0.74 75.20 10 11 recorded guidelines promoted speaking quality 3.52 1.15 70.40 14 12 fc created a healthy learning environment 3.38 1.01 67.60 19 13 this style helps me to be an independent learner 3.52 1.22 70.40 14 14 some teachers are reluctant to using technology 3.72 1.13 74.40 11 15 the teacher has enough time to guide us towards debating 3.50 1.13 70.00 17 16 my teacher became my companion in learning 3.46 1.13 69.20 18 17 fc created an interactive atmosphere in speaking class 3.52 1.01 70.40 14 18 recorded voice encourages me to use good english 3.60 1.11 72.00 13 19 fc doesn't contribute to improving learning speaking 3.66 1.30 73.20 12 20 lack of technology and instability of the internet doesn't help 3.28 1.16 65.60 20 total 3.85 0.20 77.06 table 5 reveals that the proportional mean of the total score of e.g is high = (77.06). this result means that fc model has a high impact on the experimental group members. statements (2, 4) (recorded materials help me to write correct sentences) (the given handouts promote organizing my ideas) had the highest proportional means but statements (12, 20) (flipping created interesting lessons) (lack of technology in my home city doesn’t help) had the lowest proportional means. the findings of the application showed that most students in the e.g made outstanding progress in their language oral skills although there were some did not check the materials at home. flipped classroom gave all learners ample time to review and prepare materials beforehand individually. the class time was invested in the application part of the lessons including evaluation, creation and analyzing the given information face-to-face in the classroom. additionally, the result of pre and posttests demonstrated noticeable progression in the participants' performance since it had enough exposure to the teaching materials. both students and teachers had a positive attitude toward the flipped methodology. the qualitative method was also employed to enrich the collected data and come out with accurate data. the interview was conducted with the participants in the current study to support the result of using a flipped classroom model. so, all of the interviewee's responses were gathered and analyzed thematically. here are some extracts of participants' reactions towards flipping learning strategy. students’ reactions extract 1 “fc would be an interesting strategy to fix the gap in my competence. we experienced positive interaction with teachers and partners when conducting debates, discussions, describing posters, tell stories, compare and contrast speech.” extract 2 "we had more access to course materials. listening to my teacher’s guides at home was beneficial. i could speak fluently after practicing speaking skills. watching guideline videos and listening to the recorded materials encouraged us to enhance input”. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 7 integrating the qualitative method in this study provides positive responses toward flipping class as a style of enhancing learning quality. as it was illustrated, the participants in this study announced that flipping motivated the engaged students in learning. the majority of students had positive interaction with the teacher and peers. also, they indicated that they had a positive attitude towards using fc since they prepare themselves before going to the class (extract 1). they also enjoyed that technique since they watch the teacher's recorded video-clips (extract 2). teachers’ reactions extract 1 “…flipping classroom is an important strategy to reverse classroom activities with assignments. the problem with that system is that some students are uncommitted to achieve what they have to study before coming to the classroom". extract 2 “flipping class is recent to secondary school students in oman but if this strategy is run perfectly, it will come out with successful results. the videos recorded materials and other instructional supportive materials online must be well thought out, designed and prepared perfectly beforehand. flipped classroom saves classroom time and teachers can train students on carrying out speaking in real situations”. extract 3 “…video-clips and audio recorded materials give students enough chance to use what is to be done in the class act their pace. this strategy may be a panacea to overcome difficulties students encounter since they lack exposure to good english. on the one hand, some teachers feel unhappy with incorporating technology along with a traditional classroom. such blended learning will be accepted since it is new to students but some teachers are ill-trained”. the above teachers’ responses indicate that fc is an important strategy since it reverses class activities with home-work but they state that some students lag in preparing what is assigned for the following day (extract 1). they also declare that fc is a novice but it works if is used employed properly. they argue that teachers should be well-trained to prepare teaching materials online. teachers have to exploit the fc strategy to invest classroom time thoroughly (extract 2). they add that some teachers are reluctant to use technology beside classroom activities but some tome they accept it as a new system. teachers' competence in technology integration; good competence in technology, the accessibility of technology lack of training in using technology appropriately (extract 3). flipping learning is applicable in linguistic classrooms but there are some obstacles to use such a strategy since it needs persistence from teachers and students as well. although students require much practice, the traditional approach is enjoyable to most students since they consider it easy to just receive information from the teacher's side. moreover, producing teaching contents requires well-trained teachers who have the ability to prepare well-organized and teachable videos. difficulty in-class activities and watching videos frustrate students since the recorded materials are prepared unsuccessfully. besides, internet breakdown affects students' online activities such as watching video-clips and following guidelines towards achieving speaking tasks. the flipped classroom is an ineffectual teaching strategy in some classrooms due to weakness and lack of confidence in achieving online tasks. further, monitoring students at home needs rapport between teachers and students and training towards independent learning. additionally, preparing recorded materials is not easy since it requires skillful and well-trained teachers. conclusion this paper intends to explore the possibility of using the fc model in a secondary school in oman to check its impact on the students' speaking performance and the participants' attitudes towards having such a strategy to enhance speaking skills. the result shows that fc motivates students to work hard and listen to the recorded materials furnished online. fc technique increases class activities, share knowledge autonomously but it is unwelcomed by inexperienced. further, this study reveals that the new system affects students' attitudes positively. the blended strategy is highly appreciated by both teachers and students since it is applicable in efl/ esl classrooms but there are some yahya ashour alkhoudary the effectiveness of flipping classroom model on efl secondary school speaking skills 8 impediments may discourage some educators to include fc in classrooms. flipping classroom strategy is an important strategy to grant students enough opportunity to absorb the prescribed teaching content. since technological devices are in everyone's hand, teachers can start flipping in a small group to check the applicability of using this strategy among learners then extend flipping to all students in the class. it is recommended to teachers to give students a small number of assignments to avoid boring tasks. training programs should be planned for teachers to acquire the skills necessary for using this model. also, it is important to ensure that students watch video-clips before coming to class. students can be trained gradually to reduce their dependence on teachers. however, the majority of students eager to have their teacher explanation in classrooms even though they resist using technology in learning the english language. anyhow, further works towards autonomous learning are required to incorporate technology in education. acknowledgement i am thankful for and fortunate enough to get constant encouragement and support from my family who helped me to complete this work successfully. also, i would like to extend my sincere esteem to all who always give me help in doing research. references aaron, s., & bergmann, j. 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(2013). a new model to reach all students in all ways. internet @ school, 20(1), 14-16. sams, a., & bergmann, j. (2013). flip your students’ learning. educational leadership, 70(6), 16-20. street, s. e., gilliland, k. o., mcneil, c., & royal, k. (2015). the flipped classroom improved medical student performance and satisfaction in a preclinical physiology course. medical science educator, 25(1), 35-43. wiginton, b. l. (2013). flipped instruction: an investigation into the effect of the learning environment on student self-efficacy, learning style, and academic achievement in an algebra i classroom. unpublished dissertation. university of alabama. wu, w. v. v, chen hsieh, j. s., & yang, j. c. (2017). creating an online learning community in a flipped classroom to enhance efl learners’ oral proficiency. educational technology & society, 20(2), 142-157. yahya ashour alkhoudary the effectiveness of flipping classroom model on efl secondary school speaking skills 10 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 11 the english-learning strategies of an indigenous english learner in the northeast of thailand vincentia aprilla putri graduate program in elt, faculty of letters, universitas negeri malang, indonesia e-mail: vincentiaaprillaputri@gmail.com apa citation: putri, v. a. (2020). the english-learning strategies of an indigenous english learner in the northeast of thailand. indonesian efl journal, 6(1), 11-18. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v6i1.2633. received: 11-03-2019 accepted: 10-06-2019 published: 01-01-2020 abstract: this study investigated english-learning strategies applied by an indigenous student in amnat charoen province, in the northeast of thailand. despite the lack of english exposure in the area, the participant, who was an english learner at a private primary school in amnat charoen province, thailand, had an excellent english ability. the data collection and analysis were done qualitatively through interviews and observations. based on the interviews and observations, the participant was reported using both direct and indirect strategies in learning english. the dominant direct learning strategies were memory strategies and compensation strategies. the participant developed habits to summarize learning materials and use gestures to assist the speaking practice. also, in the frame of indirect strategies, the participant applied social strategies more frequently than other indirect learning strategies. the social strategies were obviously noticeable in the consistency to practice english by interacting with foreign teachers. further, the social learning strategies were also believed to be the most essential learning strategies developed by the participant. keywords: learning strategies; direct strategies; indirect strategies. introduction individuals do not use the same way to learn (seel, 2012). in order to give explanations of individual learning differences, experts introduced the notion of learning strategies (seel, 2012). oxford (1990) as cited in pawlak (2019), stated that strategies are specific actions taken by learners to make learning easier, faster, more enjoyable, more self-directed and more transferable to novel situations. hence, each individual who has developed learning strategies can enhance their autonomy in mastering the target language. meanwhile, recently griffiths (2018) as cited in pawlak (2019) defined language learning strategies as actions chosen by learners for the purpose of language learning. research on learning strategies revealed that good language learners benefited from some language learning strategies, especially in terms of proficiency levels. most studies on language learning strategies confirm that successful learners use more strategies than unsuccessful learners. besides, successful learners frequently use the strategies that help them become successful (qingquan, chatupote, & teo, 2008; lai, 2009; rao, 2012; oxford, 2017). similarly, another study conducted by dmitrenko (2017) identified strategies used by multilingual learners who were learning additional languages. they were aged 18 onwards, and have different academic and professional backgrounds and stemming from intermediate or higher socioeconomic environments. all of them had spanish as their first or second language, and they learned a european language with a latin-based writing system. the study revealed that almost all the strategies listed in the questionnaire based on the framework of the learning strategies by oxford (1990) were reported to be applied frequently by multilingual learners. since studies have shown that learning strategies are rigorously related to successful learners, having more considerations on students’ learning strategies will be undoubtedly beneficial. this point of view is in line with bai & guo (2019) who specified that in relation to language teaching, the success of a language teaching depends, among others, on understanding students’ learning strategies. in the school setting, for instance, when teachers have a good understanding of students’ learning strategies, they will have a better implementation of instruction which are suitable for students to improve language learning. nevertheless, studies on language learning strategies have shown that there are various factors influencing individuals’ english learning strategies, such as cultural background, national origin, and language teaching method (nyikos, 1989 in lai, 2009). most studies revealed that students who come from different culture, nationality, and various schools are potentially mailto:vincentiaaprillaputri@gmail.com vincentia aprilla putri the english-learning strategies of an indigenous english learner in the northeast of thailand 12 different in the ways they approach learning. for instance, mazumder (2014) investigated the motivation and strategies used by students in public and private universities in bangladesh. the study used the motivated strategies for learning questionnaire (mslq) and revealed that there was no significant difference between public and private universities in bangladesh in most of the categories. after that, the result was compared to two other results from two countries, china and the usa. the comparison revealed some differences between bangladesh, china, and the usa. the difference indicates that students from different geographical regions may learn differently. although previous studies have demonstrated the learning strategies of students from different countries, the majority of them were conducted among students with diverse backgrounds and learning experiences from the one who is going to be the participant of this study. besides, most of the studies were conducted among a mixed group of learners from different countries, and there are very limited studies investigating the englishlearning strategies used by students from monoculture and particular linguistic contexts, such as thailand. therefore, this study aims at investigating the english-learning strategies of a successful english-language learner in the northeast of thailand by answering the following research question: what are the english-learning strategies employed by a successful english-language learner from the northeast of thailand? english has been a part of the curriculum and becomes a compulsory subject from primary school onward in thailand (chamcharatsri, 2010). the presence of english subject in formal schools has been for around 150 years, since king rama iv ordered that english be a part of the training for royal children (watson, 1980 in grubbs, chaengploy, & worawong (2009). thai people then consider english as a foreign language, which is mainly used for business, tourism, and educational purposes. thus, students who want to get a good position in large corporations push themselves to learn and use english accurately and fluently. however, numerous thai students still claim that english subject is monotonous and stressful. they do not even find reasons to learn english (chamcharatsri, 2010). a study conducted by grubbs, chaengploy, & worawong (2009) on students at three traditional university campuses and four rajabhat university campuses in central-western thailand revealed that students had positive views on english. most students thought english was important and beneficial for their academic pursuits. however, they did not think highly of their abilities. this point of view is in line with other studies that revealed the difficulty in english-learning among thai students. the challenge in mastering english is shown by the english test results of thai national testing, which got worse at least from 2000 to 2008 (klainin, 2009). further, it is surprising that among all regions in thailand, the northeast of thailand (which is known as isan and consists of twenty provinces) is ranked as the weakest region at english in year 11 national testing (draper, in press as cited in draper, 2012). the national language spoken by students undeniably influence the english proficiency of thai students. the thai language is somehow different from english in terms of phonological, grammatical, and lexical items. in terms of grammar, the thai language does not apply the verb as a tense marker. it uses adverbs or nouns signifying time, which is placed in the sentenceinitial position. in the thai language, the participant precedes the verb, the object follows the verb, forming subject-verb-object word order without the presence of the semantic role of a noun phrase. besides, in thai language, verbs are not only to represent action and its objec-tives but also a cause and its result, and action and its evaluation. moreover, causative and passive constructions are part of verb serialization (minegishi, 2011). in terms of speech or expression, some speech events in thai and english are different. for instance, in saying apology and thanks. in english, there are many ways to apologize, whereas thai people would say sorry in a single form. besides, when the british may have several direct strategies to express thanks, thai people have less explicit strategies (intachakra, 2004). one of the best-known frameworks for concepts of english-learning strategies is the one launched by oxford (1990). oxford believes that language learning relies on two major learning strategies, namely, direct strategies and indirect strategies. direct strategies contribute directly to learning, and indirect strategies contribute indirectly to learning. direct strategies require mental processing of linguistic information. meanwhile, indirect strategies support and manage language learning without directly involving the target language (oxford, 1990 as cited in ardasheva & tretter, 2013). direct strategies involve memory strategies, indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 13 cognitive strategies, and compensation strategies. memory strategies enable learners to store verbal materials and retrieve them for communication. in memory strategies, learners learn through acronyms, rhyming, images, the keyword method, body movement, mechanical means and location. they also do grouping and using context. memory strategies are helpful for learners to memorize vocabulary and structures (oxford, 1990 in solak & cakir, 2015). cognitive strategies involve the transformation of the new linguistic material to comprehension and production. these strategies include practicing, receiving, and sending messages, analyzing and reasoning, and creating a structure for input and output (oxford, 1990 in ardasheva & tretter, 2013). in cognitive strategies, learners usually do analysis, note-taking, summarizing, synthesizing, outlining, and reorganizing information to reach their objectives (oxford, 1990 in solak & cakir, 2015). lastly, compensation strategies enable learners to practice a new language for either comprehension or production despite limitations in knowledge. compensation strategies involve guessing, asking for help, and using gestures (oxford, 1990 in ardasheva & tretter, 2013). meanwhile, indirect strategies involve metacognitive, affective, and social strategies. metacognitive strategies enable learners to control their cognition and learning needs. for instance, learners have focus attention, planning, organizing, arranging, monitoring, and evaluating the learning process (oxford, 1990 in ardasheva & tretter, 2013). the metacognitive strategies are related to students’ own regulation and monitoring of their vocabulary learning (yaacob, et al. 2019). affective strategies assist in regulating emotions, attitudes, motivation, and values. students who employ these strategies can lower their anxiety and have selfencouragement (oxford, 1996). since these strategies are useful for dealing with interfering feelings, they are advantageous for beginner learners (seker, 2015). however, learners do not need these strategies as they improve in proficiency (oxford, 1996). finally, social strategies facilitate students’ interaction, social behaviour, and communication. learners who use these strategies like to work with others, ask questions, ask for help and have the desire to learn about other cultures (oxford, 1996). method the participant of this study was a successful english-learner, namely noi (pseudonym). the participant lived in a province in the northeast of thailand, namely amnat charoen. amnat charoen is part of isan (regions in the northeast of thailand, bordering laos and cambodia). since amnat charoen is very close to laos, people in amnat charoen, including the participant, speak isan language (thai language, which is still related to lao). in terms of the tourism industry, amnat charoen has not been widely known by international tourists; thus, finding foreign tourists in amnat charoen is not as easy as finding tourists in bangkok. the participant was a ten-year-old primary-four student in a private elementary school in amnat charoen province, in which the researcher taught english for two years from 2016 to 2018. at school, the participant learned english in three different subjects, namely basic english, english for communication, and phonics. although the school was not an international school, each of the three subjects was taught for two hours per week by teachers from cameroon, indonesia, and thailand. the participant was special. despite the fact that other thai students faced many problems in learning english, the participant was considered to be a successful english learner by a number of teachers. the participant had excellent test scores in all of english subjects, and showed clear and excellent pronunciation in english. therefore, the participant could communicate well with foreign teachers. moreover, the participant showed high motivation and interest in english competitions held by schools and governments. as a result, the participant frequently won english competitions, such as storytelling, speech, and other projects, not only at school level but also in the province and national levels. this research was conducted qualitatively. according to creswell (2012), one of the characteristics of qualitative research is examining a problem and elaborating a detailed understanding of a central phenomenon. in this qualitative research, the researcher uses a case study as a method. as defined by fraenkel (2012), a case study focuses on extensively studying single individual, group, or important example and collecting varied data to formulate interpretations which are applicable to the specific case or to provide useful generalizations. therefore, the researcher tried to extensively explore the englishlearning strategies of the indigenous student from the northeast of thailand, namely noi (pseudonym). the investigation and analysis were done based on the theories which were related to english-learning strategies of individuals. in this study, the research instruments used by https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2042753014558384 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2042753014558384 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2042753014558384 vincentia aprilla putri the english-learning strategies of an indigenous english learner in the northeast of thailand 14 the researcher were an interview guide and an observation form. the interviews aimed at discovering the english learning strategies possessed by the participant. besides, to avoid response bias, the observations on the english learning strategies were also done. by using these two instruments, the research was expected to demonstrate trustworthiness, the interviews were conducted in english and were done twice during the weekend on 17th and 24th february 2018. meanwhile, the observations were completed every week in two months, from february to march 2018. the interviews covered questions related to the english-learning strategies possessed by the participant both inside and outside the school. at the same time, the observations focused on the english learning strategies maintained by the participant during the english classes. there are two big dimensions of english-learning strategies, namely direct and indirect strategies developed by oxford (1990). the direct strategies consist of memory strategies, cognitive strategies, and compensation strategies. meanwhile, indirect strategies cover metacognitive strategies, affective strategies, and social strategies. upon the completion of the data gathering, the researcher carried out the data analysis. the data obtained from the two instruments were transcribed, analyzed, and interpreted. results and discussion since both direct and indirect strategies contribute to the success of learning, digging out the use of both strategies on a successful english learner is necessary. although most studies show that successful learners used more strategies than unsuccessful learners, the present study discovers that a successful english learner has shown dominant learning strategies that significantly contribute to her success. the analysis of the strategies possessed by the successful english learner promotes the awareness of the broad range of englishlearning strategies options available to reach the same success. besides, the understanding of students’ learning strategies will help teachers to have a better implementation of instruction to improve students, especially since english is a compulsory subject for students at primary school onwards in thailand. based on the interview, the participant learned english successfully because of the assistant of both direct and indirect strategies. in the scope of direct strategies, the participant employed memory strategies, cognitive strategies, and compensation strategies. those three strategies were used frequently in dealing with the english language both at school and outside the school. in addition, in the scope of indirect strategies, the participant employed social strategies which undeniably gave a significant impact on her speaking proficiency. in a similar vein, the observation conducted by the researcher showed that the participant employed both direct and indirect strategies in learning english. however, the dominant englishlearning strategies shown by the participant were memory strategies, compensation strategies, and social strategies. the three strategies were observable during the school periods since the participant frequently applied those three strategies in the classroom. besides, the three strategies were observed when the participant had interactions with foreign teachers. the researcher discovered that memory strategies were useful for vocabulary building and memorizing sentence structures. in terms of vocabulary building, the participant did not just memorize vocabularies. still, the participant also put the vocabulary in written sentences and conversations with foreign teachers so that at the same time, the participant learnt the sentence structures. based on the findings, the researcher found out that the present study is in line with the studies conducted by lai (2009) and qingquan, chatupote, & teo (2008). the two studies revealed that successful students used a more comprehensive range of strategies. particularly in the study conducted by lai (2009), the subjects of the study use the six strategies in the medium frequency. in addition, the subjects reported using compensation strategies more frequently than other types of learning strategies. the specific techniques the subjects use often included guessing intelligently by using linguistic or other clues and overcoming limitations in using language by using gesture, circumlocution, or synonym. in contrast to the previous study by lai (2009), which revealed that among all six categories, affective strategies and memory strategies were reported as infrequently used by all students. the results showed that these students tended not to use affective strategies that helped them regulate their emotions, motivation, and attitudes while they learned and used english. meanwhile, in the present study, the participant of the study employs memory strategies more frequently and has a better ability than other students in terms of vocabulary building. however, in a similar vein with the previous study, the participant of the indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 15 present study employs affective strategies infrequently. yaacob et al. (2019) stated that in order to be successful in learning languages, in the learning strategies, a language learner must place the focus on vocabulary building rather than on memorizing grammar rules and structures. referring to this belief, the participant in the present study had also shown more effort in vocabulary building. from the observation and interview, it was discovered that the participant enjoyed activities in the classroom which involve vocabulary games, such as hangman and categories games. based on the observation, the participant was actively involved in the games and eager to lead the games. in addition, the school has facilitated her to improve her vocabulary. the participant had enough chances to learn new words and put the words in sentences. the school had provided every student with a book that contained vocabulary items arranged by foreign teachers. the list of vocabulary items was taken from the three english textbooks, namely basic english, english for communication, and phonics. those books were good quality books which were published by an international publisher. hence, every student, including the participant, was required to write the meaning of the vocabulary items and put the new words in sentences. for instance, the vocabulary item was rose. the participant was obliged to find the meaning of the word rose and tried to write a sentence consisted of the word rose. the participant also had an excellent ability to relate the lesson to her imagination. the participant could make a vocabulary item meaningful for her because the participant could imagine the real or visual object that was related to the vocabulary. for example, the participant learned the english word “solar system”. when the participant knew the definition of the solar system, the participant started to imagine planets and could relate the knowledge to what the participant learned in science class. another example was when the participant went to a shopping mall and found an english advertisement. the participant was intrigued to understand the advertisement. when the participant did not know vocabulary. “… kha, for example, i learned the words solar the meaning, the participant managed to use google and tried to find the meaning of the words stated in the advertisement. her curiosity enriched her system then i imagine planets. i can use the word solar system to explain planets.” although numerous thai students still claim that english is a monotonous and confusing subject, the participant was interested in english subject since the participant could learn english from various sources. as a student, the participant learned a lot of english words and expressions from foreign teachers occupied to teach english at her school. however, it was undeniable that the use of technology also gave impact to her vocabulary building. the participant's vocabulary has been improving since the participant has new hobbies to watch english cartoons. the participant grew her vocabulary through english cartoons which were supported by subtitles both in english and thai. the cognitive strategy was also found in the participant’s learning strategy. in a reading test, for instance, the participant was accustomed to answering the comprehension questions through skimming the reading text. the participant did not consider checking the meaning of each word because it was necessary to answer the question. however, in an occasion when the comprehension question required her to find out a synonym, the participant read the text slowly to find the best answer. the participant was not only skilful at reading, but the participant was also considered as a successful student in other tests. the participant achieved excellent scores in almost all english subjects because the participant has developed habits to learn by writing summaries. the concise summary helped her a lot to understand the learning materials gathered from school. additionally, based on the observation, the researcher found out that the participant always wrote the summaries on a thin book. each page was mostly decorated with colorful drawings which were confirmed to be advantageous to make her interested in reading the summaries. despite all of the cognitive strategies possessed, the participant did not have enough time to read for fun in english. the participant attended school from monday to friday from 7 a.m to 5 p.m. the participant also had extra courses outside the school at the weekend. besides, english books, english novels and english comics could be hardly found in almost all book shops in amnat charoen. mostly the bookshops provided books, stories, and comics only in thai versions. however, the participant was completed with another facility, like the internet. the participant had the chance to access the internet and social media, such as instagram and line so that the participant could read english text outside schools. since the vincentia aprilla putri the english-learning strategies of an indigenous english learner in the northeast of thailand 16 participant had improved her reading skill, the researcher considered that the participant should have had more efforts to practice her writing skill, mainly because the participant had the chance to express herself through the use of social media. in terms of practicing english, the participant was considered to be the most consistent english user at school, despite the gaps of linguistic knowledge in her surroundings. the participant overcame the weaknesses by employing compensation strategies. the participant discovered that the participant could practice english with anyone, including herself. when the participant was alone, the participant could practice her english by connecting words with motions. based on her experiences, memorizing a poem by moving around before competition started was also very helpful to overcome the nervousness and to enhance her memory. meanwhile, when the participant needed to interact with others, moved her body and used gestures to speak english. “… i use that because it is easier for me, teacher. i also memorize poem, or what is long by moving my body.” in daily school activities, the participant rarely found difficulties in interacting with foreign teachers. when a foreign teacher misunderstood what the participant meant, the participant used her hands to present better explanations. in addition, the participant habitually drew pictures to help her explain what the participant meant when the participant did not know the english word that the participant was going to express. for instance, in the classroom, the participant tries to speak with one of the teachers from cameron about a thai festival that needed candles. the participant did not know how to say candles in english; thus, the participant drew the picture of a candle. the strategy used by the participant showed that the participant never gave up, although the participant stated that sometimes the participant worried that people might not understand her. among various indirect strategies, the participant developed metacognitive strategies, affective strategies, and social strategies. the participant showed the metacognitive strategies through her strong will to be a good student in english class. when the teacher asked questions, the participant tried to answer the questions confidently. when the participant made mistakes, the participant recognized the mistakes, and the participant was eager to fix the errors and do the same things more carefully. the participant could find her strength in english, which was her speaking ability. nonetheless, the participant realized that the participant still needed to practice writing. the participant stated that sometimes the participant found difficulties in writing sentences with the correct grammar. as a primary school student, the participant was very good at managing her emotion. the participant developed appropriate affective strategies in learning english. the participant was very confident in speaking english. hence, the participant enjoyed participating in various english competitions, such as storytelling, speech, and other projects. the participant did not just join the competitions at schools, but also in the province and national levels. in order to do all of the competitions, the participant kept the power to drive away herself from anxiety. according to her, practicing speaking in front of her classmates was a precious stepping stone to be able to speak up in front of other audiences in english competitions. when earning a good score or winning competitions, the participant did not reward herself, but the participant was encouraged to give better performance. everyone in her family knew that the participant loved english because the participant always shared her feelings to the family, especially to her mom. the participant did not just share her happiness, but also her anxiety every time problems during the preparation for competitions emerged. this strategy was helpful because the participant received supports psychologically. because of her interest in english, her family supported her to practice english by giving the participant opportunities to join english courses even on the weekend to practice speaking with the foreigners. the participant was also supported to join english competitions outside amnat charoen province. the most important thing to note was that the participant was very good at speaking. the excellent speaking ability was the result of her consistency in practicing english. the vocabulary the participant earned and the speaking practice were advantageous for the enhancement of her speaking proficiency. although the school had provided students with a day called an english day to practice english, the participant was pleased to speak english with others every day. “… every day is the same, if i want to speak, i speak. but i speak if there are people who understand.” from the interview, the participant also shared her opinions about people whose first language is indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 17 english. the participant had an interest in people from a european country, namely england. the participant was not just curious about how people in england live. still, the participant prepared herself to be able to speak english fluently so that one day the participant could visit england. in speaking english, the participant realized that sometimes the participant used the incorrect grammar, yet the participant was very convinced to speak english because the participant enjoyed it. in the school settings, the participant spoke english with foreign english teachers, math teachers and science teachers. however, the participant acknowledged that the participant used thai when the participant had a conversation with a thai teacher who taught english. the participant stated that the participant was more comfortable to speak thai with thai teachers, for the sake of the classmates. on the contrary, the participant was delighted to speak english with all foreign teachers at school. conclusion to sum up, the result of the study is consistent with the findings from the majority of the previous studies (lai, 2009; qingquan, chatupote, & teo, 2008) which suggest more frequent strategy use by more proficient learners. in the case of the participant, an indigenous english learner in northeast thailand, the english language has been seen as an essential part of her life. the participant loves speaking english and having interaction with foreign teachers. the participant also has been using both direct and indirect strategies. however, the most essential and dominant indirect learning strategies found in the participant is social strategies. the participant has consistency in practicing her english with foreigners. meanwhile, the dominant direct learning strategies the participant uses are memory strategies and compensation strategies. the participant does not just memorize vocabulary items, but the participant also summarizes learning materials so that the participant has the ability to recall the lessons well. besides, the participant has been using compensation strategies frequently to assist her in speaking practice. the participant uses gestures to communicate well in english. considering that different learners may employ different strategies, more research is needed to gain a better understanding of the learning strategies of the majority of thai learners. besides, future researchers must consider various reasons for students choosing particular strategies in learning english. acknowledgement the sincerest thanks goes to the researcher’s beloved student, who gladly participated in the research. references ardasheva, y., & tretter, t. r. (2013). strategy inventory for language learning-ell student form: testing for factorial validity. the modern language journal, 97(2), 474-489. doi: 10.1111/j.1540-4781.2013.12011.x. bai, b., & guo, w. (2019). motivation and selfregulated strategy use: relationships to primary school students’ english writing in hong kong. language teaching research,1–22. doi: 10.1177/1362168819859921. creswell, j.w. (2012). educational research planning, conducting, and evaluating quantitative and qualitative research (4th edn.). boston: pearson. dmitrenko, v. (2017). language learning strategies of multilingual adults learning additional languages. international journal of multilingualism, 14(1), 6– 22. doi:10.1080/14790718.2017.1258978. fraenkel, j. r., wallen, n. e., & hyun, h. h. (2012). how to design and evaluate research in education (8th edn.). new york: macgraw-hill. grubbs, s.j., chaengploy, s., & worawong, k. (2009). rajabhat and traditional universities: institutional differences in thai students' perceptions of english. higher education, 57(3), 283-298. doi:10.1007/s10734-008-9144-2. intachakra, s. (2004). contrastive pragmatics and language teaching: apologies and thanks in english and thai*. regional language centre journal, 35(1), 37-62. doi: 10.1177/003368820403500105. klainin, s. (2009). using the results from international and national assessments. presentation at improving equity and quality of education in thailand: an international perspective, chiang mai, thailand. retrieved from http://go.worldbank.org/k13ikddg30. mazumder, q. (2014). student motivation and learning strategies of students from usa, china and bangladesh. international journal of evaluation and research in education, 3(4), 205-210. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/ijere.v3i4.6288. minegishi, m. (2011). description of thai as an isolating language. social science information, 50(1), 62–80. doi: 10.1177/0539018410389107. oxford, r.l. (1990). language learning strategies: what every teacher should know. boston: heinle & heinle. oxford, r.l. (1996). language learning strategies around the world: cross-cultural perspective. manoa: university of hawaii press. oxford, r.l. (2017). teaching and researching language learning strategies: self-regulated https://www.researchgate.net/deref/http%3a%2f%2fdx.doi.org%2f10.1111%2fj.1540-4781.2013.12011.x http://go.worldbank.org/k13ikddg30 http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/ijere.v3i4.6288 vincentia aprilla putri the english-learning strategies of an indigenous english learner in the northeast of thailand 18 regulation in context (2nd ed.). new york: routledge. pawlak, m. (2019). investigating language learning strategies: prospects, pitfalls and challenges. language teaching research, 1–19. doi: 10.1177/1362168819876156. qingquan, n., chatupote, m., & teo, a. (2008). a deep look into learning strategy use by successful and unsuccessful students in the chinese efl learning context. relc journal, 39 (3), 338-358. doi: 10.1177/0033688208096845. rao, z. (2012). language learning strategies and english proficiency: interpretations from information-processing theory. the language learning journal, 1–17. doi: 10.1080/09571736.2012.733886. seel, n.m. (ed.). (2012). encyclopedia of the sciences of learning. new york: springer us. doi: 10.1007/ 978-1-4419-1428-6. seker, m. (2015). the use of self-regulation strategies by foreign language learners and its role in language achievement. language teaching research, 20(5), 600–618. doi:10.1177/136216881 5578550. solak, e., & cakir, r. (2015). language learning strategies of language e-learners in turkey. elearning and digital media, 12(1), 107–120. doi: 10.1177/2042753014558384. yaacob, a., shapii, a., alobaisy, a.s., al-rahmi, w.m., al-dheleai, y.m., yahaya, n., & alamri, m.m. (2019). vocabulary learning strategies through secondary students at saudi school in malaysia, sage open, 1–12. doi: 10.1177/2158244019835935. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 73 grammatical errors performed by tourist guides in gorontalo city muziatun department of english language, faculty of letters and culture, state university of gorontalo, indonesia email: muziatun@ung.ac.id ansar tario jusuf department of english language, faculty of letters and culture, state university of gorontalo, indonesia email: ansartario@gmail.com apa citation: muziatun, m., & jusuf, a. t. (2020). grammatical errors performed by tourist guides in gorontalo city. indonesian efl journal, 6(1), 73-80. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v6i1.2640. received: 08-07-2019 accepted: 11-09-2019 published: 01-01-2020 abstract: the goal of this research is to investigate grammatical errors in speaking performed by tour guides in gorontalo city. as demanding english is a compulsory language for those who work in the tourism sector when they deal with foreign tourists. this study aims to uncover grammatical errors produced by gorontalo tour guides. afterwards, this research uses sequential mixed method that proposed by creswell, which aims to investigate and discover the types of grammatical errors followed by modus data. moreover, the data analysis of this study uses a guideline that proposed by politzer and ramirez who explained the types of grammatical errors in detail. this study reveals that the ability of 12 tour guides produce speaking in a grammatically low manner. it indicates that the number of grammatical errors is dominated by the verb phrase, noun phrase and transformation. followed by third person present singular, simple past tense, and past participle. overall, this research is expected to contribute to tour guides in gorontalo city, especially what needs to be emphasized by tour guides in speaking grammatically. keywords: grammatical errors; tourist guide; gorontalo. introduction the study of grammatical errors had been conducted by many researchers around the world (asif, zhiyong, ali, & nisar, 2019; çerçi̇, derman, & bardakçi, 2016; maros, hua, & salehuddin, 2017; uysal & aydin, 2017). çerçi, derman, and bardakçi (2016) identified turkish as foreign language learners’ grammatical errors. they investigated grammatical, syntactic, spelling, punctuation, and word choice errors. it revealed that errors are limited to the linguistic and intralingual developmental errors. in line with çerçi, derman, and bardakçi (2016), hemati (2012) also explored the benefits of the effect of teacher, peer, and self-editing on the improvement of grammatical accuracy in writing, using three groups of participants. the results confirmed that teacher’s editing as best way to improve students’ grammatical errors rather than peer-editing and self-editing. some of chakas’ (2012) results of the study confirmed that participants’ sms and im paragraphs displayed linguistic and contextual textisms, and errors in varying degrees. in the context of grammatical errors, kyung-im, and hyekyeng (2017) also discovered the gap between learners’ grammatical awareness and their perception of major grammatical items of efl learners from two local universities in south korea. the results confirmed that there was a significant difference in the scores of tense, article, and voice for grammatical awareness between the high-level and the lowlevel group. this study also strongly highlighted the importance of individualized curriculum design for the effectiveness of teaching as well as self-initiated studying especially in grammatical aspect. in practice, what is the relationship between grammatical errors and tourism? the use of correct grammatical aspects will be helpful for better service of tourism (cappelli, 2016; manca, 2016; qiong, 2016). primarily, for improvement of communication services for tourists who come from many countries around asia. the challenge of english communication appears in the progress of international issues, such as decision of english language as requirement of communication is agreed upon to be as international language in region scale of asean (kirkpatrick, 2011, 2012; muziatun, 2017), united nations, international academic and education, international organization, and other communities. the challenge requires that english as the tool of communication among muziatun & ansar tario jusuf grammatical errors performed by tourist guides in gorontalo city 74 others such as economy, trading, education, law, culture, health and tourism sector. it means that international issues that relate to these sectors decide to use english as the requirement of international communication (khramchenko, 2019). so, they have become the main focuses in this era of globalization world. in the same way, lembong (2018) has argued that particularly tourism sector is the second international activity after commerce, because tourism involves a people around the world. besides, richards (2001) states that english is a compulsory language for those who work in tourism sector when they deal with foreign tourists. subsequently, gorontalo is one of regions in indonesia, which has potentials to attract tourist through its destinations and nice hospitality based on what tourists have thought so far. this data has been provided by gorontalo tourism department in 2016 year. furthermore, this can be seen from a number of tourists have been increased each year, based on the statistics data provided by gorontalo government tourism office in 2016. afterwards, it announced that a number of foreign tourists in 2011 were 56.261 people and currently has been increased to approximately 231.000 people. regarding the number of foreign tourists, absolutely tour guides should master a good english language. it is because, the tour guides will speak english to foreign tourists as regard the language is upon to be agreed as the requirement of international language. for these reasons, tour guides need to know what grammar actually is and how important grammar is in communicating english (hahn, jurafsky, & futrell, 2020).. it is because that the important grammar in communication is to make ideas clearly. as stated by richard (1987) knowledge of grammar emphasizes our capability to comprehend and generate language. additionally, david crystal (2004) states grammar helps us to detect ambiguity in a language. it means that grammatical competence conveys all the ideas wanted to be covered by the speaker. therefore, the listener will understand and get the meaning of the target language used by speaker without feeling ambiguity in a language. moreover, grammar helps people to develop communication through referring the ideas using a correct form. when an idea is conveyed with the correct grammar, the idea will be easier to be understood by the listener. in a nutshell, tour guides should have realized that the important grammar in communication is to make ideas clearly. based on the decision letter of the indonesian ministry of tourism, number: km.82/pw.102/ mppt-88 (1988) states that tourist guide is someone who in charge of giving guidance, instructions, and lighting related tourism destination in particular area. besides that, tour guide also helps to everything needed by tourists such as giving explanation, services and accommodations. in the same way suwantoro (1997) states that tour guide is someone who gives explanation and provides instructions for tourists related to the whole aspects which needed be seen by tourists, during their visit to tourism destinations, or certain tourist areas. regarding two opinions before, researchers conclude that tour guide is a profession that must be responsible to explain and to provide services related to tourists when they visit certain tourism destinations. in order to provide the services excellently to tourists, so tour guide should communicate clearly when conveying services to tourists. for instance, tour guide explains instruction of tourism destination to tourists by using clear language. therefore, tourists can understand what have tour guide explained because of the excellent of communication skills. according to richard and renandya (2002), speaking is an essential thing in communication. this means that speaking plays crucial things in communication. it is supported by huebner (1969) who states that speaking is the main skill in communication. while, byrne (1984) states that speaking is oral communication which involves productive and receptive skills of understanding between speaker and listener. as stated by cameron (2001) speaking is actively using a language to convey meanings orally. furthermore, brown (2004) states: speaking is a productive skill which can be directly and obviously observed. it means that, the listeners can recognize directly through observing what the speaker have said to the listeners, whether they understand or not. based on these ideas before, speaking is a direct communication that is happening between communicator and receiver (khaparde, 2020). while the communicator speaks, at the same time, the receiver also hears. in this case, the speaker and listener should be able to indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 75 understand each other; in order the idea of communication is achieved clearly. there are some aspects in speaking (dippold, bridges, eccles, & mullen, 2019; tavakoli, nakatsuhara, & hunter, 2020). grammar is one of the aspects that should be concerned. it is needed in order to make the idea of speaking clearly. hence, speaker should have realized the important of using grammar. as stated by richard (1987) grammar comprehension emphasizes someone’s capability to comprehend and generated language sentences it means that grammatical competence conveys all the regulation wanted to be covered by the speaker. therefore, the listener will understand and get the meaning of the target language used by the speaker. furthermore, speaking cannot be separated tourism activities (erazo, ramírez, encalada, holguin, & zou, 2019), to fulfill the responsibility the tour guide complies the procedural of decision letters namely giving explanation and communication clearly to tourists as discussion in section before. it means that, in the tourism sector, the tour guide as the speaker and foreign tourists as listeners. indeed, tour guide should speak clearly, in order tourist does not misunderstand. according to morris (1979) the definition of errors as general is the action, statement, or certainty that accidentally deviates of what is correct. in addition, he also states that error is the situation of false or incorrect knowledge, the act of deviation from code ethics, transgression and wrong doing. subsequently in linguistic field, corder (1973) states that error is branch of code which made by a person because of he or she has lack of knowledge concerning of the information rules of the language. moreover, ellis (1995) error in language is the incorrect deviation of someone who does not master the rules of the target language (ellis, 1995). moreover, dulay, burt, and krashen (1982) suggest that there are four kinds of error taxonomy. one of them is linguistic category classification: this type of taxonomy carries the specification of error in terms of linguistic categories. the researchers focused on grammatical error. grammatical error is the error in combining words into larger unit, such as phrases, clauses, and sentences. it consists morphological and syntactical error. morphological error involves a failure to obey the norm in supplying any part of word classes such as noun, verb, adjective, adverb, and preposition. subsequently, syntactical errors affect texts larger than word such as phrase, clause, sentence, and paragraphs (james, 1998). based on the background presented earlier, the guiding questions for this paper are: what are the types of grammatical errors produced by tourist guides in gorontalo city? what is the dominant type of grammatical errors produced by tourist guides in gorontalo city? method this study has been conducted in several destinations of gorontalo city where the tour guides and foreign tourist tour. the research participants were 10 tour guides selected based on purposive sampling which is a technique to determine the sample of research with some consideration to make the data will be more representative. so the researchers consider the tour guide only in gorontalo city, and they have an official license as the tourist guides and legalized by ministry of tourism. this study used documentation as the technique of collecting the data. so, the documentation in this study is the result of the voice recording of tour guides. while the tourist guides were guiding their tourists, the researchers observed and recorded their speaking. after recording, there was audio transcription process that would be made by researchers in order to analyze the data. the process of audio transcription here was the researchers wrote all of the words and sentences that produced by tourist guides during their speaking to foreign tourists. moreover, the duration of collecting the data during three months start from june to august 2019. as responding the first research questions, this study used a description and classification of grammatical error types by using linguistic category classification that proposed by politzer and ramirez (as cited in dulay et al., 1982, p. 146-148). this taxonomy was the only taxonomy which separating error based morphology and syntax. both levels are considered as a grammatical level, they aim to reveal grammatical error types. subsequently, in order the researchers could investigate the dominant of error as responding for the second research questions, so the researchers used formula to count all grammatical error types into dominant type adapted from fraenkel et al. (2012) stated as follows: p = 1σ x100% muziatun & ansar tario jusuf grammatical errors performed by tourist guides in gorontalo city 76 results and discussion the data of this research was gathered from tourist guides’ speaking and their recording have been transformed into transcript form. all of the grammatical errors were investigated from transcript form and have been analyzed by using linguistic category classification that proposed by politzer and ramirez (as cited in dulay et al., 1982). the results are presented as follows: table 1. the result of types of errors no types of errors frequency percentage 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. agreement of subject and verb noun phrase transformations third person singular present simple past tense incorrect past participle incorrect total 14 9 5 4 3 1 36 38.88 % 25.0% 13.88 % 11.1% 8.30% 2.77% 100% agreement of subject and verb substituent of verbs in verb phrase occurs because of someone produces replacement inappropriate auxiliary verbs in phrase or sentences. according to verspoor and sauter (2002) who stated that speaker or writer who used an appropriate auxiliary verb can express the differences of the event or situation. it means that, a speaker who produces the use of auxiliary verb appropriately, so that the listener can recognize the ideas clearly about the situation what the subject is, and also the listener can recognize indication of time whether it occurred at past, future or progressive. but in this case the researchers investigated that some participants produced inappropriate auxiliary verb. subsequently, this one of the data that has been identified as the inappropriate auxiliary verbs: they is serving many tourists there concerning the idea of the sentence presented earlier, it occurred at progressive. it is because the sentence has been identified by the adverb of time “now” at the last sentence. afterwards, the subject of sentence above “they” followed by the auxiliary verb “is”. while the sentence contains the subject “they”, means that the subject must be followed by the appropriate auxiliary verb “are”. it is because the auxiliary verb “are” elucidates those subjects such as “they” as the third plural and “we” as the first person plural (kent, 2015). as a result, the sentence must be corrected: they are serving many tourists there noun phrase errors in this study, the researchers investigated only three types of noun phrase errors that produced by participants, they are: error in number of using singular and plural, error in the use of preposition, and misordering of noun phrase. 1. error in number of using singular/plural. the researchers analyzed error in number of using singular/plural to be discussed into several categories. there were three errors in irregular plural incorrect. additionally it followed by two omission of mark-s in regular plural nouns. the discussion of error in number of using singular/plural starts discussing irregular plural incorrect as follows: irregular plural incorrect. as cited by grammar dictionary (2019) in english language, plural noun should be marked by adding “s” or “es” at the end of a word. however, some certain nouns are plurals that should not be marked by adding “s” or “es” at the end of a word, which is irregular plural. in this case, the researchers analyzed that there were two occurrences of irregular plural incorrect produced by some participants. this one of the data of noun phrase error that has been analyzed as the irregular plural incorrect: many childs concerning the data presented earlier, this phrase consisted the words “many” as the adjective and “childs” as the “noun”. so, the noun “child” as the head of phrase to be modified by adjective “many” it means that, the idea of phrase about the noun “childs” is plural. it is because the noun as the head of phrase to be described by the word “many” as the indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 77 adjective. in this case, the participant 2 of this study produced plural noun “childs” that followed by adding “s” at the word of “childs”. however, the phrase presented earlier was error; because english-zone (2019) shows the word “child” as an irregular plural noun must not be added by adding “s” at the end of the word. as a result the phrase must be corrected as follows: many childs children omission of mark-s in regular plural nouns. omission of mark-s in plural nouns is part of noun phrase error that consists adjective or determiner followed by inappropriate regular plural noun without mark-s at the end of a word. it should be the regular plural to be marked by adding “s” or “es” at the end of a word. here is one of the representation data to be discussed as follows: many flower the phrase above consists of two words between adjective “many” and noun “flower”. in addition, the idea of the phrase about the noun “flower” is plural. it is because the noun as the head of phrase to be described by the word “many” as the adjective. in this case, the participant 12 of this study has recalled plural noun “flower” by deleting mark-s at the end of word “flower”. concerning that, the phrase presented earlier was error; this is because the word “flower” categorized as regular plural, so that the noun “flower” should be marked by adding “s” at the end of the noun “flower”. as result the phrase must be corrected as follows: many flowers regarding the description of data findings: omission of mark-s in regular plural nouns before, so the researcher has corrected the overall data of omission of mark-s in regular plural nouns by adding “s” at the end of the plural nouns: error in the use of preposition. error in the use of preposition is part of noun phrase error which consist the inappropriate preposition followed by noun phrase in the group of words. here is the data to be discussed as follows: the coffee in the table as stated by kent (2015) an appropriate preposition that can be used for indentifying a thing, which is being from the surface of an object is “on”. therefore, the use of preposition for identifying the object “the table” must be connected by preposition “on” it is because, indeed the subject “the coffee” is being from the surface of “the table” as result the sentence must be corrected as follows the coffee in on the table misordering of noun phrase misordering of noun phrase occurs where the structure of noun phrase is broken. it is because; the placements of the head of modifier noun phrases are not arranged well. here is one of the representation data of misordering of noun phrase to be discussed as follows: the view beautiful the researchers investigated that there were three word classes on the phrase above; they are determiner “the”, followed by noun “view” and closed by adjective “beautiful” concerning the data above, in order to be non misordering of noun phrase, so that the phrase to be started by determiner “the” followed by adjective “beautiful” and closed by the noun “view”. as result, in order the misordering of noun phrase to be arranged the structure of noun phrase appropriately; here it is the phrase structure: the view beautiful transformation error in this study, the researchers only found two types of transformation error produced by gorontalo tour guides recalled by foreign tourists, they are: question transformation and there transformation. the first discussion would be followed by question transformation. question transformation question transformation occurs to interrogative sentence that deviates of using assertive sentence or affirmative sentence, whether the sentence starts the word of present tense (“do” and “does) or the sentence starts the word of primary auxiliary verbs (“am”, “is” and “are”). are you need transportations? pertaining to the identification of representative data of question transformation, there were four word classes that produced by participants, they are primary auxiliary “are” subject “you”, main verb “need” and the noun as the object “transportations”. as stated by wilson (2013) the interrogative sentence which is started by marking primary auxiliary such as “am, is and are” should be followed by a subject and then followed by muziatun & ansar tario jusuf grammatical errors performed by tourist guides in gorontalo city 78 adjective. however, in this study, the participant produced that the subject “you” followed by the main verb “need”, while the question mark is “are”. it means that what the participant produced about the use of primary auxiliary in making interrogative sentence followed by main verb is wrong form, so that the question should be marked by marking “do” at the beginning of interrogative sentence. it is supported by wilson (2013) who states the interrogative sentence which is started by marking “do” or “does” should be followed by a subject and then followed by main verb. as a result, the data of question transformation should be: are do you need transportations? regarding the overall descriptions about question transformation, so the researchers corrected all data about question transformations. there transformation wilson (2013) elucidate there transformation error is about there is and there are. for instance, error in there transformation such as there is occurred because it followed by inappropriate noun phrase which is identified as plural noun phrase. furthermore, wilson (2019) states the use of there in english is always confused by mostly people. it is because, they confuse to distinguish between the use of there is and there are. however, in this study the researcher only found the errors of using there is. here is one of the data findings of there transformation to be discussed as follows: there is many peanuts as cited from british council site that accessed by researchers in 2019. it published that the use of there with part of be in english should be followed by appropriate noun phrase. it means that, the use of there is should be followed by singular noun phrase and there are should be followed by plural noun phrase. regarding that, this contrary to what participant produced “there is” followed by plural noun phrase “many peanuts”. it is because, the use of there is should be followed by singular noun phrase, but in fact the participant produced “there is” followed by plural noun phrase. as a result the data must be corrected as follows: there is are many peanuts third person singular incorrect the researchers investigated there four occurrences of third person singular incorrect recalled by some participants. he always go there concerning the data above, it occurred at simple present tense. it is because; the idea of data is indicated by the word of habitual activity “always” after the subject “he”. however, there is an incorrect verb produced by participants. it is because, while the subject “he” is third person singular, but in this case the participant produced only verb “go” without adding “s” at the end of verb. as stated by wilson (2013) the use of verb in simple present tense of third person singular (she, he and it) should be marked by adding “s” at the end of verb. furthermore the simple present tense is identified by doing a habitual activity and stating a fact of something. as a result the verb must be corrected as follows: he always go goes there simple past tense incorrect wilson (2013) states simple past tense incorrect is used to express an event that occurred in the past, indeed the event has ended and not related presently. he elucidates simple past tense incorrect is divided some categories, they are error in regular past tense verb and error in irregular past tense verb. in this case, the researcher only found error in irregular past tense. i eat the cake yesterday concerning the data above, it occurred at simple past tense. it is because; the idea of data is indicated by the time signal “yesterday” at the end of sentence. however, there is a simple past tense incorrect produced by participant. it is because, while the event of sentence occurred in past tense, but in this case the participant produced only infinitive (present tense) “eat” without changing the infinitive in verb two (past tense) “ate”. as stated by wilson (2013) in arranging the simple sentence, the formula as follow subject + verb 2 past tense (regular/ irregular verb past tense) + time signal in this case the infinitive “eat” from the data is categorized as the irregular verb. it means that, the infinitive would be changed the formation to be irregular past tense verbs should be changed as well as english standard. irregular verbs do not follow the normal verb indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 79 such a regular verb only to be added “ed” in the end of regular verb. considering the explanation above, as a result the data must be corrected as follows: i eat the cake yesterday past participle incorrect past participle contains a verb 3 which is formed from a regular verb or irregular verb. for regular verb (inivinitive) to be past participle can be added by adding suffix such as –ed, -d, -t, -n or – en. in addition, for irregular verb to be past participle verb is indefinitely to explain. it is because, the irregular verb to be past participle has own their arranged as well as spelled by english. in this study, the researcher only found one past participle incorrect recalled by participant. here is the data. i have eat kent (2015) states the arrangement of past participle to function as a verb namely the subject should be followed by have/has and verb 3however, this is contrary what produced by participants, the past participle “i have eat”. this is because “eat” is an infinitive verb, not participle verb, so that the infinitive “eat” should be the past participle verb “eaten” by adding suffix “en” at the end of infinitive “eat”. regarding that the suggested correction as follows: i have eat eaten conclussion this study does not represent the grammatical errors produced by all the tourist guides in gorontalo, it only represents the grammatical error produced by only 10 tour guides. it revealed only 6 types of grammatical errors produced by tourist guides were subject-verb agreement, noun phrases, transformations, third person present singular incorrect, simple past tense incorrect and past participle incorrect. the researchers conducted the analysis of this study, in which the largest number of grammatical errors produced by participants are dominated by agreement of subject and verb as many 38.88 % percentage. it means that, the 10 tourist guides difficult to construct how the way to use the correct form of agreement of subject and verb. moreover, the researchers would like to give some recommendations either in tour guides in gorontalo city or english student. this research is expected to be able to contribute and recommend to tour guides. it will be helpful by giving some information about what should be noted and emphasized by tour guide concerning the way conveying a speaking appropriates with the grammar aspect rules. references asif, m., zhiyong, d., ali, r. i., & nisar, m. 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(2013). essential english grammar: jakarta: mahirsindo utama. http://www.kemenpar.go.id/asp/ringkasan.asp?c=11 http://www.warta/ indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 63 image building through efl textbook ‘my pals are here’ to students in kupang, eastern indonesia peggy jonathans faculty of teacher training and education, artha wacana christian university, kupang, indonesia e-mail: jonathanspeggyofficial@gmail.com apa citation: jonathans, p. (2018). image building through efl textbook ‘my pals are here’ to students in kupang, eastern indonesia. indonesian efl journal, 4(2), 63-70. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v4i2.1377. received: 16-03-2018 accepted: 21-05-2018 published: 01-07-2018 abstract: english textbook is supposed to display society traditions and civility to encourage intellectual conversation among students. even at earliest stage, young students can grow thoughtful principles of living in diversity and respectful among multicultural and religious community. the heart of moral values in students’ english book is expected to effectively address social and moral problems of society and to maintain the harmony of living. ‘my pals are here’ english textbooks for primary schools, presents efl/esl asia themes. this motivates one private primary school in kupang, eastern indonesia to use this book believing that their students are part of international and wider communit y and engaging them in more asia perspectives with attractive and colorful world teaching them many good values. by elaborating humanistic approach in the book content, this book achieves to deliver daily issues encountered by asian children living more progressively with the introduction of many discourses in asia and beyond without such pigeon holed the context of the book to very narrow scope. this discussion paper therefore aims to look at and discuss the input established within the book through the language and topic contents, as well as social and cultural values underlying the content, and the virtues addressed to the children. images built within this book depicted through illustrations, figures, negotiation of meanings and interaction which extensively encouraged and performed from tasks given. the textbook succeeds to show self-identity of asia throughout the content. keywords: language content; subject content; moral values; images. introduction in designing learning materials, the background of targeted students and their contextual needs should be accommodated through their subject textbook as this helps learning becomes meaningful and relevant. ‘my pals are here’ published by maxwell limited (2004) is one collection of mentari books, designed for grade 1 up to grade 6 for elementary school of asia which combines both notional as well as situational syllabus. according to setiyadi (2006, p. 16), the first syllabus type consists of a collection of functions or notions to perform in the english lesson; whereas the latter type is about imaginary situations used for learning the language. within notional and functional syllabus, communicative functions are selected and logically ordered to the students’ needs and the learning materials written referring to this approach will elaborate experiences, intuitions and common senses. as in complementary to functional approach, situational approach takes real world situations with three factors come into play including participants, setting and communicative goals (cunningsworth, 1995, p. 57). this textbook written in english for beginner level, accompanied with exercise book called as ‘workbook’ for each grade comprises of averagely 8 up to 12 topics, for example, selfintroduction, neighborhood, people on street, pet, animals at wild, roles of family members, dreams and ambitions. students doing the exercises will have direct clues from the textbook such as color association, picture illustration, sequenced pictures, rhymed poem, https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v4i2.1370 peggy jonathans image building through efl textbook ‘my pals are here’ to students in kupang, eastern indonesia 64 funny sound reading and useful vocabulary. translation is least encouraged as the book tries to bring the students’ mind into english thinking on their level and beyond. broad themes are introduced before several related topics. cultures, ethnicities, religion, traditions of asia are addressed within the language contents so students’ learning complexity is merely coming from english language. role of textbooks should be more than skill exercises but further to serve life purposes. risager (1990, in cunningsworth, 1995, p. 88) urges one of main responsibility of textbook is contributing towards cognitive mapping, by providing organized perspectives into culture and society; otherwise the skillbased subject would have no contents. content analysis covers inquiry such as analysis on natural occurring language which aims of content analysis: to ensure objectivity, to see scientific methods which provide means to achieve systematic study, fulfillment of various scientific criteria including reliability and validity (neuerdorf, 2002, p. 1). further, he adds methods of content analysis in systematic and quantitative way by elaborating certain ways of analyzing and coding. krippendorf (2004) asserts that manifest content or latent of book through classification, tabulation and evaluation of its key symbols and themes is to ascertain its meaning and probable effects. through this present writing, the writer will bring up how an esl textbook my pals are here be engine of social and economic transformation in asia context. my pals are here textbook is reflecting social structure, with pictorial constituents. krippendorf (2004) claims that the ideas of messages serve specific purposes, and writing itself has predictable effects. what do texts in the book mean to students-users, and what do the texts and pictures enable or prevent the students from something, and what information carried by them does. neuerdorf (2002, p. 24) then recommends that latent content should manifest variables whereby the analysis can be conducted on written texts, transcribed speech, verbal interaction, visual images, characterization, non-verbal behaviors, sound events, any other message types. accordingly, content analysis should be a summary analysis but an empirical analysis on content, e.g., making classification by sorting out the data from intensive coding on measured data. he emphasizes that valid coding in content analysis is essential made throughout training and substantial planning. as an academic endeavor, objectivity should be met at most cases in content analysis even no such thing really objective in social issue however the analysis must strive consistency among inquiries. the inter-subjectivity standard used in the context is to ask others whether they could ‘agree on that something is true’ rather than ‘finding out objectively if something is really true’. lasswell (1952 in neuerdorf, 2002, p. 36) mentions that content analysis is technique aiming to describe with strict objectivity, precision and generality, on particular subject, in certain place at specific time. in addition, he mentions that some analyses aim to make predictive power within certain message areas instead of trying to answer theoretical importance. the design of efl/esl textbooks for primary school students are more colorful, eye catching, and full of clues and hints as compared to higher level of students. content analysis of this textbook will give academic implication of this practice of how textbook plays significant role addressing social values and norms to the students especially the young children. sidek (2012) gives examples on the use of expository passages starting from elementary school in english in the first language (l1) setting will prepare students for the next school level and it is considered as best practice to expose them to content literacy by working with them, and this analysis will be good recommendation to other similar levels. in indonesia, temporarily english is not listed neither as a compulsory nor elective subject for her elementary education. however, many local primary schools in the country due to the need of their students teach english and decide certain textbooks based on their own discretion. in regards to classroom textbooks, cunningsworth (1995) asserts that language contents operate at very complex stage and they need to be realized into smaller unit of lessons. he strongly recommends to reduce indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 65 learning load for young students to be able to grasp it. grammar aspects underlie the base of language contents. it is hotly argued whether form or use firstly introduced, although grammar plays essential role in language learning. he emphasizes that both must be learnt and as closely together as possible. this aims to make meaningful outcome of the grammar used and to contextualize the vocabulary in relevant settings. therefore, it is stressed that exercises in textbook which sensitized learners to the structure of english lexicon and the various relationships exists. global aspect of language also includes stress, rhyme, intonation, and the students’ natural sounding of english approciacy will depend on their phonology skill and this is not transferable from their first language. utterances will make sense which influenced by natural sound of their language. in a child-centered lesson, paul (2003, p. 28) urges that the children need to have support throughout the topic-based syllabus for fitting to their learning environment, relating to familiar themes, performing abilities and addressing meanings rather than forms. imada (2012, p. 576) compares between american textbooks and japanese, the first highlights theme of individualism such as self-direction and achievement whereas the latter highlights collectivism such as conformity and group harmony. each of the cultural characteristics was also observed in picture content, attribution of the outcome, narrator, and role played. the study also indicated cultural differences in story characteristics. rodriquez (2015, p. 167) found in an efl textbook only static and congratulatory topics of surface culture and omit complex and transformative forms of culture, and this hinders students building more substantive intercultural competence in the language classroom. this therefore according to him, teachers need to address deep-rooted aspects of culture, so communication serves its purposes well addressing the targeted values and messages. some textbooks are pursued by national elites to pose political agenda through education. textbooks can show economic, political, and mirror social reality (xiangmei, 2016, p. 478). some books are well noted for their textual description of certain communities and future expectations for better society. images and additional modes for meaning making for children in learning efl are necessarily important due to their limited capacity to understand abstract concepts and the messages sent by english textbook beyond their inferences. moses (2015, p. 83) revealed that teachers’ comprehensive knowledge about roles of images for bilingual learners can help their students by assisting them to scaffold language contents through images. she found that efl young learners interacting with informational texts equipped with images can draw from their world while at the same time develop their vocabulary. visual images, however, play indispensable pedagogical role in educating young learners (leview et al., 1982; carmey et al., 2002, in xiangmei, 2016, p. 480). social and cultural changes are reflected and roles of each member depicted from images presentation in each textbook. in humanistic perspectives, effective learning is when students are engaged in learning process as ‘whole’ individual people, making choices, learning in meaningful contexts and in anxiety-free environment (paul, 2003, p. 170), believing learning this way facilitates students to reach their full potential. the classroom book contents will do contribution to this virtue established within the students. virtues are defined as admirable character traits and virtue ethics form of moral reflection which gives a central place to such traits of character. arthur further adds that this approach includes a tolerance of ambiguity, an acceptance of one self and others, having peak experience leading to personal transformation through new personal insights. these can be exercised by providing the students to ideal discourse, e.g. textbooks, to make them part of their world by interchanging views, building mental model of english, encouraging the students to handle conflict and respecting each other regardless the background attachments. because intellectual virtues-which are qualities of mind, are not inborn, yet need to be trained to young learners to act accordingly. kupperman (1991, p. 16-17, in arthur, 2003, p. 33) claims that moral education cannot peggy jonathans image building through efl textbook ‘my pals are here’ to students in kupang, eastern indonesia 66 merely be a series of rational appeals. this implies that the affection aspects of the students should be assisted by teachers and textbooks. delivering textbooks to students with this in mind allows teacher to teach the students to deal with real complexity of living. students are endowed with temperamental and biological disposition which determine, along with the way of how they are brought up and exposed to social contact, this helps them to learn making decision (arthur, 2003, p. 29). having this on mind, the study is interested to analyze textbook content under a topic ‘image building through ‘my pals are here’ to efl students in kupang, eastern indonesia’, motivated by two questions: 1. what is the language content delivered in the textbook, in terms of grammar use, vocabulary, and integration of pronunciation? 2. how are images of asian life realized in the topic and subject content as well as the social and cultural values? method this study is designed as descriptive method. the subject as the heart of the study is efl textbook, my pals are here, published by maxwell limited (2004), in cooperation with mentari book collections. taking 4 packages of books, each consists of a student book and a workbook, the book number 1a, 1b, 2a, 2b taken as the purposive sampling, out of 6 in total. purposive sampling technique has been vital, although this cannot be generalized, but the concern lies on the goal to acquire in-depth information from the source (cohen et al., 2007, p. 114-115). in addition, they view that this sampling technique on the basis of their judgment of their typicality or possessions of the particular characteristics being sought. this selection is based on the gradual transition of the books’ topics and level of english, since the first four books (1a-2a) are essentially important to progressively develop the pupils’ basic english as second or foreign language. the instrument then is called documentary, because the primary data was taken from the printed sources. interpretations and discussion are orientating to positive images established within the contents. results and discussion the language content of the textbook: grammar use, vocabulary, and integration of pronunciation the textbook my pals are here mostly use basic grammar, i.e., present tense and simple past for grade 1 up to grade 4 primary school. this simple form is at the appropriate level for the students, delivered in short sentences and the language is very direct with explicit meanings. the vocabulary coverage is also graded and has color clues e.g. object around them including animals sound and plants. the list come from the students’ special interests, e.g. hobbies, sports, games, happy holidays. to add this book complexity, students explore new words and the context connection in sequence such as family time, fairy tales, folklores and outer space. as the difficulty levels increase, the vocabulary for pre-cautions and rule for public have been addressed and well organized with pictures aids to understanding. there is a clear association between pictures and words to send meanings to students, with some additional sounds of animals or objects to complete the onedimension picture in the book as if representing the whole living things in the environments. the tenses used by the textbook writers are highlighted by different colors to indicate different point to the students without complicated explanation to the students, very brief and quite eye catching. the simple past tense is used in the units of the book 1a and 1b with some examples provided allow the teachers as well as the students themselves to extend to other sentences production. another grammar point, imperative, come into play. the students have been familiar with orders and instructions in real life and this form stimulates their schemata knowledge to utilize the pre-notions into learning english in formal situations. this linking knowledge has been practiced by the book and very ideal for any other english lessons. pronunciation in ‘my pals are here’ begins with rhyming words in short poems, songs with repeated chorus and short passages. the indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 67 size of the materials for pronunciation is quite small but the consequencing materials on pronunciation keep closely related in topics. negotiation of meanings in these contexts takes place. the students will then be excited to pronounce the words with purpose and in meaningful ways. the topic and subject content and social and cultural values the discourse of my pals are here depicts asian modern life with many good values and positive attitudes, including environment and animals caring, enjoying life through sports and games, fostering imaginative skills, encouraging dreams for future, gender awareness, safe zone for young children, fair play and healthy competitions. one of trending issues in global and local scope is gender awareness. several figures in the book address gender equality in household, take for example, in one illustration in book 1b, a father grills sizzles with hot pan while a mother is cooking noodle mie in burning stove. the children look happy while waiting for the food on the dining table for their parents preparing meals. this is very different from indonesian textbook which tends to discriminate women as the house chores bearer and children carrier in addition to the overwhelming domestic responsibilities, while the spouse (men) at the same time can get relax reading for newspaper or just waiting on the table together with the kids. gender issue is also addressed in family holiday, where both mom and dad can relax with the children, for example, on the beach, a mom can be so relaxing enjoying the family holiday without being asked more extra task in attending the kids, but her partner in turn will look after the kid. such an ideal family where responsibilities are shared and the two deserve holiday or vacation after tiring work at home and office. children in the illustration seem to enjoy being with their parents spending time with them at home and outside, which this book represents as the common picture of the society. as far as my observation, many indonesia efl textbooks leave untouched this gender issues. further, this textbook highlights boys and girls at schools being encouraged to compete in fair play or sports and games. no restriction at all and pigeon holes on certain games based on the sex of players. deep down to the whole aspects related to community, english textbook writers should thoughtfully consider multi-faith and multiethnicity contexts where the students exist within. being insensitive to this discourse can mislead the children at their golden ages which considered as the crucial foundation for their later life. thus a book review is essential before releasing any efl textbooks to public. with such open-minded attitudes, ‘my pals are here’ gives credits to all residents by simply mentioning their names, e.g., indian heritage name (raju), chinese ethnicity (mr. li), and other tribe (mr. ahmad), malay, or moslem name. pictures of these men in garden or agricultural sector vividly are shown without ranking each ethnicity to different level of jobs (higher versus lower). indonesia efl textbooks, on the contrary, tend to ignore that indonesia consists of many tribes and people with various backgrounds, and to worsen the situation, they are not represented well by those publishers. this book, however, brings positive message that everyone can be great in any sectors of economic despite their background, e.g., farming. mr. li and mr. ahmad as previously mentioned, in this regard are of two different ethnicities in singapore but share of the same passion. this indicates members of community are not discriminated for their jobs. beside ethnicity names, foreigners’ names also draw this research interest, i.e., de cruz family, which have been permanent residents in the country (singapore per se) and are being acknowledged. this textbook internalizes modern perspective that being asian means being global citizenship and acting accordingly. raju, an indianheritage-sound name mentioned in book 1b, lives with four family members of the same ethnicities in a modern asian household where the house is fully equipped with modern appliances. this condition erases such hegemony of asian being in line of poverty but nowadays they progress more in their way of life comparing to the past. this does not mean ignoring the poverty happens around, yet peggy jonathans image building through efl textbook ‘my pals are here’ to students in kupang, eastern indonesia 68 the writer tries to put everything in balanced for better perception to the young students. along with this, interfaith communication appears in the content. one figure mentions christmas celebration, being announced in a newspaper article with brief reading passage, entitled ‘a christmas event in orchard road’. the children learn to respect other religions despite the differences among them. objectivity in designing the content makes all children belong to the discourse delivered, without leaving any students left behind unacknowledged. the reading passage continues to chinese and singapore moslem folklore written in interesting setting. the passages present multicultural and multifaith society, each in its setting but all stories are important to listen to. one important issue also put forwards is environment. the book illustrates happy fish in sea while a speed boat is running close to the fish. similar to australia, this book promotes and shares the idea of safe and friendly environment in public and open areas for men as well as for animals in asian countries. learning this concept early educates the young students and forms their attitudes toward wildlife. this book further tries to highlight different aspect of the children life in many developed countries. to some, it is a new positive practice in one culture to have a family discussion with the whole family members to decide family’s vacation to a certain place. this child-friendly family habit opens the pupils horizon that family should hear young children voices. the concept of family holiday outside the living area or far away destination in this book contextualizes that holiday has become essential need for modern family, aiming not only to create closer relationship among family members but also to refresh family and improve their daily life quality. although to this point, on the other part of the world, many children still suffer due to overload domestic tasks and poverty, but this book attempts to put everything in proper position, emphasizing that children must have rights to experience fullness in their childhood, and sports and games have been the tools for children to express themselves at their potentials. children sometime meet taboos, controversies issues, legend, myths and stereotypes. dealing with these, the book provides various texts to help them understand those things and logically can differentiate facts from imaginations. this makes them better people in their society to act according to their sincere conscience as they get used to which are logic, good for everyone, polite, acceptable, respect and just. learning efl means learning the culture to add the sense to the language. having pets at home, is probably a common thing to some, especially taking the pet as close friend. however, the context of pet could be awkward to others. instead of a pet, in one figure in book 2a, a boy grows a cactus at home, but his parents get so angry when he forgot to bring it outside as the plant got bigger and caused a problem to the family. this normally happens when the children lack of responsibilities of taking good care of their pets or favorite plants. this figure at the same time talks about the pet culture and teaches discipline and responsibility. this motivates hobby and responsibility are two inseparable aspects. realizing that the children are part of the universe, this book further brings very modern and sophisticated topic such as outer space. learning astronomy would motivate the children creating their future dreams such as becoming astronauts. they can think of making pollution-free environment and saving endangered ozone. after the planets topics, the book moves to the world of imagination. children grow a lot the cognitive domain through the world of fantasy. they need to experience of fairy tales and explore imaginative creatures beyond real times. this boosts the students’ visualization skill towards their concrete world. at the end of the book, the children learn public rules and manners as well as social skills, to properly be accepted as the public talking in public area are integral part of this book. the book plays as social tool transforming members. topic regarding crossing on the street and the safety and indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 69 manner of the citizens including the young members of society that everybody should behave accordingly for the harmony of all. acting based on rules and manners teaches them behaviors of civilized community and respect attitudes. many in indonesia tend to be insensitive talking in public zones. for the comfort of all, children should learn to lower their volume. this seems insignificant topic to bring up to the conversation but then many people these days forget to concern about this and as consequence cause problems to interpersonal relationship and to others’ discomfort. many other topics, like driving bikes, whispering, manner of eating are put into perspective as training the kids to have their pure conscience in their civilized and modern community and to lead them into proper behaviors. the children at schools should also understand that wearing swimsuit in beach or swimming pool are common things and they should learn because in many public pools prohibition for other swimmers not wearing them due to security reasons. mostly many indonesia publishers for english textbooks restrict themselves to talk to this area stereotyping this as pornography. usually they just show the swimsuits without the person who are wearing them. however, my pals are here illustrator draws it very clear and colorful swimsuit as part of sport and recreational activities and the students can have the whole comprehensive picture of what is swimsuit and location the swimsuit belongs to. this one-dimension picture successfully sends the messages to readers the real-life representation of the sport ‘swimming’ and ideas related to that. logically this book has been facilitating the students to be independent in public areas, for example, to go to toilet or to certain facility, in their opportunity going somewhere with the family, at least they know how to find direction of a map or board of notice. the children are taught in using mapping skills in public area to survive if they get lost or need to return to their parents. although this does not mean to replace the parents’ responsibilities, the children have been trained to survive in any unexpected circumstances. the children, on the other hand, are trained to be independent to go toilet or nearby facilities although still under the parent supervision. in under-developed or developing countries, child labor issue is of regular news. eradicating this bad practice requires all parties to work hard. different from developed countries, children can also get extra money from part-time jobs offered during school holidays or summer. this culture can be introduced to the children but showing that their parents should send them to schools for their education rights. the children not only learn to be independent but also skillful in doing small chores around house and neighborhood that gives them the jobs. through this reading, they understand how to collect extra money and grow to be independent. helping or caring for friends is also part of the values this book delivers. in fair play and competitive atmosphere, solidarity and healthy competition is taught through the exercise. the children see clear pictures of sports and story after the sports, a friend helps a wounded player and they went home with happy feeling. this teaches the children that competition should not end in quarrel or conflicts but close with empathy for the wounded friends. this will build within the children the integrity of personality traits in their adulthood and sportive acts dealing with defeat versus victory. this picture encourages the students of paying positive attitudes towards others on bad times. conclusion this research report paper concludes that language content of this textbook covers very practical topic such as color, hobbies, games, sports, space adventure, holiday, folklore, nature (wildlife and plants). the grammar used is present tense and smooth transition happens with different structure, past tense for the students to be familiar with dynamic of english language. new vocabularies in segments to add the complexity of the book slowly are addressed within the units. the integration of pronunciation is created by simple transcript the young students can identify and use as model for pronunciation, in peggy jonathans image building through efl textbook ‘my pals are here’ to students in kupang, eastern indonesia 70 addition to the teacher’s assistance in using the words clearly pronounced and used in context. the exact pronunciation is not prioritized at the first place. further, the images of asian life within the topics and subject contents cover asian discourses and worldwide issues such as festivals, values of the community (the social and cultural values), diversity in beliefs and religion, inventions of technology and facilities addressed to the students. in conclusion, five important things to highlight of this study as follows: a. efl teachers in indonesia are supposed to have open-minded attitudes. they need to teach with global perspectives but with local touching. this will help them bring the idea of world community to their students as very dynamic, modern, and safe place to live b. efl textbook writers for indonesia schools should realize that indonesia consists of many ethnicities, religions, backgrounds and cultures. the efl textbooks and the like should not be used as political tool to change the rich property of the country and to exercise power but indeed to highlight the differences as rich diversity to color the country. any false or misleading contents in the book are very dangerous for the young learners to internalize wrong values. their information intake in early years will be the foundation for later life. c. indonesia government particularly the education authority in districts and local area should work together to exercise both the positive asian values and cultures and amazing indonesian ones but do not limit the books into certain values of the country. d. school administration of many schools in ntt province are encouraged to use “my pals are here” as main reference for their efl course in addition to their modified handout because the students should be prepared to be global citizens with such integrity attitudes whose discourse provided in this textbook. e. parents would be glad if their children have global and modern perspectives dealing with any aspects of their life. they are not pigeon holed but trained to be civilized through the book content. any books similar to this one are good for parents to spend time with their children for discussion and exercise new constructive and useful tradition at their home, such as family meeting for any family plans, survival skills, pet responsibilities, parttime job, etc. acknowledgment high appreciation is addressed to tunas bangsa primary school in kupang and the teachers who shared their stories about the reasons behind of using this textbook and challenges when introducing the discourse to the efl pupils. valuable contribution was also shown by one of the students, alicia mondolang, for her frank and genuine opinions when the writer worked with her throughout this book, to have her perception on the contents. this research was accomplished by the financial support of research centre of artha wacana kupang, conducted under 2018 internal scheme. references arthur, j. (2003). education with character: the moral economy of schooling. new york: routledge falmer, taylor and francis group. cohen, l., manion, l., & morrison, k. (2007). research methods in education (6th ed.). london & new york: routledge taylor and francis. cunningsworth, a. (1995). choosing your coursebook. oxford: macmillan heinemann. krippendorf, k. (2004). content analysis: an introduction to its methodology (2nd ed.). london & new delhi: sage publications, inc. moses, l. (2015). the role(s) of image for young bilingual reading multimodal informational texts. language and literacy, 17(3), 82-99. neuerdorf, k. a. (2002). the content guidebook. london & new delhi: sage publications, inc. paul, d. (2003). teaching english to children in asia. hong kong: pearson education asia limited. sidek, h. m. (2012). efl textbook analysis. language and literacy, 14(3), 27-45. paper title (use style: paper title) indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 165 understanding and evaluating personal letter writing: a systemic functional linguistics analysis of student texts in one of senior high school in indonesia alfira veronica mangana department of english education, school of postgraduate studies, universitas pendidikan indonesia, indonesia e-mail: alfiraveronicamangana@upi.edu eri kurniawan department of english education, school of postgraduate studies, universitas pendidikan indonesia, indonesia e-mail: eri_kurniawan@upi.edu apa citation: mangana, a. v., & kurniawan, e. (2020). understanding and evaluating personal letter writing: a systemic functional linguistics analysis of student texts in one of senior high school in indonesia. indonesian efl journal, 6(2), 165-174. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v6i2.3385. received: 12-12-2019 accepted: 21-04-2020 published: 01-07-2020 abstract: based on 2013 curriculum, personal letter can be considered as one of the challenging text types that should be mastered by the students. this might be the reason why the text is taught in senior high school level. therefore, it is crucial for the teachers to expand their knowledge regarding this type of genre to overcome students‟ problems faced during writing personal letter. this study is aimed to analyse student‟s personal letter text based on three metafunctions in sfl perspective. it is expected that by identifying students‟ problems, teachers can decide and design appropriate pedagogical plan. the data of this descriptive qualitative study were analysed by using three metafunctions in systemic functional linguistics (sfl). the result of the study reveals that the student‟s major problems in producing personal letter text are the use of subject and verb tense (interpersonal metafunctions), the generic structure of the text, the use of conjunctions, the grammatical errors, and l1 interference. keywords: personal letter; systemic functional linguistics; metafunction; discovery learning strategy. introduction in july 2013, the education system in indonesia establishes a new curriculum that is 2013 curriculum. there are many factors underlying the establishment of the 2013 curriculum including in the law no. 20: 2003 that concerns the purpose of national education to develop students' potentials to become persons of faith and fear of god, noble, healthy, knowledgeable, capable, creative, independent, and become citizens of a democratic and accountable. in addition, in order to realize the ideals of educating the nation that in line with the vision and mission of national education, ministry of national education (renstra kemdiknas, 2010-2014) had a vision in 2025 to produce intelligent and competitive indonesians (perfect human/plenary). according mulyasa (2013: 19) argues that "smart indonesians is comprehensive intelligent beings, that spiritual intelligent, emotionally intelligent, socially intelligent, smart intellectual, and kinesthetic intelligent". the term socially intelligent means having competence in communication not only in spoken but also in written, or it is commonly known as social skills (permendiknas no. 22, 2006; emilia et al., 2008). thus, several years before 2013 curriculum is nationally applied in efl classroom, genre-based approach has already been adopted and implemented by indonesian government to improve students‟ ability in communication (emilia et al., 2008) and is still used in nowadays teaching process (potradinata, 2018). according to suherdi (2013), there many kinds of genres like monologues, interpersonal and transactional conversation, and essays of particular genres such as descriptive text, procedural text, narrative text, personal letter text, and other similar things which are claimed as kinds of text. nevertheless, unlike other genres, personal letter text, as the oldest and most basic form of written communication (barton, & hall, 1999; ivask, 1990, cited in mortensen, 2003), provides us an option for linguistic or social interaction that fulfils the demands that are not mailto:alfiraveronicamangana@upi.edu mailto:eri_kurniawan@upi.edu alfira veronica mangana & eri kurniawan understanding and evaluating personal letter writing: a systemic functional linguistics analysis of student texts in one of senior high school in indonesia 166 provided by spoken communication. however, to learn english texts as a foreign language, there may be no doubt that indonesian student might experience difficulty in terms of structure and context (sayukti & kurniawan, 2018). in other words, this condition is also considered as interlanguage which describes the language learner develops a linguistic system of his native language (l1) in mastering the target language (l2) (selinker, 1972). in brief, it is a condition when l1 influences the l2 linguistic system and causes an error in representing a proper target language. thus, it is significant to address this issue in order to provide educational resources for teaching in teaching writing. there have been several studies of systemic functional linguistics (sfl) perspectives on students‟ writing analysis in efl setting. nurohmah (2013) studied writings of the eighth semester students of english department in one university in bandung, indonesia. using sfl analysis, majority of students cannot differentiate between the use of simple present, past tense, irregular, regular verb, and prepositional phrase (nurohmah, 2013). in another case study conducted in junior high school in indramayu, indonesia, most of the students still made mistakes in identifying past verb in writing recount text (yulianawati, 2015). noviyanti (2015) reveals that mostly students used the reiteration pattern by repeating the same element as a theme and employed the zigzag pattern to make a sense of cumulative development of a text. another study identified that transliteration is also the most common interference used by the students, followed by omission errors, spelling errors, the incorrect pronoun used and incorrect word use (owu-ewie & lomotey, 2016). as previous studies mostly concern on the analysis of recount text based on the grammatical error, this study intends to analyze students‟ selfcomposed personal letter text in sfl perspectives and its implication toward the meaning of the text. as based on senior high school syllabus of 2013 curriculum, personal letter itself is one of text genres that should be taught to the students. however, personal letter seems to be more challenging, commonly addressed to intimates, since it needs an absence of knowledge by both the reader and writer to be shared (crane, 2016). writing personal letter in a foreign language is also connected to the needs to present an identifiable set of procedures to fulfil the criteria on tasks like discussing personal issues, congratulating, inviting, greeting, and so forth that are culturally bind. moreover, personal letter requires a different process in terms of constructing ideas, conducting a uni-direction argument, or encoding information and presentation (khotib, 2001). therefore, it is essential for the teachers to expand their knowledge regarding text genre, here specifically personal letter text, to overcome students‟ problems faced during writing personal letter. one way to help the teachers master and tackle the said problems is by investigating the students‟ personal letter text through systemic functional linguistic (sfl) framework that is believed can provide a solution to explore a text comprehensively. the analysis will contain 3 types of language metafunctions promoted by halliday (2014) and eggins (2004) namely interpersonal meaning, experiential meaning, and textual meaning. furthermore, the features of the text written by the student will be shown and then compared to the ideal one. as a result from the problems found, a best method can probably be considered to be implemented by the teacher when teaching this kind of genre. method the present study intended to explore how student‟s personal letter text writing is analysed through the perspectives of sfl. concerning to the phenomenon, the researcher utilized a qualitative case study approach. a qualitative case study design is useful to address explanatory questions to a social phenomenon (hamied, 2017). the fact that case study is closely related to its generalizability, punch and oancea (2014) believe that there are some types of case where generalization is not the main purpose of the study. this study, moreover, described and reported the type of grammatical cohesion occur in analytical personal letter texts written by students systematically, factually and accurately based on the data of the research. the data of this research was collected from a student‟s work of personal letter text during the english class. the writing was deliberately chosen from a student at the eleventh grade of a senior high school in bandung, west java, indonesia during the even semester of academic year 2019/2020. the writing was chosen based on the consideration that the writing represent the problems faced in writing class. this study used triangulation for collecting the data in order to deal with the validity of the study. thus, the instruments of the research were students‟ corpus, observation, semi-structured indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 167 interview, and class‟ documents like lesson plan, modules, and syllabus. based on the research instruments above, at first, the corpus of students was collected from the teaching process by the teacher. then the semi-structured interview was conducted with the english teacher and the classroom observation was applied to find out the methods implemented by the teacher in teaching personal letter and know more about the problems faced by the students in writing the text. eventually, modules and lesson plan of the teacher were checked to see the correlation with the text written by the students. the content analysis approach was used to analyze writing errors of students in the personal letter text. the data was collected through the process of observing, analyzing and interpreting. at first, a semi-structured interview was done with the english teacher. the questions of the interview was carried out based on the problems faced by the students in learning personal letter writing and the teacher in teaching writing. furthermore, the researcher was analyzed and diagnosed the meta-function in the samples to find out its appropriateness with the theories underlying personal letter text. as a result, a comprehensive analysis was done based on the social function, schematic structures, and language features from sfl perspectives namely interpersonal meta-function, experiential metafunction, and textual meta-function. in addition, the corpus was analyzed in terms of the letter‟s schematic structure, i.e., the preferred structural properties consisting of various obligatory and optional „stages‟ (hasan, 1996) that relate to specific communicative acts and collectively realize a text‟s larger communicative purpose. understanding a genre‟s structure allows one to track linguistic patterns and strategies that language users deploy as they move texts from a starting to an end point. in this way, genre provides a contextual framework to understand how and why particular language appears where it does in a text. additional analyses of the dominant lexicogrammatical resources appearing in the letters‟ unfolding stages were conducted to identify the different linguistic strategies that writers draw on in personal letter writing. given the key role that affects plays in letters, the primary focus of this part of the analysis was evaluative language, i.e., language used to convey emotions, attitudes, and stances. here, sfl‟s functionally-oriented framework of appraisal (martin & white, 2005) was used to explore evaluative meanings in the texts (i.e., the positive-negative nature of the evaluations, and its degree of explicitness or implicitness) and relate the most common and effective lexico-grammatical patterns to the register variables of field, tenor, and mode. in sfl, the construct of „register‟ refers to three main meaning types that exist at clausal and discourse levels: field is concerned with the semantic domain of propositional content; tenor refers to participants and their relationship to each other; and mode considers the contribution that text makes in presenting information (halliday & matthiessen, 2004). results and discussion the analysis of a student’s writing in sfl context interpersonal meta-function interpersonal meta-function of a text can be somehow challenging for the foreign learners who learn the level of formality of certain genre since it marks the relationship between the writer and reader and how the writer put his/herself in that writing. it can be investigated through mood and modality system. mood can be analyzed from how subject and finite are organized in a clause in a text, while modality system can be seen by looking at how various devices, namely modal finite, mood adjunct, and grammatical metaphor are utilized to make meaning. regarding mood, advanced writers of personal letter text typically use statements as the speech functions in order to give information as commodity to the readers. this question statement is seen by declarative mood generally constructed in (but not limited to) the structure subject^finite (thompson, 2014). by looking into the text analyzed, 7 out of 12 clauses are written in declarative mood. clauses are began with subject, and then finite comes after. with one or some adjuncts precede them in some cases. from the use of declarative mood eases the writer to express the information to the reader, which in this case most of his statements are about the topic. nonetheless, some of the clauses are not constructed well. some of clauses miss one or some elements in mood. the following are the examples. clause 3: you ( ) fine clause 4: how ( ) for plan next week, clause 7: if you there activities. clause 8: bay the way i will coming in your home next week, o’clock 02:00 pm. alfira veronica mangana & eri kurniawan understanding and evaluating personal letter writing: a systemic functional linguistics analysis of student texts in one of senior high school in indonesia 168 from the examples above, the student probably finds difficulty in making proper sentences. some clauses do not contain finite and predicator, whereas some others use incorrect predicator (as in clause 4 and 8) and subject (like in clause 4). then in term of preposition, she is still confused to differentiate between “in” and “to” in term of its usage, resulting on the use of “in” rather than „to‟ that refers to your home (in clause 8). furthermore, it can be seen that the student missed to use punctuations like (?) in clause 3, and (,) in clause 8, and wrote misspelled words. in term of finiteness and tenses, most of statements are stated in the present time, indicating that the writer wants to express single modality of factuality or certainty (kress 1985; eggins, 1994 in emilia, 2014), while one of them is future time like will as a median modality that shows possible willingness to do in the future (emilia, 2014). moreover, it cannot be found a description of some acts taken place in the past, and thus the student does not use any past tense form in her clause. regarding the relationship between the writer and the reader in this writing is relatively close, since the writer uses first person pronoun “i” in the second clause of her text to show her position in the topic, and she is likely to use second person pronoun “you” to address the reader more frequent. this way of establishing interaction of interlocutors results in showing higher degree of intimates between the writer and the reader. the way of using first or second person pronoun is permitted since it is a personal letter that aims to be sent to the relatives or friends who are closed to the writers. about the modality, some clauses use some instances of modality which are used to reflect possibility, as in bay the way i will coming in your home next week, o’clock 02:00 pm. this shows the student‟s capacity to express writer attitude toward what she is saying. the student has succeeded to use modality in her writing to show her willingness (kress, 1985 in emilia, 2014). experiental metafunction in personal letter text, experiental metafunction represents the feelings, thoughts, and actions that are associated with the writer and the reader, and their respective situation on the daily discourse of the participants (crane, 2016). due to understanding how experiential meaning is made by the learners, teachers can use transitivity analysis to analyze how participants, processes, and circumstance of a clause are organized in particular ways. based on the transitivity analysis of the sample text, five types of process appear: possession process, affection proccess, mental process, verbal process, material process, and relational process. the student starts his writing using mental process, as in how are you?. this opening reveals how the writer wants to know the condition of the readers. the use of mental process in the clause constructs feeling and sense in line with the function of the clauseto open the topic. for the next clauses, the writer still uses mental process to show her affection to the reader. however, the most frequent type of process used by the writer is material process. typically, the sample regularly uses material process to express the notion that some entity physically does something. the examples of how the student constructs a clause can be seen as follows: the use of material process makes the student able to pass information, which is related to the topic, to the reader. however two of those clauses seem to order the readers to do something based on what the writes ask her to do. moving to participant roles, the first participant role, as mentioned previously, is that of senser assigned to “you” and “i”. the presence of senser may constitute an attempt from the writer to emphasize on personal feeling and willingness toward the topic. despite introducing the main topic, “school holiday” as the participant of the clause, the writer directly presents her personal intimates by using second person pronoun to shows the writer as the participant of the clause. since other clauses have a material (goal) process and a mental process, the roles of senser appear frequently. other interesting problem faced by the student can be seen when she tries to construct a clause by using possession process like the example below: clause 8 bay the way ii will coming (pr: material) in your house…. clause 10 you stay (pr: material.) clause 11 and (you) wait for my coming(pr: material.) indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 169 clause 7 if you there activities. interpersonal conjunctive adjunct subject finite predicator complement mood residue experiential possessor pr: possession possessed textual textual topical rheme theme from the example above, it can be investigated that instead of using the proper predicator to show possession like ‘have’, she uses ‘there’ which is known to have the same meaning in the student‟s first language, indonesian. it can be assumed that the student is disturbed with the cultural issues in using language. textual metafunction textual metafunction considers how the communication is channeled in the text. moreover, it tells where a clause in a text comes from, and where it goes to (gerot & wignell, 1995). textual meaning of a text can be analyzed by using theme system analysis (or themerheme connection). the sample letter is about school holiday, but in the whole analyzed text cannot be found any word or clause that presents the school holiday as the theme of the letter assigned. in the text analyzed, the first theme mentioned in the beginning of the text is not about the condition of the reader, yet it is commonly used to open the topic in a personal letter text. thus, the sample text starts by using personal pronoun “you” as the rheme, that then becomes the topical theme in the next 2 clause. nonetheless, overall, the student likely starts with textual theme, and the absence of actual theme can be seen as follows. alfira veronica mangana & eri kurniawan understanding and evaluating personal letter writing: a systemic functional linguistics analysis of student texts in one of senior high school in indonesia 170 overall, it can be seen that the theme of the writer means in her letter is to ask and give information about her willingness to come to the reader‟s house at a particular time stated by the writer. meanwhile, the sample text successfully uses textual theme realized in conjunctions (both coordinating conjunctions and subordinating conjunctions). the use of conjunctions as textual themes gives texture to the text. examples of textual themes in the text are: clause 6 tell me interpersonal finite predicator complement textual textual theme rheme clause 7 if you there activities. interpersonal conjunctive adjunct subject finite predicator complement textual textual topical rheme theme the use of textual themes in the text shows the writer‟s capacity to construct clause complexes in the text that becomes one of characteristics of written text (emilia, 2014). to organize the text so that the clauses are coherent one another, the sample text uses the theme reiteration. in the theme reiteration, an element is only reiterated by the writer to keep a text cohesive and focused. examples of it is: the theme reiteration from the example, the student succeeds to construct the thematic reiteration as thematic progression in her writing; repetition of elements (which in this case is you) is done to keep the text cohesive and focused. however, it cannot be bound the zigzag pattern of this thematic scheme, the text does not appropriately follow the pattern. on the other words, despite using rheme of a clause as theme in next clause, the writer comes with a new theme which is not mentioned in the previous clause. this issue also usually occurs in the text. it means that the student is likely to face problem in maintaining thematic progression particularly the zigzag pattern. the analysis of text features social function in general, the social function of analytical personal letter text is to make sense of events through the imagined lived experiences of two human beings (crane, 2016). this purpose can be accomplished by giving appropriate information based on the theme in the body of the letter by means that readers can understand the main the topic wanted to convey by the writer as an important thing to be concerned. thus, it can be concluded that the writer is failed to construct a text which aims to talk about the school holiday, yet the reader seems to understand the information of the writer regarding her intention to come to the reader‟s house. it is probably understood by the clause: i will coming to your house next week, wait for my coming. those statements are delivered in the form of are you busy? (clause 5) (you) tell me (clause 6) if you there activities. (clause 7) indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 171 declarative mood and contain modality to share information in certain degree of probability/certainty. generic structure based on the 2013 curriculum, personal letter text commonly consists of eight parts, namely date, address, salutation and name, introduction, body, closure, complimentary close, and signature. regarding the date and address, those reveal when and where the letter is written. the second stages are salutation and name that show greeting and the name of the addressee like “dear” for the intimate ones. then, in introduction, the writer presents the opening of the letter, sometimes like „how are you?‟ to show the personal affection to the reader. next the main stage of the latter is the body that contains the actual purpose of the writer in writing the latter. the 3 last parts are closure, complimentary close, and signature. in those stages, the writer initially begins a sentence that indicates that the letter is going to end, and it is then closed by some specific words that can depict the relation between the participants such as best regards, your best friend, sincerely yours, love, and so forth, that latter will be signed using the name or signature of the sender. it can be analyzed from the table above that the text does not written in a proper structure since the writer does not put the date, address, and the complimentary close. a more professional letter presents appropriate address forms and conventionalized communicative acts like salutation that reveal a fixed level of formality of both interlocutors (crane, 2016). the following is analysis of generic structure of the sample text: linguistics features according to gerot & wignell (1995), there are several important lexicogrammatical features of analytical, like the use of simple tense, the use of relational process, the use of internal conjunctions, and the use of reasoning through causal conjunction and nominalization. the first two features appear in the sample texts. the simple tense is used in the text to show single modality of factuality, while the relational process is only used once to assign quality. unfortunately, internal conjunctions and causal conjunction are poorly implemented in the text, resulting in weak connections between clauses. nominalization also becomes problem for the students as there is no nominalization found in the text. conclusion based on the systemic functional linguistics analysis above, there are some obstacles encountered by the students in writing a personal letter text. interpersonally, the students find it is hard when dealing with finite and predicators. in experiential metafunction, the problem is in form of word choices showing a process of possession. while textually, the challenges comprise the  date (when the letter is written):  address (place where you are writing from):  salutation & name: dear wilda  introduction: how are you? i hope you fine  body: how for plan next week, are you busy? tell me if you there activities. bay the way i will coming in your home next week, o‟clock 02:00 pm.  closure i hope you stay and wait for my coming. have a nice day   complimentary close:  signature dara alfira veronica mangana & eri kurniawan understanding and evaluating personal letter writing: a systemic functional linguistics analysis of student texts in one of senior high school in indonesia 172 proper organization of theme-rheme in thematic progression. furthermore, the crucial one is the student misses some parts of the general structure as the basic elements of every kind of genre text. therefore, the failures may come from some weakness that should be fixed hand by hand by both teacher and student and need to be solved so that the students can construct text better and more appropriate with its function in the culture. by implementing sfl gp approach, the students are likely to have a better assistance in building the text knowledge and also in creating the text independently. moreover, by teaching the text in the perspective of sfl, teachers are expected to be more aware of what to emphasize in the learning practices and how to approach a text. nonetheles, sfl gp literally may need more time since it is developed to deal with a text as a mean of social communication rather than a mere grammatical structure. on the other hand, regardless the challenges and the limitations of the approach, sfl gp may become a promising approach if it is carried out systematically and done optimally. references ali, a. & tanzili. 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(2012). context, individual differences and pragmatic competence. new york/bristol: multilingual matters. tardy, c. m., & swales, j. m. (2014). genre analysis. in k. p. schneider & a. barron (eds.), pragmatics of discourse (pp. 165–187). berlin: mouton de gruyter. thompson, g. (2004). introduction to functional grammar (2 nd edition). london: arnold publishers. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0b0iar0vlaepax2jsr0gxzxpld1u/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/0b0iar0vlaepax2jsr0gxzxpld1u/view?usp=sharing alfira veronica mangana & eri kurniawan understanding and evaluating personal letter writing: a systemic functional linguistics analysis of student texts in one of senior high school in indonesia 174 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 121 nurturing students' writing narrative interest through mind mapping and cooperative integrated reading and writing ratih inayah english department, faculty of language education, institut keguruan dan ilmu pendidikan (ikip) siliwangi, indonesia e-mail: ratih.inayah@gmail.com ningtyas orilina argawati english department, faculty of language education, institut keguruan dan ilmu pendidikan (ikip) siliwangi, indonesia e-mail: tyas.orilina@yahoo.com apa citation: inayah, r., & argawati, n. o. (2019). nurturing students’ writing narrative interest through mind mapping and cooperative integrated reading and writing. indonesian efl journal, 5(2), 121-130. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v5i2.1781. received: 21-03-2019 accepted: 25-05-2019 published: 01-07-2019 abstract: this study aims to investigate the motivation of senior high school students at 11st grade in reading and writing english texts, especially narrative text. the study also explores the insight toward the use of mind mapping and cooperative integrated reading and writing in nurturing students’ interest and motivation in writing narrative text. the study used qualitative case study to learn and pay attention to phenomena that the students’ motivation in reading and writing narrative text are needed to be nurtured. there were 36 students of 11st grade in senior high school in bandung were involved in this study. questionnaire and interview were given to the students. the results show that the students who show positive view toward reading and writing narrative texts are 74% students. they interest and willingness in making mind mapping of the narrative, because they know that narratives texts are full of information and moral value. while only 26% students who seem force to read and write narratives text to compose mind mapping. eventually, integrating reading and composition in the classroom can nurture their reading interest and increase their willingness to read narrative text. since, many students can understand the moral value of the narrative text through discussing with their friends at the class and making a mind mapping through cooperative learning about the narrative text is very useful to develop their mind. keywords: cooperative learning; mind mapping; narrative text; reading; writing. introduction students at senior high school level are expected to have a great interest into reading and writing of narrative text, especially for those who are at 11st grade. reading english material is something that cannot be avoided in their daily activity in teaching and learning english. reading narrative text will be something familiar and students will find it almost every day during their study time of learning english at school. according to buzan (2012), mind mapping is an alternative thinking of the whole brain towards linear thinking. mind mapping reaches in all directions and captures various thoughts from all angles. while writing narrative text through mind mapping can be a good way to pour students’ idea, this is also growing students’ willingness to write in english. hamied and musthafa (2009) explain that reading is cognitive process of understanding a written linguistic message. there are many people who think of reading as a simple and easy activity, however reading narrative text is not always as easy as what many people guess. somehow, reading is actually complex process that needs a big effort of active participation on the part of the reader (brown, 2005). moreover, writing narrative text is considered as hard skill. nurturing students’ interest and habit in reading and writing narrative text is started from our consideration that some students are less enthusiastic when they have to read narrative texts alone without mailto:ratih.inayah@gmail.com mailto:tyas.orilina@yahoo.com ratih inayah & ningtyas orilina argawati nurturing students’ writing narrative interest through mind mapping and cooperative integrated reading and writting 122 participation of other people moreover to rewrite it again. accordingly, among those four skills in english, writing is considered as the most difficult skill to be learned independently. this is supported by alwasilah (2001) who says that writing is considered as the most difficult skill to acquire by everyone and teach by the teachers. this difficulty often caused by the complicated process of writing itself, the experiences of the writers, the background knowledge in which the writers have to focus not only on grammar, vocabulary and mechanism, but also how the ideas expressed, delivered and developed in a proper way. some students cannot elaborate and generate the ideas form a particular to be written. thus, some students failed to construct a good writing either in term of fluency or coherent. this fact is in accordance with nunan (2003) who assume that in term of skill, producing a coherent, fluent, and extended piece of writing is probably the most difficult things to do in language learning. the genre of reading text that students often find in the year of their study time very often is narrative text. they will spend times to read the literature as part of learning material. we think as a teacher, choosing the best materials for reading in general communication is not simple thing. we must consider their interest instead of forcing the students to read the materials that they are not even interested in it. this research is conducted to nurture students' interest in reading and writing english material. in this research, we try to solve the problems that we often find in the classrooms. the research questions are; 1). how do students interest in reading and writing narrative text? and 2). how does cooperative integrated reading and composition by using mind mapping can nurture their reading interest? to solve the problems in teaching and learning reading and writing, teachers require teaching techniques that is expected to be able to help students to generate their ideas in writing english especially narrative text. mind mapping are offered to be one of the solutions for those matters. mind mapping is introduced and developed by tony buzan, a professional who always well organized in thinking and elaborating his mind. as explained by cahyono (2009), it is simply a diagram used to represent words, ideas, or other items linked to and arranged in a free fashion around a central key words or ideas. the usage is expected to help the students to associate and giving ideas, think and do creatively, and make the right connection that might not otherwise make (buzan, 2010). reading and writing is the key of knowledge and we need it to open up our mind. every single person must have both very essential skills, no matter what field they concern. we usually learn from the texts that we read, and then we try to transfer what we know through writing or composing as supported by brumitt (2007) especially while we are still learning in school, many things and information that we know are based on what we read. since writing is the act of pouring what we know in a piece of paper, we must read general and specific information in order to be able to write what is interesting and important for us. according to brown (2005), the processes of reading and writing should develop as natural as possible. sometimes, reading is considered as a force for some students. there are many books and texts that the students have to read during their times learn at school. somehow, the nature of pouring the materials which they learn is still limited. this is in line with rodliyah (2016) that students only read what they guess important and sometimes they miss some essential information. in other words, the skill of considering general information and specific information needs extra care. the development of reading and writing are in the eyes of the using of reading and writing skills during teaching and learning situations. the classroom-learning environment that forces students to read what is important for them is crucial to the successful of reading and writing. according to inayah and rahayu (2015) teachers must be able to understand and apply the importance of teaching reading and writing indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 123 in the same time. teachers must be able to develop materials that they will teach. a good teacher should be able to make reading and writing alive in the classroom setting. that is a challenge for teacher to bring the reading and writing skill together and meaningful as part of essential skill in students’ perspective. argawati and suryani (2017) also point out that the processes of learning to read and write should become intertwined in natural language activities. when reading and writing are taught naturally, then the students will find these as a meaningful activity. on the other hand, rizqiya, pamungkas, and inayah (2017) also emphasize that teachers should provide opportunities for students to understand reading and writing connection between becoming a reader and writer. in our class right now reading and writing are taught at the same time. during the reading activity, students also write what is important to them. many students do not know what they read. they do not have clear ideas of what the writer intents to communicate (nunan, 2003). the problem is they do not read and write effectively and efficiently. reading and writing in effective and efficient way is very important for students at school because the students must find the main idea of the texts. there are two strategies in reading that the most popular among all. those are skimming and scanning. when skimming, it means that the students must be able to find the most important information, the most common patterns are a series of questions, such as who, what, where, why, when, and how. the students are expected to be able to read the texts quickly for information about who, what, where, why, when, and how. as reading skill, skimming is used by students to find general ideas quickly. according to harmer (2007) there are some reasons to use skimming strategy. first is to anticipate the general content of a chapter they are going to read. second is to decide if a chapter has the kind of information they are looking for. third is to get the general idea of a chapter they do not have time to read. the habit also has an effect in skimming strategy because it usually the students move their eyes across the lines rapidly, and they will not stop until get what they need, as we know that the first sentence usually prepares the reader for the paragraph. while scanning is a reading technique, that is commonly used by a student to find specific information quickly. students will do scan to find facts and to answer questions. according to buzan (2012), mind mapping is also a great route map for memory, allowing us to arrange facts and thoughts in such a way that the natural workings of the brain are involved from the start. it means that remembering information will be easier and more reliable than using traditional recording techniques. all mind mapping have similarities, everything uses color and everything has a natural structure that radiates from the center. all of them use curved lines, symbols, words, and images that fit a series of rules that are simple, basic, natural, and in accordance with how the brain works. with mind mapping, a long list of information can be transferred to a colorful, highly organized, and easy to remember diagram that works in harmony with the brain's natural way of doing things. michalko (2011) states that in the cracking creativity book, mind mapping will activate the entire brain, clear the mind of mental clutter, allow us to focus on the subject, show the relationship between parts of information that are mutually exclusive, give a clear picture of the whole and details, allow us to group concepts, help us compare them, and require us to focus on the subject that helps transfer information about it from short-term memory to long-term memory. there is much research have been done to investigate the implementation of using mind mapping in teaching and learning english in the classroom to empower students’ skill and achievement. a research by fauziah (2017) proves that the reading and writing activity that used mind mapping as a technique seems to be more focus in generating students’ idea. accordingly, using mind mapping technique also had deepened explanation of the topic as well as clear main idea and supporting ideas. in addition, another study conducted by rahmah (2017) revealed that there is a positive effect in the result of students’s ratih inayah & ningtyas orilina argawati nurturing students’ writing narrative interest through mind mapping and cooperative integrated reading and writting 124 descriptive writing after using mind mapping technique. then, a research conducted by yunus (2016), it investigates the use of mind mapping to enhance writing skill in malaysia. the result of the study reveals that the technique is effective to enhance writing skill. the major difficulties during the study mostly related to the structure. this study is aimed to nurture students’ interest in writing narrative text by using mind mapping and cooperative integrated reading and writing. according to kagan and kagan (2009), cooperative learning is the most extensively researched educational innovation of all time and results are clear. hundreds of lab and field research studies demonstrate that impact on classroom climate students’ selfesteem, empathy, and internal locus of control, role taking abilities, time on task, attendance, acceptance of mainstreamed students, liking for school and learning. cooperative learning can be defined as learning based on small group approach in teaching and learning process that holds students accountable for both individual and group achievement (orlich, 2007). it is strengthened by jacobs and hall in richard and renandya (2002) state that cooperative learning is a tool consisting some techniques which teachers use to encourage mutual helpfulness in the groups and the active participation of all members. as the cooperation, in the process, cooperative learning is applied in groups. according to orlich (2007), each group consists of three to four students. whereas musthafa (2008) argues that generally, the most efficient size for each group is four to six. another opinion is proposed by jacobs and hall in richard and renandya (2002) that in a group there should be four students. furthermore, the students work on an assignment or project together in such a way that each group member contributes to the learning process and then learn all the basic concepts being taught. method this study employed a qualitative approach which was considered appropriate to answer our research problems. in this case study, we tried to submit a systemic collection of information about a person and group in social setting. alwasilah (2011) said that in order to gain meaningful insight related to using mind mapping in reading and writing by using cooperative learning strategy. this research was done in natural setting, and the natural setting was in the classroom. it was considered as a source of direct data, and we are as the part of key instrument. we took the data in the form of words or images, rather than numbers. then we examined processes as well as outcomes, we tended to analyze the data inductively, and the main focus of our research was how students understand their part as a reader and writer. then, how to read narrative text became a good habit for students’ life in school. from the characteristic above, this research can be classified as qualitative research. in gaining the data, this research employed various techniques such as classroom observation, interview and students’ mind mapping result. in this research, interview was used to gain specific information and opinion or essential data about students’ feeling or opinion which was shown through observation (cresswell, 2010). the participants in the research were students of 11st grade in a senior high school in bandung. there were 36 students in the class. at first, we made a group of students which consist of four students as heterogenic as possible, the second we gave narrative texts that was suitable with learning topic. the narrative texts that we gave consist of nine titles, it was based on nine groups in the classroom. the title of narrative texts were princess rose and golden bird, rapunzel, sangkuriang, lake of toba, aladdin and magic lamp, malin kundang, nasredin and the young boy, beauty and the beast, and the cursed prince. the next step was students work together in group and they must read and found the main idea and giving response toward the narrative texts and then in the group they must write a mind mapping about the narrative text that they had read into a piece of paper that we provided. the fourth, indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 125 students should demonstrate and share the result of the group work. eventually, students and teacher made a conclusion together related to the narrative texts. to know students’ interested in reading and writing narrative text, it was done by spreading questionnaire and interview to them. the questionnaire was given to all 36 students, while the interview was given to high achievers and low achievers in the classroom. in analyzing the data, the researchers tried to integrate and relate the findings to the background of the study, especially to the research questions, theories, and the methodology for classifying the data into manageable units as suggested by emilia (2008). results and discussion students’ interest in reading and writing english text the genre of text that students always read was narrative text. they would spend time to read literature as a part of learning material. we thought as a teacher, choosing the best materials for reading in general communication was not simple thing, we must consider their interest instead of forcing the students to read the materials that they did not even interested in it. based on the questionnaire, some students became less enthusiastic in reading a narrative text. since they did not have a willingness to know what the advantage of reading that text (30%). they just did what they were asked to do without knowing the benefit of reading that narrative texts (24%). however, they have a mindset that to know and understand the materials they have to search by reading through some techniques (70%). reading by using scanning technique was more often used than skimming technique (60%). students were only interested to read the materials that they thought will appear in the examination (80%). students often leaved the narrative text in the middle of the way they were reading (50%). students had a willingness to read a modern popular narrative rather than the classic one (70%). students had only few times to read narrative text (50%). students obtained moral values from the narrative text that they read (70%). students obtained entertainment from the narratives text (74%). figure 1. students motivation reading and writing narrative text those percentages from the result of the figure above could representative students’ motives and interests in reading and writing narrative text. this was in line with rodliyah (2016) who stated that narrative text could not be separated from the life of students at school. it means that reading narrative text was a source of knowledge and information to students while writing a mind mapping was an appropriate way to describe students’ idea in an interesting way. people wrote a narrative story might be just for pleasure, to attract and get the reader’s interest through the story. besides, they like to write any kind of story due to they wanted to reflect their own experience and the think that the readers may had similar with the story that written by the researcher. this is in line with musthafa (2010) said that some purposes of narrative were to entertain, to express feelings, to relate experience, to inform something happened with someone, to inform something which could teach a lesson to the reader, and to persuade. brown (2004) emphasized that the generic structures of narrative text, such as: 1). 74 26 high achievers low achievers ratih inayah & ningtyas orilina argawati nurturing students’ writing narrative interest through mind mapping and cooperative integrated reading and writting 126 orientation/exposition was the introduction of what was inside the text. what the text was talk in general. who involved in the text. when and where was happen; 2) complication/rising action was a crisis arises. the complication was pushed along by a serious of events, during which usually expected some sort of complicating or problem to arise. it explored the conflict among the participant. complication was the main element of narrative. without complication, the text was not narrative. the conflict could be shown as natural, social or psychological conflict; 3). resolution was the crises were resolved. in this part, the implication may be resolved for better or worse, but it was rarely left completely unresolved. although, it was possible in certain types of narrative which leaved us wondering “how did it end.”. the language features of narrative text were: 1). a narrative text usually used past tense; 2). the verbs used in narrative were behavioral processes and verbal processes. from the discussion above, it could be concluded that narrative had several social functions such as to amuse, to entertain, and to deal with actual experiences in different ways. narrative dealt with the fiction story that can entertain the readers as well. from the interview that was done by researcher, one student who was high achiever (that was known by the rank in the classroom) was interviewed then she answered the questions as natural as possible, “reading narrative text was one of my favorite activities. i read narrative not only in the classroom of reading class but also at home. i often spent my idle hours to read some narrative text. i also found pleasure in writing a mind mapping to describe narratives text that i have read” (ps). the answers from ps as a high achiever represented the voices of many students or 74% who showed positive point of view and it showed how good her response through reading and writing narrative text in a cooperative way by using mind mapping. she showed a high interest and willingness in reading, it proved that she enjoyed reading narrative as a happy activity. the researchers also did an interview to other student, one student who was low achiever (that was known by the rank in the classroom) was interviewed and he answered the questions as natural as possible. “reading narrative text was one of the things that i did with force. i did not like reading narrative text because i thought all of narrative text was quite boring, only a few that was interesting. i also hard to make a mind mapping because it was not interesting for me” (fi). the answers from fi as a low achiever showed the truth of many low achievers students who thought that they were forced to read narrative text. he thought that reading a narrative text did not have advantage and he could not find pleasure while he was reading for narratives text. integrated reading and writing by using mind mapping and cooperative method this was something new for many students, they must think how to re-tell that again in a form of writing. writing a mind mapping about narrative text was considered as a challenge for some students because they must divided their attention through reading and writing. the observation was conducted on march, 14th – april, 18th. the result of observation was observed to answer the research question about the implementation of mind mapping in integrating reading and writing in cooperative method in learning english. generally, the teaching and learning process by using mind mapping through cooperative learning was run well. the observation filled by five colleagues in the learning process. the result of observation recorded in the observation sheet. the following described some of the result observation in the use or implementation by using cooperative learning in teaching and learning writing narrative text. before the learning process started, the students directed to create a group as was determined as the previous to make a group in heterogeneous consisted of 4-5 students. the result of the observation described that students’ activity when they formed a group was well organized. after all students created the groups, the teacher shared the students’ indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 127 work sheets of text narrative, and discussed the questions with other students in their group and they must present the result in the end of the learning process. at the discussion, the teacher became the important role to guide the group members who faced the difficulties in solving the problems were given by the teacher. each of members was given a freedom and flexibility in explained and expressed their opinion or ideas during the discussion. after that the teacher given a quiz in the end of the learning process, and the students with their group answered to compete with another groups. based on the observation result, it could be seen that the students who needed help to get the explanation correctly from the teacher when they asked the question to the teacher. the students were cooperative well in group. they could answer the questions and wrote the mind mapping related to narrative text based on their understanding. after the discussion in group was done, the teacher commanded to all groups prepared to present the group result in front of the class and discussed with another groups. after that the students and the teacher concluded the material already learnt by them at that time with reflected the material and evaluated it together. finally, the teacher gave the rewards for the students and groups’ discussion. the interview was conducted to know about the students’ difficulties faced in writing mind mapping related to narrative text. the result of interview was to know the students’ difficulties faced by using cooperative learning. the interview consisted of the explanation and opinion from the students who was included as the high, medium, and low student achievers. the researcher took three high students, three middle students, and three low students based on the result score in the data analysis in this research with used initial s1, s2, s3, s4, s5, s6, s7, s8, s9 in order to prevent something unwanted and it could represent the students in the class. for additional information that initial s1, s2, s3 were low achievers, the initial s4, s5, s6 were medium achievers, and the initial s7, s8, s9 were high achievers. the researchers interviewed the students on thursday, march 18th, 2019 (09.00-10.00). the researcher asked them related to the students’ difficulties faced by using problem based learning in writing narrative text. it can be concluded as follows: researchers: after learning writing narrative text by using mind mapping, what is your opinion in reading and writing narrative text and what is your difficulty in writing mind mapping? s1 : kurang menyenangkan, sulit untuk dipahami. (it was less fun, difficult to understand). s2 : pembelajaranya sangat menyenangkan, kesulitanya itu dalam mengartikan bahasanya. (the learning activity was very interesting, the difficulty in interpreting the language). s3 : biasa saja, susah memahami artinya. (just so so, it was hard to understand the meaning). s4 : pembelajaranya memudahkan saya dalam belajar, kesulitanya kurang begitu paham penulisanya. (the learning activity made me easy to learn, the difficulty was not understand about the writing). s5 : pembelajaranya mudah dimengerti, kesulitanya ketika guru membacakan dan kita menulisnya. (the learning activity was easy to understand, the difficulty was found when the teacher read and we have to write it). s6 : kurang menyenangkan, kesulitanya menghapal kata-katanya. (it was less fun, the difficulty in memorizing the words). s7 : pembelajaranya sangat menarik membuat semangat dalam belajar, kesulitanya dalam mengartikan kata-kata. (the learning activity was very interesting, it made us enthusiasm in learning, the difficulty in interpreting the words). s8 : pembelajaranya sangat menyenangkan karena bisa menghilangkan rasa bosan, kesulitanya tidak ada. (the learning activity was very fun, because it could eliminate boredom, there was not difficulty). s9 : pembelajaranya membuat semangat, karena selalu ada hadiah ketika menjawab pertanyaanpertanyaan, kesulitanya dalam mengartikan katakatanya. (the learning activity made enthusiasm, because there were rewards when we answered the questions, the difficulty in interpreting the words). based on the description above, it could be seen that some of students had the difficulties with the use structure and grammatical in writing narrative text by using mind mapping. they still confused how to generate their ideas in writing narrative text. meanwhile, they expressed their opinion that teaching and ratih inayah & ningtyas orilina argawati nurturing students’ writing narrative interest through mind mapping and cooperative integrated reading and writting 128 learning writing narrative text by using mind mapping was quite new to be applied in their clasroom. however many students (74%) are glad to compose mind mapping, because they were challenged to show that they had a big attention through reading narrative text and they could pour what they catched and understand through writing a mind mapping. many students helped each other by discussing what they obtained from the narrative text that they read. the cooperative method was applied by discussing and helped each other to less selfish feeling among students. cooperative learning offered an alternative way to competitive model of education. it also offered many benefits such as improving both academic learning and social skills. according to richard and renandya (2002), the more benefits were: 1). greating motivation for learning. as explained before that in cooperative learning group there would be groups of students’ work. in doing the activity, they worked in group and support each other; 2) lessing teacher talk. the students tried to study and did the activities by themselves, led by the leader of the group, and sometimes they asked the teacher for guiding them; 3). increasing student participation. each student was pushed to take part in the activities; 4). more varied student talk. the students would have a discussion in their own group. there would be varied talk from each student. they could share freely about the materials and did the activity together with their team-mate; 5). negotiating of meaning. from the varied talk of the students, there would be many opinions that were shared together and it would ease them to solve the problem in their activity. it would also produce a greater amount of comprehensible input; and 6). relaxing classroom atmosphere. it would comfort the students in learning process. they would feel that the situation in class was not too strict and formal. moreover, there were also some characteristics of cooperative learning stated by kagan (2009), namely; 1). using small groups. each group consisted of three, four, or five students. it depended on the activity; 2). focusing on tasks to be accomplished. together with the team-mate, they should work hard to finish the tasks successfully; 3). requiring group cooperation and interaction. the students worked as team. they should work cooperatively and help each other; and 4). mandating individual responsibility to learn. besides as the team-mate, each student was also asked to have the responsibility individually. it supported division of labor, because in cooperative learning, sometimes each student had each own job in team, and they must responsible with their job. the result of this study was relevant with the previous studies conducted by rodliyah (2016), gillies (2016), and johnson and johnson (2009) in which the result of their study showed that by integrating reading and writing at the same time, the students got so many advantages. firstly, they could get more information about the reading materials that they needed to know. secondly, they could increase their reading skill, because they have to read in appropriate way by using skimming and scanning technique. thirdly, they could make group a concept through mind mapping. it was very important to know that reading many narrative texts could make the students increased their vocabulary and knowledge skill. since narrative text were full of knowledge, culture, and moral value. the result of this research also in line with musthafa (2008) which showed that teaching and learning reading and writing in the same time were effective in nurturing students’ interest in learning english. in teaching and learning writing used cooperative learning, teachers and students found many advantages and new experiences. those were the type of activities in teaching and learning process that combined cooperative learning procedures and writing process (rodliyah, 2016). cooperative writing activities had two aims. the first one was focusing on messages and targeted communication function which was related to fluency and the second one was focusing on form or structure which was related to accuracy. if teacher decided to focus on the first aim, they could use several types of indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 129 activity such as brainstorming, speed writing, story sequences, etc. however, if they wanted to focus more on the second aim, they could use tasks like group timeline projects. conclusion this study has already answered the research questions by data. the data shows that some students less enthusiastic in reading english text for the reasons that they do not recognize the benefit of reading narrative text for their reading and writing skill. by using mind mapping, students are helped to organize their idea in a proper way. some students have a big attention toward reading narrative text, since they consider that there are many benefits obtain from reading narrative text. the students show positive view toward reading narrative text. it shows their interest and willingness because they know that narrative texts are full of information and moral value. this moral value drives the students to work in collaborative technique with their friends to discuss a good side and bad side of a character in narrative text. integrating reading and composition in the classroom can nurture their interest and increase their willingness to read narrative text, because many students can understand the moral value of the narrative text through discussing with their friends at the class and making a mind mapping about the narrative text in the same time. cooperative technique in reading and writing are a good technique to keep students’ motivation to search and gain new knowledge together also to less selfish behavior. by cooperative integrated reading and writing, they are motivated to share their opinion and ideas with others confidentially without feeling ashamed and doubt. furthermore, researchers are expected to explore the characters that alive in narrative text to be explored deeply through discussion and sharing knowledge. acknowledgement this study is one of the recipients of research grants for internal lecturers (hibah penelitian dosen internal) organized by lembaga penelitian dan pengabdian pada masyarakat institut keguruan dan ilmu pendidikan (ikip) siliwangi with the year of implementation on 2019. this paper is the result of our hard work and dedication to our beloved campus is institut keguruan dan ilmu pendidikan (ikip) siliwangi. references alwasilah, c. (2011). pokoknya kualitatif: dasar-dasar merancang dan melakukan penelitian kualitatif. bandung: pustaka jaya. argawati, n. o., & suryani, l. (2017). teaching writing using think-pair-share viewed from students’ risk taking. english review: journal of english education, 6(1), 109-116. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i1.776. brown, h. d. (2005). teaching by principles: an interactive approach to language pedagogy. new york: longman inc. buzan, t. (2012). the ultimate book of mind maps. jakarta: gramedia pustaka utama. cahyono, y. b. (2009). technique in teaching efl writing. malang: state university of malang press. cresswell, j. w. (2010). research design: qualitative & quantitative approaches. new delhi: sage publications. emilia, e. (2008). menulis tesis dan disertasi. bandung: alfabeta. fauziah, u. n. e. (2017). the use of mind mapping in generating students’ idea. acuity: journal of english language pedagogy, literature, and culture, 2(1), 45-60. gillies, r. m. (2016). cooperative learning: review of research and practice. australian journal of teacher education, 41(3). hamied, f. a., & musthafa, b. (2016). problematika pengajaran bahasa & sastra inggris di perguruan tinggi di indonesia. jakarta: depdikbud. harmer, j. (2007). how to teach writing. kuala lumpur: pearson education limited. inayah, r., & rahayu, s. (2015). exploring students’ difficulties in comprehending reading for academic material used in their class. jurnal ilmiah upt p2m stkip siliwangi, 2(2), 240-245. johnson, d., & johnson, r. (2009). an educational psychology success story: social interdependence theory and cooperative learning. educational researcher, 38, 365 379. kagan, s., & kagan, m. (2009). kagan cooperative learning. san clemente: kagan publishing. musthafa, b. (2010). teaching english to young learners in indonesia: essential requirements. educationist, 4(2), 120-125. musthafa, b. (2008). teaching english to young learners: principles and techniques. bandung: upi press. nunan, d. (2003). practical english language teaching. london: mc grow hill. orlich, d. c., et al. (2007). teaching strategies a guide to effective instruction. boston: houghton mifflin company. ratih inayah & ningtyas orilina argawati nurturing students’ writing narrative interest through mind mapping and cooperative integrated reading and writting 130 rahmah, u. (2017). the effectiveness of using mind mapping technique on students’ writing ability in descriptive text. mini thesis. fakultas pendidikan bahasa. uin sh. richard, j. c., & willy, a. r. (2002). methodology in language teaching: an anthology of current practice. cambridge: cambridge university press. rizqiya, r. s., pamungkas, m. y., & inayah, r. (2017). the use of power learning strategy to improve students writing competency. okara: jurnal bahasa dan sastra, 11(2), 253-262. rodliyah, r. s. (2016). using a facebook closed group to improve efl students’ writing. jurnal ilmu pendidikan, 82-101. yunus, m., & hua chien, c. (2016). the use of mind mapping strategy in malaysian university english test (muet) writing. creative education, 7, 619626. doi: 10.4236/ce.2016.74064. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 107 native language interference on target language writings of indonesian efl students: an exploratory case study r. agus budiharto english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, university of madura, indonesia e-mail: congbudiharto@gmail.com apa citation: budiharto, r. a. (2018). native language interference on target language writings of indonesian efl students: an exploratory case study. indonesian efl journal, 5(1), 107-116. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v5i1.1630. received: 28-09-2018 accepted: 30-11-2018 published: 01-01-2019 abstract: possessing language students who are skilled in creating a structured, orderly and no error-found piece of composition constitutes a hope and a wish for many efl teachers, as they are the individuals who undergo a big problem when their students commit numerous errors in efl writing as a result of their native language interference. this study is aimed at exploring native language influence on students’ english writings as well as investigating the salient and common grammatical errors in their writing with the purpose of checking whether or not indonesian as the students’ l1 influence them when writing in english. to this end, a corpus of 22 english essays written by students is examined and the errors are then categorized according to the following aspects: grammatical, lexico-semantic, mechanics, and word order sorts of errors. in this study, mixed methods research designs are used: quantitative and qualitative. the results revealed that unira students commit different sorts of errors which are chiefly on account of their native language (indonesian) interference. the students highly rely on their l1 in stating their thoughts, even though the ranking processes revealed that their essays hold different sorts of errors, those in the grammar and the lexico-semantic statistically constitute the most serious and recurrent ones. keywords: grammatical sentence; l1 interference; lexico-semantic; writing. introduction there seem to be an acknowledged truth that english language has appeared become a worldwide language and a lot of nations of the world are struggling a lot for learning it as a target language (tl) or a foreign language (fl). english, which is broadly employed in either spoken or written forms, has been a significant communication instrument in a multi-ethnic humanity and can be used for many different interests in a variety of fields, such as in the field of education, business, employment, etc. by virtue of its increasing significance, more attention and endeavor are placed within the instructions of language, writing for instance. schunk (2009) has a notion, that “writing forms an important component of literacy although less research is conducted on writing”. it is perceived as a very complicated activity even in the mother tongue. moreover, writing in a foreign language definitely is twice more complicated and it may take time and attempt to become skilful in it. for indonesian learners as tl learners at all stages doing activities of writing in english as a foreign language (efl) frequently present immense challenge and meet difficulties with an accomplishment related to chiefly writing in english as their target language. writing proficiency is considered as the most complicated one to master for them. the complexities lie both on how ideas are generated and organized, and on how these notions are translated into legible text. more importantly, indonesian learners of english have to consider the use of the efl sentence structures appropriately in order to be able to write an essay well. it is mailto:hanifadiantika@gmail.com r. agus budiharto native language interference on target language writings of indonesian efl students: an exploratory case study 108 so noteworthy to be applied that it can create a good piece of writing in english. within the study of target language, the grammatical sentence structure may occupy a leading position. it is because discovering how words are pronounced, spelled, and their meaning in dictionaries is seemingly uncomplicated, but examining the grammatical sentence structures of tl without having a substantial command regarding the rules of grammatical sentence structure in tl is seemingly complicated. hence, a case of the rules of grammatical sentence structure within target language merit more focused attention. indonesian and english have divergence in the rules of the grammatical sentence structure, the linguistic parts, and the verb forms. in indonesian, the forms of the verb do not need to change its form, whereas the verb forms of english alter a lot. in english usage, if indonesian students wish to state actions or events that are happening, they have to employ pattern ‘s+ verb ‘be’ + ing form’. if indonesian students wish to say something occurs in the past, they have to utilize the past tense time. all in all, the individuals require using different tenses to express something occurring in different times. in indonesian, we just alter adverbial phrases to state something that occurs in different times. in addition, there are a number of distinctions on the verb’s meaning between indonesian and english; therefore, it is very easy for indonesian students to yield errors in employing verbs in english writing. given english constitutes the fl/tl for indonesian students, the mother tongue then will inevitably possess some unaware influence on employing the tl. it is fairly common for indonesian students to take their grammar to english writing. in any case, they translate words, phrases, sentences from indonesian into english by employing the cognitive process in indonesian’s structure in their writing. therefore, unavoidably, it can interfere with their written english. despite the fact that writing is regarded as an extremely difficult practice, the students cannot stop practicing it. it is because in students’ academic life, writing gives an indispensable feature for them. clearly, writing in target language (tl) is not a simple job to achieve with no difficulties because when writing tl, many appealing possibilities of knowledge occur. one of them is the native language (l1) interference. native language interference then can be associated with writers utilizing command from their mother tongue (l1) to a foreign language or target language. taking into account many researchers have developed theoretical approach, which have effectively investigated l1 interference “so that students, learners, researchers, and teachers of the second language could further develop the exploration about the impact of mother tongue influence” (olutekunbi, 2011). additionally, according to adebayo (2017), numerous studies have been carried out around the world, chiefly after the establishment of second language acquisition (sla) in the 1970s. since this time, many researchers and linguistic experts have carried on examining the influence of native language interference in the learning of a fl or a tl. it is generally admitted that the native language (l1) has an influence on tl or fl particularly when it takes place to writing, which is deemed the most complicated proficiency to master. nowadays, there has been mounting attention in many studies connected to writing since such proficiency is regarded as an extremely important matter not only inside academic studies but also outside academic learning. possessing language students who are skilled in creating a structured, orderly and no error-found piece of composition actually constitutes a hope and a wish for many efl teachers because they are the individuals who undergo a big problem when their students commit numerous errors in efl writing as a result of their l1 interference. moreover, the most important task the efl teachers must do is to instruct their students not only how to consider but also to employ a tl/fl like the indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 109 native employer does. indeed, this is not a trouble-free task for the teachers. the influence of mother tongue is obviously revealed in the written forms that become the starting point of technique the teacher uses in testing their student skill. the present study aims to explore native language influence on second-year university of madura (unira) english-major students’ written english in writing course 1, as well as to investigate the common grammatical errors in their writings with the purpose of checking whether or not indonesian as unira students’ l1 potentially influence them when writing in english. unira is one of private universities in indonesia owning english education department of fkip where english is a medium of the instruction. in this regard, unira students of english education department have to use english when they are doing communication, presentation, written assignments, or examination in the efl classroom. that is why the students’ considerable knowledge of english sentence structure is considerably needed. it has been accepted that in the process of learning english as fl or tl native indonesia-speaking unira students meet many difficulties and commit numerous errors. error analysis (ea) is accounted as a set of actions to identify, describe, and explain learners’ errors (ellis & barkhuizen, 2005). however, ea not only relates to identify and detect learner’s errors but also to explain the reason for occurrence of learner’s errors. ea, a particular type of linguistic analysis that is dealt with the errors the learners create, has started to be a much-discussed issue within the field of efl. error analysis is very significant to be done, it is because to know if there are errors to be corrected or not. essentially, an error relates to an identifiable change of the grammatical elements of a native speaker, depicting the learners’ aptitude in the target language (brown, 2007). additionally, errors in language learning come about systematically and repeatedly with no any notice by the learners (gass & selinker, 2008). errors, as the nonnative outcomes of the learners’ inadequate linguistics command, are viewed as mother tongue interference in the foreign language or target language. interference, in this regard, means transferring of element of one language into learning of another. errors may develop automatically as languages skill development that can be obtained and learnt. there are two ways in developing the language aptitude. first way is concerning language acquisition which can be regarded as a subconscious process and comes about in natural non-intimidating surroundings. language errors in the natural surroundings usually are not at once corrected as they might be in informal academic surroundings. second way is concerning language learning which takes place at school in an academic setting. it is unlike language acquisition, this type of language learning is regarded a deliberate process. thus, errors frequently take place in this type of language learning since rules and grammar dealing with what learning is all regarding. this indicates that errors can be caused when individuals began learning languages. according to darus and ching (2009), errors in efl writing occur as a result of interlingual and intralingual errors. errors located to be attributable to l1 interference are called ‘interlingual’. ‘interference’ or also named ‘transfer errors’ which become the major concern of this study, is defined as the inappropriate influence of a native language (l1) structures or rules on second language (l2) use (saville-troike, 2006). moreover, the influence of a native language on the tl has become a main problem, which not only influences language students in acquiring a new language but also in the quality of written english as a tl. olanipekun et al. (2014) maintain that school students may elicit the poor-quality level of attainment in numerous areas of study by virtue of a poorquality foundation in the language of english, which always associated with the clash between native language and english as tl. at any rate, the interference as stated by ellis (2008) can occur in a variety of areas of linguistics components (such as phonology, r. agus budiharto native language interference on target language writings of indonesian efl students: an exploratory case study 110 morphology, syntax, lexis and semantics). l1 interference is traceable to system of the native language in influencing the making of the target language. this way is considered as language transfer (lt). lt is a significant cognitive aspect regarding error in writing english as foreign language or tl. lt involves positive and negative. it is called positive transfer or facilitation when learner transfers structures of tl and structures of any other languages that is regarded similar and correct, or in another words positive transfer takes place when l1 and tl contain appropriate structures of linguistics. in contrast, negative transfer occurs when learner transfers structures of the two languages which are regarded dissimilar, inappropriate or ‘error’. an error that occurs due to the learners’ ignorance of an item in tl is called intralingual error. in the words of darus and ching (2009), intralingual errors are those that occur because of incomplete application of rules and failure to learn conditions for rule application as experiences in the tl are very limited. generally speaking, in the language learning process, this error usually occurs when the learners have acquired a limited linguistic knowledge, for example, in grammar rules which are puzzling them. intralingual error consists of some subcategories of errors, namely: 1) overgeneralization it is related to redundancy reduction. it occurs when the learners face the difficulties to apply the rules of tl, they attempts to reduce their linguistics burden by over-generalizing their rule to cover examples to which that rule does not apply. as a result, they make an unexpected arrangement on the foundation of other arrangements in tl, e.g. "she will swims" whereas english rule allows “she will swim" and "she swims"; 2) ignorance of rule restriction this term is associated with the learners’ failure to notice the limits of existing structure, effecting in the wrong use of norms in tl. the learners are unsure of applying the correct rules of tl grammar, which are appropriate for the acceptable english usage. thus they are inclined to take no notice of the rules, and attempt to apply what look ‘correct’ to them in a special context, e.g. "the man who we saw him" through extension of the pattern “the man whom we saw"; 3) incomplete application of rules it deals with errors created by the learners when they apply a completely developed arrangement, e.g. “where they buy the umbrella?" instead of “where do they buy the umbrella”; and 4) incorrect hypothesis this refers to errors resulting from incorrect notions hypothesized derive from the incorrect comprehension of difference in the tl. the learners are not able to completely comprehend a difference in the tl, e.g. the application of “is” as an indicator of simple present tense in “he is cleaned the garden” whereas english rule allows “he cleans the garden or he is cleaning the garden”. given that learners’ l1 plays a very important role in getting knowledge of tl, it needs to be noticed that many studies have been carried out to examine the interference of mother tongue (l1) in the learning of english as a foreign language or a target language. a research by bridgit (2015) which highlighted the grammatical bits of english affected by the grammatical bits of lumarachi among the lumarachi students of english by investigating the examples of interference by virtue of errors of morphology demonstrated that differences regarding the phonological and morphological structural between lumarachi and english cause l1interference. in addition, another study conducted by adebayo (2017) that investigated the extent to which the grammatical and structural differences between english and yoruba influences the learners’ english aptitude revealed that errors became inevitable in l2 acquisition, taking into account that even advanced students of a foreign language are prone to commit errors. bearing in mind the use of a native language on the tl becomes a main trouble, which influences language learners in indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 111 learning english as tl/fl, thus this study aims to examine the errors native indonesiaspeaking unira students generate when writing essay in english and to explore the causes and sources of the students’ errors. the error sorts attributed by native language will be presented in the following category; errors in grammar, lexico-semantics, word order, and mechanical errors. method in this study, mixed methods research designs are used: quantitative and qualitative. according to gay, mills and airasian (2009), “mixed methods research designs combine quantitative and qualitative approaches by including both quantitative and qualitative data in a single study”. the quantitative method is used with the intention of collecting the data of the statistic regarding errors that were obtained from the subjects’ written composition. while the qualitative method is used with the intention of collecting the data empirically in the written composition form made by the subject for analyzing the error. twenty-two students of unira from english education department of fkip participated in this study. they were registered in the english writing i course during the second semester of the academic year 2016-2017. the partaking students have ever been studying efl as a school discipline for 6 years when they were in middle school and high school. nevertheless, all of them also had their education in national schools, in which indonesian as their native language became the media of instruction. they all started learning indonesian in elementary school more or less at the age of 7. in contrast, english is a tl taught as efl in their college. all of the participants speak more indonesian as native language (l1) at their home and with their friends than english. the data was gained by collecting a piece of the students’ writing which was produced in an assignment of the english writing i in a classroom. each of the students was given a theme: “a good student and a bad student,” then they were asked to write on it approximately 120 to 200 words. the compositions were all written in 60-minute class sessions. the students were not conscious that their essays are going to be under analysis. twenty-two essays collected were analyzed to examine a variety of errors and to count the amounts and ratios. then, the highest existing of either interference will be described quantitatively because quantitative study reports statistical information including percentages displayed in helpful graphics for example graphs and charts (nunan & bailey, 2009). this present study was carried out, through error analysis (ea) to explore the sorts of error unira students composed in their efl writings. in analyzing the data, ellis and barkhuizen’s steps (2005) are utilized in this study. they are 1) collection of a sample of learner language; 2) identification of errors; 3) description of errors; and 4) explanation of errors. results and discussion interlingual errors generated by the unira students were classified according to the grammar error (words or sentences which are relative to tense, subject-verb-agreement, singular/plural markers, articles and preposition), the lexico-semantic error (errors associated with wrong choice of vocabulary meaning), the mechanical error (spelling error), and word order errors. table 1 shows the sorts of interlingual errors. table 1. sorts of interlingual errors no sorts of errors freq. % 1 grammatical errors tense subject-verb-agreement singular/plural markers articles prepositions 34 15 12 12 5 32% 15% 12% 12% 4% 2 lexico-semantic errors 14 14% 3 mechanical error 9 8% 4 word order 5 4% total 106 100% further, figure 1 illustrates total number of unira efl students’ errors. the r. agus budiharto native language interference on target language writings of indonesian efl students: an exploratory case study 112 statistics presented in the figure proves that the grammatical category constitutes the salient errors category with the highest percentage of 75%. then, the lexico-semantic errors category comes in the second position because it contains a problematic feature of the target language (tl) that is regarding spelling with a percentage of 14%. next, the mechanical errors come in the third position with a percentage of 8% and lastly are the word order errors with the lowest percentage of 4%. figure 1. total number of unira efl students’ errors grammatical errors from figure 2, it can be seen that the tense errors have the highest percentage of 32% and form the most troublesome part, subjectverb-agreement errors are 15%, singular/ plural markers errors are 12%, articles errors are 12%, and the lowest percentage is 4% which represents preposition errors. figure 2. grammatical errors tense errors tense errors become the most salient characteristic in the target language writings of unira students. these errors constitute 34% of the whole numbers of error. the students commit numerous grammatical errors for a number of reasons. they are not able to write appropriate negative or interrogative sentences in the simple present tense. auxiliary verb forms of simple present tense, such as do and does, should be employed in making construction in either negative or interrogative form. however, the students do not utilize the verb forms and surprisingly they utilize be “is” in both negative and interrogative sentence. it may occur since there are no english auxiliary verb forms in indonesian sentence; the students thus produce errors in their construction (see examples 1 and 2). they are also inclined to add one of the different forms of the conjugated verb “be” (such as: are, was) to become an additional verb in constructing simple present tense and simple past tense form (see examples 3, 4, and 5), and also the students are puzzled to make interrogative sentence forms so they omit auxiliary verbs which should be utilized (see examples 6, 7, and 8). the students also omit copula verb, such as is, am, are, in creating a positive sentence form (see example 9). besides, they are predisposed to omit helping verb form when they make a present progressive tense (see examples 10 and 11). 1. he is not respect time 2. why is he come late? 3. they are listen to lesson well 4. they are come late 5. he was live in a bad society 6. he not listen his teacher 7. why the student not obey the rule? 8. how they educate them? 9. a kind student not always smart 10. when the teacher teaching the material 11. he often not coming to class these findings reveal that the participants do not possess a comprehensive command on the use of different verb tenses in english such as copula, helping verb and auxiliary indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 113 verb. the students also feel perplexed and meet complexity in selecting and utilizing the appropriate verbs in verb phrases. accordingly, they mismatched an item in a verb form to other verb forms incorrectly and they produce errors in their writings. these errors are caused by negative transfer or interference since the students are already accustomed to the simple arrangement of indonesian verb tense. subject-verb agreement errors the second rank in the grammatical errors is the incorrect use of subject-verb agreement with a percentage of 15%. in the english sentence rule, the subject and the verb phrase are supposed to agree in number and person. such as a singular subject agrees with a singular verb, whereas a plural subject is followed by a plural verb. however, the students frequently are not aware when to add the bound morpheme “s” of singular and when to add the plural morpheme “s” to tl verbs. thus, they are befuddled and have a tendency to add the third person singular bound morpheme “s” to the verb when the subject is plural (see example 14) and drop the morpheme “s” in the verb when the subject of the sentence is singular (see example 12, 15, 16 and 17). the participants also give singular copula verb “is” for plural subject (see example 13). it reveals that the students are puzzled regarding final “s” as plural form and final “s” as third person singular, for that reason, they are liable to add bound morpheme “s” to the verbs when the subject is plural (such as they) and omit bound morpheme “s” when the subject is singular (such as she, he, it). moreover, these errors occur due to the absence of the third person singular bound morphemes of “s” and the plural morpheme “s” in indonesian verbs. 12. he also understand the lesson 13. students is someone who... 14. bad students always makes... 15. because he always come late 16. everybody have a bad side 17. the teacher give a material singular/plural marker errors putting marks with singular and plural forms are deemed as one of the major complexities that the students face in their english writing. this kind of errors constitutes 12% of the whole figure of errors in this study. it is discovered that the students omit the bound morpheme “s” of plural even when the sentence holds plural quantifiers, such as many, a lot of and some, which characterize the plural (see examples 20, 21, 23, and 24). they also tend to add the morpheme “s” in the plural nouns with words such as a, an, much, each, etc. (see examples 18, 19, and 25). furthermore, a transfer from the spoken medium of fl possibly influences the misuse of the plural bound morpheme “s” because indonesian students are inclined not to pronounce or read the “s” when they are speaking accordingly the students commit error in creating their sentence. 18. there are a students like that 19. a clever students... 20. there are some good student have... 21. there are many factor... 22. because a good pupils...... 23. they have much friends 24. ...that have a lot of backgorund 25. ...think about a good students 26. they will make friendship with peoples articles errors given the fact that indonesian has no article system, whereas nouns in english commonly are preceded by indefinite articles: a, an, definite article: the and zero article: ø, indonesian students are liable to neglect the use of english article system. consequently, they yield errors in article by misusing or deleting of articles in english. besides, errors in article occur because when the students write in english, they are prone to translate directly from their native language (indonesian) into target language, i.e. english. the students also look perplexed with the usage of definite, indefinite, and zero articles in english as seen in the following examples. r. agus budiharto native language interference on target language writings of indonesian efl students: an exploratory case study 114 27.good student is diligent student 28.every school must have good student 30.some students have no good attitude 31.good student always have good behaviour 32.a good pupils.... 33.good student is student… 34.how to give advice to bad student? 35.there are a students.... preposition errors it needs to be noticed that indonesian preposition contains general meaning but english contains particular meaning. nevertheless, the efl indonesian students are inclined to equate english preposition with l1 preposition when they write in english. thus, seemingly, they intentionally create an effort to come across similar structures to their native language in english. accordingly, they easily can recall their prepositional command of l1. preposition errors in their english writings then are unavoidable produced. besides, these errors occur as the students are incapable of choosing the proper preposition by virtue of a choice of prepositions that contain the same function in english such as prepositions “at”, “in”, “on”, etc. additionally, they frequently refer to indonesian, i.e. by translating their l1 sentence into the tl word by word (it is called literal translation) such as in the following examples. 36.kind students look at from their uniform 37.because he is busy in him life 38.you can find from the attitude 39.being lazy at the class... lexico-semantic errors these errors deal with the students’ capability of mastering vocabulary and using lexis correctly in conveying a given message. the unira efl students are not able to use tl words that have similar meaning in their appropriate context. this is because they seemingly do not master tl vocabulary meaning and usage yet, so errors in lexicosemantic occur. they also translate directly from l1 to convey their thoughts in english. these errors can occur because of student’ lack english vocabulary. as indicated in examples 40, 44, and 45 that the students’ vocabulary are deficient in noun, examples 41, 43, and 46 can prove that the students’ vocabulary are very poor in an adjective and an adverb. so do the example in 42 which shows that the students are inefficient at knowledge of vocabulary in preposition. 40.all childish are good people (children) 41.it can make the student be more bad (worse) 42.they come to school only sleep (for sleeping) 43...can receive knowledge from the teacher goodly (well) 44.in backside......(in another side) 45.a bad student not has politeness (a good behaviour) 46.the teacher give small score for them (low) mechanical errors there are phonemes and combinations of phonemes used in english which do not occur in indonesia, for example, 1) the last letter e in bite or late. the spelling e is not pronounced. bite is pronounced with the phonemes /baɪt/; 2) the use of a combination of three phonemes (also called a triphthong) such as /aɪə / in fire; 3) the letter i in fire is pronounced with the phoneme /aɪ/. it is of course different from indonesian. the letter/spelling i in indonesian is unchanged as in ibu, which is pronounced /ibu/. these descriptions indicate that indonesian does not have a spelling system as english. consequently, errors in spelling (misspelling) occur. besides, they have habits to utter using l1 spelling system in their daily life which can influence their writing in english (see examples 48, 49, 45, 53, and 55). besides, they also misspell phonemes in english by epenthetic vowels, i.e. by adding a vowel at the middle of sounds or phonemes (see examples 47, 50, and 51). 47.a bad student can be a cleaver student 48. but many friends fill like.... 49.....they will thing about.... 50.... coming too class 51.they wiil make ..... 52.the cliver student often talk 53.there are smart, stupid, activ... 54..less attantion from the parents 55.the teacher mus know the character indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 115 word order errors inappropriate word order constitutes a common error syntactically that the learners generate on account of l1 transfer. the following examples demonstrate that the students are still affected by indonesian word order system. they have a tendency to create the adjective follow the noun according to indonesian word order system (see examples 56, 57, 59). in english word order system, the adjective is supposed to precede the noun. nevertheless, the students who are ignorant about this rule, they will follow their l1 rule and then use it to tl (see example 60). consequently, errors in word order come up. in imperative sentence like example 60, the students put adverb of frequency (always) after the noun phrase “the class”. the adverb should be put in the beginning of sentence or before the verb “come”. 56.from the attitude students 57.....can give punishment appropriate 58.every teacher there is care 59.good students usually have attitude humble 60.come to the class always on time conclusion this study is aimed at identifying and analyzing the common errors in english essay writing generated by the efl indonesian university students. from the analysis, it is found that students’ native language (indonesian) interference is the main cause of their errors in the english essay writing. the present study came up with the following outcomes. the unira students highly rely on their native language in stating their thoughts. this is in line with statement of alvarez (2014) that the use of native language, particularly at public institutions, occupies a huge proportion of the language used in class. students persistently resort to native language, leading to its overuse and to avoiding using english. in this study, the ranking processes reveals that the students’ essays hold different sorts of errors, those in the grammar and the lexico-semantic statistically constitute the most serious and recurrent ones. it is vital to represent students’ notice to the distinction between indonesian structure and english where the errors are recurring. hence, students should need to practice writing activities more often with the intention of internalizing them and to be capable of using them appropriately, whenever they are demanded to write in english. some experts (pritchard & haneycut, 2005) highlight that in order that pupils to write well, they need enough time with the intention that they are able to think critically, rewrite, select, revise, and organize their notions in real writing and re-writing. if this practice is committed, it may carry alteration in efl writing errors. there are a number of particular ways for language teachers to assist the students avoid interference of indonesian in english writing. first way is by boosting students to think in native means. it means that the students do interlingual transfer since they are not “thinking” in a native means. by committing this, when language students are able to think in the native means, they potentially will have no opportunity to transfer their “native notion” into the tl, which results in interlingual transfer. therefore, language teachers have to attempt to create the students not possess the opportunity to commit the word-to-word translation of their native notions or group of words. second way is by giving essential language input for the students. this way talks about lots of different visions regarding the role of input in development of language. yet, it has been commonly admitted that language input can determine the output. in addition, great quantity of l2 input can adjust students’ tendency in formulating their notions and developing them in idiomatic way, thus it can assist to diminish l1 transfer. third way is by creating contrastive analysis (ca) of indonesian and english. language students need to be fully conscious of the possibilities of interference so that they may be able to avoid generating errors transfer. it is highly needed in order that the students become aware regarding the linguistic divergences between indonesian and english. in the r. agus budiharto native language interference on target language writings of indonesian efl students: an exploratory case study 116 course of english teaching, students’ insight and sensitivity towards the differences between indonesian and english should be cultivated by employing not only the method of analysis, contrast, but also induction. the last way is by increasing a good command of english vocabulary and grammar. it needs to be noticed that native language transfer causes numerous errors not only at the lexical level but the grammatical level as well, which will have a negative impact on students’ english writing. on the involvement of teachers in teaching process, their speech in explaining new words and phrases and structures of syntax are extremely vital for students in college english courses. teachers should give a situation and connect both the new words and phrases to either the familiar context of the students’ life or to the context of the text. this can effectively assist students construct an integrated command of english in vocabulary and grammar as opposed to memorize the grammatical rules and semantic equivalents references adebayo, c. u. 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(2009). introduction: the discipline and practice of qualitative research. in n. k. denzin, & y. s. lincoln, (eds.), handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 129). thousand oaks, ca: sage. olanipekun, s., atteh, d., zaku, j., & sarki, p. (2014). mother tongue and students’ academic performance in english language among secondary school students. international journal of language, literature and culture, 1(1), 1-6. olutekunbi, i. b. (2011). mother tongue interferrence in english news cast: a case of kwara television news. essay, 1-60. pritchard, r. j., & honeycutt, r. l. (2005). the process approach to writing instruction: examining its effectiveness. in c. a. macarthur, s. graham & j. fritzgerarl (eds.), handbook of writing research. usa: guidford press. saville-troike,m. (2006). introducing second language acquisition. uk: cambridge university press. schunk, d. h. (2009). learning theories: an educational perspective, (5th ed). london: pearson educational international. http://othes.univie.ac.at/48223/1/50917.pdf http://erepository.uonbi.ac.ke:8080/xmlui/bitstream/handle/11295/93591/ouma_a%20study%20of%20mother%20tongue%20interference%20in%20the%20learning.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y http://erepository.uonbi.ac.ke:8080/xmlui/bitstream/handle/11295/93591/ouma_a%20study%20of%20mother%20tongue%20interference%20in%20the%20learning.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y http://erepository.uonbi.ac.ke:8080/xmlui/bitstream/handle/11295/93591/ouma_a%20study%20of%20mother%20tongue%20interference%20in%20the%20learning.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y http://erepository.uonbi.ac.ke:8080/xmlui/bitstream/handle/11295/93591/ouma_a%20study%20of%20mother%20tongue%20interference%20in%20the%20learning.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y http://erepository.uonbi.ac.ke:8080/xmlui/bitstream/handle/11295/93591/ouma_a%20study%20of%20mother%20tongue%20interference%20in%20the%20learning.pdf?sequence=1&isallowed=y https://repository.usfca.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1229&context=capstone https://repository.usfca.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1229&context=capstone r. agus budiharto introduction method in this study, mixed methods research designs are used: quantitative and qualitative. according to gay, mills and airasian (2009), “mixed methods research designs combine quantitative and qualitative approaches by including both quantitative and quali... twenty-two students of unira from english education department of fkip participated in this study. they were registered in the english writing i course during the second semester of the academic year 2016-2017. the partaking students have ever been st... the data was gained by collecting a piece of the students’ writing which was produced in an assignment of the english writing i in a classroom. each of the students was given a theme: “a good student and a bad student,” then they were asked to write o... twenty-two essays collected were analyzed to examine a variety of errors and to count the amounts and ratios. then, the highest existing of either interference will be described quantitatively because quantitative study reports statistical information... this present study was carried out, through error analysis (ea) to explore the sorts of error unira students composed in their efl writings. in analyzing the data, ellis and barkhuizen’s steps (2005) are utilized in this study. they are 1) collection ... results and discussion references indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 35 the features of mediation in efl classroom interaction: teacher perspectives hanna sundari department of english education, faculty of language and arts, indraprasta pgri university, indonesia e-mail: hanna.sundari@gmail.com; hanna.sundari@unindra.ac.id apa citation: sundari, h. (2020). the features of mediation in efl classroom interaction: teacher perspectives. indonesian efl journal, 6(1), 35-44. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v6i1.2636. received: 01-09-2019 accepted: 11-11-2019 published: 01-01-2020 abstract: the classroom is a place where the teacher, as an expert and the knower, teaches students through interactions influenced by several sociocultural backgrounds. moreover, the teacher plays a role in mediating language learning processes by providing effective mediation. in brief, mediation can be defined as all objects delivered by the teacher to mediate the students to bring their current ability to the targeted performance. this current research serves to describe the features of mediation applied by english teacher in one lower secondary school in the efl classroom context. this qualitative-based inquiry applied classroom observation and interviews as instruments to explore how the teacher mediated language learning in the classroom particularly for beginner-level students in one private school in jakarta. the findings showed that the features of shared intention are the most salient to be mediated. this indicates that the teacher is very concerned with helping and facilitating the students to perform tasks. in addition, in mediating values, challenges, change and competence, the teacher creates engaging classroom discourses, selects particular tasks, and nurtures a positive classroom climate. moreover, the teacher sets herself as a mediator as well as mediation as an ideal form of behavior and language model in the class. keywords: english; foreign language; mediation; sociocultural view. introduction from the sociocultural view, learning is a social process and experience through social interactions in various settings. moreover, for human, mental activity appears in the interaction with others in a certain experience (lantolf, 2000). then, gredler (2009) also posits that social interactions with knowledgeable adults to scaffold the students beyond their capability are essential and significant. particularly in language teaching, lantolf (2000) in atamturk, atamturk and dimililer (2018) asserts that it occurs in a social context in the social interaction with a more capable person. through these interactions, the students develop both meanings and ways to make use of symbols to facilitate learning. meanwhile, more competent adults play a role as “the ideal-form” of behavior which serves as a model for what the students should do in a particular developmental stage (gredler, 2009). for example, parental language input/model provided by parents may guide the child in producing language and developing language complexity (sundari, 2016a). in other words, the adults, parents or teachers help the students in controlling task elements, provide guidance to do the tasks, and assess the students’ understanding. the classroom setting is a place where a learning process between the students, as active receivers and the teacher as a more competent adult takes place through interactions. in the classroom, both parties, who are influenced by their status, identity and roles, create a small community with specific characteristics to attain the same learning goals. the language classroom, in this case, shows proofs of how language learning fundamentally occurs when the students actively and orally interact with each other for task completion. moreover, in the language classroom, the oral interaction is not only facilitating learning, but also the source of both what the students learn and how they learn (thoms, 2012). in general, gredler (2009) argues that the teacher in the classroom becomes a model for appropriate behavior and provides guidance and assistance as the students work through the tasks as mediation. it can be stated that the teacher in the language classroom has to be a model of language for the students; at the same time, they help and lead them to enhance their language development through various types of mediation. the concept of mediation in language learning was firstly offered by vygotskian approach and feuerstein’s theory of mediation. the sociocultural theory views that the development of language ability is shaped in social interactions through participating in communicative practices hanna sundari the features of mediation in efl classroom interaction: teacher perspectives 36 with guidance and assistance from a more competent participant (thoms, 2012). the guidance and assistance then can be called mediation. meanwhile, the one with the most knowledge, usually a parent, a teacher, or a peer is known as the mediator (williams & burden, 2007). in mediated-learning experience, feuerstein explains that visualizations, written explanation, models and examples are provided by mediators to stimulate the students to perform tasks (poehner & infante, 2017). these put in mind, a mediation which is selected by the teacher in the classroom can be in various types and categories depending on several considerations, such as students’ abilities, learning objectives, and targeted tasks. in a very simple term, mediation can be referred to as the use of tools which are applied to solve a problem or achieve a goal (williams & burden, 2007). the mediation can be in the form of the use of language or other sign symbols, such as charts, graphs, numbers, or objects; however, it is mostly delivered in linguistics and symbols so that guidance and assistance can be defined as mediation (thoms, 2012). the function of mediation is to help the students move from the zone of incapability to that of ability to perform tasks. it is called zone of proximal development (zpd), which is “the difference between what a learner can do without help and what a learner can do with help” (siyepu, 2013). in the language classroom, mediation, given by a more competent teacher or peer, leads the students in acquiring, experimenting and interacting language resources so that they can accomplish the tasks and promote language development. moreover, lantolf (2000) in atamturk et al. (2018) states that language is a metaphorical tool of mediation and parents or teachers act as mediators to scaffold learning processes. in mediated-learning experience, the cognitive and affective domains are inseparable in learning processes; as a result, feuerstein (2003) cited by poehner and infante (2017) states that affective elements, such as feeling of competence and belief of positive behavior, might have implications on the students’ orientation and performance. therefore, in presenting a task, the teacher, as a mediator and a mediation herself, should select appropriate mediation that requires some criteria. vygotsky believes that with proper assistance provided by the mediator teacher, a student at the zpd can enhance the achievement to accomplish a particular task (galloway, 2001) in (siyepu, 2013). the key features of mediation proposed by feuerstein (in williams & burden, 2007) are displayed on table 1. much of the research in second language learning and teaching is concerned with mediated processes particularly in the language classroom. the first and the foremost review is rendered by lantolf (2000). he reviewed the research in second language learning as a mediated process for over 5 years and summarized that, as stated in the previous part, mediation can be in the form of social mediation, self-mediation, and artifact mediation which give implications to language learning and performance. moreover, a study by behroozizad, nambiar and amir (2012) taking six iranian students found that scaffolding provided by the teacher mediates the english-asa-foreign-language (efl) student’s strategy development by reorganizing the classroom culture. besides, the research carried out by tulung (2013) in indonesia gives a proof from the classroom that oral discourses generated through peer interactions using communicative tasks lead to the opportunities for second language (l2) production and decrease the use of l1. in addition, kourieos and evripidou's (2013) study of characteristics and teaching behaviors in cyprus found that, based on students’ perceptions, effective language teaching is seemingly connected to assumptions of a more assisting, mediating role of the language teacher instead of an authoritarian role of the said teacher. although a great deal of research has been conducted in the field of second/foreign language learning as a mediated process, some areas particularly in the foreign language setting are still uncovered. many studies have been carried out in the esl/efl language setting in the university context while a few studies investigate contexts in which the students are beginner language learners in primary or secondary schools. then, some works have been conducted in exploring classroom discourses and students’ perceptions in the language classroom. however, only little research has been undertaken to discover teachers’ perspectives about how they mediate language learning through interactions and why they finally select the types of mediation for the classroom. indeed, the teacher, as a mediator in the language classroom, plays a significant role and authority in shaping the form of interactions and teaching as well as helping the beginner language students establish relationships, develop language skills and build a perception of what they experience. this may give implications and consequences to the process indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 37 and result of language learning years after. to fill the research niche, this current study is to address the following research question: what features of mediation do the teacher apply in efl classroom interactions at lower secondary school based on an indonesian teacher’s perspective? table 1. the key features of mediation by feuerstein (williams & burden, 2007) features of mediation descriptions significance aware of the significance of the learning task purpose beyond here and now aware of wider relevance beyond immediate time and place shared intention a clear intention (understood and reciprocated by the students) a sense of competence feeling of being successful in doing particular tasks control of behavior regulating learning, thinking and action goal-setting setting realistic goals and ways to achieve them challenge providing suitable challenge to the students’ current capabilities awareness of change recognizing changes a belief in positive behavior the possibility in finding solutions sharing solving problems cooperatively individuality recognizing own individuality and uniqueness a sense of belonging belonging to a community and culture method as a part of inquiry into language classroom interactions, this current research is qualitativebased. in qualitative research, one of the characteristics is to empower participants to share their voices under the participants’ contexts/settings using some instruments to induce and establish patterns and themes to address a problem or issue (creswell, 2007). this current study is aimed at exploring the features of mediation applied by english teacher in efl learning environment. the research site was one private junior high school in jakarta, the capital of indonesia. the participant of the research was one english language teacher whose name was yanti (a pseudonym). she was special since she had unique and interesting teaching experience. from the initial classroom observation, yanti employed very attractive and engaging classroom activities when building interactions with the students. yanti has been teaching english at lower secondary schools for more than 17 years in four different schools, both public and private schools, including the one in which this research took place. despite the fact that she was graduated from a non-education major, yanti had a high passion in teaching and decided to improve her professional teaching qualifications by taking a master’s degree program in education. moreover, she also becomes one of teacher trainers in her current institution she works for. the teaching experience, dedication, and career development make her appropriate to be recruited as participant. to collect the data, the instruments used were classroom observation/recordings and interviews. classroom observation/recordings were taken 5 times in approximately 3 hours 40 minutes for identifying the features of mediation applied by the teacher in classrooms for grade 7. moreover, the interview lasted for approximately 80 minutes in exploring deeper understanding about the features applied based on the teacher’s perspectives, ideas, and thoughts. the interview was then transcribed verbatim. the data from both observation and interviews were analyzed following the steps in open coding and developing themes. after that, the emerging themes were classified and discussed from the view of key features of mediation by feuerstein (williams & burden, 2007). results and discussion from the collected data, not all features of mediation clearly came into view when the participant teacher, yanti, mediated language learning through interactions in the classroom. however, it was revealed that the feature of shared intention in which classroom strategies built by students’ understanding of what the activity was all about and how they had to do it was the most frequently applied and emerged in the classroom. the data were then presented based on the three main features of mediation: significance, purpose beyond here and now, and shared intention. after that, the other features were also described and discussed. in general, it could be seen that the features of the mediation in language learning could be mediated by everything that played a role in either providing language resources or simulating the use of the target language. in the classroom, the participant teacher and the students mostly hanna sundari the features of mediation in efl classroom interaction: teacher perspectives 38 had an asymmetrical relation; this went exactly as reported by consolo's (2006) study. therefore, the teacher, yanti, as the more competent, knowledgeable participant, had the authority to manage classroom activities and control the students’ activities particularly in english in the foreign language classroom with especially beginner-level students at the secondary school. all objects in the class could be used as mediation, including the teacher herself as the main mediation by using language and symbols in interactions and communication. as gredler (2009) points out, the teacher serves as an ideal model to appropriate behavior and provides guidance when the students perform the tasks. possessing seventeen years of experience in teaching english at lower secondary schools, yanti, of course, has faced a great number of students in many classes from different cultures and backgrounds. despite the fact that she did not take the education major, she pursues a professional career in teaching and now attends her master’s degree program in the english education major. having taught a lot of classes, she finally concludes that her major teaching goal in lower secondary schools (smp) is to change the image or give a positive impression of the english subject among students. from the interview, she asserted that “they have just known english since attending smp (lower secondary school). at that time, they did not like it. so, i have to change it. english is fun; english is something worth learning. my current passion in teaching is to make them love english…at least they love me”. by delivering fun english, she expects that the students will love it. at least, they turn to want to study it because of her. in short, she, as a teacher, posits herself as the mediation as well as the mediator to bridge the students and the subject because the teacher and the subject taught are inseparable being in one package. besides the fact that the teacher needs to have knowledge, pedagogical and communicative competences, good personality traits, such as being helpful, friendly, humorous and attentive, which all make the students love the teacher are also prominent characteristics of effective language teachers (nghia, 2015; shishavan & sadeghi, 2009; sundari, 2016b; wichadee, 2010). though the participant teacher did not explicitly share and verbally convey to the students what the significance of any given activity was, it was clearly seen that she carefully selected a particular activity which was not only to enhance language proficiency, but also to build characters in the students. for instance, she set class rules at the first meeting, such as saying please to show politeness and using islamic expressions such as excellent, alhamdullilah to show the islamic values as required by the school system. moreover, in mediating, she also tried to help the students perceive the values by giving clear direction, repetition, elicitation. those practices depicted the key features of significance in mediation. concerned with the students, yanti, the participant teacher, highly realized what she worked on. she really noticed who the students were, what class she entered and how she dealt with them. she thought that every student was unique. she believed that language is like “a recording” that needs a lot of exposure. learning language is not just memorizing a set of rules and imitating sound patterns; moreover, the students need to experience and use the language in various types of communication with the teacher and/or others. therefore, the purpose of language learning is not only to perform given tasks inside the classroom, but also to get competences leading them to better language performance in the next grade. not only having a very clear view about language learning, she also revealed that adjustment in teaching methods and learning styles was frequent in planning and lessons. for example, when handling classes with kinesthetic students, she prepared some games that required the students to move around. meanwhile, a set of songs was also made ready as an attention getter for passive auditory students. experiencing the language that leads to meaningful learning by making adjustment of teaching methods and setting several opening activities can be pointed out as one feature of purpose beyond here and now (table 2). table 2. features of purpose beyond here and now 1. making adjustment of teaching methods to the students’ learning styles 2. experiencing the language, not only miming 3. setting several opening activities 4. creating meaningful learning the shared intention was the most salient feature in mediating language learning (table 3). from the classroom observation, there could be listed some strategies applied by the participant indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 39 teacher in describing precisely what she wanted the students to do and ensuring that the students understood exactly what was required of them to do. using tools, such as audio-recordings, movies, and songs were alternative features to sharpen the purpose and perception. she uttered that she modeled several samples of greeting cards before asking them to make one. by giving a lot of exposure, she expected that the students could comprehend, modify, and produce language related to a required task, namely, making greeting cards as a sample using their own ideas and language resources. moreover, slow pace, confirmation, repetition, and the use of l1 were chosen to make sure that the students understood what to do in the given task and had the willingness and ability to do it. slow pace as a characteristics of teacher talk is also found in studies by rashidi and rafieerad (2010), sundari (2017) and walsh (2011). then, the use of l1 as a medium of instruction for beginner language students is also similar to harmer's view (2007) and research reported by petek (2013) and sundari (2017). table 3. features of shared intention 1. daily repetition, short expressions and questions 2. writing the expressions on the whiteboard 3. giving fill-in expressions for classroom language 4. setting class rules, such as using polite expressions for permission 5. explaining step-by-step activities 6. confirmation check by asking questions 7. preferring the use of l1 when needed 8. giving a chance to respond in indonesian 9. giving exposure or model texts 10. completing the materials using technology 11. reminding the students to use english 12. giving help and guidance when deemed necessary 13. reading aloud the model texts and giving more samples 14. asking one student to present her description in front of the class 15. demonstrating the targeted dialogue 16. asking the students to read aloud the text 17. asking the students to nominate other students 18. being a language model for the students 19. playing the teacher-made recorded audio for the listening section 20. writing all words discussed on the whiteboard 21. slowing down the speed when deemed needed in line with the major goal of her teaching, the participant teacher created a fun and enjoyable classroom climate to encourage the students’ positive self-image. she revealed that she tried to give feedback proportionally by avoiding facethreatening acts for the students. fostering them to express themselves in english, even though it was wrong, with no fear of failure or being blamed mediated the learning to make the students gain confidence in using the language and feel competent. in mediating the sense of competence, proportional feedback, chance to use the language, humor and praise as the features of mediation could enhance the feeling of confidence and competence (table 4). not only facilitating a positive climate for the students to feel competent in doing the tasks, the participant teacher also mediated challenge in the class to improve the students’ language use through leveling questions and tasks and giving rewards. the participant teacher said that the questions were gradually delivered depending on the students’ excellence. the more excellent the students turned, the more complex the questions became. for grade nine, she thought that the students were quite ready for logical, analytical questions. moreover, she also said that she had already prepared a list of questions for various activities. sometimes, several questions were for a similar purpose in a case where the students did not understand them in the first place. for instance, she modified her questions: what should you do after this? what do you have to do? or after this, you have to do what? number one? two? giving repeated questions is also found in a study by rido (2017); he states that teachers delivered questions repeatedly when there was no response or when they were not sure that the students understood the question. to give a feeling of challenge, once she set a group competition in the form of a whispering-horse activity for the listening and speaking sections hanna sundari the features of mediation in efl classroom interaction: teacher perspectives 40 with hobbies as the topic. in another activity, the students were asked to write down their answers on the whiteboard; then she announced the best students of the day and gave them rewards. the participant teacher mediated challenge in the language learning through leveling questions and tasks, competitions, and rewards (table 5). table 4. features of sense of competence 1. class feedback (evaluation) or personal feedback 2. not focusing on grammar rules 3. lecturing no more 4. giving praise or appreciation 5. chance to use the language though wrong 6. room for humor 7. calling the students’ names with fairness 8. extending the time 9. facilitating the students’ requests the participant teacher then mediated change by mapping the students’ abilities and giving monitor and assessment (table 6). she said that she gave a simple written test as a placement test at the first years of teaching to decide what kind of treatment she had to give. different classes needed different treatment, she said. over the time, with more experience to handle classes, she just opened a conversation with the students for the ice-breaking purposes at the first meeting. after that, the treatment for the class was decided. meanwhile, during the class activity, when the students performed the given task or did language exercises in pairs or in groups, she moved around the class to monitor and give feedback and help when deemed needed. she gave correction or remedy to all students’ answers either on the whiteboard or in the books. she also provided some praise for several outstanding performances. therefore, she mediated the change of students’ performance by giving oral and written tasks, such as completion and reading tests and evaluating how well the students could accomplish them. how feedback is effective in learning processes and outcome is also reported by behroozizad, nambiar and amir (2012). they sum up that in general, teacher feedback connects the students, self-confidence and the use of language particularly for listening-speaking tasks. table 5. features of challenge 1. levels of questions 2. levels of task difficulty such as leveling worksheets 3. announcing the best students of the day 4. giving rewards the participant teacher then mediated change by mapping the students’ abilities and giving monitor and assessment (table 6). she said that she gave a simple written test as a placement test at the first years of teaching to decide what kind of treatment she had to give. different classes needed different treatment, she said. over the time, with more experience to handle classes, she just opened a conversation with the students for the ice-breaking purposes at the first meeting. after that, the treatment for the class was decided. meanwhile, during the class activity, when the students performed the given task or did language exercises in pairs or in groups, she moved around the class to monitor and give feedback and help when deemed needed. she gave correction or remedy to all students’ answers either on the whiteboard or in the books. she also provided some praise for several outstanding performances. therefore, she mediated the change of students’ performance by giving oral and written tasks, such as completion and reading tests and evaluating how well the students could accomplish them. how feedback is effective in learning processes and outcome is also reported by behroozizad, nambiar and amir (2012). they sum up that in general teacher feedback connects the students, self-confidence and the use of language particularly for listening-speaking tasks. table 6. features of awareness of change 1. mapping the students’ abilities 2. providing different activities for different classes 3. assessing the students’ performance indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 41 4. monitoring the students one by one by moving around the class furthermore, the participant teacher mediated the feature of sharing by setting class activities in the mode of small groups, pair groups and individual activities. she said that the language proficiency and types of activity became consideration in setting the class mode. the class with excellent students tended to actively do all the required tasks both individually and in small groups, while the low-achieving students were more dependent and non-autonomous. this view is quite similar to what harmer (2007) asserts that individual activities foster autonomy and independence while pair and group work facilitate the use of language with peers. then, the participant teacher finally preferred three to four students in one group that she considered to be quite effective for a language class. the lower level the students were, the smaller the group setting had to be, she concluded. classroom modes in the combination of individuals, pair and group activities are also reported by behroozizad, nambiar and amir (2012), nisa (2014), and sundari, rafli and ridwan (2017). in mediating individuality, particularly for grade nine as the highest grade in smp, the participant teacher stated that she gave opportunities to the students to express their personal ideas and individual choices. meanwhile, for the lower grades, exposure by giving a lot of samples or model texts from the teacher was emphasized to enrich the students’ language repertoire. from the classroom observation/recording, the participant teacher provided tasks for each meeting in each class to accomplish particular learning objectives. using one task activity for each meeting, she could mediate, though not always, several areas of mediation features. table 7. samples of task activities and features of mediation task activities features of mediation task activity 1 using a worksheet, each student has to ask two classmates, who sit on the opposite and diagonal sides, about their hobbies based on a set of pictures on the sheet. then, they present the result orally. in the language learning view, the purpose of the task is to learn simple present tense in expressing hobbies particularly for speaking and listening skills. however, at another phase, it has a value to get better understanding and use of the language in real communication. the teacher mediates individuality for the students to have ample room to show their own choices with no feeling of incompetence. reflection given by the teacher when asking “what have we learned today? mediates the awareness of change that the students make in their language development, in this case expressing hobbies using simple present tense. setting the class in a mode that leads them to communicate to others, the teacher mediates sharing when they help each other to solve a problem. task activity 2 the class is divided into groups of five by asking them to count to five. each similar number combines together to make one group to play a whisperinghorse game. each student whispers a friend’s hobbies and hers to the student next to her. then, the last student in the group writes all the answers on the whiteboard. this task focuses on speaking and writing skills, and the topic is expressing hobbies using simple present tense. by selecting an appropriate task that fits on the grid, the teacher makes the students feel successful, mediating a sense of competence. to mediate challenge and change, the teacher evaluates the answers, gives correction when deemed needed, and provides rewards to the group with the best performance. task activity 3 using a worksheet, the students are assigned to write things in the classroom and rooms at the school in the provided table. then, the teacher plays the teacher-made recording audio about the same topic and asks the students to fill in the blanks in the text based on the description they hear. though this kind of activity sounds common in the listening section, it also brings the value of students’ building vocabulary and using language resources. initiating the activity with a discussion can mediate sharing by constructing behavior such as listening attentively, taking turns, checking and cooperating. hanna sundari the features of mediation in efl classroom interaction: teacher perspectives 42 based on the findings, by selecting one particular task activity and selective classroom discourse in building interactions, the participant teacher mediated some areas of mediation. the task activities and the classroom discourses delivered by the teacher could mediate the value of the lesson, give the students the opportunity to use the language through interactions, and enhance their language capability without feeling incompetence. furthermore, the classroom climate created by the teacher drove the students to enjoy and get involved in the task activities. in line with vygotsky’s sociocultural view (gredler, 2009), it can be concluded that the participant teacher has effectively accomplished her role as the ideal-form of behavior and a language model for the students. the teacher provided assistance by fulfilling the students’ needs and creating an effective classroom context (atamturk et al., 2018). in addition, the participant teacher has effectively become a mediation and a mediator to mediate some features of mediation in presenting the lesson by providing fruitful task activities in the classroom interaction. these findings are also consistent with what is stated by atkinson, derry, renkl and wortham (2000) in siyepu (2013) that learning environment is the most effective when a dynamic interaction between the teacher, students, and task brings plenty of room for the students to create understanding during interactions. conclusion constructed with the sociocultural theory and mediation theory by feuerstein in mind, this paper is aimed at describing the features of mediation applied by english language teachers in lower secondary schools in the efl learning environment. the findings show that the participant teacher mostly mediates the features of purpose and shared intention by selecting tasks, using teaching media and manipulating classroom discourses, such as talk, questions, intonation and pace, and demonstration. moreover, in mediating challenge and change, she applies some leveled tasks and questions, gives praise and rewards, and monitors assessment to evaluate how the students could climb up the stairs of knowledge and performance. in addition, having good personality traits as a teacher, she succeeds particularly in dealing with beginner language students at lower secondary schools. she plays her role as an ideal form of behavior and language model as well as encourages the students to feel the success of doing the tasks without feeling of failure or incompetence by creating a fun classroom climate. experience in attending many classes and handling various kinds of students leads her to know exactly what the students need in learning the language and how they can fulfill the needs. this research does not address the evaluation of how effective the teacher mediates language learning in the classroom interaction, nor does it assess the success in the teacher’s teaching process. however, especially with beginner-level students in the efl context in mind, these research findings have proven that the more knowledgeable, experienced participant, namely, the teacher in this case, plays a significant role in mediating the students to meet the learning objectives and accomplish the tasks as well as facilitate their language development refrences atamturk, n., atamturk, h., & dimililer, c. 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(2007). psychology for language teachers: a social constructivist approach. cambridge: cambridge university press. hanna sundari the features of mediation in efl classroom interaction: teacher perspectives 44 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 165 strengthening reading comprehension and interest through sq3r strategy using whatsapp during pandemic d. abdul kohar english education department, univesitas terbuka, indonesia email: abdoelkohar@gmail.com andang saehu english literature department, uin sunan gunung djati bandung, indonesia email: andangsaehu@uinsgd.ac.id lidwina sri ardiasih english education department, universitas terbuka, indonesia email: lidwina@ecampus.ut.ac.id apa citation: kohar, d. a., saehu, a., & ardiasih, l. s. (2022). strengthening reading comprehension and interest through sq3r strategy using whatsapp during pandemic. indonesian efl journal, 8(2), 165-176. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v8i2.6440 received: 07-03-2021 accepted: 14-05-2022 published: 31-07-2022 introduction the study of central connecticut state university stated that indonesian’s reading interest ranked 60th out of 61 countries, and it was below thailand in 59th and above botswana in 61st position (antaranews, 2020). indonesian people had not good english reading although they had studied english texts since elementary school (iftanti, 2012), and their english proficiency is considered relatively low (rinantanti, rahman, atmowardoyo & bin-taher, 2017). the average of students’ english reading mark in junior high school was about 50.23 (kemendikbud, 2019). furthermore, the problem of lower reading interest was faced by english teachers of madrasah tsanawiyah negeri 6 cianjur. they said that students’ reading test in academic year 2018/2019 was unsatisfying, and some of them were not interested in reading english. moreover, because of the effect of corona virus, the indonesian government has instructed all institutions to limit their affairs including schools. they should work from the home as stated in the circular letter of ministry of empowerment of abstract: the study employed the pre-test and post-test control group design focusing on strengthening reading comprehension and reading interest during the pandemic time using whatsapp platform through survey, question, read, recite and review (sq3r) strategy. the participants were the students of ninth graders of mtsn 6 cianjur who were selected randomly to be the experimental and control classes. the instruments were the prepost reading comprehension test and reading interest questionnaire especially on three dimensions; situational, individual and topic. the validity and reliability of both instruments were confirmed before applying them in the study. the analysis revealed that significant score (2 tailed) or (p) of post-reading comprehension test obtained by both experimental and control classes was 0%. since it was less than 5%, the significant difference was confirmed, and the result quality of experimental class on reading comprehension was higher than control class. it decided that sq3r strategy had strengthened reading comprehension skill. moreover, all significant scores (2 tailed) or (p) of post-reading interest questionnaire on three dimensions obtained by both experimental and control classes were 0%. as they were less than 5%, the significant difference was confirmed, and the result quality of experimental class on reading interest was higher than control class. it exposed that sq3r strategy had strengthened reading interest. therefore, sq3r strategy strengthened reading comprehension skill and reading interest using whatsapp platform. furthermore, sq3r strategy was an alternative reading strategy in the pandemic time. however, the stakeholder should support it by providing free internet access and other requirements, and the study should be deepened by conducting other research especially qualitative study to enrich the scope of research. keywords: sq3r strategy; reading comprehension; reading interest; pandemic time; whatsapp. d. abdul kohar, andang saehu, & lidwina sri ardiasih strengthening reading comprehension and interest through sq3r strategy using whatsapp during pandemic 166 state apparatus and bureaucracy reforms about work system of civil servant in new normal 58/2020. shortly, the school has to change from the face to face class to the online class or e-learning class which refers to a learning utilizing electronically technology in interacting and conveying the material (suciati, wardani, winataputra, melati, dina & herry, 2016) that will be more challenging especially in teaching reading. furthermore, reading plays an important thing to add knowledge, enhance the high level of life, and survive in this word as bigozzi, tarchi, vignoli, valente & pinto (2017) said that reading is to achieve the goal, develop the knowledge and potential, and participate in the society. it is in line with brown (2004) said that if reading is emphasized in the young learners’ curriculum from the very beginning of their language education, the young children will progress faster not only in learning to read, but also in understanding and speaking the language. indeed, it is a crucial thing to do because the information runs fast by developing technology. safaeia & bulca (2013) said that by reading and freedom of choice, the students can experience a new practice that might have a motivating impact on their language learning. thus, reading must be a habit of life that will support the success of learning process. based on that condition, this research was expected to be one of the solutions through examining sq3r strategy to strengthen students’ reading comprehension and reading interest in the online class. sq3r is a reading comprehension strategy standing for its five steps: survey, question, read, recite, and review. this strategy was introduced firstly by francis p. robinson, an american education philosopher in his 1946 book effective study. he said that sq3r is a useful strategy for fully absorbing written information (robinson, 1946), and it is an effective strategy to get a fuller understanding to improve subject matter mastery (fleming, 2020). the previous research found that sq3r is very effective for teaching reading comprehension (anjarwati, 2012), and it can improve students’ reading ability (sabarun, 2012). moreover, teaching reading comprehension using sq3r is very useful because it is a suitable strategy to improve students’ reading comprehension (anjuni & cahyadi, 2019; dharma & abdullah, 2013). baier (2011), kusumayanthi & maulidi (2019) and masruuroh (2015) recommended using sq3r strategy in teaching reading and found that sq3r technique is significant in teaching reading. moreover, sq3r strategy can help students to develop reading comprehension (bulut, 2017; prasutiyo 2014; riyadi, nuryani & hartati, 2019; widiawati, nuraida & saputri, 2020). the previous research mostly concerned with reading comprehension in the face to face class using action research, survey, and case study, and they didn’t concern with students’ reading interest. however, this present research was conducted in the online class using the quasi experimental method, and it focused on examining reading comprehension and investigating reading interest using whatsapp platform during the pandemic time. in line with that statement, the study tried to answer the following question: (1) how different is the result quality of reading comprehension achieved by the ninth graders of mtsn 6 cianjur who are taught through sq3r strategy and those who are taught through conventional strategy during the pandemic time? (2) how different is the result quality of reading interest level achieved by the ninth graders of mtsn 6 cianjur who are taught through sq3r strategy and those who are taught through conventional strategy during the pandemic time? method this study applied a quasi experimental method in which the participants of control and experiment class were non random assignment; it meant that both of them were not changed anymore. it used pre-test and post-test control group design type (wibawa, basuki. mahdiyah & afgani, 2016; nayak, 2016) as stated in the following table. table 1. table of pre-test and post-test control group design select the control class pre-test no treatment post-test select the experimental class pre-test experimental treatment post-test it began with the pre-treatment session using two classes, and both of them were tested as a pre-test, the second was treatment session by creating control class (the class using the conventional strategy) and experimental class (the class using the sq3r strategy), and the last was post-treatment indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 167 session; both groups were tested as post-test to be compared each other. the populations were 278 students of ninth graders of mtsn 6 cianjur. selecting the sample used random sampling technique that all students of ninth grades of mtsn 6 cianjur had a chance to be a sample of this research (mahdiyah, 2016). the samples were 60 students including 30 students of ix h and 30 students of ix i. furthermore, the role of the researcher was a designer of reading comprehension test and reading interest questionnaire. the researcher collaborated with an english teacher (vn) and gave him guidance especially in lesson plan, material and the schedule to match the perception. besides that, brief meeting in every meeting was done to know the condition of teaching learning process in the online class for both experimental and control classes. those activities were done to reduce the bias and get the reasonable result in this experiment (mahdiyah, 2016). the teaching learning process was conducted in the online class for both control and experimental class using whatsapp group, and both classes got six meetings, there were two meetings in a week, so the treatment finished in three weeks. both control and experimental classes had three stages of teaching learning process (mukminatien, suryati, febrianti, furaidah, 2016), the first one is pre reading, the second one is whilst reading, and the third is post reading stage.the experimental class used sq3r strategy and control class used conventional strategy. in addition, both classes had same materials namely finding topic, main idea, detailed information, preference, and inference in the english text. the reading comprehension test and the reading interest questionnaire were used as the instruments. the reading comprehension test was adapted from national exam from 2007 to 2019 including finding topic, main idea, detailed information, preference, and inference as the following table. table 2. the basic competence (bc) and indicators of reading comprehension test no basic competency indicators focus the number of questions 1 3.7. comparing the meaning contextually relating to the social function, text structure and language used of short and simple narrative text relating to the fairy tales. 3.7.1. students can be able to comprehend the content of the story well (topic and main idea) topic 4 main idea 2 3.7.2. students can be able to comprehend the detailed information of the story perfectly detailed informatio n 2 3.7.3. students can be able to identify the reference in the text of the story well reference 3 3.7.4. students can be able to infer the hidden information in the text easily. inference 4 the total number of questions 15 questions it consisted 15 questions formed in the feature of google form with the link https://forms.gle/iwyanv7kntrjenc3a. it was a standardized test because the test instrument had been validated by national board of education in indonesia (bsnp). thus, it indicated that it had not to be validated gain. besides that, the national examination (ne) was reliable because it had been standardized by national board of education in indonesia (bsnp), and it was based on the curriculum for the junior high school. the standardized test means that the test had a standard, and it through national board of education in indonesia (bsnp) had passed some steps as fachrurozy & tresnadewi (2017) and saehu (2015) stated they are assessment preparation, writing the test, critical review, trying out, revision, and the last is final form of test . based on that, the researcher used reading comprehension test adapted from national examination (ne) in this study without conducting validity test and reliability test to it. the reading interest questionnaire was adapted from eidswick (2009) including situational, individual, and topic interest. their validity and reliability were confirmed before applying them in the study. it was written in indonesian language and shaped in the feature of google form in the link https://forms.gl/ck2fqpm1dodttjsy7. it was validated by the expert as the following table. d. abdul kohar, andang saehu, & lidwina sri ardiasih strengthening reading comprehension and interest through sq3r strategy using whatsapp during pandemic 168 table 3. the blueprint of reading interest questionnaire no dimension indicators the total 1 situational interest a. textual coherence and comprehensibility b. novelty c. personal relevance 2 2 2 2 individual interest a. a desire to acquire new information, b. a desire to find out about new objects, events, and ideas not restricted to any narrow domain 2 3 3 topic interest a. individual knowledge b. individual experiences c. individual perceived valuae of a topic 1 2 3 total number of questionnaires 17 the validated questionnaire was tried out to 25 students that they were not the subjects of this research. the first dimensian is situational interest including 6 items. the analysis of reliability statistic of first dimension items was shown in the following table. table 4. the reliability statistisc of situational dimension reliability statistics cronbach's alpha 89% cronbach's alpha based on standardized items 89% n of items 6 it indicated that the coefficient reliability of cronbach alpha was 89% for the dimension of situational interest. if the cronbach’s alpha is higher than 60%, the item is reliable (nurgiyantoro, gunawan & marzuki, 2015). based on that, the item of situational interest was reliable because it was higher than 60%. the second dimension namely individual interest contained 5 items. the analysis reliability statistic of individual items was shown below. table 5. the reliability statistics of individual dimension reliability statistics cronbach's alpha 86% cronbach's alpha based on standardized items 86% n of items 5 it shown that the coefficient reliability of cronbach alpha 86% for the personal dimension. the cronbach alpha must be higher than 60% to get the reliable item (nurgiyantoro et al., 2015). based on that, the item of personal interest was reliable because it was higher than 60% (86% > 60%). meanwhile, the third dimension namely topic interest included 5 items. the analysis reliability statistic of topic interest items was shown in the following table. table 6. the reliability statistics of topic dimension reliability statistics cronbach's alpha 87% cronbach's alpha based on standardized items 87% n of items 6 it indicated that the coefficient reliability of cronbach alpha was 87% for the dimension of topic interest. if the cronbach’s alpha is higher than 60%, the item is reliable (nurgiyantoro et al., 2015). based on that, the item of topic interest was reliable because it was higher than 60%. based on that result of analysis for all items of three dimensions, the reading interest questionnaire was reliable, and it could be used in this study. after having both validated and reliable instruments, the study was done. the process of analyzing data used spss 24 (statistical package for social science), and the significance level used α: 5%. the levene’s test was used to determine the equality of variance (homogeneity). the liliefors was used to do the test of normality of data. the normality test was aimed to check whether the obtained data was distributed normally.the t-test was used to determine the difference of both classes’ data (nurgiyantoro et al., 2015; mahdiyah, 2016). indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 169 results and discussion the useful finding of this study was that the sq3r strategy can strengthen the students’ reading comprehension and interest during the pandemic time using the whatsapp platform. reading comprehension it was the focus of the study. it refers to the process of constructing the meaning of written text on screen or reading on paper (jati, 2018) using the strategy (fachrurozy & tresnadewi, 2017) between reader’s and author’s background and knowledge (mukminatien et al., 2016). the result analysis of post-reading comprehension test produced by both experimental and control classes was displayed below. table 7. the t-test result of post-reading comprehension of experimental and control classes group statistics class n mean std. deviation std. error mean post reading comprehension test experiment 30 8600% 960% 180% control 30 7200% 950% 170% independent samples test levene's test for equality of variances t-test for equality of means f sig. t df sig. (2tailed) mean difference std. error difference 95% confidence interval of the difference lower upp er post reading comprehension test equal variances assumed 14% 71% 579% 5800% 0% 1433% 247% 938% 192 9% equal variances not assumed 579% 5799% 0% 1433% 247% 938% 192 9% the table shown that the mean score obtained by experimental class was 86, and control class got 72. it meant that the means obtained by experimental class was higher than control class. in addition, the t-value in the table was 579% and sig (2 tailed) was 0% that was less than 5%. nurgiyantoro et al., (2015) said that if significance score (2 tailed) was less than 5%, there were significant differences between both classes. based on that, there was the significant difference between both classes on the result quality of reading comprehension skill, and the result quality reading comprehension skill of experimental class was more improved than control class. furthermore, it was strengthened by the experimental class’s improvement which was revealed by comparing the result of their prereading comprehension test score and their postreading comprehension test score. the analysis of their pre-reading comprehension test score and their post-reading comprehension test score was displayed in the following table. table 8. the analysis result of experimental class’s pre and post-reading comprehension test score paired samples statistics mean n std. deviation std. error mean pair 1 pre test reading comprehension experimental class 5400% 30 990% 180% post test reading comprehension experimental class 8600% 30 960% 180% paired samples test paired differences t df sig. (2-mean std. std. 95% confidence d. abdul kohar, andang saehu, & lidwina sri ardiasih strengthening reading comprehension and interest through sq3r strategy using whatsapp during pandemic 170 deviation error mean interval of the difference taile d) lower upper pair 1 pre test reading comprehension experimental class post test reading comprehension experimental class 3200% 725% 132% -3507% -2966% -2445% 2900% 0% it shown that 54 was the mean score of pre reading comprehension test obtained by experimental class, and 86 was the mean score of post reading comprehension test obtained by experimental. it decided that the mean obtained by experimental class in the post reading comprehension test was higher than mean obtained by experimental class in the pre reading comprehension test. moreover, the t-value in the table was 2445%, and sig (2 tailed) was 0% that was less than 5% (sig (2 tailed) < 5%). it established that there were significant differences between score of pre reading comprehension test and score of post reading comprehension test obtained by experimental class as nurgiyantoro et al., (2015) said that if significance score (2 tailed) was less than 5%, there were significant differences between both classes. in short, it proved that implementing sq3r strategy effectively strengthened the result quality of reading comprehension skill. in essence, there was the significant difference between both classes on the result quality of reading comprehension skill, and the experimental class’s result quality of reading comprehension skill was higher than control class. based on that explanation, there was confirmation of significant result quality in reading comprehension achieved through sq3r strategy comparing to conventional strategy during the pandemic time using the whatsapp platform. thus, sq3r strategy strengthened the reading comprehension. it proved that sq3r was useful strategy for fully absorbing written information (robinson, 1946), it was very effective for teaching reading comprehension (anjarwati, 2012). teaching reading using sq3r was very useful because it was a suitable strategy to improve students’ reading comprehension (dharma & abdullah, 2013; anjuni & cahyadi, 2019). furthermore, the sq3r strategy was recommended in teaching reading (baier, 2011; kusumayanthi & maulidi, 2019), and it could help students to develop reading comprehension (bulut, 2017; prasutiyo, 2014; riyadi, nuryani & hartati, 2019; sabarun, 2012; widiawati, nuraida & saputri , 2020). in addition, students were guided by the steps of sq3r. the students surveyed the text by scanning or paying attention to the title, picture, and difficult words carefully, found out what the writer wanted to convey, and asked the teacher if they did not understand in the whatsapp group or consult the online dictionary (survey and question).they read again the text actively while keeping the previous steps in their mind (read).they were asked to read loudly and make a summary of the text that they have read (recite). they reviewed what they had read and paid attention to the difficult one in order to comprehend the text well (review). thus, they could comprehend text easily, and it was an effective strategy to get a fuller understanding to improve subject matter mastery (fleming, 2020). moreover, it proved that using technology such as whatsapp could help teacher and students to get the learning objectives and meaningful learning, and the students can learn individually and collectively in that technology (jati, 2018). furthermore, whatsapp was significant to be the learning tool (yudhiantara & saehu, 2018), and it not only improved listening skill (nurhayati, 2020) and writing skill (susanti & tutmuji, 2016), but also it improved the result quality of reading comprehension skill as found in the study. thus, the novelty of this sudy lied in strengthening reading comprehension through sq3r strategy in the online class using whatsapp platform in the pandemic time. reading interest it was another focus in this study that was implemented through sq3r strategy using whatsapp during pandemic time. it refers to students’ fascination of something or individual’s interaction with certain object that will influence to students’ reading comprehension because learning is influenced strongly by interest (eidswick, 2009). indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 171 the students will be more persistence, engagement, and positive affect toward tasks if they are interested in that task (ainley, hidi, berndorrf, 2002). the data was obtained from the pre and post reading interest questionnaire. the result analysis of post-reading interest questionnaire on three dimensions; situational, individual and topic interest was shown below. table 9. the t-test result of post-reading interest of experimental and control classes on situational dimension group statistics class n mean std. deviation std. error mean post-test reading interest on situation dimension experiment 30 9000% 565% 103% control 30 8300% 616% 112% independent samples test levene's test for equality of variances t-test for equality of means f sig. t df sig. (2tailed) mean difference std. error difference 95% confidence interval of the difference lower upper post-test reading interest on equal variances assumed 41% 53% 459% 5800% 0% 700% 153% 395% 1005% situation dimension equal variances not assumed 459% 5758% 0% 700% 153% 395% 1005% the mean score of post-reading interest questionnaire on situational dimension obtained by experimental class was 90 and the control class was 83. the t-value in the table was 459%, and sig (2 tailed) was 0%. it meant that all scores of sig (2 tailed) were less than 5%. it established that there were significant differences of reading interest on situational dimension. the mean scores of postreading interest questionnaire on individual dimension obtained by experimental class and control class were displayed in the following table. table 10. the t-test result of post-reading interest of experimental and control classes on individual dimension group statistics class n mean std. deviation std. error mean post-test reading interest on individual dimension experiment 30 9100% 589% 108% control 30 8500% 823% 150% independent samples test levene's test for equality of variances t-test for equality of means f sig. t df sig. (2tailed) mean difference std. error difference 95% confidence interval of the difference d. abdul kohar, andang saehu, & lidwina sri ardiasih strengthening reading comprehension and interest through sq3r strategy using whatsapp during pandemic 172 lower upper post-test reading interest on individual dimension equal variances assumed 261% 11% 346% 5800% 0% 640% 185% 2 ,702 1010% equal variances not assumed 346% 5251% 0% 640% 185% 269% 1011% the table shown that 9 was the mean score of post-reading interest questionnaire on individual dimension obtained by experimental class, and control class got 85. the t-value in the table was 346%, and sig (2 tailed) was 0%. it meant that all scores of sig (2 tailed) were less than 5%. it established that there were significant differences of reading interest on individual dimension. whereas, the mean scores of post-reading interest on topic dimension obtained by experimental and control classes were displayed in the following table. table 11. the t-test result of post-reading interest of experimental and control classes on topic dimension group statistics class n mean std. deviation std. error mean post-test reading interest on topic dimension experiment 30 9273% 593% 108% control 30 7917% 639% 117% independent samples test levene's test for equality of variances t-test for equality of means f sig. t df sig. (2tailed) mean difference std. error difference 95% confidence interval of the difference lower upper post-test reading interest on topic dimension equal variances assumed 6% 82% 852% 5800% 0% 1357% 159% 1038% 1675% equal variances not assumed 852% 5768% 0% 1357% 159% 1038% 1675% it shown that the mean score of post-reading interest on topic dimension obtained by experimental class was 93 and control class was 79. it meant that the means of three dimensions obtained by experimental class were higher than control class. the t-value in the table was 852%, and sig (2 tailed) was 0%. it meant that all scores of sig (2 tailed) were less than 5%. it established that there were significant differences of reading interest on topic dimension. it meant that all scores of sig (2 tailed) of three dimensions were less than 5%. it established that there were significant differences of reading interest on three dimensions between experimental and control class as nurgiyantoro et al., (2015) said that if significance score (2 tailed) was less than 0,05, there were significant differences between both classes. based on that analysis means of post-reading interest and their scores of sig (2 tailed) of experimental and control class above, the reading interest of experimental class on three dimensions was more improved than the reading interest of control class. it meant that there was an expose of significant result quality in reading interest level achieved through sq3r strategy comparing to conventional strategy using whatsapp during the pandemic time. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 173 moreover, it was reinforced by comparing the result of pre-and post reading interest questionnaire of experimental class as the following table. table 12. the analysis result of experimental class’s pre and post-reading interest on three dimensions scores paired samples test paired differences t df sig. (2tailed ) mean std. deviatio n std. error mean 95% confidence interval of the difference lowe r upper pai r 1 experiment pre reading interest on situational experiment post reading interest on situational -1350% 867% 158 % 1674 % 1026 % 853% 2900 % 0% pai r 2 experiment pre reading interest on individual experiment post reading interest on individual -1013% 710% 130 % 1279 % 748% 781% 2900 % 0% pai r 3 experiment pre reading interest on topic experiment post reading interest on topic -2140% 980% 179 % 2506 % 1774 % 1197 % 2900 % 0% it shown the mean score of pre-reading interest achieved by the experimental on three dimensions. the mean of pre reading interest on situational dimension was 77, individual dimension was 81, and topic dimension was 71. meanwhile, the mean score of post-reading interest achieved by the experimental class was 90 on situational dimension, 91on individual dimension, and 93on topic dimension. it meant that the mean achieved by experimental class in the post-reading interest questionnaire was more improved than mean achieved by experimental class in the pre-reading interest questionnaire especially in the three dimensions. furthermore, the t-value in the table was 853% on situational dimensions, 781% on individual dimensions, and 1197% on topic dimension. whereas, the sig (2 tailed) was 0% for all the dimensions, it was less than 5% (sig (2 tailed) < 5%). it meant that there were significant differences between score of pre reading interest questionnaire and score of post reading interest questionnaire obtained by experimental class as nurgiyantoro et al., (2015) said that if significance score (2 tailed) was less than 5%, there were significant differences between score of pre-reading interest questionnaire and score of post-reading interest questionnaire. at the end of experiment, the experimental class’ score of post-reading interest questionnaire was higher than score of pre-reading interest questionnaire. thus, there was an expose of significant result quality in reading interest level achieved through sq3r strategy comparing to conventional strategy using whatsapp during the pandemic time. it meant that implementing sq3r strategy effectively strengthened the reading interest. paired samples statistics mean n std. deviation std. error mean pair 1 experiment pre reading interest on situational 7693% 30 1191% 218% experiment post reading interest on situational 9043% 30 565% 103% pair 2 experiment pre reading interest on individual 8107% 30 1007% 184% experiment post reading interest on individual 9120% 30 589% 108% pair 3 experiment pre reading interest on topic 7133% 30 691% 126% experiment post reading interest on topic 9273% 30 593% 108% d. abdul kohar, andang saehu, & lidwina sri ardiasih strengthening reading comprehension and interest through sq3r strategy using whatsapp during pandemic 174 this finding proved that students’ reading interest can be influenced by implementing the suitable method in teaching reading such as sq3r strategy that can guide them in reading comprehension process (bulut, 2017). whereas, reading interest is a multidimensional construct, incorporating one’s affective, cognitive and behavioral tendencies towards an object, event or tasks related to reading activity (ardasheva, wang, roo, adesope & morrison, 2018). it could be influenced by the environment that can shape one’s personality and mindset (ay & bartan, 2012) such as modifying the teaching learning process with the sq3r steps. thus, they had the culture to read systematically that would influence the students’ interest in the learning environment (dewi, fahrurrozi, hasanah, & wahyudi, 2020). in the sq3r strategy using whatsapp, the students were involved in reading process, and they were provided with template fitting the steps of sq3r. thus, they learnt effectlvely as klippel (1994) said that learning would be effective if they were involved in the process. moreover, they were guided in systematic steps namely survey, question, read, recite and review. thus, they were motivated to learn, and this motivation would encourage them and fond to read (wheatley, gerde, & cabell, 2016). based on that explanation, the novelty of this study lied in strengthening reading interest through sq3r strategy in the online class using whatsapp platform in the pandemic time. conclusion the first result of current study decided that the experimental class’ result quality of reading comprehension was significantly improved since ttest score decided that there was significant different between experimental and control class, and the result quality of reading comprehension obtained by experimental class was higher than control class. it established that sq3r strategy was effective to strengthend reading comprehension skill using whatsapp platform in the pandemic time. the second result revealed that the experimental class’ result quality of reading interest was also significantly improved since t-test score decided that there was significant different between experimental and control class, and the result quality of reading interest obtained by experimental class was higher than control class. it established that sq3r strategy was effective to strengthen reading interest level on three dimensions namely situational, individual and topic dimension using whatsapp platform in the pandemic time. it is suggested that teaching reading should consider the implementation of sq3r strategy to improve reading comprehension and interest. the sq3r strategy should become the solution to teach reading in the online class especially using whatsapp platform or other kinds of mobileassisted language learning (mall). moreover, the study exposed the urgent of reading comprehension skill besides other language skills. thus, the teacher should give more time to teach reading skill especially in the pandemic time using the sq3r strategy. moreover, the students should understand the sq3r steps well that could guide them to comprehend the text easily. thus, they can read effectively although they learn in the pandemic time. furthermore, the institution and other stakeholders should support the implementation of sq3r strategy in the online class by providing supporting tools that can help both teachers and students to enhance the reading comprehension skill. however, this research gave the opportunity to conduct other research on reading comprehension skills qualitatively as well as focusing on students’ reading interest that can strengthen the study and enrich the scope of the research. acknowledgement we would like to gratefully acknowledge to the supervisors and reviewers for giving feedback and suggesstion to be a better research paper. we also thank to head master of mtsn 6 cianjur for allowing to be the research place and the teacher collaborater for implementing the teaching-learning process in this research. references ainley, m., hidi, s., & berndorff, d. 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(2020). improving the student’s reading skill through sq3r technique in mts al-khairiyah. interference: journal of language, literature, and linguistics, 1(1), 71–78. https://doi.org/10.26858/interference.v1i1.12815 yudhiantara, r & saehu, a. (2018). mobile-assisted language learning (mall) in indonesian islamic higher education. research gate, 21–25. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 33 indonesian 2013 curriculum implementation: teachers’ techniques, challenges, and voices towards students’ affective competence hanif nurcholish adiantika universitas muhammadiyah cirebon, indonesia e-mail: hanifadiantika@gmail.com dila charisma universitas muhammadiyah cirebon, indonesia e-mail: deela1985@gmail.com fitri aprianti universitas muhammadiyah cirebon, indonesia e-mail: aprianti22.fitri@gmail.com eline rozaliya winarto universitas muhammadiyah cirebon, indonesia e-mail: namasayaeline@gmail.com apa citation: adiantika, h. n., charisma, d., aprianti, f., & winarto, e. r. (2021). indonesian 2013 curriculum implementation: teachers’ techniques, challenges, and voices towards students’ affective competence. indonesian efl journal. 7(1), 33-42. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i1.3988 received: 29-09-2020 accepted: 27-11-2020 published: 31-01-2021 introduction along with the global economic competition and the demanding need for efficient and skillful labor force, there are some attempts by highest authorities and policy-makers to initiate educational reforms to improve the teaching and learning quality. “wherever the change goes, english should always include as a bandwagon of trend” (hamied, 2014) as it is widely used throughout the world. therefore, english in this process is not deemed simply as a mere school subject, but as a common language required for successful communication in many human’s fields of activity including education, business, technology, and communication. consequently, many countries initiate reform or change in their english as a foreign language (efl) curricula to educate more competent language users. most of these changes have emerged within the framework of communicative language teaching to make communicative competence the goal of language teaching and develop procedure for the teaching of the four language skills that refers the interdependence of language and communication (richards & rodgers, 2014, p. 85) owing to the matter of changes as aforementioned, there has been a substantial alteration from teacher-centered to learnercentered instruction particularly in the field of foreign language pedagogy (harmer, 2001; abstract: one of the prominent alterations in 2013 curriculum is that this curriculum does not only put an emphasis on cognitive competence but also affective competence. consequently, the evaluation must be carried out to assess students’ affective assessment. nevertheless, the issue concerning the complexity of affective assessment has been circulating for years. therefore, the present study aims to scrutinize teachers’ techniques, challenges, and their voices with regard to development and the implementation of 2013 curriculum. this study utilizes a qualitative research by using descriptive qualitative design. one teacher, who has implemented 2013 curriculum, in a senior high school was selected as the respondent in this study. interviews and document analysis were conducted to obtain the data. this study reveals that there are two evaluation techniques carried out by the teacher specifically observations and peer-assessment. furthermore, two challenges are identified as teachers’ shortcomings for instance inadequate acquaintance of 2013 curriculum and time availability in assessment process. thus, this study recommends teachers to raise their awareness regarding the challenges as well as select an effective technique to assess students’ affective competence. keywords: affective assessment; 2013 curriculum; teacher; voice; techniques; challenges mailto:hanifadiantika@gmail.com mailto:deela1985@gmail.com mailto:aprianti22.fitri@gmail.com https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i1.3988 hanif nurcholish adiantika, dila charisma, fitri aprianti, &eline rozaliya winarto indonesian 2013 curriculum implementation: teachers’ techniques, challenges, and voices towards students’ affective competence 34 nunan, 2013). recently, it is practically impossible to seek serious assistance for language instruction depending totally in teacher. this occurrence has been deemed considerable in molding the face of language pedagogy for epochs. this sort of substantial alteration also covers the assessment which plays an integral role in teaching and learning circumstance. in other words, assessment or evaluation is considered essential to measure students’ acquaintance towards the learning objectives they have to achieve. it is also in line with genesee as cited in carter and nunan (2001) that assessment plays a fundamental role in teaching and learning and also curriculum (print, 1993; richards, 2001). by conducting assessment, teachers are able to obtain holistic understanding regarding the current achievement of the students (dietal, et al., 1991 cited in pertiwi, 2005 cited in adawiyah, 2008; see also print, 1993; carter and nunan, 2001; richard, 2001; nation and macalister, 2010) and the degree of changes in behavior (tyler, 1949 cited in hasan, 2008). morevoer, carter and nunan (2001; see also brown, 2001; nation and macalister, 2010) delineate that assessment also provides appropriate motivation for students to study harder. one of the considerable alterations in the new indonesian curriculum namely 2013 curriculum is on the assessment domain (kemendikbud, 2013; and syahmadi, 2013). the 2013 curriculum does not only emphasizes on cognitive and psychomotor competences but also affective competence. it is indicated by the occurrences of the core competence 1, known in indonesia as ‘kompetensi inti’ (ki 1) (spiritual attitude) and core competence 2 (ki 2) (social attitude) in 2013 curriculum. owing to this, it is a must for teachers to assess or evaluate at least three competences of students; cognitive, psychomotor and affective competences. however, one thing the teachers can hardly deny is that affective assessment is not an easy task to implement. there is an issue related to the affective assessment. some experts assert that affective competence is not easy to be assessed (brown, 1995; brown, 2001; mariam et al, 2018). brown (1995) states that affective domain seems difficult to be quantified since affective competence is related to behavior. it seems consistent with the view stated by mariam et al. (2018) that despite the prominence of affective assessment since it is related with human’s life especially in making decision, perception, interaction, communication, and intelligence the implementation of affective assessment is not an easy task to conduct or measure since everyone has a view and many assumptions that should be taken into account as well. it is exact that the implementation of affective domain is vital for everyone however the implementation is far from being as expected. this is because designing the achievement of affective learning goals is not as simple as cognitive and psychomotor domains. therefore, it is fundamental to investigate teachers’ approaches or techniques as a reference for the contextual development of affective assessment taking the prominence of assessment, the new curriculum, and the issue mentioned above into account, finding appropriate technique for students’ affective competence is therefore mandatory. teachers, as the vital agents of curriculum implementation (print, 1993; richards, 2001; nation and macalister, 2010), may select different techniques in assessing students’ affective competence even when they work toward equal goals. this study attempts to investigate the voice proposed, techniques implemented, and the challenges encountered by the teacher who has implemented 2013 curriculum in assessing students’ affective competence. there are some techniques that can be implemented by the teachers in assessing students’ affective competence. the techniques can be classified into observation, self-assessment, and peer assessment (kemendikbud, 2013; see also brown, 2001; and syahmadi, 2013). research has proved that self assessment and peer assessment provides some benefits such as encouraging the students to be autonomous learners, increasing students’ motivation, and so forth (brown and hudson, 1998 cited in brown, 2001). in line with the aforementioned problem, the theories and related research discussed above, this study intends to investigate the implementation of 2013 curriculum. this study tries to investigate teacher’s voice concerning the implementation of 2013 curriculum, some techniques carried out by the teacher in assessing students’ affective competence and find out the challenges encountered by the teacher in assessing students’ affective competence. therefore, by conducting this study, it is expected to examine teacher’s voices, challenges and effective techniques in assessing students’ affective competence as prescribed in indonesian national curriculum that is 2013 curriculum. the main purposes of this study are to investigate teacher’s voices towards 2013 curriculum, the techniques utilized by indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 35 teacher in assessing the students’ affective competence (ki 1 and ki 2) and to scrutinize the challenges encountered by teacher. they are conducted to answer these questions: (1) what are the techniques applied by the teacher in assessing the students’ affective competences? (2) what are the challenges encountered by the teacher in assessing students’ affective competences? (3) what are the teacher’s voices with regard to the improvement of 2013 curriculum? this study is expected to contribute to the development of teaching and learning english in efl context, especially in indonesia. theoretically, the result of this study is expected to enrich the literature on assessment in english teaching and learning. moreover, this research will be a reference for those who are interested to conduct in the same area of research. practically, the study is expected to provide alternative techniques for teachers in assessing students’ affective competences and lead the policy maker to provide an appropriate help for teachers to conduct an effective assessment in teaching and learning, particularly in assessing students’ affective competence. there have been literatures focusing on the assessment and evaluation in the field of efl and esl classroom. most people often use the terms evaluation and assessment interchangeably (genesee cited in carter and nunan, 2001). nevertheless, genesee cited in carter and nunan (2001) articulates that they are technically not the same. assessment is a partial part of evaluation that covers collecting and analyzing information about students’ learning (genesee cited in carter and nunan, 2001; broadbent et al, 2017; farahian & avarzamani, 2018). while on the other hand, evaluation is more comprehensive. it “considers all aspects of teaching and learning and also to look at how educational decision can be informed by results of alternative form of assessment” (genesee cited in carter and nunan, 2001). as a part of evaluation, assessment has some values in teaching and learning. it can foster learners to set the goal, extend a sense of periodic closure to various units and modules of curriculum, spur students self-evaluation of their progress and help in evaluating teaching effectiveness (brown, 2001). there are several types of assessment. first is placement assessment (nation and macalister, 2010; see also harmer, 2007a; shute & kim, 2014). it is aimed at ensuring the course is going to be too easy or difficult for students. second is observation for learning (nation and macalister, 2010; to & charles 2015). it is aimed at examining if the activities in the classroom are likely to achieve its learning goal. third is shortterm achievement assessment to see what students are learning from the course (nation and macalister, 2010). fourth is diagnostic assessment (nation and macalister, 2010; see also harmer, 2007a). it is to investigate the students’ strength and weaknesses in knowledge. fifth is achievement assessment (nation and macalister, 2010; see also harmer, 2007a). it is examining the effectiveness of the course. the last, sixth is proficiency assessment (nation and macalister, 2010; see also harmer, 2007a). it measures students’ language knowledge. in indonesian curriculum, prominently called 2013 curriculum, teaching and learning focus on developing three competences of students; affective (ki 1/spiritual attitude and ki 2 /social attitude), cognitive (ki 3/ knowledge), and psychomotor (ki 4/ skill). as a result, assessment aspects also cover those three competences (kemendikbud, 2013). to assess the effectiveness of teaching and learning and also students’ achievement, teachers must assess those three competences. moreover, kemendikbud (2013) says that the assessment must be conducted authentically. it should comprehensively assess the input, process, and also the output/ product. regarding to assessment of affective competence (spiritual and social attitudes), there are some techniques are suggested by kemendikbud (2013; see also syahmadi, 2013) to assess students’ affective competence. those are observation, self-assessment, and peer assessment. observation observation is an assessment technique which is conducted continuously by using senses. it can be conducted directly by the teachers or indirectly by other teachers, parents, students, and staff’s help. as stated by motallebzadeh et al., (2017), teacher observation is accepted as a legitimate source of information for recording and reporting student demonstrations of learning outcomes. in other words, observation deemed as a legitimate source of information, employed mostly by teachers as a common norm in some schools or private institutions. in most institutions, all classes are normally observed by the supervisors. therefore, instead of being observed by supervisors, teachers feel more contented when they are observed by their colleagues however, teachers consider if hanif nurcholish adiantika, dila charisma, fitri aprianti, &eline rozaliya winarto indonesian 2013 curriculum implementation: teachers’ techniques, challenges, and voices towards students’ affective competence 36 their classes being observed by their colleagues than supervisors, they feel better. santos and miguel (2016) assert their point of view with regard to the prominence of peerobservation by underlining that peer-observation can be a good instrument for continuous professional development for teachers in order to develop their teaching strategies. at the same sense, jonas and gallen (2016) delineate the significance of online peer-observation in which online peer-observation plays an essential role in improving development through subsequent reflection and dialogue. furthermore, tenenberg (2016) states that the implementation of teaching and learning process through observing peers in practice will be such a cherished proof as peerobservation for learning and development for the observer. there are some instruments that can be used to make the observation is easier to be conducted. kemendikbud (2013) mentions observation checklist, rating scale, and also journal can be used as instruments for observation. self-assessment self-assessment has been deemed as one of the clearest exemplifications of formative assessment because it is related with students’ understanding about their own learning process through their performance not merely based on the completion of tasks (brown, 2001. self-assessment is done by asking the students to tell their strengths and weaknesses about themselves in terms of their achievement on affective competence. in addition, “self assessment can be either a process assessment or more formal product assessment coupled with performance assessment” (shambaugh & magliaro, 2006). as pointed out by jamrus and razali (2019) that self-assessment is very beneficial for teachers especially in large classrooms where teachers do not have adequate time to assess every students’ progress. in other words, instead of neglecting what the students have been through so far, the students’ progress should also be considered as a crucial element of teaching and learning process inside the circumstance of self-assessment. in addition, it is in line with mican and medina (2015) that the implementation of self-assessment plays an important role in fostering students’ affective domain of ownership for their own learning. owing to this, self-assessment is deemed to be effective in fostering commitment in learning english among many others and students’ self regulation by guiding them through the stages of goal setting, planning, self-monitoring, and selfreflection (wang, 2016). instruments that can be applied in this technique are observation checklist and rating scale which consist of certain rubric (kemendikbud, 2013). peer-assessment different from self assessment which asks students to assess themselves, peer assessment allows students’ peer or classmate assess their friends’ achievement on affective competence. this kind of assessment provides teachers wider information related to the students’ achievement. as stated by o’farrel (2004) that peer assessment provides possibly feedback than a teacher can normally provide”. with regard to this, li and gao (2015) emphasize that peer assessment, despite its numerous types, usually encompasses students to provide feedback on other students’ work through either formative feedback or summative grading, or the integration of both. it appears to be consistent with li (2016) that formative peer assessment often employs students in both circumstances as assessor and assesse. furthermore, li (2016) enlarges that students considering themselves as assessors, students will review and identify the strengths and weaknesses of peers’ work based on marking criteria or rating scale; while on the other hand, when the students deeming themselves as assesse, they will assess and reflect upon peer feedback and improve their own work. observation checklist and rating scale which consist of certain rubric can be employed in this technique (kemendikbud, 2013). method the present study employed a qualitative research by using a descriptive qualitative approach. this approach was expected to allow the present study to, examine, define, analyze, and explain the topic of the study. in addition, the present study attempted to describe and analyze the data of particular participant. particularly, this study was aimed at examining teacher’s voice towards 2013 curriculum, the techniques applied by the teacher to assess students’ affective competence and the challenges encountered by the teacher in assessing students’ affective competence. the present study involved one efl teacher employed in a state senior high school in kuningan, west java province. the participant was purposively chosen based on certain considerations; (1) accessibility in terms of permission and location; (2) the participant has been teaching english for more than three years indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 37 and (3) the participant is one of the teachers who implements 2013 curriculum. in collecting the data needed for the research, two instruments were employed; they were interviews and documents. this research used semi-structured interview in order to get the information needed. this kind of interview allows the researcher to control the interview (creswell, 2013). the interviews consisted of some questions related to the implementation of 2013 curriculum, particularly, teacher’s voices towards 2013 curriculum in efl setting in particular the context of the study (davari & aghagolzadeh, 2015; ketabi & talebinejad, 2009; rahimi & nabilou, 2010) and the framework of efl curriculum development and change (nation & macalister, 2010), assessment techniques applied by the teacher in assessing students’ affective competence (ki 1 and ki 2), and the challenges encountered by teacher. the documents, as the secondary instrument, were used since they were considered as valuable resources to record the values systems of an institution (patton in hatch, 2002 cited in fitria, 2013). in the present study, the documents were employed to investigate information related to teacher’s strategies in assessing students’ affective achievement. the documents used were teacher’ lesson plans. there were some procedures in conducting the study. first, collecting some theories and previous studies related to the assessment techniques in assessing affective competence and also 2013 curriculum. second was selecting the site and participant of the study. third, after being permitted, interviews, observation and collecting teacher’s lesson plans are conducted in order to find out related information regarding to the problems of the study. results and discussion this following section describes the finding and discussion of the study. it shows and explains the data obtained from interviews and document analysis. finding and discussion of interview and document analysis: teacher’s techniques in assessing students’ affective competence in responses to the first major question related to the techniques applied by the teacher in assessing students’ affective competence, the data analysis reveals that the teacher applied two techniques in assessing students’ affective competence. those are observation and peer assessment. the following part will discuss the techniques applied by teacher in assessing students’ affective competence: observation based on the interview, it can be inferred that the teacher conducts observation in assessing students’ affective competence. observations are conducted inside (in teaching and learning process) and outside classroom (on the break time, pray time, in the canteen, and so forth). the teacher states that by conducting observation, the students’ progress can be observed. the excerpt below is in accordance with gebhard’s (2006) statement that journal offers some benefits to be possible to get to know students better. there are some instruments used by the teacher in conducting observation. first is students’ journal. by observing students’ journal, the teacher intends to be able to see how the students’ act in their daily life and how they encounter their problems. it is stated by the teacher in the excerpt below: “students have a journal, it allows me to measure how far their responses toward my subject… since most of them write about their daily life or experiences, journal also allows me to measure their attitude in their daily life include their attitude in encountering their problem.” based on the aforementioned excerpt, it is relevant with santos and miguel (2016) who says that teacher observation provides students’ demonstration of learning outcome. in other words, they state their perspective concerning the importance of peer-observation by underlining that peer-observation can be a good instrument for continuous professional development for teachers in order to develop their teaching strategies. besides, the teacher also believes that through observation the assessment can be done holistically. in this sense, what the teacher believes is in line with jonas and gallen (2016) and tenenberg (2016) that teacher observation is essential for the teacher to do assessment holistically as a cherished instrument for learning and development for the observer. the second instrument is teacher’s journal. it is stated that teacher’s journal is only used to record interesting and/or special things about the students. the third instrument is scoring rubric. based on the interview and document analysis, the teacher utilizes some indicators in the scoring rubric. as stated by kemendikbud (2013) scoring hanif nurcholish adiantika, dila charisma, fitri aprianti, &eline rozaliya winarto indonesian 2013 curriculum implementation: teachers’ techniques, challenges, and voices towards students’ affective competence 38 rubric can be used as an instrument to assess students’ competence. it enables the teacher to be easier in conducting the assessment. peer-assessment in the interview, the teacher delineates that peerassessment is going to be used to assess students’ affective competence. the teacher believes that it serves balance information about the students; so that the teacher does not always use the teacher’s point of view but also students’ to measure the progress of students’ affective competence. it is in accordance with li (2016) that formative peerassessment often employs students in both circumstances as assessor and assesse. li (2016) also adds that when students considering themselves as assessors, students will review and identify the strengths and weaknesses of peers’ work based on marking criteria or rating scale while on the other hand, when students deeming themselves as assesse, they will assess and reflect upon peer feedback and improve their own work. therefore, the assessment distribution will be as equal and balance as expected from both perspectives, teacher’ and students ‘perspective. it can be seen from the excerpt below: “peer-assessment gives balance information about learners; we can’t always use our sight but also students’ and their peers’… we need complete information from different side.” this finding is relevant by the theory stated by o’farrel (2004) that peer assessment provides possibly feedback than a teacher can normally provide as it serves adequate and balance information about the students. furthermore, li and gao (2016) also put an emphasis that peerassessment, regardless of its various types, usually includes students to provide feedback on the other students’ work through either formative feedback or summative grading, or integration of both thus the result will be equal for both sides. in other words, the result of the assessment is considered to be equal and considerably objective since it relies on not only teacher’s point of view but also students’. finding and discussion of interview analysis: teacher’s challenges in assessing students’ affective competence the teacher’s interview was also intended to answer the second research question regarding the teacher’s challenges in assessing students’ affective competence. the challenges are described as follow. lack of knowledge of 2013 curriculum the 2013 curriculum is newly established so the teacher still has limitation of knowledge of 2013 curriculum. the teacher states that the lack of knowledge of 2013 curriculum leads to the difficulty of interpretation whether the affective assessment conducted in the process of or after teaching and learning. the data can be seen in the following assertion: “the other challenge is when we see or assess students’ attitude, how we define affective assessment? is it related to students’ attitude toward the subject or their attitude after learning the subject?” the aforementioned excerpt is in accordance with ornstein and hunkins (2013) and darsih (2014) that, in english subject, teachers are deemed to fail to implement 2013 curriculum due to the complexity of assessment process, delivery skill and time allotment for the english practice. owing to this, many teachers prefer to use both the approach and teaching strategy that have been familiar with them before in the previous curriculum rather than exploring the objectives and advantages of the new curriculum. to encounter this problem, teacher does observation inside and outside classroom in order to be able to assess them holistically, not only the process but also the product. it was appropriate with kemendikbud (2013) statement that the assessment must be done holistically. time constraints for conducting the assessment the teacher argues that the assessment is time consuming enough especially when dealing with administration staff. it seems consistent with darsih (2014) that new curriculum obliges a comprehensive assessment for every integrated theme and teachers require a lot of time to prepare for writing lesson plans, creating teaching aids, or making students’ narrative assessment. however, the teacher reveals that it does not disturb teacher’s activities besides teaching. as mentioned by oecd (2005), one of the major barriers of assessment is the time consuming to be practical. this challenge requires the teacher to find an effective technique. from the interview, it can be seen that the teacher tries to overcome the challenge by applying observation technique. as described in the previous section, the observation indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 39 is conducted inside and outside classroom. in addition, the teacher employs observation technique by using some instruments such as students’ journal, teacher’s journal, and scoring rubric. findings and discussion of interview analysis: teacher’s voices with regard to 2013 curriculum improvement teacher’s demand on english additional time allot in 2013 curriculum regardless of the challenges occurrence in the aforementioned discussion, the teacher also shares his point of view due to the implementation of 2013 curriculum. it can be evidenced from the excerpt below: “the government strongly suggests us to implement the teaching and learning process where the students become the center of learning. it is not an easy task to do though since students have different ability levels and the time is very limited. if my voice is taken into consideration, time allot for english in 2013 should be added as it takes a lot of time especially for carrying out affective assessment.” the teacher highlights the issues related to time allot for english in 2013 curriculum which is regrettably reduced, from 4 hours in a week, to 2 hours in a week only. it seems consistent with the aforementioned finding with regard to teacher’s time constraints in conducting affective assessment. time constraints will somehow lead to any shortcomings for teacher especially when they are conducting assessment or any other procedures under newly established 2013 curriculum. the teacher also underlines the prominence of considering students’ different proficiency level as the basis of curriculum development in a students-centered learning. the significance of need analysis to be taken into account as the basis of 2013 curriculum in addition, the teacher is also concerned with the absence of need analysis (na) in the implementation of 2013 curriculum as the basis of the initial curriculum development as stated by brown (1995), richard (2001), and nation & macalister (2010). it can be seen from the excerpt below. “the curriculum developer from the top, i think, should deem what students’ need really are. it is important to seek what the students really need in the curriculum. in other words, need analysis is a mandatory to be implemented as the ministry should reveal students’ need before actually developing the curriculum. this, if implemented, will play a vital role with regard to outcome of the learning.” the teacher said that government should really deem need analysis as an integral basis of the curriculum. by including need analysis, it would be very effective for teachers to implement the curriculum as prescribed by the policy-makers particularly minister of education. it is in line with poedjiastutie & oliver (2017) that a need analysis plays a salient role in the development of curriculum as it can identify students target situation. however, regardless its importance, the implementation of need analysis in indonesian curriculum development is not deemed essential as an initial phase in curriculum development. it is because, according to panggabean (2015), indonesian learners tend to take very long time to acquire english since they do not make english conversation as habit and have a little english exposure. consequently, considering the significance of need analysis (na) in an initial curriculum development process will lead to more independent or decentralized policy-making process instead of promoting learning objectives ordered by those who are far from classroom. the prominence of teachers’ involvement in every single decision-making process of curriculum development in particular in the final section of the interview, the teacher puts an emphasis on the lack of teacher’s involvement in curriculum development. in other words, the teacher strongly believes that the teachers’ involvement plays an essential role to diminish misconception in 2013 curriculum. it is proven by the excerpt below: “i think the most important aspect in curriculum development are the teachers themselves. it is because they are the one who knows the condition at the school and classroom level. in other words, any kind of curriculum development must equally involve many teachers with various background of teaching experience thus the information will be holistic and objective.” he views that the 2013 curriculum is singlehandedly developed by the policy-makers without considering teachers’ voices and suggestions. the teacher also believes that 2013 curriculum is developed in a top-down approach where teachers hanif nurcholish adiantika, dila charisma, fitri aprianti, &eline rozaliya winarto indonesian 2013 curriculum implementation: teachers’ techniques, challenges, and voices towards students’ affective competence 40 are considered to be mere implementers rather than the agents of educational reform. it is relevant with the study conducted by poedjiastutie (2018) that one of the most problematic issues in indonesian curriculum development is that it is still implemented in in tow-down approach which is full of political nuances. at the worse sense, topdown policy curriculum development will lead to the marginalization of teachers’ role in the process of decision-making in general and curriculum development in particular. it appears relevant with the study conducted by alnefaie (2016) in saudi context and rahimi and alavi (2017) in iranian context where teachers are greatly marginalized and neglected from their true role as the integral parts of any educational reform in curriculum development. this truth seems to be conflicting to the theoretical framework as pointed out by nation & macalister (2010), banegas (2011), and zohrabi (2014) that the core community and main agents of change are teachers who are responsible for enforcing the reform at the class level and generating curriculum based on their students’ needs not based on policy makers’ single perspective. therefore, teachers’ involvement should be taken into an account as a critical consideration for the curriculum development. conclusion this study indicated that there were some techniques used by the teacher in assessing the students’ affective competence. the data gained from interview and document analysis showed that the teacher used observation and peer assessments. furthermore, there were some instruments applied by the teacher. those were students’ journal, teacher’s journal, and scoring rubric. the techniques and instruments are used to help the teacher to assess the students in terms of affective assessment authentically. in addition, the data gained from interview indicated that teacher encountered several challenges in assessing students’ affective competence. the challenges found are (1) lack of knowledge of 2013 curriculum that leads to the difficulty of interpretation about affective assessment and (2) time consumption for doing assessment that requires the teacher to find effective technique for assessing the students’ competence. furthermore, the present study showed that there were three teacher’s voices with regard to the improvement of the 2013 curriculum exposed from the interview. the teacher’s voices exposed are (1) teacher’s demand on english additional time allot in 2013 curriculum since it is reduced to only two ours per week; (2) the significance of need analysis to be taken into account as the basis of 2013 curriculum; (3) and the prominence of teachers’ involvement in every single decisionmaking process of curriculum development in particular based on the results of the study, there are some recommendations that hopefully can be useful. the recommendations are proposed for further researchers who investigate research in the same topic. it is recommended to conduct the research in a long period of time to give clearer description and better result about affective assessment techniques in the teaching and learning. subsequently, further researchers are suggested to conduct the study by involving more than one participant to get more comprehensive and reliable data from different point of view related to techniques and challenges in assessing students’ affective competence. it is also suggested to conduct the study that not only investigates it qualitatively but also quantitatively. the last but not least, it is strongly recommended for the policy-makers, in this case ministry of education, to provide teachers more significant role in curriculum development. thus, ministry of education should ponder the importance of including the entire educational 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(2014). promoting teacher development through an interactive approach to curriculum development. procedia-social and behavioral sciences, 98, 2025–2034. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.03.638 https://dx.doi.org/10.24093/awej/vol9no2.12 https://doi.org/10.1080/09585176.2017.1344134 https://doi.org/10.1080/09585176.2017.1344134 http://dx.doi.org/10.5539/elt.v9n10p39 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2014.950954 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2014.950954 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.03.638 indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 80 bridging critical discourse analysis in media discourse studies ratna sari department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education universitas lancang kuning, pekanbaru, indonesia e-mail: ratnasarimarlis@gmail.com silvia eka putri department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education universitas lancang kuning, pekanbaru, indonesia e-mail: silviaeputri@gmail.com herdi department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education universitas lancang kuning, pekanbaru, indonesia e-mail: herdi@unilak.ac.id budianto hamuddin department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education universitas lancang kuning, pekanbaru, indonesia e-mail: budihamuddin@unilak.ac.id apa citation: sari, r., putri, s. e., herdi, h., & hamuddin, b. (2018). bridging critical discourse analysis in media discourse studies. indonesian efl journal, 4(2), 80-89. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v4i2.1379. received: 23-03-2018 accepted: 28-05-2018 published: 01-07-2018 abstract: the precarious and critical period of the initiation of discourse analysis was populer at the end of the 1990s and the beginning of 2000s. various approaches and frameworks were proposed during the time especially in the field of applied linguistics. this is including critical discourse analysis (cda) as one of its leading areas. this present study aimed at exploring and catching out how the cda’ presentation in overall related to media studies and how it can be applicable to uncover an unseen ideologies while examining the existence of media discourse studies. the study is considering 25 journal studies to scrutinize the ways and methods used in discern social phenomena while illuminating the true characteristics of the social actors. as result, it was revealed that cda is used openly to expose ideologies that somehow differentiate oppressed groups by offer ing a dummy image used by the highest authority or elite. keywords: cda; ideology; media discourse; social actors; power. introduction the analysis of language in use we might call discourse analysis (da) is the way of accepting interactions in social areas including written and spoken discourse. in the other word, it tries to recognize the various part in linguistics used among social context, identities, and relation. it can be useful to any problem and condition. to be sure of definitions this study seesdiscourse analysis is a way of thinking or approaching a problem. it means that da ussed as an approach to help us to understand the situation in a particular discourse phenomenan and find the resolution. it is also, a way for analyzing the relation among content, ideas, and structure of the text encode it among the ideas itself. the definition above well recognised, "da provides a basic methodology to describes and analyze how the structure and content of the text. encodes ideas and the relation among the ideas itself that are present in the text, systematically" (hamuddin, 2012). mailto:ratnasarimarlis@gmail.com mailto:silviaeputri@gmail.com https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v4i2.1370 ratna sari, silvia eka putri, herdi, & budianto hamuddin bridging critical discourse analysis in media discourse studies 81 since the 1990s, cda recognized as one of the most dominant research in discourse area as well as communication. a mammoth alike papers have been published in the area of cda and among it well known resercher are teun van dijk, ruth wodak, and norman fairclough. they have donated to this field through their influential work. these researchers put various approaches and theories with their different frameworks and method of discourse analysis. van dijk (1990) study "society and discourse" as his first well-known journal that discussed around the globe and then followed by several of his books. it is discussed how and why discourse contributes to the text by re-production of structures, cultural and ideological. critical discourse has various uses of language of power in society. therefore, this study saw that van dijk through his "society and discourse" leaves us with an important view to examine the enactment of power and to understand the means by which power exercised by the domination group or elite upon the marginalized as well as those who were oppressed. among ruth wodak academic works “methods of critical discourse analysis" is one of her phenomena. this book explains the introduction of cda and gives an overview of the various cda theories and methods associated with this sociolinguistic approach. it also explained the leading figures in cda and the methods to which they are related. the book aimed to provide a deep and comprehensive description of the methods, an exploring of the theories to which methods refer and a comparative treatment of each of these methods so that students may be able to determine which is the most suitable or appropriate to select to help in answering their research question. this book also quiet balance between theory and its application in the fields of linguistics, sociology, social sciences and social psychology in general. moreover, through norman fairclough “discourse and social change” cda well known introduce 1993. he tries to build an understanding and links on a critical introduction to discourse analysis as it is practiced in a variety of different disciplines at that time, from linguistics, sociolinguistics to sociology and cultural studies. fairclough shows his concerns with the analysis of discourse can be combined with others approach, in a systematic and productive way, with an interest in broader problems of social analysis and social change these three scholars seem to share the same perspective on what is the principles of cda  cda investigated people's domination that experienced injustice.  cda contains various theories, methods, and application of issues in society.  cda discussed social problems such as human rights, social discrimination, mishandling various power in indonesia such as racism, prejudice, and so on.  cda does not the emphasis on a particular discipline and it is openly presented in public.  cda explain the phenomena that happened in the society moreover, they also explained in their next works that cda' application is not refined for text analysis (van dijk, 2009) but consists of several methods (wodak & meyer, 2009). it is to analyzing 'social phenomena that are definitely complex (wodak & meyer, 2009). van dijk (2003) recommends that cda depends on how strength, dominance, and inequality are practiced in politic and social contexts. in bright of this approach, fairclough (1995) suggests cda is the connection between a) event and texts b) broader social and cultural relationships" (p. 132) moreover van dijk (2003) also underlined cda depends on how the social image by social groups. therefore this study considers cda as the correlation in 'discourse, social and cultural development' that emphases on "typical social problems and political issues (i.e. power, dominance, interests hegemony, class, gender, race, reproduction, gender, institutions, discrimination, social structure, ideology and social order)". nevertheless, cda exploring and focuses on the structure of discourse by reproducing and challenging relationships between dominance power in a society. as this study would like to underline indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 82 that cda services to see many unseen of ideologies and media' power in discourse studies by implementingcda and its application theories and frameworks in the related studies. media discourse is a fascinating view to exploring, mostly when objectivity grows into the main topic. as hamuddin (2012) mentions in his paper "we should also concern regarding media discourse is access". it means that social people more or less linked the power of force limitations on media' access. in another argument, van dijk also said the "influential people can make affect the structure of language in society". as well as, media as power and encouragement to the shaping of media users' critical thinking. the fact that media discourse is public incomes of many conversation analysis that is involved in its form of influential talk, which can be related to different forms of talk. as we know that, an improvements in technology have great balance to use in media discourse. also, it can be increased because of its availability on newspapers, radio and television programs and etc. this study would offerings the differences between cda approaches and theories as said by van dijk, ruth wodak, and norman fairclough to make this study crystal clear on the methods. the works below gifts the several models of social theories that used in the various ideological thinking. wodak’s historical-discoursemethod ruth wodak is one of a legendary icon in cda, who has offered various studies on discourses related to prejudice, racism, discrimination etc. in society. wodak in the historical-discourse analysis conducted a study on the anti-semitism discourses in 1990, and which role's emphasis in the historical area.within cda, the media is realized as public space and discourse of media as the strategic location and social struggle. written discourse is most prominent in the cda on media studies so far. although, media text has gained a lot of attention that has been shared by radio and television. "if various disciplinary sides are not we analyzed, and their epistemological frame not we reflected before used or integrated, and then interdisciplinary does not have much sense" (wodak, 2003). nonetheless, she offered defined criteria for an interdisciplinary methodology in a concept of; common understanding of analytical concepts (wodak, 2003). there is critical of social study such as cda.wodak presented three types of critique in discoursehistorical method which release rationalization on why certain analysis once it has criticized, seems valid and abstract (reisigl and wodak, 2009). there are three types of analysis: 1. socio-analysis aims to draw on their background knowledge to understanding discursive events. 2. analysis of text aims to discover any conflicts, self-contradictions, paradoxes, and quandaries in internal discourse structures. 3. future-prospective tries to find the improvement of communication further in this research' approaches is investigated discourse by genre of text are supposed to be interconnected (reisigl & wodak, 2009) texts are deliberated in part of discourse as bridges between ideological and discourse structures. it is observed that discourse is not a closed unit of speech but it is the unit which is open to multiple analyses and connection. then, it can be brought up to be genre and it is recognized through the manipulation of discourse for a particular purpose. also, discourse used in a phenomenon of social is realized through different genres, for instance, by debate in politics, public speech, news reports, at the public conference. the basic power of wodak's work is the relationship between intertextual and interdiscursivity discourse. intertextual focuses on how texts are connected to other texts or discourse pointedly to one another in past and present events. it is also related to interdiscursivity as all the communicative actions which occur to earlier events. meanwhile, it explores how discourses are associated with one another in multiple ways and how it consequently relates to another ratna sari, silvia eka putri, herdi, & budianto hamuddin bridging critical discourse analysis in media discourse studies 83 form of discourse. additionally, interdiscursivity is a combination of discourses and genres in a communicative purpose. supremely, in dha' analysis follows the three-step critical procedure in which a) the subject of specific discourse is identified, b) discursive strategies are investigated, c) the particular context of linguistic comprehensions is examined. the following questions are used in dha analysis: what characteristics, qualities, and features are recognized to social actors, objects,phenomena/events, and processes?  from what perspective are these selections, attributions and opinions expressed?  how are persons, objects, phenomena/events, processes, and actions?  what arguments are engaged in discourse' question?  are the personal statements spoken overtly; are they increased or decreased? finally, the strength of wodak's methodology in dha is analytical concepts are direct and understandable to the person who is experienced in the field of linguistics but it may be determined for others with nonlinguistic knowledgethe insufficiency of this method liesmerely on its framework as it is hugely designed and it can be fundamental to interpret theconcept or analysis . van dijk’s ideology and social theories he studied ideology' theory is the essential framework for establishing compound ideological theories and consumptions. it controls the judgments by a social group which then represent social characteristics from the group, is based on identities, goals, norms, values, positions, and resources of them. for example, feminists share ideas such as abortion, optimistic actions and stereotypes by males. hence, these ideologies lead to feminist. it is supposed by members group of society through long-term progressing. it is associated with positive and bad properties. cognitive gatherings are the basic method which organizes, display and control outlooks from the social group. every ideological given experience of someone who is mentioned as models. van dijk asserted models are specific information about actions managed the shortterm memorial. in other words, models are matching to cognitive functions as the thinking and knowledge of an individual. it is the capability to control proficiencies by the social actor. related to this, models control the various acts of human habitual life as an ideology. the line here brings the existence of van dijk's ideological square. van dijk (2000) framed values for expressing ideological analysis by different ideological stances. there are: positive things emphasis and negative things emphasis these points show the wider contextual strategy of positive or negative presentation. self-presentation argues the individual's action as a group of participants by asserting different ideological notions with positive behavior. this is conflicts characteristic as the communication form faces the other people. so, there are positive or negative stances in context of especially in studies of media discourse. further, van dijk (2009) tries to link cognitive approaches. nevertheless, cda attack to the expectations made by the more powerful on the less powerful. he announced cda as the critical perception, situation or attitude in social practice. because of its reason, he offered the discourse, cognitive and society. these emphasize of the ways of discourse structure in social discrimination, dominion, and ideologies occur. so, to discover social actors we need a connection, it should look at the structure of discourse and society. he also shows out the white group are control leads to social discrimination and racism in certain countries. similarly, cda is concentrated on discrimination in society. fairclough social theories this review was conveyed by fairclough (1992) studied discourse of social theory aims to analyze the political and social event. deceptively, these indications show various world sights from different perspectives. he stated that "a language is social practice' form rather than an individual activity”. this insight is interrelated to power and also the ideology in discourse. a social group that follows political or economic activity with indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 84 propositions contain to their social power.in discourse, he proposed 3 principles of social practice. firstly, practice in society is thinking the process of social structures. he stated in his study discourse aims to study the written features to know "how is the text designed, why it is designed in this way, and how else could it have been designed?" (fairclough, 1995, p. 202). then, exploration of text describes on the formal features like a phrase, sentence vocabulary, grammar, syntax, images, figures, color, or a blend all of the media. secondly, paradigms of personalities between various classes in society which involves the consumption, production, distribution of texts by how writers processing to produce texts, and readers understanding. thirdly, social practice includes background knowledge of a language such as functions of identity and relational. furthermore, it is the connection between social structure, practice, occasion, and semiotics. overall, social theory is about how discourse in society on the interaction outlines between participants, goals, and types of social events. matched with this theory, he has framed cda which contains text, discursive and social practice. these frameworks explain the certain occurrence and highlight of discourse. commonly, it is aimed at presenting ideologies which are challenging when the text is interrelated to the social context. the first of dimensional framework is the occurrence of makes a possible textual linguistic analyze features. hence, fairclough also organized linguistic features into four main classifications which are vocabulary, cohesion, grammar in the text structure (fairclough, 1992; jorgensen and phillips, 2002). it means that by these linguistic features the correlation society and text. it is also linked to the conversational practice which texts are typically inspired differently depends on social context. an example which can be applicable to the pattern of cda. such as the production, distribution, and taking theinformation from the text. so, we need to practice in our society by seeing who are our goal, type of person, and events which are related to our reader understanding from our text analyze. method in showing the review, first, the electronic' search was effected in from google scholar database. google scholar was used because it is free to access and it keys literature of disciplines. in choosing related studies for the review, the search was limited to, a period of ten years since 2005 to 2015. keywords such as cda and media and then search. another review is based on authenticity data. at first, 31 related studies were downloaded with 15 studies are a concrete theoretical framework. only studies put on cda were appraised and 16 research studies were read comprehensively and the content was analyzed according to major theoretical frameworks. the appendix shows a summary of research studies according to authors, year of a journal, research objectives, methodology, sources of data and findings. besides that, the major frameworks reviewed three major themes. firstly, the framework is concerned with cda' application that using fairclough's analytical. the secondly and thirdly, themes application using from van dijk's and wodak framework within this frame around ten years. results and discussion studies on political, power and discursivity ideologies in discourse have been explored as hidden so many word connotation and power behind all word in exposing the identity of a social leader. it is open that power is often connected with the act of controlling the contributions of the non-powerful in the society' participants that take a position between the powerholder and the powerless. actually, the powerless people are refrained to comment or debate on political issues. it is seeming that ideology has a power to sightless noncritical discourse analysis in various ways. in addition, the positive in self-presentation or negative in other-presentation strategies were frequently engaged. the discriminatory group is exposed as the negative other-presentation by the group' dominance which possesses positive self-presentation. the analytical ratna sari, silvia eka putri, herdi, & budianto hamuddin bridging critical discourse analysis in media discourse studies 85 frameworks for each study are indomitable by the researchers of the particular study. the studies further down are organized into three major themes which are related van dijk's and fairclough's framework application. van dijk’s framework application nowadays, in media texts' approaches used mixed methods are very often working. examples of mixed methods are the work of the glasgow media group (1976, 1980, 1985) on news programs and van dijk's work (1998) comparing news reports in different countries. there are in content analysis combination with text-linguistic and analytical of discourse approaches. so far media are concerned in linguistic approaches with focusing mostly on the moment of the text. although there has been increasing curiosity of viewers in the past years, studies that link media studies and response are still limited. furthermore, van dijk has been noted in his studies about ideological and social approaches. ideological square van dijk's ideological framework: macrostrategies include negative other-presentation and positive self-presentation. the findings expressed various contradicting ideologies of the newspapers. one example media was posted against iran is the phrase "a country which tries to advance a nuclear weapon". this phrase gives a horrifying ideology that seen as an intimidation. as a consequence, it is shown that prejudgment between the america-iran associations as the most and less powerful ideology. van dijk's ideological square scanned the islamic ideologies in the egyptian newspaper. it is perceived that ideologies do emphasize the respectable and bad rules to expose. an instance that can be showed as negative is the presentation of unofficial brotherhood relationship. the good statement "unofficial" as this clues to the understanding that "the muslim brotherhood" is not recognized as a group. thus, events which are lead are said to be illegal and unauthorized. hence, a negative belief is directed "the muslim brotherhood" to their good acts. another study, investigate the affiliation in each ideology and language in the manifestation of four main newspapers in america and britain to scrutinize islam's images. the newspaper' analysis headlines release the misconception, on how an issue is observed by the social life. an example which can be portrayed the headline ‘"how islam has been corrupted". this headline assumed islam is corrupted. on the contrary,islam stands do not like as they said. no corruption and no negative believes which cast an opposed bright upon the muslim community. ahmadian and farahani (2014) in the study of news reports was approved to consider the ideological differences in da between the los angeles times and tehran times under van dijk’s ideological framework: macro-strategies which are the positive and negative presentation. the findings showed various contradicting ideologies in both the newspapers were used in shoot upcountless negative ideologies against the others. example one the phrase was posted, iran is “a country which tries to develop a nuclear weapon”. it gives a disturbing ideology to the society as a threat for them and it is open that prejudice looks like to be one of the main ideology between the america-iran relationships as the most influential possesses a positive ideology meanwhile the less influential be a negative ideology. social approach cda aids discovering the unseen objectives by social actors insight of the society.studied the bond discourse and ideology from political tv talk show are applicate to assists in finding out the hidden purposes from social actors in the perceptiveness of the society. within this context, more than a few ideological can be spotted during the question and answer section when the politician missed and broke off sentences not wanting to show up certain questions raised by the journalist. in this context, several secret ideological stances can be realized. for example, it can be sawed during the question and answer session when the politician avoided and stopped smashed off sentences not requiring to show indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 86 up certain questions mentioned by the anchor. this form of switching substances a lot as it could be a secret he did not want to reveal, or deliberately skipped off to another topic to redirect the attention of the audience. therefore, it can be exemplified as emerged ideologies, the conversation is handled by the dominating one (politician) which collapsed the audience from additional inquiring. discourse is comprehended to be dishonest to the pure as it hides ideological propositions which tends to be a stalker in the political subject. azad (2013) in the news broadcasting that examined a negative ideological item was stared to the former president of united states, george bush as his ‘8 years of the presidency' is stamped as ‘8 years of crime’. this stance implies to an unkind meaning as in an awful leader, an embarrassed occupant, and an authoritative. in this application, it is also explored the company of ideology in a selection of radio news that implicit power is exercised. it is like president obasanjo has recognized good governance in the certain news. his speech brought a faith that nigeria's lack of good governance which has caused complications in the country's economy. for that reason, the existence president obasanjo as the recent president is seen as a panacea to the country which will cure the unbalanced economic metropolitan. thus, it implies a positive selfpresentation as the president is a person who conveys variations in the economic activities. fairclough’s framework application in the area of applied linguistics, cda has been used colossally in various types analyzingthe critical phenomena which leads to the rise of a certain ideology, powerdomination and relationwithin a dominion, dissimilarity amonggenders, races, and social classes. it issupposed that the most fundamental aspect where domination and power are functional is in the lifeof the public over media. media is a categorical public area is showing to variousideologies which outcome and blindfold their mind as a convinced ideology is required onthem in their daily life.for example, zhang (2014) observed the news reports from political area among the context of american and iraq in the american newspapers specifically the newyork times employing fairclough’s three-dimensional framework to examine the discursivityof text, interactions, and perspective in unmasking the contradictory ideologies. results have shown apositive ideology for the bush government as he was ordered as a liberatorwhile the iraqi community leader sadam hussein was written off as an enemy which exposed anegative ideology. further analysis opens a may partial image on both the countries thusportraying diverse ideological notions. another study by mayasari, darmayanti, and riyanto(2013) in the context of new reports marked at the take out the relationship between language aspect and ideology in the indonesia daily newspapers on the formation of thecorruption eradication commission (cec) building. the commonplaces between both the gatherings, cec and government, have led to a positive ideological construction for the cec as the publicheld to anti-corruption which heartened donations in order to create thebuilding. on the other hand, the government strongly opposite the production of the new buildingwhich caused to a negative ideological appearance. thus, the negative ideological creationtowards the government has been made as members of the government are assumed to becorrupted and are complicated by corruption. fairclough (1995) and garrett and bell (1998) delivered a general idea of the different text of discourse analysis approaches and their media studies application. the approaches engaged within critical linguistics to put emphasis on the prominence of the context of social and area of historical and the interdiscursive element. consequently, the claim is not to expose "hidden meanings," as this would infer a static origin of the text, but to identify and analyze discursive outlines, argumentation, and revenues of awareness. bell (1984)as an example, while seeing the microlinguistic advanced in viewers intention, considers the groups in word endings. cda has been used colossally in various genres in ratna sari, silvia eka putri, herdi, & budianto hamuddin bridging critical discourse analysis in media discourse studies 87 applied linguistics such as certain ideology, power domination, discrimination among races, genders, and social classes. where power and also authority is implemented is in the life of the public through media. media' public is exposed to various ideologies which effect mind as a convinced ideology in our daily life. fowler (1991) put on several tools of linguistics functional includes the modality, transitivity, nominalizations, procedure of passives etc. in language studies of a rule of news on media. it means that analysis on media is anxious with a problem and not unbendingly simultaneous to the one or other linguistic methodology. what seems suitable is an approach of multimethod that syndicates different tools and levels of critical analysis.for illustration, zhang (2014) studied the political news reports between the circumstance of american and iraq in the american newspapers in detail the new york times exploiting three-dimensional framework of fairclough investigated the discursivity of text, interactions, and context in finding the different ideologies. results out a positive ideology for the bush paperwork as he was classified as friendly and a liberator while iraq'leader sadam hussein as an enemy which give negative ideology. further analysis revealed a partial image on both the countries thus representing various ideological notions. vahid and esmae'li (2012) studied the thoughts and power of companies' product through advertisements which inclined buyers indirectly. it is passed to enable consumers to trust the product totally. an example beauty product by nivea exposing the word ‘goodbye cellulite'. the ideology here is the product has the supremacy to go form any cellulite, and that it is truthful. it is interest for women with cellulite problems as these arguments are proficient of changing one's thoughts. in consequence, it is handled consumers strongly. in another opinion, kaur, arumugam, and yunus (2013) also see the sights of ideology in the beauty products' advertisement. discourse on the beauty products also as social practice on the text language and it grows into a portion of social practice. in the advertisements' language reveals a women's ideology and social status; as a result, women with fair skin, slim and good-looking more power than the ordinary women in the society. through women' qualities is created exposing the duplicate of being ‘in-group' rather than being oldfashioned. phrases which are used to expose the sense of fashion are ‘big is beautiful', ‘plump your lips', and ‘shimmering rouge' which are linked with women of higher class. further, mayasari, darmayanti, and riyanto (2013) also mentioned in their study in the case of new rumors about the liaison between some pieces of linguistic and philosophy in the indonesia daily newspapers based on formation building of the corruption eradication commission (cec). they have been able to be a positive philosophical in public supported anti-corruption which stimulated donations in order to construct the building. nonetheless, the parliament strongly opposite the new building which resulted in a negative ideological image. therefore, its assembly has been twisted as members of the parliament are believed it to be corruption. another example delivered by iqbal, danish, and tahir (2014a) also look at discourse used countless beauty products to capture women' mind in transmitting positively ideological but most consumers failed to notice the negativity in arrears discourse structure. for example, popular product as a cream form like fair & lovely uses words such as ‘night fairness', ‘face polish', and ‘daily fairness'. in these words, women hug the belief that fairness. in consequence, the ideology manipulates women while handover negative views. besides products, another analysis is given by fauzan, subroto, and poedjosoedarmo (2014) examined the unseen ideology in the indonesian tv news reports. it discussed extra disaster of the mudflow. one may be unacquainted of the cause of mudflow, but the power of discourse dishonesties with the text maker. in this condition, he practiced to illuminating the ideologies. to help viewers gather mudflow caused by a) mudflow was not a natural tragedy; b) the effect of mudflow destroyed lives of many citizens; c) caused economic declination. these negative indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 88 ideologies "underlined their bad things" (van dijk, 2000, p.44). in similarly, tahmasbi and kalkhajeh (2013) analyzed tv bank and magazine advertisements are expressed to endorse facility and to offer viewers in the banking sector. they have a target of watchers over discourse such as "besides 201 offers to buy peugeots 407". in this phrase, bank advertisers take on their viewers to purchasing or upgrading their car. thus, the advertisers have created discourse which has manipulated the viewers indirectly. in a related study, behnam and mahmoudy (2013) learned the political ideology in iran's nuclear report. in determining the ideological structures. it can be described: "iran has not providing requested information…" (kerr, 2009, p.2). the phrase denotes a negative belief in iran. besides, it can be through monotonous words for instance contamination, undeclared, uncertainties, inconsistencies. it shows a negative image for such as a) iran is trying to hide information from world' sight, and b) iran is changeable in its nuclear program. like to the studies above, bolte and keong (2014) analyzed cda as the ideological representation of illegal immigrants in the malaysia news that outlines the manner a text is made (jorgenson & phillips, 2002; fairclough, 1992) and vice-versa. it was found in the media discourse is the tools to protect of agreement that denotes a positive representation of malaysia and australia. although, they were joined forces to provide accommodation to these immigrants. conclusion this study is showing that mass media act a momentous role in the production of beliefs, prejudice, and power on social context. this study has established that cda has popular in the arena of discourse studies by a look at the increasing quantity of cda studies in investigating various social context to see the sights as well as correlation among language and ideology.this study have seen how discourse approach in social context examine the interaction patterns between participants, social goals and types of social events hence theemploy of the discursive practice in the relationship between text and social practice is bridged. then, under the ideology context of elite which controls the thought of a social group it will then represent the basic social characteristics e.g identities, goals, norms, values, positions, and resources. this research used to observe how dominating group,elite (social actor e.g politician, public figure, wealth figure, religious figure) repress the less powerful person or minority. this study have found out that power often associated with the act of controlling and constraining the contributions of the nonpowerful participants in the society as this encounter usually takes place between the powerholder and the powerlessare refrained from commenting or debating on political issues and the rationality of an event. on the whole as there is implicit association in every word and power behind each word in unmasking the identity of a noble or horrendous character of the elite. it is unmistakable that cda is a controlling tool in analyzing texts as ideological representations. hence, this study review presented cda which are marked to make recognized stereotypes, beliefs, domination, power and ideological relevance. in conclusion, the social circumstance defines the making of discourse and contributing the social power. finally, the exploration of this research is hoped that cda researchers can contribute existing cda knowledge to elevation attentiveness for new researchers in conducting studies on critical discourse analysis studies. references ahmadian, m., & farahani, e. 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(2014). a critical discourse analysis of political news reports. theory and practice in language studies, 4(11), 2273-2277. indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 1 the merits of quizlet for vocabulary learning at tertiary level agung ginanjar anjaniputra english education study program, universitas suryakancana, cianjur, west java e-mail: anjaniputragi@gmail.com vina aini salsabila english education study program, universitas suryakancana, cianjur, west java e-mail: vnsabila91@gmail.com apa citation: anjaniputra, a. g., & salsabila, v. a. (2018). the merits of quizlet for vocabulary learning at tertiary level. indonesian efl journal, 4(2), 1-11. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v4i2.1370. received: 12-03-2018 accepted: 28-05-2018 published: 01-07-2018 abstract: vocabulary has been at the pinnacle of language learning since vocabulary mastery helps in communicating language. however, learning vocabulary yields problems prevalent among learners of this new digital era such as low participation and difficulties to keep learners attentive to lessons being learned. deploying classroom action research, this study aims to depict the implementation of quizlet in learning vocabulary at the tertiary level and to elicit learners' responses to quizlet utilization in the classroom. in this regard, observation and interview were triangulated to get an enhanced portrayal of what occurred during the learning. these instruments resulted in findings that quizlet to some extent helped in fostering learners’ engagement, as well as persistence in vocabulary learning and that the learners enjoyed learning vocabulary in quizlet and considered quizlet as useful and beneficial tool for their learning development, particularly in vocabulary learning. hence, it is suggested that teachers make use of quizlet to provide learners with a new way of learning that is interesting, innovative, and probably improving learners’ learning experiences, eventually fulfilling the learners’ demand of the 21 st century. keywords: vocabulary learning; quizlet; learner engagement; call. introduction vocabulary is inextricably linked to the production and comprehension of language. insufficient vocabulary may limit one to understand and produce speech as well as text. in line with it, groot (2000) affirms that vocabulary has something to do with reading, listening, speaking, and writing. as an example, a person must at least master 5000 words to be able to comprehend nonspecialized texts (nation, 1990) cited in (groot, 2000). despite its primacy of vocabulary these days, many students have limited numbers of vocabulary (barr, 2016), which can prevent them from producing and understanding a large coverage of speech or text. moreover, so long as vocabulary learning is concerned, problems of learning vocabulary are apparent among second language learners (gass & selinker, 2008). in this regard, based on the writers’ experience, students are also indifferent to the learning, leading to reluctance to participate. besides, the students seem to be unenthusiastic about and inattentive to it. therefore, vocabulary needs are learned an interesting way. one interesting way of learning vocabulary is by incorporating technology into the classroom, known as computer assisted language learning, henceforth call. it will not bring about any significant technical problems since technology is now indispensable and students live with it. roles of call in vocabulary learning are crucial since it provides students with metacognitive activities allowing for making inferences through contexts using imagery and semantic techniques (kose, cimen, & mede, 2016). it is affirmed that the use of technology in the classroom is, in fact, beneficial in a way that it can motivate students and engage them in https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v4i2.1370 agung ginanjar anjaniputra & vina aini salsabila the merits of quizlet for vocabulary learning at tertiary level 2 learning (wieking, 2016). besides, the development of technology allows language teachers to easily make use of it. technology, as vargas (2011) argues that it can be realized through call, promotes persistence in reading lessons. it constitutes supplementary classroom activities which can motivate students to engage in learning activities. once students are engaged, they may willingly explore their interests so that students can learn at their own pace, allowing for self-control over the learning. twyman & tindall (2006, cited in vargas, 2011) assert that the ability to make the learning personal brings about more involvement and success feeling that are likely to stimulate students to motivate themselves in continual learning. one of the realizations of call recently prevailing, especially for vocabulary learning, is by using quizlet that is a new sophisticated tool specifically designed for learning vocabulary. found in 2005, it comes with an array of features that can help teachers to organize their classes. it promotes collaborative learning, drilling, and repetition, as well as enjoyable fun ways of learning. therefore, students are not bored easily. quizlet has been researched to measure its significance for vocabulary learning. research on quizlet was conducted to see its effect on vocabulary learning (see vargas, 2011; ashcroft & imrie, 2014; barr, 2016; kálecký, 2016; andarab, 2017), and to explore efl learners’ views on the use of quizlet (lander, 2016; kose, cimen, & mede, 2016). despite a few studies concerning quizlet, research descriptively qualitative investigation of quizlet at tertiary level, which is particularly combined to search for the students’ responses, is lacking. this gap is necessary to be filled since it can enrich knowledge of using a digital-based tool for vocabulary learning in indonesia. furthermore, the issue of technology integration in the classroom is prevailing and attracting many scholars. quizlet is a website that allows users to learn vocabulary by means of flashcard sets using a variety of game-like learning tools. it is also available for android and ios, allowing users to use it anytime and anywhere. for the teacher, classes may be created to manage certain students learning with certain lexical items. the flashcard sets are easily free for all quizlet users to create, dependent on vocabulary to learn. learners can also contribute to sets created by teachers or make their own vocabulary sets for learning. the sets consist of terms for the lexical items and definitions for the description where a picture or sound can be added. the game-like tools comprise two main categories: study and play. in study, there are five modes entailing learn, flashcards, write, spell, and test; “learn” allows users to take control of their learning to get them familiar with the sets; “flashcards” as its name implies provides users with digital flashcards that can be flipped over by only clicking on the card; “write” is to write the correct term of the description shown; “spell” provides users with spelling practice in which listening to the spelling and writing the correct answer of the spelling are encouraged; “test” is indeed designed for testing purposes, whose users are given random questions based upon the given set and results are directly shown as all the questions are answered. in the meantime, three choices are available in play, encompassing match, gravity, and live; “match” allows users to match terms and definitions scattered around the screen; “gravity” presents meteors with words on it, then users have to type the answer for the words before the meteors hit the earth; “live” is an online collaborative activity where each group competes to reach certain criterion by answering correctly because one wrong answer will cause the group to start from the beginning. all of the modes can be monitored by the teacher as long as students are included in the created class. for instance, whether or not students have completed study modes can be seen or items answered by students are shown statistically, allowing for revising or focusing on items answered correctly or incorrectly most of the time by students. quizlet has been reported to have some virtues as well as shortcomings in its implementation. it gives advantages in terms of learners’ performance, engagement, autonomy, interests, and motivation. the advantages of it result from some studies indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 3 suggesting that commonly students can progress if learning by using quizlet (vargas, 2011; ashcroft & imrie, 2014; kálecký, 2016; andarab, 2017), particularly kinesthetic learners can generally perform well for testing (barr, 2016); learners’ engagement in the classroom is apparent (vargas, 2011; barr, 2016; beyer & lynch, n.d.); it results in learners’ autonomy to learn on their computers and smartphones (vargas, 2011; barr, 2016; kálecký, 2016; beyer & lynch, n.d.); a new, enjoyable way of vocabulary learning is provided (lander, 2016; beyer & lynch, n.d.); students can control their progress and directly see at which part of vocabulary sets the students to lack (kálecký, 2016); and students can benefit from the “spell section” to improve the spelling of words (vargas, 2011; kálecký, 2016). notwithstanding the aforementioned advantages, a number of barriers also occur. the barriers encompass the failure to encourage spaced repetition (barr, 2016), students’ negligence of sets whose unit tests were completed (barr, 2016), a heavy workload on students’ mind (beyer & lynch, n.d.), social distraction so long as phones are used (beyer & lynch, n.d.), and the internet connection, phone memory, low-charged battery, and acceptance of only the exact same answers (kálecký, 2016). it is worth noting that teachers who are interested in implementing quizlet should anticipate the possible drawbacks. these disadvantages are however challenged to the implementation of call, quizlet in particular. in this case, learner autonomy, which may result from using quizlet, plays a vital role to deal with those shortcomings. according to nation (2001), responsibility for learning is typical of autonomous learners, who are also capable of taking control of their own learning. hence, it is expected that once autonomy is attained, the problems of spaced repetition failure, negligence, social distraction, etc. mean nothing as autonomous learners are aware of deciding when, where, what, which, how much certain items should be learned. puentedura (2006, cited in ashcroft & imrie, 2014) proposed a model to assess the integration of technology into the classroom, the so-called the samr model. it is the abbreviation of the substitution augmentation modification redefinition model. the samr model is recommended for english language teaching contexts in which learning is particularly deployed (hockly, 2013, cited (romrell, kidder, & wood, 2014). this model, as suggested by puentedura (2006, 2010), classifies four stages that can progressively impact on the learning activities in the classroom. substitution is when technology is used to replace old-fashioned ways of learning, yet the function is still the same. meanwhile, augmentation deals with replacing tasks with some improved functions. besides, modification allows for redesigning tasks in a significant way. the last is redefinition in which new tasks previously inconceivable are created by technology. the four stages are also depicted in table 1, comprising the definitions and examples of quizlet application by ashcroft and imrie (2014, p. 641). table 1. the samr model for technology impact assessment substitution technology is used to perform the same kind of task that was done before computers e.g., making basic digital flashcards augmentation although still acting as a substitute, technology offers some functional improvement e.g., making digital flashcards with images and audio modification technology facilitates significant task redesign e.g., generating a test from a set of digital flashcards redefinition technology allows for the creation of tasks that were previously inconceivable e.g., inter-class/interschool/international digital flashcard learner collaboration agung ginanjar anjaniputra & vina aini salsabila the merits of quizlet for vocabulary learning at tertiary level 4 in detail, (ashcroft & imrie, 2014) further exemplify the activities representing each stage of the model. substitution has to do with making digital flashcards as a study set. besides, augmentation entails combining the flashcards with pictures or sounds, and studying in modes available, mobile quizlet, and printing. in addition, modification encompasses importing data for creating the study set, using the test mode, and sharing a set through the website. lastly, redefinition comprises studying together or sharing resources, which puts emphasis on student collaboration such as using the live mode. in addition to the samr model, the way vocabulary should be taught entails some considerations in order that learning and acquisition can occur. the first one is the concreteness of vocabulary presented to students. it is found that concrete and cognates words are learned more easily compared to the abstract and noncognate ones (groot & keijzer, 2000). this to a certain extent supports the notion of transfer where similarities in terms of vocabulary in the first language can ease learners' acquisition of words in the second language (steinberg & sciarini, 2006). in addition to cognate and concrete vocabulary, nation and macalister (2010) propose that high-frequency words should be prioritized. this means that words required to be acquired in advance are those mostly used in communication. however, lowfrequency vocabulary can be taught as long as the high-frequency items have been covered. it is further argued that regardless of high and low-frequency lexical items, academic vocabulary cannot be neglected (nation, 2001). it is important, in spite of uncommon occurrence in non-academic texts, because of its substantial number of words in academic texts (ibid.). in the tertiary level, academic texts constitute common materials for students in the four language skills. thus, academic words should be taught to learners at the tertiary level of education. unlike adult learners, for children, as they are in the critical period, it is easy to acquire a huge number of words by means of induction through high exposure to the use of words. according to steinberg and sciarini (2006), as people reach adulthood, their memory ability declines. this implies that to acquire certain vocabulary, adult learners need not only high exposure but also drilling and repetition. this is suggested by schmidt (2008) that maximized exposure and incidental learning, as well as explicit intentional learning, are components required for vocabulary learning programs. vocabulary learning through explicit learning is said to be effective, which leads to long retention. in addition to this, nation and macalister (2010) that repetition is necessary for a language program. it is stated that language-focused learning, one of which is vocabulary, should be taught to students through, as further exemplified, repetition or vocabulary learning on cards. repetition and flash cards are typical of learning vocabulary in quizlet, yet in different forms which are online and digital-based. with regard to previous related studies and literature review of vocabulary learning, the process of vocabulary learning by implementing quizlet is very much of concern. therefore, this study is aimed at depicting how the use of quizlet in the classroom is for learning vocabulary, and how students at the tertiary level respond to the use of quizlet. method deploying classroom action research, this study focused on qualitative means of describing the data. in this regard, the data were portrayed descriptively in relation to what really occurred in the classroom while quizlet was implemented. the participants constituted a class of the fourth year students taking the complex vocabulary subject, which consisted of 30 students. yet, not all the students were involved since some of the students missed the class as quizlet was applied. through classroom observation, tests and interview, data were collected in this study. classroom observation and tests were intended to yield the merits of using quizlet in the classroom, especially for vocabulary learning. in the meantime, the interview was administered to elicit the student’s responses on the use of quizlet and, to a certain extent, indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 5 to confirm what was found in the classroom observation so the data were triangulated. the implementation of quizlet was divided into four meetings. the first one was when quizlet was solely used in the classroom and the students were able to learn based on their own preferences. students started to get accustomed to learning by means of quizlet. the items learned in this meeting were synonymous words such as nil and naught, shallow and superficial, etc. likewise, the second meeting was also carried out to have students learn antonymous words prepared in a study set, for example, bring about vs avert, persistent vs loath, etc.. the third meeting was somewhat different from the previous meetings that the students focus on the test mode to pass the criteria set by the teacher. the items learned are, for instance, in/with regard to, remind about/of, etc.. the fourth meeting differed from the third meeting in terms of the learning activities which focus on the game modes. the vocabulary learned was verbs such as a stop to do/doing and have something done/do distinctions. the activities comprised guessing games, writing exercises, the whisper game, and completing exercises. vocabulary learned in the meetings entailed selected words, many of which are advanced words marked “a” in cambridge advanced learners’ dictionary, 3rd edition. prior to coming to the class, the teacher created a class so that students could join and provided a vocabulary set linked to the class. the students were given a class link to join the class and the students clicked on or followed the link would be directed to the class. after clicking “join”, the teacher will accept the students. once the students joined the class, access to the prepared set including study and play modes are open. therefore, before coming to the class, most of the students had joined the class. in the next meeting, since all students joined the class, what was prepared was another vocabulary set so, in advance of the class meeting, the set had been ready and linked to the class. in the classroom, everything was ready for students to use quizlet. during the classes, all student activities were videotaped for the sake of data analysis. after the fourth meeting, a test was administered to get a description of students’ attainment. the data were then analyzed by means of describing the activities in the classroom and how the students did the activities. to result in the findings, the data from the observation and the interview were coded to generate broader themes. the themes were categorized based on several recurring patterns of the students in relation to how the students react to the use of quizlet in the classroom. the themes of the classroom observation were compared to the resulted themes of the interview to confirm the findings. the themes prevailing in both the data of classroom observation and the interview are to be analyzed for interpretation. the findings resulted in the portrayal of how the deployment of quizlet in the classroom was for vocabulary learning. in addition to the analysis of the observation and the interview, an analysis to yield students’ responses to the use of quizlet was carried out, whose data are of the interview result. the result of the analysis bore the students' responses. similarly, these findings were also interpreted to come up with a thoroughly comprehensive understanding of issues under investigation. results and discussion this section presents findings of how the use of quizlet in the classroom is for vocabulary learning and how students respond to the use of it. the use of quizlet in the classroom is going to be presented separately in each meeting so there will be four meetings portrayed accordingly. this finding will consecutively be discussed and supported by the data from the interview. concerning the students' responses, the results are conveyed descriptively. the implementation of quizlet in general, to follow the samr model, the use of quizlet in the classroom realized the three stages: substitution, augmentation, and modification. the substitution was realized through making flashcards in quizlet; augmentation was manifested in a variety of modes where the digital flashcards were combined with the spelling-sound; modification was demonstrated when students agung ginanjar anjaniputra & vina aini salsabila the merits of quizlet for vocabulary learning at tertiary level 6 were provided with test generated randomly from the given set in the “test” mode. the whole depiction of quizlet integration in the classroom is shown in table 2. the details of what occurred and of students’ activities in the classrooms are also portrayed in each meeting, following the table. table 2. the integration of quizlet phases meeting 1 meeting 1 2 3 4 substitution making flashcards of a study set √ √ √ √ augmentation studying in flashcards mode √ √ studying in spell mode √ √ studying in learn mode √ √ studying in write mode √ √ studying in the game mode √ √ √ √ modification modifying flashcards imported from other sources √ √ √ using the test mode √ √ √ creating a class √ √ √ √ monitoring progress √ √ meeting 1 the class began with checking the attendance list. after that, the teacher asked the students about joining the quizlet class as it had been told beforehand. however, there were some students had not joined the class for some reasons such as the limited internet connection, problems in logging in because of forgetting the email registered as well as the password losing the class link, and negligence as the students had missed the previous class. the teacher asked the students to go on joining the class, while other students who had joined the class were asked to exploring quizlet by learning the set for that meeting which was about synonymous words. besides, another problem was that some students did not bring laptops as they had been told. laptops were used since some features could not be accessed by some smartphones, such as "gravity" and "live". so to handle this problem, the teacher allowed students to use their smartphones. to attract students’ attention to quizlet, the teacher asked the students to play “match” or “gravity”. this was intended to motivate students to learn vocabulary as if they were playing a game. learning is better if students can enjoy it, which in turn can engage them and increase their interests in learning. this is in accordance with (vargas, 2011) that making students engaged in learning, as one of the benefits of using technology, may lead to the exploration of their interests so that students can learn at their own pace, allowing for selfcontrol over the learning. when students were playing gravity or match, the teacher informed students that their scores would be recorded automatically. match recorded students score in terms of seconds or minutes, the faster students complete the task, the higher their ranking is. meanwhile, gravity recorded the score from nil to hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands depending on how long users can last. they seemed enthusiastic to get the highest score so that their names could be shown in the top three ranking. it was observed that once a student got the first rank, then being replaced by her friend, the student tried to get her position back on to the top. it indicates that quizlet encourages students to be motivated and engaged in the learning. this was also mentioned by the students in the interview that quizlet made them engaged in learning. thus, this finding is in harmony with some previous studies that learners' engagement in the classroom is apparent (vargas, 2011; barr, 2016; beyer & lynch, n.d.). meeting 2 the vocabulary items learned were presented in antonymous pairs. the teacher asked the students to go to match. yet, some preferred accessing learn, spell, write, flashcards, or even just scrolling down the set. this shows that the students tried to control their own indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 7 learning based on their own pace. this is an indication of autonomy possessed by the students at it is affirmed by nation (2001) that autonomous learners are capable of taking control of their own learning. moreover, the situation may be caused by the willingness of the learners to first learn what is required for them, instead of directly accessing match. it seemed that the students internalized the learning in the previous meeting so that the students monitored their learning. this confirms the previous studies that quizlet results in learners’ autonomy to learn (vargas, 2011; barr, 2016; kálecký, 2016; beyer & lynch, n.d.). it is worth noting that match to some extent helps in increasing students’ interests to learn, yet it brings about a problem. the problem was that the students match the flashcards as fast as they possibly could without reading the words at all. remarkably, the students can complete a task in match in only 7 seconds. this was because the scores shown in the ranking are the time to complete a task. therefore, since the students wanted their names to be shown in the ranking list, they irresponsibly do so. at least, two ways can be done to prevent this. the first one is by creating a set which has the similar number of words in the term boxes and in the definition boxes. it is better to replace the definitions that comprise long sentences or phrases with pictures, if not by a single word as the term itself. the second way is by only allowing students to play in the hard level of difficulty, not the easy or medium one. in a hard level, so many flashcards are shown, limiting students to match without even reading it. if they do so, much time will be spent. after playing in match and gravity, students were directed to test. the test was deliberately focused on 20 written questions. each student was given the 20 questions randomly and no one got the exact same questions. the students were challenged to get a score of 80. some students were surprised because they got bad marks. however, this initiated students’ interests as they kept on doing it until they scored 80. a few students scored 80 easily, so they were asked to score 100. in contrast, it was harder for them to score 100, the students could not believe it. a student scored 90 several times and showed the scored to the teacher. nevertheless, it did not stop the students re-trying on and on again. the student was persistence in scoring 100 no matter how hard it was. this evidence corresponds to the argument that the use of technology in the classroom is, in fact, beneficial in a way that it can motivate students and engage them in learning (wieking, 2016). meeting 3 in the third meeting, the teacher directly asked students to learn the way the students want. most of the students preferred match to other modes. some accessed learn, write, flashcards, etc.. after 20 minutes of exploring quizlet, the teacher asked students to access test. instead of answering 20 questions in test of the previous meeting, the students were merely instructed to answer ten questions in each turn of test. the type of questions allowed was still the written question. the students were allowed to move to the next stage of answering 20 questions in test as the students scored perfectly for ten questions. few students could pass this and started to answer 20 questions. when the students finished completing a test, their scores were mentioned to attract the teacher’s attention. while mentioning their scores the students looked proud when the score was high but annoyed when the score was disappointing. in addition, it was observed that after answering the test and the result was disappointing, the students return to the set to remind them about the answer. sometimes, the students also jotted down something on their notebooks concerning the vocabulary items being learned. students can control their progress and directly see at which part of vocabulary sets the students to lack (kálecký, 2016). once the information the students required was found in the study set, the students started over the test. failure in the test seemed to boost the students to strive harder. it was observed that the students relentlessly made any endeavor to pass the criteria set by the teacher. this showed that students’ persistence was generated. regarding this, the agung ginanjar anjaniputra & vina aini salsabila the merits of quizlet for vocabulary learning at tertiary level 8 student interview also yields that quizlet is deemed effective to promote students’ persistence in vocabulary learning. albeit the prevailing student persistence, a number of problems were apparent in this meeting, including the internet connection which immediately was unreachable by their phone and mistyped answers. several students were impeded by this mistyping problem. a student told the teacher that “i should have gotten a better score if i had not mistyped the answers”. these problems were also found by (kálecký, 2016). besides, it is stated that phone memory and low-charged battery alongside the internet connection and mistyped answers were issues in using quizlet. concerning the mistyping problem, teachers must remind students to carefully type the answer. meeting 4 the students were previously asked to bring laptops to the class because the teacher intended to focus on gravity. of other features in quizlet, gravity resembles a modern game designed not for learning. thus, when playing gravity, the students can enjoy the game. games stimulate students to learn because students consciously play games, yet subconsciously learn vocabulary. gravity is wrapped in such a way so students were interested in the game. this is consistent with the fact that quizlet provides a new, enjoyable way of learning vocabulary (lander, 2016; beyer & lynch, n.d.). one of the features generates enjoyment, as mentioned before, is gravity. gravity interests students in a way that the students can maintain their focus and attention. it is worth mentioning that as the time was up, a few students continued playing quizlet. their continual learning was also noted that there was a change in the top ranking of match and gravity after the class ended. this shows that the students personalized their own learning. twyman & tindall (2006, cited in vargas, 2011) assert that the ability to make the learning personal brings about more involvement and success feeling that are likely to stimulate students to motivate themselves in continual learning. the learning is continued and done repeatedly by certain students until the students became one of the top scorers. it is suggested by nation & macalister (2010) that vocabulary should be taught to students through repetition or vocabulary learning on cards. hence, repetition of vocabulary being learned can lead to long retention of the words. after the fourth meeting, a test is carried out. the result is discernable in the table below. table 3. students’ scores students scores students scores students scores 1 59 9 83 16 78 2 91 10 70 17 83 3 96 11 48 18 63 4 80 12 72 19 76 5 78 13 83 20 61 6 78 14 46 21 46 7 83 15 61 22 59 8 61 the average of the students’ scores is 70.68. although the average is not quite promising, the highest score among the students is 96. besides, it can be seen from the scores that only a small number of the students scored lower than 60. it is likely that those having low scores are not the kinesthetic type of learners since according to barr (2016), kinesthetic learners can benefit from quizlet when it comes to testing. nevertheless, quizlet has been proven out to be the aid for teachers to overcome students’ low participation and lack of attention. furthermore, students’ engagement and persistence in learning are also apparent during the lessons, supported by the interview data. indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 9 students’ responses to the implementation of quizlet this section describes how students responded to the use of quizlet in the classroom. the result shows that students realized the positive effect of using quizlet in learning vocabularies. the students assumed that quizlet provided enjoyable learning, generated their autonomy, increased their persistence and engagement in the learning process. providing enjoyable learning the finding from the interview demonstrated that quizlet provides enjoyable learning for students. some students stated that they enjoyed learning vocabularies due to various features on the application. those different features gave ‘fun experience’ for students to feel ‘different way’ of learning. some students further declared that they rarely got bored in the learning process because they did various activities through quizlet. they could easily do drilling from learn, flashcards, and match to memorize new vocabularies. they could check the pronunciation and spelling of each vocabulary in spell and practice writing on write feature as well. “learning vocabularies became more fun”, the students said. they also said that they felt like playing and learning at the same time. it can be seen in this statement: “....quizlet makes my learning more fun. i like the features of the apps. it made me enjoy learning new vocabularies and decreased my boredom” (student 1). this statement is also confirmed by the observation findings showing that most of the students enthusiastically tried the different type of quizlet features during the learning process. it also emphasizes that various types of features are able to give students ‘richer ways’ to engage with quizlet (ravipati, 2017). it also proves that quizlet is a new, enjoyable way of vocabulary learning (lander, 2016; beyer & lynch, n.d.); generating learner autonomy furthermore, the use of quizlet in the classroom helped students generate their autonomy. since quizlet is easily accessed, they could use the apps inside and outside the classroom. the ease of access improved students’ chances to learn independently. the finding shows that most of the students voluntarily learned vocabularies using quizlet. students’ autonomy revealed in the following statement: “i often used quizlet when i was at home since this application could be accessed on my smartphone. hence, i can decide when i should learn and what (material) that i wanted to repeat” (student 2). this statement indicates that students’ autonomy had been developed. it is in line with the observation finding in meeting 2 that demonstrated students’ initiation to select their own choice to learn vocabularies. it is also relevant to nation (2001) who mentioned that autonomous learners are capable of taking control of their own learning. another autonomy is shown from students’ ability in controlling their progress by checking their score in score feature. student 3 mentioned that she could know her ability by observing the score progress. she could also know what vocabularies that she had not known yet. hence, this response is related to kálecký (2016) who claimed that through quizlet, students are able to control their progress and directly see at which part of vocabulary sets the students to lack. generating learner persistence another merit exposed to students' response is that the use of quizlet improved their persistence in learning vocabularies. all interviewed students agreed that they tried their best to memorize vocabularies appeared on quizlet in order to reach the best score. the desire to reach the top preserved their persistence in facing some challenges during the learning process. furthermore, student 3 said that quizlet helped her lengthen the attention span. she further explained that she had to keep practicing in quizlet and fully pay attention to the lecturer's instruction, hence she was able to defeat her friends’ score. in other words, the feeling of competition motivated students to keep their persistence. it is in line with lens, lacante, and vansteenkiste (2005) who declared that the persistence did not only depend on their motivation but also the competing activity. agung ginanjar anjaniputra & vina aini salsabila the merits of quizlet for vocabulary learning at tertiary level 10 this finding demonstrates that the implementation of quizlet was quite successful in turning students’ short attention span into persistence in the learning. hence this statement confirms the finding of the observation in meeting 3. generating learner engagement the last finding from the interview is the improvement in students' engagement. the students assumed that they tended to be more active in the classroom. since all students were ordered to use quizlet in the classroom, they automatically participated in classroom activity, as mentioned by student 4 who said that: “firstly i felt ‘obliged’ to access quizlet but after i tried it, i became more motivated to use it again and again. i also wanted to be more active in class because i learned a lot of vocabularies) from it (quizlet)” (student 4). this report designates that the use of quizlet encouraged the students to be more engaged in each classroom activity. despite some students claimed that using quizlet as a perfect order, but in the end, they used it inside and even outside the classroom as voluntary. this finding emphasizes that learners’ engagement in the classroom is apparent (vargas, 2011; barr, 2016; beyer & lynch, n.d.). additionally, the finding also shows that some students got engaged to quizlet due to their curiosity. when they failed to get 100, they tried to play again, fixed the mistakes, and memorized the difficult vocabularies. “as long as i had not succeeded in reaching 100, i was curious and trying to play again and again”, said student 1. its statement is relevant to laricchia (2013) who assumed that “engagement is all about being genuinely curious and actively exploring whatever has caught your interest”. conclusion as it was observed, the merits of quizlet are concerned with the provision of enjoyable learning, generating leaner autonomy, persistence, focus, and attention, as well as engagement. the students did not get bored easily, as they could focus on the vocabulary set the whole meeting by exploring what is needed by them and the way of learning they prefer. short attention span and low focus are changed into persistence and engagement in the learning. furthermore, learner autonomy is reflected in continual learning outside the class as the students are motivated to get their names shown at the top scorer lists. however, further studies are required to see its significance, whether or not quizlet can improve students’ motivation and achievement. robust research procedures are also suggested for the improvement of this study. acknowledgment we would like to extend our sincerest gratitude to the english education study program of suryakancana university that has always been supportive so that this study could be done, and also to the fourth year students of english education department who participated in this study. references andarab, m. s. (2017). the effect of using quizlet flashcards on learning english vocabulary. proceedings of 113th the iier international conference (p. 37). frankfurt, germany. ashcroft, r. j., & imrie, a. c. (2014). learning vocabulary with digital flashcards. jalt2013 conference proceedings (pp. 639–646). tokyo: jalt. barr, b. w. b. (2016). checking the effectiveness of quizlet as a tool for vocabulary learning. the center of efl journal, 1(2), 36–48. https://doi.org/10.15045/elf_0020104. beyer, l. m., & lynch, k. n. (n.d.). flashcards versus quizlet: achieving maximal verbosity. gass, s. m., & selinker, l. (2008). second language acquisition: an introductory course (3rd ed.). new york: routledge. groot, p. j. m. (2000). computer assisted second language vocabulary acquisition. language learning & technology, 4(1), 56–76. groot, a. m. b. de, & keijzer, r. (2000). what is hard to learn is easy to forget : the roles of word concreteness, cognate status, and word frequency in foreign-language vocabulary learning and forgetting. language learning, 50(1), 1–56. kálecký, r. (2016). quizlet vs. vocabulary notebook: the impact of different methods of storing and revising vocabulary on students' progress, retention, and autonomy. masaryk university. kose, t., cimen, e., & mede, e. (2016). perceptions of efl learners about using an online tool for vocabulary learning in el classrooms: a pilot project in turkey. procedia social and indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 11 behavioral sciences, 232, 362–372. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2016.10.051. lander, b. (2016). quizlet : what the students think – a qualitative data analysis. in s. papadimasophocleous, l. bradley, & s. thouësny (eds.), call communities and culture – short papers from eurocall 2016 (pp. 254–259). researchpublishing.net. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.14705/rpnet.2016 .eurocall2016.571. laricchia, p. (2013). curious and engaged. retrieved from http://livingjoyfully.ca/articles/curious-andengaged/. lens, lacante, and vansteenkiste (2005). study persistence and academic achievement as a function of the type of competing tendencies. european journal of psychology of education., 3, 275-287. nation, i. s. p. (2001). learning vocabulary in another language. cambridge: cambridge university press. nation, i. s. p., & macalister, j. (2010). language curriculum design. puentedura, r. r. (2006). transformation, technology, and education. puentedura, r. r. (2010). samr and tpck: intro to advanced practice. ravipati, s. (2017). new quizlet feature lets students customize study materials with pictures. retrieved from https://thejournal.com/articles/2017/08/24/newquizlet-feature-lets-students-customize-studymaterials-with-pictures.aspx. romrell, d., kidder, l. c., & wood, e. (2014). the samr model as a framework for evaluating mlearning, 1–15. schmidt, n. (2008). instructed second language vocabulary learning. language teaching research, 12(3), 329–363. steinberg, d. d., & sciarini, n. v. (2006). an introduction to psycholinguistics. vargas, j. m. (2011). modern learning: quizlet in the social studies classroom. wichita state university. wieking, b. a. (2016). technology integration and student learning motivation. northwestern college, orange city, ia. retrieved from http://nwcommons.nwciowa.edu/education_maste rs/5/. introduction method results and discussion the implementation of quizlet meeting 1 meeting 2 meeting 3 meeting 4 students’ responses to the implementation of quizlet conclusion acknowledgment indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 1 using multiple texts to teach critical reading skills to linguistically diverse students kaemanje thomas bronx commnunity college city university of new york, united states e-mail: kaemanje.thomas@bcc.cuny.edu minkyung choi bronx commnunity college city university of new york, united states e-mail: minkyung.choi@bcc.cuny.edu apa citation: thomas, k., & choi, m. (2018). using multiple texts to teach critical reading skills to linguistically diverse students. indonesian efl journal, 5(1), 1-12. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v5i1.1626. received: 30-09-2018 accepted: 29-11-2018 published: 01-01-2019 abstract: mastery of developmental reading courses offers both an opportunity for academic enrichment and a barrier to college completion. we examine what it means to use multiple texts in college developmental reading courses, the benefits of using them, and considerations that instructors may employ in their instructions. a review of the literature indicates linguistically diverse students (lds) often lack the required critical thinking skills needed to tackle the rigor and demand of their college level courses. we conducted a study to tests whether using multiple texts improved lds critical reading skills. participants of 30 undergraduate students taking rdl 500 course were analyzed using pre and posttest results. findings indicated that integrated use of multiple texts is a practical teaching approach for lds improved their critical reading skills and their navigation of unfamiliar texts. this implies the use of the one size-fits-all approach may not be an effective pedagogical practice by instructors who teach the ld student. keywords: community college; critical literacy; cultural capital; developmental reading; language minority students; linguistically diverse students; multiple texts; sociocultural literacy. introduction according to hussar and bailey (2013), enrollment numbers for immigrant students in public elementary and secondary schools increased by 7 percent between 1997 and 2011. it is projected that this population of students are expected to increase by another 7 percent by 2022. placed in numeral context, more than four million of this population are in the process of developing english and are classified as english learners (u.s. department of education, 2015). robinson-cimpian, thompson, and umansky (2016) contended that english learners (els) represent more than 10 percent of the united states student population. moreover, the national center for english language acquisition (2011) found that, more than one out of every four children in the united states are from immigrant families, and in most cases, they speak a language other than english at home. furthermore, research found that one in five students in u.s. public schools speak a language other than english at home. samson and collins (2012) contend that english language learners or linguistically diverse students (lds) are one subgroup of students that require special attention, particularly because of their growing numbers and low-performance relative to their nonlds peers. garcća and weiss (2015) believed black and latin/o lds begin kindergarten with the greatest disadvantages in math and reading, due to the link between their minority status and social class. while the stereotypical labels are not a representation of all ld students, these students grow up to be adults who carry these disadvantages into their kaemanje thomas & minkyung choi using multiple texts to teach critical reading skills to linguistically diverse students 2 college experience. bedore and pena (2008) affirmed in their findings that second language speakers might experience gaps in comparison to their monolingual peers. correspondingly, second language speakers may have the ability to navigate between different languages at home or work, but many sometimes struggle with english proficiency in academic settings. for the ld student, navigating the academic setting, text-structure and developing their comprehension skills can lead to poor academic performance, if not addressed. these factors are a cause for concern, as these students’ academic performance in content area subjects, may have a severe impact on their graduation from high school and college entrance admittance. the us department of education, the nationwide dropout rate for foreign-born students in 2007 was 21%, compared to 8% for nativeborn students. although flores, batalova and fix (2012) found that students’ graduation from high school had a higher correlation with race and ethnicity than the status of the ld student. based on the data obtained, it is difficult to isolate race and ethnicity from other factors which affects this group. research obtained from the u.s department of education showed that lds are more likely to live in lower-income households compared to their monolingual englishspeaking peers. the research indicated that, 66% of lds had a family income of 200% lower than the federal poverty level, in comparison to 37% of monolingual englishspeaking students. besides, 44% of englishspeaking students had parents who either had a two-year or four-year postsecondary degree, compared to 22% of lds. when we consider the above factors as barriers not only to college entrance but also to college graduation, it is possible to observe that the rate college completion is a challenge nationwide for the linguistically diverse student population. bailey and dynarski (2012) found that students growing up in high-income families have the advantage of completing college within four years. lowincome peers have the burden of juggling employment, academic responsibilities, and survival, minus the guidance and support of college-educated parents, which places them at a disadvantage. in addition to rising college costs, the college environment can be an intimidating experience for many lds. students from limited englishspeaking backgrounds often need more developmental education intervention than their native english speakers. if ld students are to master college level materials, supplemental support and use of diverse teaching strategies are needed to make them successful. challenges with college reading engle and tinto (2008) found that of the 4.5 million low-income, first-generation learners (many of whom are lds) enrolled in secondary and postsecondary education today (approximately 24 percent of the undergraduate population), thus, their path to a bachelor’s degree will be long, indirect, and uncertain. they further affirmed that first-generation and lds face many challenges, which make it difficult for them to be successful in college. moreover, most lds disproportionately come from ethnic and racial minority backgrounds with limited academic preparation. the more risk factors a student has, the more likely the student will fail in his/her attempt to earn a bachelor’s degree. ells or ld’s typically face multiple challenges in the transition from home to school as most are from culturally diverse backgrounds. it is our belief that the academic experience should reaffirm the social, cultural, and historical experience of all students, but often results in cognitive dissonance for the ld student. based on our interaction with the ld students and reading, academic language is often decontextualized, abstract, technical, and literary. due to the nature of how college texts are written and structured, ld learners often struggle with making a connection between textbook language and the literacy skills taught in college classrooms. more often, the college classroom reading expectations are indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 3 sometimes not in alignment with the academic needs of the out-of-school literacy of the ld student who is often accustomed to little reading exposure either at home or at work (hull & schultz, 2002). according to samson and collins (2012), literacy and critical reading development are formidable challenges in an academic setting for native english speakers; they are even more difficult for ells. conversely, moll, amanti, neff, and gonzalez (2005) postulate that most lds enter the [college] classroom with a wealth of experience, knowledge and linguistic abilities that do have the potential to enrich their learning experience, educators should be aware of and learn to utilize. according to bourdieu (1977), capital is not only economic, but it is social and cultural. society’s structuring of differential distribution of cultural and social capital sometime ignores the needs of those they considers marginal. cultural and social resources are motivating factors that increase an individual’s or group chances of success. by implication, the more cultural and social capital one possesses, the more likely are the chances for success. for ld students, their inability to use language, which is required for upward mobility, limits the chance of success. for many, the chance of getting an education requires communicating and reading explicitly, and the challenge of inadequate mastery of the language, limits their chance of success. in addition, legal immigration status among other social ills can become hurdles, which affects their drive to complete college or read to attain success. developmental reading is an area from which instructors can draw from students’ prior knowledge, build literacy capacity and critical thinking skills. for lds learner, the challenge for the instructor relies on providing multiple opportunities for reading and tailoring instruction that focuses on minimizing reading difficulties of interpreting a second language, but that which simultaneously strengthens reading comprehension. most u.s colleges offer english language classes for lds in some capacity, but instruction, which targets the deficit of the lds students, remains undeveloped or targeted. some offer language immersion courses, while others focus more on an area, such as writing or reading. typically, lds not only take english language courses upon college admittance, while some are simultaneously enrolled in developmental reading courses. it is imperative instructors across various disciplines take into consideration the reading skills of all students, who may include the lds, enrolled in their courses. furthermore, they should seek to provide instruction that will assist the lds students in building critical reading skills, but also prepare their students for college success. reading courses are important for lds, as they are the primary tool for all students’ academic achievement. moreover, reading comprehensively affords the lds the opportunity to develop skills and strategies they will [use] transfer into other courses (gee, 2015). the purpose of reading courses at the college level should not be for students to simply decode words in a text, but also make connections to other texts inside and out the college classroom. in college-level courses, the vast majority of students read expository textbooks with a primary purpose in mind: to memorize and, hopefully, understand enough information to receive a particular grade on a course exam. larusso, et al. (2016) postulate, deep reading comprehension refers to the process of a students’ ability to evaluate texts, integrate information from an array of texts, and use textual evidence to formulate a position. however, readers have exhibit different inference-making patterns, which influence what is remembered from a text, as a function of their purpose for reading (e.g., van den broek, lorch, linderholm, & gustafson, 2001). unfortunately, a sizeable number of students do not effectively alter their cognitive processing to meet specific educational goals. at the college-level, reading requires students to make text-totext, text-to-self, and text-to-world connections. these higher-order skills are kaemanje thomas & minkyung choi using multiple texts to teach critical reading skills to linguistically diverse students 4 necessary since the process of reading is scientific and analytic. critical reading involves cognitive, psychological, and psychosocial functions. integrating a variety of reading skills is essential if ld students are to improve their comprehension skills. hence, college reading instruction should also be a reflective process as most of the texts read at the college level are informational. information learned requires students to make connection, personal and otherwise. rather than merely relying on college courses to fill in the missing gaps, we shift our focus on integrating reading strategies, which scaffold the lds college entrant and assist them in developing critical reading skills academically and beyond. most of the texts that ld students encounter in college are written at a level beyond the middle and high school levels. williamson (2008) contends that these informational texts require the use of higher order reading strategies, and continuous instruction to support ld students entering college. for ld learners, developing critical skills are essential for their success and the informational texts they read while in college. williamson (2008) further postulated that there is a readability continuum upon which texts become more complex in college compared to high school. if ld students are to become successful readers, they must learn reading strategies that will help them bridge what they encounter in informational texts. lds enrolled in high school should read more challenging and be exposed to a variety of texts so that they can handle the rigor of college reading. more importantly, colleges should provide adequate and more supportive reading courses for ld students who need to develop critical reading skills. for example, most science texts used by non-science majors are written at a reading level higher than that of the reading level of the average college student. if students are to prepare for college level reading, they need to read beyond their basic language skills. students skim more, that is, read in a more shallow-manner, when reading for class preparation than for exam preparation (lorch, lorch, & klusewitz, 1993). students need to develop and expand their understanding of the meaning of reading critically and synthesizing the information they read. in the college developmental reading classroom, students’ reading levels range from upper elementary school to high school. while the linguistic experiences and levels of students vary, the challenge for developmental reading instructors are to consider the learning needs for all students and to use differentiated reading strategies that include the needs of all students. in the instances when lds demonstrate a need for support services, instructors should invite lds to be a part of the reading process, rather than alienating or relying on a singular method of instruction. instructors can help the ld student recognize that a textbook provides a larger social and educational context, which allows for multiple perspectives. this in turn, allows the lds student to build a larger knowledge base. from this exposure, the learner can make connections between seemingly isolated texts, and thereby improving academic literacy. college instructors should anticipate that lds do not widely read, although admittedly, this issue is not limited to just lds. yet, the common assumptions held about lds are that they are recent migrants to the us. one assumption that might hold true for this group is that most may not have had the opportunity to read, or at least, read text in a language other than their native language, which is not english. at the college level, reading instruction compete with many unforeseen factors. in the developmental reading course, a typical class comprises of students, placed in the course because they received similar placement exam scores, but who may have a vastly different reading background. some students, although they demonstrate fluency in the spoken dominant language, sometimes lack a strong foundation in basic reading skills; such as identifying the main ideas of a reading selection or locating supporting indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 5 details in a passage. one may infer that preparation at the secondary level may be a contributing factor. in addition, other students in the developmental reading class are newly arrived immigrants from english speaking backgrounds who can read at the high school level, but are not proficient in academic reading. many of these students struggle with reading college-level texts and often have difficulty comprehending long passages in various disciplines. some newly arrived ld students speak a dominant language at home and sometimes are no fluent in reading or writing english. the task of developmental reading courses is not only in improving students’ overall reading abilities, but also developing reading strategies that will assist them in being successful in both academic and professional spheres. one of the many challenges of teaching reading using multiple texts is following the learning outcomes designed by colleges in developmental reading courses. the instructor is left to find ways to cultivate basic skills in reading, while providing opportunities for students to expand their background knowledge in academic texts. this limitation, posits several issues where the texts used are often at a higher reading level and in language, not familiar to the ld students’ native tongue. in addition, when ld students face a barrier in reading at home, due to the sheer amount of unfamiliar vocabulary, they have difficulty in reading comprehension. another problem that reading instructors face when teaching ld students is that some may not be knowledgeable about how to select texts with which their students can connect. this, in turn, affects limited scope and effective teaching approaches that could enhance or motivate the ld student learning experiences. another challenge is selecting appropriate texts which meet the ld students’ background. instructors should recognize that texts in of themselves are not stand-alone materials. using texts that does not relate to students’ background, experiences, or culture may create undue stress during the learning process. this emphasizes that, according to dahl (2016), english language learners are almost immediately placed in a unique position because the acquisition of literacy and language are developing in two languages. our aim is to support this dilemma and offer methods that enhance learning. to help frame our inquiry, the authors drew on several models of cognitive processing theories, such as smagorinsky’ (2001) theoretical model of cognitive processing and integrated the use of multiple texts, and spiro’ (1988) cognitive-flexibility theory. within the learning environment, knowledge development requires active involvement from the learner as they engage in acquisition. instead of introducing the learner to a single text with a definite linear structure, we introduce the ld student to multiple texts with various structures, which requires the use of multiple perspectives. our study assesses the development of critical reading comprehension using multiple short passages. this complex exposure to multiple sources of information eliminates the ld students’ ability to use low-level information processing and instead requires higher-order thinking skills. sternberg’ (1985) triarchic theory of intelligence states intelligence development occurs with a socio-cultural setting. in this regard, people interact with their surroundings based on their level of familiarity and intelligence. the triarchic theory is threefold: first, internal intelligence involves the individual’s ability to process information using their metacognitive abilities. this helps him/her to solve problems in reading and acquiring knowledge. secondly, external intelligence requires individuals to interact with real world constructs or experiences. this, in turn, allows learners to adapt to their new environment or learning situation, if they cannot adapt, they find ways to either change the environment or learning experience. finally, experiential intelligence involves the use of one’s experiences to address new situations and solve novel kaemanje thomas & minkyung choi using multiple texts to teach critical reading skills to linguistically diverse students 6 problems. intelligent learners retrieve data from their environment and apply information learned to new situations and cope with their new surroundings. based on these cognitive theories, we believe that our students can read critically when given adequate support. this supports hammond and gibbons’ (2005) theory that instruction “designed-in” in the form of planned pedagogic tasks, or “contingent” in the form of spontaneous teacher-student and peerpeer interactions help students develop confidence. in addition, brown and broemmel (2011) agree that ells “linguistic” and cultural knowledge in their native language should be taken as a stepping-stone to build the success. as such, as ell students move through tasks in learning language programs, instructional strategies should vary based on students’ ability and reading levels. within the above-mentioned framework, we created a contemporary view of reading multiple texts as proposed by smagorinsky (2001) by using a quasi-experimental approach to study whether using multiple texts help ld students to develop critical reading skills. we also integrated computer assisted language learning (call) which functioned as support program. this in turn allowed us as instructors to provide a variety of learning opportunities, and for the ld students to recognize their learning potential (brown & broemmel, 2011). in addition, when students use their cognitive schemata to comprehend multiple sources of information, they, rouet (2006) contends cannot ignore the source information. in fact, readers must use higher-order thinking skills to evaluate various sources of information. fullam (2017) believes that instructional videos can assist students, as it assists in their ability to confront and challenge deficit-based beliefs about their learning. in this medium, technology serves as culturally responsive teaching method because it opens up opportunities for transformative learning to occur in the classroom and shifts to a culturally responsive mindset. method this study was a quasi-experimental which used a pre-test and post-test design. on both tests, we provided participants with reading materials at the 8 th -12 th -grade reading level. students completed a pre-test at the beginning of the study and the posttest at the end of the semester, which lasted for approximately 16 weeks, infused with three hours of instruction twice a week. here, we structured and selected instructional materials to which mirrored students’ cultural background experiences and allowed them to share these experiences in their native language [not english]. we subsequently paired each student with a student who is more fluent in speaking the dominant language, english. using practical reading strategies, such as annotation, close reading, and outlining, students worked in groups and discussed the selected readings. we grouped students using “think-pairshare” where students read the passage by themselves, or read in pairs, and at an appropriate point, the students’ partner will pose a question about the reading, then the student will think for a moment, and share their ideas. the participants comprised of 30 students enrolled in rdl 500 in a community college in new york (ccny). according to ccny’s report, 65% of its student population is non-native english language speakers, where ld students account for nearly 90% of the population. demographically, 80% identified themselves as linguistically diverse, 15% of asians, 25% african americans, and 70% as other. the gender distribution consists of 14 males and 16 females. with a few exceptions (5%), the participants were native-born united states citizens who spoke fluent english as their first language and had completed their secondary education in a new york city public school, 95% of the enrolled student population migrated from outside the united states. for placement purposes, all students admitted to cuny must take the cuny assessment placement exam in indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 7 reading. the cuny assessment placement reading scores are used as indicators to determine students’ critical reading proficiency. the test predicts students’ reading and comprehension levels and measures whether students are ready to take on the rigor of college. in this regard, the scores exhibit the students’ ability to analyze and synthesize complex reading passages; which is subsequently indicative of their preparation for college-level work. students are scored categorically as follows; those who scored between 00-56 are placed in rd200; those who scored above 56 are placed in rd 500; and those who scored 70 and above, are exempted from developmental reading courses. table 1. cuny reading placement scores test score placement course placement reading 00‐56 acr 94 rd200 57‐69 acr 95 rd500 70 and above exempt from developmental reading courses cognizant that students are reading informational texts, additional exposure to reading coerce the students to interact socially with the author and other students in promoting vocabulary and comprehension development. fisher and frey (2014) suggest that collaborative learning occurs when learners work with others to apply skills, strategies, and knowledge, and support each other in the process. our fusion of interactive instructional approach allows for multimedia integration, adaptable to the ld students learning style. our use of interactive technology created a space free from instructor’s input; this in turn, allows the student to use his/her metacognitive thinking strategies while interacting socially with the text and to solve problems independently. besides, selected reading materials allow students to ask selfgenerated questions, relate information gleaned from the reading materials and generate cause-and-effect questions about how ideas relate to another and self. although digital tools are essential, they are not impartial elements during the learning experience. in this context, the ld student critically assesses the effectiveness of the technology by relying on their innate cognitive abilities to process information across various multimedia platforms. the ld learners also learn to develop a critically awareness as they make new connections between multiple text forms, meanings, and ideologies. grant, et al. (2012) affirmed that learners learn best when they have opportunities to observe, test their ideas with the knowledge, explore and evaluate ideas with their peers, and apply newly learned skills. these newly acquired [skills] are then transferred to real-world authentic contexts whether they are in or out of a classroom. results and discussion as a means of assessing students’ prior reading skills, students were required to complete a pretest and a posttest on the following areas: main ideas, annotation, outlining, vocabulary, identifying arguments, differentiating facts from opinions, inferences, summary and comprehension. this was to ascertain whether participants were adapting to the instructional style and activities presented. texts selection compromised at the beginning of the semester. here, students work in groups so that they can share opinions, solve problems, and work to create a powerpoint. instructional materials used are excerpts of reading passages from the new york times, such as brutalized behind bars (2015), questions on the blake assault (2015), the challenge to legalizing drugs, richard wright’s, and american hunger (1977). comprehension strategies were selected from simple to difficult and the assigned tasks indicate how readers processed information, what textual cues they used, how they make sense of what they read, and what retrieval clues used to make kaemanje thomas & minkyung choi using multiple texts to teach critical reading skills to linguistically diverse students 8 meaning of information they do not understand, as well as personal connections. besides, we integrated elements of visualization (mind mapping, graphic organizers) and reflection. these were keys during classroom and reading instructional time and functioned as a means of boosting critical thinking skills, while keeping students engaged. in addition, after each reading activity and classroom discussions, inferential questions were asked. moreover, pre-questions are addressed at first knowledge which relate to content. using the k-w-l chart, we allowed students to read and focus their inquiry specifically on integrating blooms taxonomy order of questions: what (knowledge-based) to why (inferential-critical thinking). see table 2 for our reading excerpt questions and table 3 for the post assessment questions. in table 4, we used the k-w-l chart for students to monitor their learning. this chart functions as a metacognitive activity, in that it assists the adult esl learner by supporting the reading and comprehension process. table 2. reading excerpt questions reading excerpts question type american hunger (1977) brutalized behind bars in new york state (new york times article) sept 30, 2015 the challenge to legalize drugs (author and year unknown) questions about james black assault sept, 16, 2015 knowledge what does the word “hunger” means in wright’s autobiography, americ an hunger? what behaviors do the writer highlights as abuse? what are some reasons for taking drugs? what are your rights if you are stopped by the police? inferential why do you think wright titled his book american hunger? explain the arbitration process and cite what steps you would take to address these obvious weaknesses in the system. why is there a challenge to legalize drugs and should it be for legal consumption? explain the term, “unprovoked aggression” table 3. posttest assessment questions assessment questions pretest: 1) write the main idea of the article? 2) list three supporting details the author uses to support the main idea. 3) what is the author’s message in the article? 4) what is the proposed solution the author suggests, if any? 5) what prediction can you make about the book’s title? posttest: why do you think wright titled his book american hunger? 1) what stood out for you in this chapter or reading? 2) why do you think wright titled his book american hunger? 3) how does the theme of this book connect to other texts you have read? 4) what background knowledge can you use to make an informed reason about the author’s stance on brutality? explain your reasoning and cite evidence to support your answer. 5) write a summary of the author’s main points and justify why you believe your answer is correct. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 9 table 4. k-w-l chart what do i know? what do i want to know? what have i learned? student responses: the author is hungry. abuse happens to prisoners this an autobiography why did the author title the book, american hunger? people take drugs for many reasons why is justice fair for all? i learned “hunger” has several meanings and it is a double entendre prisoners have rights and the system in corrupt. being black in america is dangerous for american americans and latinos. table 5. descriptive statistics for pre-test and posttest test n mean std. deviation std. error 95% confidence interval for mean min. max. lower bound upper bound pretest 30 71.333 2.656 .308 70.334 72.232 65.00 76.00 posttest 30 83.867 3.758 .377 82.501 85.233 76.00 89.00 as depicted in table 5, the results indicate that there was a difference between their pretest lower bound and posttest lower bound scores. at the minimum score, the difference between pre and posttest scores improve by 11 point at the end of the semester in reading. when the mean for both the pretest and posttest are compared, the pretest mean data was 71.33, whereas posttest mean was 83.87 with a 95% confidence interval for the mean. ld students’ pretest mean was 71.33, at the end of the semester, their posttest mean improved to 83.86. this difference demonstrates that using multiple texts yield more favorably for ld students. hence, the analyses conducted on the preand post-tests suggests exposing ld students to multiple text which incorporated the explicit and culturally sensitive reading activities were found to be more effective than the use of traditional reading instruction. table 6. summary of overlap between uses of multiple texts and reading critical reading skills comprehension strategy number std. deviation std. error std. error mean locate main ideas 30 71.333 2.656 .308 inference 30 71.333 2.656 .308 analyze 30 83.867 3.758 .377 summarize 30 83.867 3.758 .377 as highlighted in table 6, most of the students who were exposed to multiple texts can improve their critical reading skills. we found that student’s reading and comprehension skills after their exposure to multiple texts improved by 11 points. most of their performance percentages were as high as 84%. besides, we also found that certain comprehension strategies helped students in being able to locate the main idea of a reading excerpt, as well as, improvement in their ability to summarize and analyze during reading. the implication is teachers of the linguistic diverse students can benefit from the present study implementing multiple texts in building critical reading skills. in considering the learning styles and preferences of the ld learner, using various instructional mediums such as print, audiovisual, youtube, and computer adaptive technology, functions as an influential component in developing the lds students’ comprehension and critical reading skills. in addition, instructors of reading can use short instructional videos as means of integrating a culturally responsive teaching. through kaemanje thomas & minkyung choi using multiple texts to teach critical reading skills to linguistically diverse students 10 this medium, students are able to process information learned, while at the same time, developing the skills of reflecting while transferring their experiential knowledge to their environment. moreover, reading activities which require students to compare and contrast, read closely, and examine critically how information relate or differ from each other provide the development of meta-cognitive thinking. research gleaned from sternberg (1985) supports this theory that students use their internal, external and experiential intelligence to process information. this information processing allows students to cognitively process different sources of information, and in so doing, they develop knowledge and experience which ultimately transforms their thinking about the world around them. through their interaction, students develop the ability to synthesize information, using various level of intelligence to process information until they arrive at a level of comprehension, satisfactory to them. conclusion the results indicate that ld students improved in their critical reading after their exposure to multiple texts. using multiple texts allows the ld student to using higherorder metacognitive skills, which enables them to comprehend learning outcomes. at the minimum score, the difference between pre and posttest scores improve by 11 point at the end of the semester in reading. the findings have certain implications for educators, in that the exposure to various genres and reading materials are excellent in providing various perspectives rather than using a linear readings. besides, instructing via multiple texts allows the ld learners to use the skills of analysis and evaluation, as they use internal, external and experiential intelligence to process information in written formats. shannon, fisher and frey (2012) agree that reading across multiple texts not only strengthens students’ comprehension of each text through context building, but it also develops critical thinking. yet, although many lds students may initially have reading difficulty with reading and understanding texts, we found chunking reading materials into a condensed format allows them to build their reading stamina, while at the same time developing their comprehension skills. the exposure to various materials, infused with graphics and providing opportunities for engagement, also assists the ld students to complete complex tasks, such as processing unfamiliar vocabulary words while decoding unfamiliar grammar and syntax. moreover, our assigned group activities, required students to work in pairs with another native speaker of the student’s language and translate reading and written activities in both native and non-native language. students’ group activities and classroom presentations promoted active engagement, social interaction, while simultaneously developing information processing encourages engagement and empowers them to build their confidence in reading. fisher and frey (2014) contend that through collaborative learning, learners work with at least one other person, use targeted vocabulary and language structures, and use socio-culturally appropriate language which then create deep understanding of the topic. in sum, we found using multiple texts to inform instruction, and activities that accommodate students’ various learning styles facilitated and created a better learning experience. in addition, the use of the multiple texts approach can be described as an influential component on lds comprehension and critical reading skills because when students are asked to compare and contrast, they are required to read closely and examine critically how information relate or differ from each other. in fact, according to cultural capital theory, educational outcomes or educational attainment are strongly linked to sociocultural origins. we might be bold to infer that the success of the using multiple texts in our classrooms improved our students’ critical reading skills since our students were free to use their native language interchangeably with what they indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 11 learned in class activities. adapting the above-mentioned strategies is simply a start to providing support and enables academic success for the many linguistically diverse students with whom we instruct. references bailey, m., & dynarski, s. (2012). gains and gaps: changing inequality in u.s. college entry and completion. retrieved from http://www.nber.org/papers/w17633. bedore, l. m., & pena, e. d. (2008). assessment of bilingual children for identification of language impairment: current findings and implications for practice. international journal of bilingual education and bilingualism, 11(1), 1-29. brown, c., & broemmel, a. (2011). deep scaffolding: enhancing the reading experiences of english language learners.the nera journal, 46, 34-39. bourdieu, p. (1977). cultural reproduction and social reproduction, in j. karabel and a. h. halsey (eds), power and ideology in education (pp. 487-511). new york, ny: oxford university press. engle, j., & tinto, v. (2008). moving beyond access: college success for low-income, firstgeneration students. pell institute for the study of opportunity in higher education. fisher, d., & frey, n. 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(2002). school’s out: bridging out of school literacies with classroom practice. new york: teachers college press. hussar, w. j., & bailey, t. m. (2013). projections of education statistics to 2021. national center for education statistics. larusso, m., kim, h. y., selman, r., uccelli, p., dawson, t., jones, s., ... & snow, c. (2016). contributions of academic language, perspective taking, and complex reasoning to deep reading comprehension. journal of research on educational effectiveness, 9(2), 201-222. lorch, r. f., lorch, e. p., & klusewitz, m. a. (1993). college students’ conditional knowledge about reading. journal of educational psychology, 85, 239-252. national center for english language acquisition. (2011). the growing number of limited english proficient students 1998-96/2008-09. retrieved from: http://www.ncela.gwu.edu/files/uploads/9 /growinglep_0809.pdf. robinson-cimpian, j. p., thompson, k. d., & umansky, i. m. (2016). research and policy considerations for english learner equity. policy insights from the behavioral and brain sciences, 3(1), 129-137. rouet, j. f. (2006). the skills of document use: from text comprehension to web-based learning. mahwah, nj: erlbaum. samson, j. f., & collins, b. a. (2012). preparing all teachers to meet the needs of english language learners: applying research to policy and practice for teacher effectiveness. center for american progress. smagorinsky, p. (2001). if meaning is constructed, what's it made from? toward a cultural theory of reading. review of educational research, 71(1), 133-169. doi: 10.3102/00346543071001133. spiro, r. j. (1988). cognitive flexibility theory: advanced knowledge acquisition in illstructured domains. technical report, 441. sternberg, r. j. (1985). beyond iq: a triarchic theory of human intelligence. new york: cambridge university press. u.s. department of education, national center for education statistics. (2015). the condition of education 2015 (nces 2015-144). jessup, md: national center for education statistics. van den broek, p., lorch, r. f., linderholm, t., & gustafson, m. (2001). the effects of readers’ goals on inference generation and memory for texts. memory and cognition, 29, 1081-1087 williamson, g. l. (2008). a text readability continuum for postsecondary readiness. journal of advanced academics, 19(4), 602-632. https://bcc-frtemail.bcc.cuny.edu/owa/redir.aspx?ref=bofja2wjfhgelf-pebvmyimxsquozh6l72s405_x8qg59pwqywxwcafodhrwoi8vd3d3lm5izxiub3jnl3bhcgvycy93mtc2mzm. https://bcc-frtemail.bcc.cuny.edu/owa/redir.aspx?ref=zu4dnqvahcz02e-cm-vp1e9w-etcony3ntr_cd31hwztvv8qywxwcafodhrwoi8vd3d3lm5jzwxhlmd3ds5lzhuvzmlszxmvdxbsb2fkcy85l2dyb3dpbmdmrvbfmdgwos5wzgy. https://bcc-frtemail.bcc.cuny.edu/owa/redir.aspx?ref=zu4dnqvahcz02e-cm-vp1e9w-etcony3ntr_cd31hwztvv8qywxwcafodhrwoi8vd3d3lm5jzwxhlmd3ds5lzhuvzmlszxmvdxbsb2fkcy85l2dyb3dpbmdmrvbfmdgwos5wzgy. kaemanje thomas & minkyung choi using multiple texts to teach critical reading skills to linguistically diverse students 12 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 205 teachers’ competence in a reading test construction luthfiyatun thoyyibah english education department, faculty of teacher training and education universitas galuh, indonesia email: luthfiyatun20@gmail.com apa citation: thoyyibah, l. (2022). teachers’ competence in a reading test construction. indonesian efl journal, 8(2), 205-214. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v8i2.6457 received: 07-03-2022 accepted: 12-05-2022 published: 31-07-2022 introduction assessment has major consequences for both students and teachers. in assessing students’ learning, teachers use tests. test becomes the most possible tool that teacher can use to see students’ learning (hartell & strimel, 2019). that relates to teachers’ competence in test construction, including developing reading test. teachers need to be testing literate. that is clearly mentioned in the government regulation number 19 in 2005 about the national standard of teachers. hence, there were four competencies that the teachers should accomplish; namely professional competence, pedagogical competence, self-competence, and social competence (maolida & anjaniputra, 2017). likewise, ma’rifatullah, ampa, & azis (2019) mentioned that constructing test is one of a teacher’s pedagogical competences besides the ability to plan, to teach, and to develop students’ reflection on learning. in line with ma’rifatullah et al., (2019), saraceno (2019) stated that there are two kinds of content knowledge that teachers need to master, which are disciplinary and pedagogical content, in which assessment is included to one of them, the pedagogical content. based on the aforementioned things of the teacher made test, there are some research studies about the quality of reading test made by the teacher. a study from elleman and olsund (2019) explicitly mention that most teachers believe that they need strong measurement skills in developing the reading test. the teacher did not have sufficient knowledge of constructing appropriate reading test. a study conducted by razali and jannah (2015) elaborated the comparison of the quality of teacher made-test on try-out with the national test items. according to the findings, more than half of the try out test items are irrelevant to the national test items. meanwhile, the final national examination test items were created with a higher cognitive domain than teacher-created test items. it demonstrates that the teacher-created test items abstract: having a certain reading ability is one of the prerequisites for becoming a professional teacher. the focus on language literacy, particularly reading abilities, has been upgraded as well. the focus of this research is to look into the process of developing an english teachers' reading test in vocational schools, and at the same time to investigate the quality of teachers' reading test reflects their ability in test construction. this study employs a case study approach, focusing on three english teachers who work in three distinct vocational schools. this study employs interviews to better understand the process of creating reading tests, as well as thorough expert standards to assess the quality of teacher-created tests. the study discovered that the process of creating a reading test for teachers includes the basic ability to find materials, select the correct text, determine the type of question, and determine the number of digits in the test. read and rate. as far as the quality of the reading test conducted by the teacher is concerned, the results of the scoring scale show that the teacher’s first reading test is considered poor and good because the passing scores of the test are 69 and 87 respectively. with scores of 51 and 56, reading test number two created by the teacher of english was deemed inadequate. the third teacher's reading test score was 81, so he was considered very good. other teachers' abilities in test creation have not been effectively utilized in terms of test design, relevance, balance, efficiency, validity, reliability, adequacy of test items, and technical voice of reading test. for reading test, english teachers should use authentic materials. the teacher is also suggested to use real text to create high-level comprehension problems. it is preferable to use a more comprehensive list as one of the study techniques in the future and to involve more participants. keywords: reading test; competence; criteria; process of constructing. luthfiyatun thoyyibah teachers’ competence in a reading test construction 206 (tryout) are more superficial than the final national test items. it could be one of the reasons why students who pass the teacher's tryout are unable to pass the national examination. on the contrary, hakim & irhamsyah (2020) pointed out that the questions posed by the english teacher at kutacane state senior high school were mostly valid and in line with the curriculum. as a result, the english teacher at senior high school 1 kutacane created valid questions, and the level of validity created by the teacher demonstrates teachers' ability to design questions in english. furthermore, saefurrohman and balinas (2016) conducted a study to philippines’ senior high school teachers and indonesian’s junior high school teachers in constructing a test which showed that philippines teachers tend to use their own made test, meanwhile indonesian teachers prefer to use test available from textbooks. as designing reading test includes to pedagogical competence, it is an essential part of evaluating students' learning engagement as well as their level of skills in applying what they have learned. thus, they need to be tested by a valid and reliable test. however, research in indonesia regarding teachers’ competence in reading test construction, to researchers-based knowledge, are still limited. therefore, it is worthwhile to conduct a study under the topic of teachers' ability to construct a reading test. teachers as professional educators have their main role in language teaching and testing. they perform their role in language teaching through some competencies. the definition of competence is determined as an entire concept of mixture of knowledge, understanding and skill (caena, 2020). due to the importance of teacher’s competencies, some educational experts put the competencies into some categories. one of the most crucial teacher competencies is disciplinary literacy pedagogical content knowledge (saraceno, 2019). constructing a test is included to one of the pedagogical contents. one of specific competences in assessing students’ ability in learning is creating test. creating a test is crucial for the teachers of english. through test, teachers are able to see the development of students’ achievement. reading becomes one of required skills in 21st century. language literacy has received renewed attention and emphasis in recent years, as twentyfirst-century global citizens, we must not only speak english, but also read and write it. there are many definitions of reading. m. wallace & wray (2015) determined reading as a unitary and selective process. this means a reader poses some actions and willingness in gaining knowledge from a text. another expert, harmer as cited in pazilah (2019) mentioned that reading is an activity that engages both the eyes and the brain; the eyes pick up on signals., and the brain must decipher the meaning of these messages. based on what pazilah (ibid) said, it can be assumed that reading makes the readers not only use their eyes but also become active to use their brain in comprehending what they read. to comprehend the meaning of the text, prior knowledge of the subject is required. the background knowledge is also useful in shaping situational or contextual knowledge. reading is also beneficial for language acquisition, according to zulmaini (2021). assuming that students comprehend the text, greater they read, the better they can be at it. thus, reading relates to the routine activity of an individual. the routine activities combine between products and meaning because reading is getting meaning from the text. in relation to reading strategies, there are many different views on it. susanti (2020) defined reading strategies as "generally purposeful, fun actions performed by productive students, several times to remedy levels of cognitive failure." furthermore, reading strategies, according to firdaus (2017), are the emotional processes or knowledge processes that readers can choose and adapt in make meaning of what those who read. the term 'reading strategy' refers to a particular tactics used by the reader to fully understand the actual meaning. thus, reading strategies are the methods applied by efl students in order to gain goals in comprehension skills of reading. on the other hand, alderson (2000) pointed out reading strategies that are beneficial for students into some categories, those are: predicting, skimming, scanning, inferring, guessing the meaning of new words, self-monitoring, and summarizing. the notion of test is measuring learning outcome among students. therefore, the test is one of the most powerful tools for measuring a student's ability and improving their attitude towards indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 207 learning. this concept is supported by hughes as cited in rahmatun &helmanda (2020), who stated that the test is a tool for measuring a student's language proficiency. in addition, shohamy, or, & may (2017) stated that testing is a method of measuring an individual's ability to know and perform a particular area. similarly, chen, halilah, & shauqiah (2017) defined assessment as a process performed to consider learners performance in a specific area within a particular time limit with a particular goal. test appears in certain intervals. there is dichotomy of time in administering the test. in most cases, the test will appear after the education process, but it may also appear to be placed before the education process. it depends on its purpose. it depends on its purpose. first, one most important thing about creating a reading test is choosing the right text. choosing the right text should be in line with the purpose of the course objectives. second, the selection of the text should be in line with a number of students that will be tested. it is supported by hughes (ibid) that reading test should be clear whether it is high stakes test or not. third, is about the authenticity of the text. clifford and parry (2014) dismissed the fact that many of the genuine texts used in reading tests are not used in the facsimile format, thus denying reader clues such as fonts and formats. i'm emphasizing. many reading texts come from more than one page of text. in relation to designing a good reading test, alderson (2000) broke down test specifications that should be covered the following points, those are test purpose, the learner taking the test (age, sex, level of language proficiency, first language, cultural background, country of origin, educational level, and nature of educational reason for taking test, likely personal and professional interests and levels of background knowledge etc.), test level (in terms of test takers ability), test construct, description of suitable language course or textbook, number of sections to the test, time for each section, weighting for each section, target language situation(s), text types, text length, text complexity/difficulty, language skills to be tested, language elements (structures/lexis/notions/functions), task types, number and weight of items, test methods, rubrics; example; explicit assessment criteria, criteria for scoring, description of typical performance at each level, description of what candidates at each level can do in the real world, sample papers, and sample of students’ performances on tasks. method three different english teachers from three distinct vocational schools participated in this study. case study design, as the name implies, is concerned with the entire process. the set was picked with care because it deals with the process, relying on purposive sampling approaches. this study involved three different participants. the first participant was identified as a crucial informant by the researcher (cohen, manion, & morrison, 2017). the researcher discovered that she, too, is a teacher at the similar home school based as the first participant. he has almost twentyfive years of experience as a teacher. the second person is a twenty-eight-year-old woman. for the past five years, she has been working as a teacher at one of banjar's public vocational schools. in addition to her vocational school teaching duties, she also led and taught a private english course. the age of the third participant is twenty-nine. since 2014, she has worked as a teacher at a private vocational school. she attended the similar university as the second participant. all of the people who took part in this study were members of the banjar forum of vocational english teachers. additionally, this study used multiple data sources. this included sources of both document analysis and data from interviews. numerous data sources have helped researchers explore and recognize the study's focus. this is the teacher's ability to elevate the grade of the test designed by the teacher and the process of writing a reading test. this research focuses on a particular case: instructor competency in creating a reading test. this study allows for an in-depth examination of specific details of teachers' abilities to build a reading test by focusing on a single scenario (cohen et al., 2017). when developing a reading exam, this study also used a small scale to maintain a comprehensive approach to understanding the context of teacher competence. this study needed extensive and thorough detailed from the teacher's conversation because of the tiny scale. results and discussion the process of reading test construction luthfiyatun thoyyibah teachers’ competence in a reading test construction 208 the primary data of answering the way teachers construct a reading test for their students taken from the teachers’ interview. each teacher had their own way of constructing the reading test. the elaboration of constructing a reading test is explained in the following result and discussion. making a plan became the most crucial thing in constructing a valid and reliable test. it covered everything in the test. planning a test determined the numbers of reading test, the type of question and level of difficulties. but one thing that should be taken into account is the word “sometimes”. it indicated that the teacher is frequently made the plan for the reading test. it was being admitted that the teacher did that only to fulfill their obligation as a teacher. it’s just a routine. the following step was preparing the material. it should be in line with the course objective. the course objective can be seen through the basic competence in the syllabus. some teachers revealed that they sometimes combine more than one basic competences into one for one reading test. it depends on the materials’ complexity. the first reading test from the first participant was for the tenth grade of vocational school. the materials in the reading test were taken from one of the bacis the basic competences for knowledge and practice from the syllabus. next, the teacher decided on how many numbers in the test items because it will affect the time allotment for the test. then, the teacher made the answer key. the teacher revealed that preparing the formula of examining the test was beneficial for him. the teacher stated that he got easier in examining and released the score of the students. the finding from other teachers were quite similar. explicitly, the teacher mentioned that one reading test could cover more than one basic competences. the next step was deciding the type of questions. it was followed by deciding the number of the questions. considering the time allotment, the teacher made a decision on the numbers in the test after deciding the type of questions. the last step conducted by the teacher was about scoring. in deciding the materials, it involved choosing a text. the authenticity of the text becomes an issue in reading test (jahan & ashraf, 2020). they further point out that many reading text come from more than pages of text. based on that fact, students need to be prepared for the real situation. based on the finding on reading tests, three out of five reading tests contained authentic texts. choosing the right text became the following stages in creating a reading test after planning the test. planning the test included determining the basic competence and materials covered in the reading test. the choice on type of the questions and the numbers of questions affected aspects of validity and reliability of test. according to the result of this study, two out of five reading tests were categorized into less valid as it did not require the students or test takers to read the text in answering the questions. it also used many exact words in the questions. it made the students cut and paste the answer from the text presented. it did not involve reading comprehension. reading involves using the brain in comprehending what they read. the two reading tests mentioned were less reliable as they did not give the information on what skill is being tested. the type of questions from the reading tests mostly consisted from multiple choice questions, matching, and short answer questions. the finding on types of questions was in line with the study conducted by santy, dewi, & paramartha (2020). the finding of the study revealed that most secondary school teacher made multiple choice questions followed by essays. actually, based on the scoring, teacher could see on the strengths and weaknesses of the students’ ability in answering the reading test. one at a time, teacher could also investigate the quality of questions they made. the result of that finding could be as a valuable input for teachers in teaching reading and constructing good questions for reading test. based on the procedures from burke (1999), the teachers have implemented several steps in developing reading test, such as make sure of the correlation on the test with the course objective, arranging various type of questions, make sure the appropriate reading, making various level of questions, and allocate sufficient time for all students to finish the test. relevant to teacher competences, especially the pedagogical competence, this study found that all teachers involved in this study aware of the ability in constructing a test, especially reading test. they have taken some steps toward developing a reading test. they had an understanding on the appropriate use of language test. they knew what should be covered in one test as one of requirements for indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 209 competence in language testing. through constructing and administering a test, teachers can see students’ achievement. students’ achievement is one of the tools that teacher can use for evaluating their teaching and testing. the quality of reading test on criteria of a good reading test the checklist comprised of eight categories. the findings of the criteria checklists on a good reading test are presented as follow. table 1. the finding from the first teacher reading test 1 category rater 1 rater 2 rater 3 average test plan 25% 25% 25% 25% relevance 50% 50% 50% 50% balance 100% 50% 50% 67% efficiency 100% 100% 100% 100% validity 100% 67% 67% 78% reliability 100% 67% 67% 78% adequacy of the test items 86% 86% 86% 86% technical 67% 67% 67% 67% rating scale 69% the finding from the first reading test by the first participant reached 69%. it means that the reading test made by the teacher failed met several criteria in the instrument of a good reading test’s criteria checklist. accordingly, based on the rating scale used in this study, this reading test is considered ‘poor’. besides, according to table above, it is shown that only one criterion, efficiency, reached 100%. from the descriptors of efficiency criterion, this percentage reveal that the texts used in the reading test is authentic and the questions are well sequenced. therefore, it does not make test taker more difficult to answer the question. the lowest number of the criteria checklist was on the test plan category. the teacher only fulfilled 25% of test plan criterion. it indicates that the teacher did not prepare the test very well. it corresponds perfectly with the finding coming from the interview. from the interview, the teacher admitted that he did not spend much time to construct the reading test. after test plan category, it is followed by relevance category which gained 50% of the criteria. for the adequacy of test item, it reached 86%. in the category of adequacy of test items, only one criterion did not meet by the first reading test. the overall quality of this reading test can be categorized ‘fairly good’ as it reached more than 77% of the criteria. table 1. the finding from the first teacher reading test 2 category rater 1 rater 2 rater 3 average test plan 25% 25% 25% 25% relevance 100% 50% 100% 83% balance 100% 100% 100% 100% efficiency 100% 100% 100% 100% validity 100% 100% 100% 100% reliability 100% 100% 100% 100% adequacy of the test items 86% 86% 86% 86% technical 100% 100% 100% 100% rating scale 87% the finding of the second reading test from the first participant was rather different to the previous reading test. the test met 87% of the criteria checklists. the 87% is considered a “good” test. this indicated that the teacher has implemented several criteria of a good reading test. the highest percentage laid on the category of relevance, balance, efficiency, validity, reliability, and the technical of test. those criteria met perfectly the instrument. this reflects the teacher’s ability in reading test construction was quite sufficient. in spite of high percentage, the table above indicated that teacher lack of ability in planning the reading test. it implies that the teacher needs to allocate the time for preparing the reading test. table 2. the finding from the second teacher reading test 1 category rater 1 rater 2 rater 3 average test plan 25% 25% 25% 25% relevance 50% 50% 50% 50% balance 50% 50% 50% 50% efficiency 50% 50% 50% 50% validity 33% 33% 33% 33% reliability 67% 67% 67% 67% adequacy of the test items 29% 29% 29% 29% technical 100% 100% 100% 100% rating scale 51% luthfiyatun thoyyibah teachers’ competence in a reading test construction 210 table 3 shows that the reading test 51% met the criteria checklists. the rating scale is considered “very poor” in the rating scale proposed by mahoney, powell, & finger (1986). this finding was different with the two previous reading tests which gained higher percentage. only one category reached 100%. it was the technical of the test. it implies that the test was free mistyping. then, the instructions were given clearly and complete. furthermore, the exam copy was legible. it indicates that this reading test fulfilled all the criteria of technical. the rest of categories reached around 50%. the lowest percentage were on the test plan and adequacy of the test items. it only met 25% and 29% of the criteria checklists. another category which gained not so much percentage was validity. validity is one of the important points in testing. that is why, the table above indicated that this reading test was considered as ‘very poor’ reading test. it needs improvement in many aspects. one at a time, it indicates that teacher lack of competence in constructing a valid reading test. table 3. the finding from the second teacher reading test 2 category rater 1 rater 2 rater 3 average test plan 25% 25% 25% 25% relevance 50% 50% 50% 50% balance 50% 50% 50% 50% efficiency 50% 50% 50% 50% validity 33% 33% 33% 33% reliability 67% 67% 67% 67% adequacy of the test items 71% 71% 71% 71% technical 100% 100% 100% 100% rating scale 56% even though the fourth reading test was constructed by the same participant, the fourth reading test was slightly better than the first reading test by the second participant. table 4 shows that 56% of category met the criteria checklists. through that number, the reading test was similar to the previous one. it was categorized as ‘very poor’. the highest percentage was in the criteria of technical. it met 100% criteria checklists. the teacher paid attention to some aspects that probably teacher assumes it did not affect the reading test quality. the percentage assumes that teacher needs for some improvement. the improvement can be done in the aspect of test plan and validity. a wellplanned test is the starting point to the success of any tests, includes a reading test. besides test plan, the test can be categorized into less valid. that was less valid because among three descriptors of validity category, the test failed to meet the two of them. table 4. the finding from the third teacher reading test category rater 1 rater 2 rater 3 average test plan 25% 50% 50% 42% relevance 50% 50% 50% 50% balance 100% 100% 100% 100% efficiency 100% 50% 100% 83% validity 100% 100% 100% 100% reliability 100% 100% 100% 100% adequacy of the test items 71% 71% 71% 71% technical 100% 100% 100% 100% rating scale 81% the last reading test by the third participant gained 81%. based on the instrument used in this study, the quality of the reading test is considered ‘good’. even though it did not show excellent, the teacher has already known some basic competence in constructing a reading test. from all the reading tests, it can be seen that all the participants were lack of ability in planning the test. from the relevance category, most teachers posed the reading test without mentioning or giving information of the types of text in the test. the elaboration of all tables above is presented in the following paragraphs on each category. the elaboration of tables is based on criteria checklists by justifying with the relevant theories posed in chapter two. test plan the first category in the criteria checklists is test plan. test plan category comprises of five criteria. those four criteria were related to whether the reading tests were high stakes or not, required test takers’ identity, time allotment of the tests, and the scoring is clearly mention or not. in total, from the three participants, 25% of those criteria were met teachers' reading test. except for the third teacher, indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 211 each teacher in each reading test received the same percentage of the test plan category by chance. relevance the text in reading test should be determined by the course objective. the texts in the second reading test by the first participant were relevant to the syllabus design. it was mentioned that advertisement and announcement were given at the beginning of the semester. there have been proven before administering the test, all the topics of the text were based on specific basic competence. actually, these reading tests were included to achievement test, especially the formative achievement test. that condition fulfilled the principles of achievement test (hughes, 2003). hughes (2003) asserted that achievement tests should be based on course content. hopkins, stanley, & hopkins (1990) went on to say that all good achievement tests should be based on either explicit or implicit objectives or topics reflected in the syllabus. every course has its own objective. the course objective lies on the syllabus and breaks down into several indicators. those that become the consideration of teachers in constructing or taking the text for the reading test. balance similar to “relevance” category which covering two criteria, the third category comprises of two criteria. the “balance” category comprises of the existence of sections in the reading test and the balance order in the text and questions. the separation numbers on sections became one of the requirements in the criteria checklists used as the instrument of this study. in one of the most familiar english proficiency test, the toefl test, there are sections. the function of section is to divide from one type of question to another type of question. it is also to discriminate among the four language skills. the last reading test by the third teacher showed that sections had function on separating the multiple-choice question to the short answer question. the first participant preferred to use authentic text. the teacher further explained that creating a text was time consuming. the teacher must devote the time for constructing the text first, the set of questions. the teacher also did not know the validity of the text they made. therefore, the teacher needed to take the authentic one. moreover, the third participant argued that an authentic text provided authentic cultural information and gave the students exposure to real language. it indicated that the teacher already known about the knowledge of text authenticity. validity each participant had different result on validity. the highest number was gained by the first participant and followed by the third and the second participant. the highest result reached the number of 100%. the lowest number performed by the teacher was 33%. it indicated that from 3 categories, one only met the criteria checklists of a good reading test. the elaboration of each criterion of validity is explored below. reliability the two reading tests gained 100% of reliability category. the first criteria in reliability category were about the easy questions to be understood by the students. from all the reading tests constructed by the teachers, all the reading tests met the first criteria. all reading tests contained easy questions to be answered by the students. all reading tests used a simple utterance in questioning, like “how long did nova work in an electronics store?” through the simple questioning, the students did not need to think in a complicated way of understanding what is being asked. if it used the word “how long”, for sure, it related to time or frequency. another sample of question was asking in the form of yes/no question; “does intan want to be alia’s friend?” that question was actually having a drawback of allowing students guess the answer without reading and comprehending the text. the students might answer by yes or no. therefore, it is recommended that teacher need to add follow up question like “why?” instead of only asking yes/no question. by the follow up question, reading and comprehending the text was needed. there was a need for students to find out the reason of a more specific question. adequacy of the test items different from the first criteria, not all reading tests contained this kind of question. accidentally, only reading tests with the multiple-choice question consisted this kind of question. the way teacher assessed “inferences” can be seen from one of the examples; “which of the following is not a duty of luthfiyatun thoyyibah teachers’ competence in a reading test construction 212 the advertised job?” actually, the text mentioned explicitly the job that was being advertised. but, rather gave the explicit word, the teacher intended to choose another word with the similar meaning that was “advertised job”. the teacher was indicated aware of making inference question from the context by referring the topic rather explicitly mentioned the word. the context of the text was about job advertisement. this inference question was seen having lower level of thinking than the two-previous type of question. but this skill is closely related to literal meaning as proposed by day and park (2005). questions asked literal meaning also marked the validity of the test as it asking the explicit information on the text. this criterion was characterized in several questions mentioned. first question is “which of the following is not one of the major divisions of horse breeds?” the teacher asked the major divisions of horse breeds which was displayed in the text. because that was a multiple-choice question, students had already given clues to answer it. students were required to scan for a specific explicit major division of horse breeds. this kind of questions implicitly measures the teacher ability to ask the students capacity in implementing one of the reading strategies. the following criterion was about the question of weaving together ideas in the context. all the reading tests made by the teachers did not meet this criteria. it indicated that the teachers did not have the ability in creating this kind of question. the last criterion is that the test item contains level of difficulties. this criterion was a summary of all the criteria of adequacy of test items. it can be inferred that most of the reading tests contain different level of difficulties as it consists of several characteristics of questioning, like drawing literal meaning, making inference, and etc. the reading test which consist of the essay which including short answer question did not show level of difficulties. those questions were identified too easy for the grade intended. it needs variation in making short answer question. technical sound of the test this category comprises of three criteria, those are “test was free of typing errors”, “instructions are clear and complete”, and “exam copy was legible – attractive”. all the criteria in the technical sound of the test were met the criteria checklists of a good reading test. one of the instructions states “complete the blanks using the words in the list!” that instruction asked the students to fill the blanks with the available words on the list. that instructions led the test takers on how to do with the following questions. another example was taken from one of the reading tests; “read the following text to answer questions number 9-10” instruction needs to be understandable and not too wordy. it dealt with efficiency in doing the test. understanding the instruction should not be more difficult than understanding the questions. therefore, the students as the test takers would not spend much time on comprehending the instruction. from the examples of test’s instructions, it was indicated that all teachers have the ability in constructing the clear and complete instruction. instructions they made were clear and straight to the point. the instructions did not use unfamiliar words that made the students as the test takers difficult to comprehend and answer the questions. these facts indicated that teacher have already aware of the concept of technical things in administering a test, especially a reading test. it related to the concept of practicality proposed by nation (2008). nation (ibid) points out that the reading test that test constructor should make the test easy to recognize in order to answer it. conclusion the study sought to investigate the process for developing reading tests by three english teachers at a vocational school, as well as the performance of the teachers' reading tests. all the teachers of english participated in the research accomplished a few stages in the development of a reading test, including defining the basic mastery of the materials, selecting the most appropriate text, defining the kind of questions, trying to decide how many numbers to include in the reading test, and grading. these exemplified that the teacher of english at vocational school are capable of creating a reading test. the initial thought was to ascertain the materials on basic competence in a syllabus. the teacher of english determines one or more fundamental competencies for every assessment. the complexity of the materials covered dictated the choice of basic competence. as a result, the purpose of the test was indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 213 based on the learning goal as stated on the syllabus. the next step was to select text. selecting the appropriate text has become one of the most important aspects of a reading test because it influences the reliability and validity of the test (nation, 2008). the kinds and quantity of questions in the test were then decided upon by teachers. the selection of text, the kinds, and the quantity of the questions were all circular. they were related to one another. the number of questions was affected by the kinds of questions and the length of the text determined the quantity of questions. the final step was to assign a score. that had something to do with the students' grades. the students' grades were used as one of considerations in teaching. they might have noticed both the accomplishment and failure of teaching. as a result, the teacher of english there thought that it was necessary to create the scoring rubrics before administering the test. according to the findings and discussions, some teachers are capable of developing reading tests at the vocational school level, while others are not. the first teacher created "good" and "poor" reading tests, the second performed two "very poor" reading tests, and the third proposed one "good" reading test. the reading tests administered by the teachers revealed some strengths and weaknesses. the reading test was created by all the teacher of english based on the basic competence found on the syllabus. each fundamental competence has its own goal with its own set of materials. this is consistent with hakim & irhamsyah (2020), who state that a good achievement test should be designed in accordance with the syllabus design in the teaching materials column. then, using the following questions, it is demonstrated that the majority of teachers have adopted the text's information flow. one of the requirements for a good reading comprehension test has been met. furthermore, the teachers have already demonstrated decent skill to ask literal questions, questions that make inferences about a word's meaning based on context, questions to find an answer explicitly, and questions in paraphrase. the ability to plan, create, assess, and use the language test in ways that are appropriate for a given aim, context, and group of test takers has proven teachers’ capability. according to bachman and palmer in bachman and palmer (2015), these were the most important requirements for teachers' competence in language testing. nevertheless, some flaws were related to the reading tests. foremost, some teachers were unaware of the text's authenticity. authentic text, on the other hand, becomes one of the most important factors in selecting the right text for a reading test. some teachers wrote their own texts that were too simple and easy for the vocational level. as a result, it did not provide students with information about the actual situation in the target language. second, the questions in some reading test used the identical words from the text. the use of it classified into non-comprehension question. it also reduced the validity of the reading test (primadani, 2019). it only requires the students to cut and paste the answers to the questions. references alderson, j. c. 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(2021). teaching and learning process of test-taking strategies in answering reading comprehension section. elt forum: journal of english language teaching, 10(2), 113–124. https://doi.org/10.15294/elt.v10i2.43281 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 49 border crossings: use of linguistic studies across subject disciplines maya khemlani david department of english language, faculty of languages and linguistics, university of malaya, malaysia email: mayadavid@yahoo.com aliyyah nuha faiqah azman firdaus asia-europe institute, university of malaya, malaysia e-mail: nuha.azman@gmail.com syed abdul manan asia-europe institute, university of malaya, malaysia e-mail: samanan1998@gmail.com apa citation: david, m. k., firdaus, a. n. f. a., & manan, s. a. (2019). border crossings: use of linguistic studies across subject disciplines. indonesian efl journal, 5(2), 49-60. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v5i2.1902. received: 01-03-2019 accepted: 11-05-2019 published: 01-07-2019 abstract: cross-disciplinary research, involving scholars of multiple disciplines, has attracted much attention from universities recently. this type of study extends beyond simple collaboration in integrating data, methodologies, perspectives and concepts and engages with real world problems, especially as global complexities have undermined the underlying ideology of countability and singularity of various disciplines founded on antiquated notions of territorialization. since most disciplines are transferred through language and linguistics sciences like socio-linguistics, applied-linguistics and psycho-linguistics, an interrogation of received discourses on language study has direct and indirect impact on almost all the other disciplines and can be used to enhance language related studies in different ways. this paper shall define cross-disciplinary research and provide an overview of how applied linguistics and professional studies interrelate, focusing on the fact that research across disciplines must yield output that advances and benefits society, while allowing for complex and nuanced assessments allowed by the porous borders of different disciplines. this paper shares the kind of cross-disciplinary research which marries linguistics, languages and communication with other disciplines (for example, studies based on socio-linguistics and health, law, business or industry) to show how knowledge achieved from such research can result in trans-disciplinary recombination and expertise in other professional domains. keywords: applied linguistics; cross-disciplinary research; language; linguistics. introduction cross-disciplinary research that involves scholars of multiple disciplines attracted much attention of scholars from academia. this paper aims to show the crossdisciplinary expansion and growth of linguistics to a number of other disciplines in a wide range of contexts. this will be done by showing the critical role linguists play across health sciences, law, business and numerous social sciences. the main thrust of the paper revolves around argument that linguistics has the potential to cross-over, and can extend its circumference from the traditionally known role of languageteaching to more applied domains. it may involve critical sites, such as the clinic, the courtroom, the corporate business sector, the public spheres and professional spaces more generally, where we have something to offer, where we can apply our knowledge, and hopefully bring about a difference (sarangi, 2012). thus, the scholarship that marries linguistics with other disciplines can produce new knowledge that can result in transdisciplinary recombination and expertise in other professional domains. this approach deploys inter-relational research that “seeks maya khemlani david, aliyyah nuha faiqah azman firdaus, & syed abdul manan border crossings: use of linguistic studies across subject disciplines 50 to describe, interpret and explain the institutional and interactional orders of ‘what it is that is going on’ in crucial communicative sites and at critical moments in those sites, makes necessary the interrelational harnessing of a range of perspectives beyond those traditionally associated with linguistic or semiotic analysis” (sarangi & candlin, 2010, p. 2-3). what is linguistics crossing-over? while charting the expansion of applied linguistics, sarangi (2012, p. 2) proposes that: i would like to suggest that applied linguistics is much more than language education in the classroom setting or language acquisition in natural settings. we can extend the circumference of applied linguistics to the clinic, the courtroom, the corporate business sector, the public spheres and professional spaces more generally, where we have something to offer, where we can apply our knowledge and hopefully bring about a difference. sarangi and candlin (2010, p. 2) further suggest that scholars engaged in crossdisciplinary ventures would promote “active engagement in sites from a variety of other professional domains, such as law, healthcare, counseling, journalism and media, business and management, and alliances with cognate disciplines.” the central commitment to the principles and practices of research within the paradigms of applied linguistics and professional studies is ‘inter-relationality’ which aims at developing “inter-disciplinary and inter-professional collaboration, integrating methodological diversity, and a commitment to exploring connectivities among the values, procedures and knowledge bases of those with whom we seek to collaborate in achieving purposeful action.” linguistics and health sciences this part reviews literature on previous work of cross-disciplinary nature with the merger of linguistics and healthcare issues in hospitals to highlight the potential for such work in malaysia. collins, peters and watt (2011) delineate on the nature of work that intersects linguistics and health and medical communication. it primarily hinges on doctor-patient relationship. this relationship is crucial in several ways: “the relationship between the patient and the doctor provides the foundations for establishing trust, rapport and understanding, explaining diagnoses, discussing prognoses, and negotiating treatment. the ways the doctor and patient use language to convey their perspectives determine how the patient’s problem is understood, as well as shaping the relationship which can have a therapeutic value in its own right” (p. 96). apart from this, linguists can engage in such research using semiotic, paralinguistic, sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic analysis of patients, doctors, social behaviors or cultural norms that are interrelate linguistics and health sciences. this section in particular discusses three major studies exemplifying the marriage and cross-over between linguistics and health sciences that include “language and hiv/aids” (higgins & norton, 2010), “alzheimer talk, text and context: enhancing communication” (davis, 2008), and bodies and language: health, ailments, disabilities (ramanathan, 2009). bodies and language: health, ailments, disabilities in her publication titled “bodies and language: health, ailments, disabilities”, ramanathan (2010) deploys an applied sociolinguistic approach towards the linguistic dimensions of the body with focus on health, aliments, and disabilities. she specifically touches upon metaprescriptive utterances of cancer, breasts, and gazes. in addition, she also analyzes autobiographical writings of alzheimer patients and caregivers. she further proceeds to study from poststructuralist viewpoints the discourses about the chronic diseases, such diabetes, epilepsy, and body breakdowns. the author also addresses the communication challenges faced by patients of autism and partial hearing. she further critically dwells on text and meaning-making in ailment and indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 51 disability related research. finally, she sums up critical ailment research in applied sociolinguistics from power, perception, and social change perspective. following is a detailed description of her take on each of the above subjects. the themes related to cancer diseases takes up key metaprescriptive utterances around breast cancer. it addresses chemotherapy, amputation and prosthesis to argue that these terms ignore the lived, material, corporeal realities around bodies and the spillage that cancer involves. drawing on feminist and other philosophical perspectives, the research offers alternate critical interpretations of these terms that permit us to begin rethinking our collective ideas about ‘disability’ and ‘normalcy’ while also raising concerns relating to medical gazes, (male) fetishism about breasts and societal notions about ‘abject’ bodies. it also addresses ways in which breast cancer patients and their partners struggle with issues around ‘altered’ bodies (e.g. whether to go in for reconstructive surgery or not, what a body with only one or no breast might be like, the extent to which their choices are governed by societal discourses about ‘normal’ attractive bodies). for instance, ramanathan analyses the linguistic and etymological aspects of the word ‘camotheraphy’. she observes that there are a number of issues that the metaprescriptive term of ‘chemotherapy’ draws a veil over and the radiating ripples around this term/event stay hidden. however, beyond this grim, difficult spillage are the linguistic and etymological aspects of the term itself. the word ‘chemotherapy’ is a combination of ‘chemo’ and ‘therapy’, with the former being derived from ‘chemo’ meaning ‘chemicals’ but specifically in this instance chemicals that have ‘a toxic effect’ and the latter from therape meaning ‘treatment’ or ‘cure’. the juxtaposition of seeming opposites—a toxic compound that kills (chemo) with a treatment that cures (therapy)– is reminiscent of derrida’s pharmakon wherein the remedy and the poison are part of each other; the term means both poison and cure. in the case of ‘chemotherapy’—a real drug administered to cancer patients—this opposition, or, as it turns out, non-opposition, is lived out: the ‘therapy’ patients actually received makes them ill (as susan points out in her narrative), and when administered to non-cancer patients (as in the case of curing hepatitis c), chemotherapy actually causes cancer. i stress these issues around etymology and morphology here to highlight the rift or gap between these terms that otherwise goes unnoticed. chemotherapy has become a metaprescriptive utterance with particular associations and specific conceptual apparatus that begs to be texted and infused with new associations and meanings. moving towards the supposedly ‘cognitive’ realm of memories and alzheimer’s disease, next part of her research presents an examination of diaries kept by alzheimer patients and their partners. it discovers ways in which diary writing becomes instantaneously an agentive way by which a sense of ‘self’ gets scripted—a point underscored in the second language learning by norton (2000) and by shenk (2005), davis (2005b) and pope and ripich (2005) in alzheimer-related work in the applied linguistics. since memory is fast slipping away, while also pointing to the fluid nature of identities as patients struggle with diminishing language and remembering skills. specifically, the chapter explores how two themes – repetition and (sure) signs, and traces and intentions – crucially inform their need to text their elusive hold on language and memories into place, making us take note of how in contexts of disabilities and chronic ailments texting, and to some extent, fixing, a sense of self may be a critical way of surviving and coping and stalling last shadows. it directly addresses the experiences of alzheimer patients and their partners as they struggle with memory loss. next, ramanathan addresses experiences around body breakdowns, especially in relation to two chronic, invisible ailments, namely type-1 diabetes and epilepsy. it contends that biomedical discourses, from maya khemlani david, aliyyah nuha faiqah azman firdaus, & syed abdul manan border crossings: use of linguistic studies across subject disciplines 52 which societal discourses draw their strength, have emphasized malfunctioning body parts, and have made little room for humanistic articulations of bodily breakdown. similarly, some strains of poststructuralist discourses on bodies in their propensity to emphasize the performative aspects of bodies and to see experience as constantly under erasure make little room for bodily breakdowns. it calls for the need for applied linguistics in general and aging-related work in particular to create interstitial spaces that avoid both the dehumanizing rhetoric of bio-medical discourses and the erasure of experiences as per some strains of poststructuralist thought. it also addresses some tensions relating to the fixing of experiences–how the recording of them runs risks of sedimentizing them–and of exploring ways of rendering them fluid. another part of research addresses issues relating to intentions—how and whether we are ever able to fully communicate what we ‘intend’ through language—and ways in which autism and deafness/partial hearing obscure our understandings of this term and its usage. premised on lacanian, bakhtinian and vygotskian thought, the analysis partially addresses parents’ accounts of initiating autistic and partially hearing children into ‘normal’ worlds. particularly, it addresses ways in which so much of everyday communication depends on our individual readings of other people’s intentions and how this space of ‘what we intend’ is far gloomier and immature than we realize. next piece of her research reports one of authors’ previous long-term, ethnographic endeavors involving extended work with the memories and life histories of patients suffering from alzheimer’s disease. collected over the span of three and a half years, this body of research is devoted to speech. alzheimer’s discourse from a derridean perspective raises critical issues relating to our developing perceptions and knowledge-making practices. it also raises quasi-philosophical questions about the nature of ‘texts’, ‘originals’ and ‘presences’, ‘truths’ and the importance of seeking ways to render our texting about disability issues more fluid, since neither ‘disabled’ person or researcher or our interpretations of data stay stable and in place. language and hiv/aids higgins and norton (2010) in their edited volume “language and hiv/aids” focus on intersection between language and hiv/aids. the volume is devoted to exploring a host of issues around hiv/aids in various geographic and virtual domains (uganda, tanzania, india, australia, andaman islands, online contexts and visual arts) and through different analytic modes (discourse analysis, first-person accounts and ethnographic data). this volume probes questions around sex, sexuality and their anxious speeches. it does so principally to draw our attention to how experiences of hiv affect subjectivities, including the formation of and resistance to cultural norms. a significant point here is not just how death and grief loom large around this condition, but how issues of discrimination and suffering are coded in local cultural norms around patriarchy, and how aids patients and their caregivers move both themselves and discourses about their condition to more uplifting domains. it is this bunch of issues that this volume invokes. it is dived into thematic sections which comprise of the following major topics: 1) constructions of knowledge about hiv/aids, 2) gendered practices in the spread of hiv/aids, 3) the place of local knowledge in hiv/aids educational practices, and 4) institutional responses to hiv/aids. this volume focuses on the role of language, discourse and semiotics in the construction of knowledge in hiv/aids education in different regions of the world, within the broader framework of applied linguistics and public health. the contributions examine the production, location and utilization of local knowledge in educational settings vis-à-vis discourses that are transmitted through official channels, such as medical and health professionals, non-governmental organizations (ngos), and international agencies. defining indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 53 hiv/aids education broadly, the volume examines the construction of hiv/aids education as a discourse within educational contexts that shapes knowledge about the disease, and the emergence of competing and cross-cultural ideologies that are coconstructed in educational settings. the central goal of the volume is to provide a collection of studies that yields helpful insights into the discursive construction of knowledge about hiv/aids, while demonstrating how the tools of applied linguistics can be exercised to reveal a deeper understanding of the production and dissemination of this knowledge. the contributors believe that they seek to democratize the construction of knowledge about hiv/aids through sensitive, emic analyses that give priority to the voices of people, including youth, who are not typically sanctioned as producers of such knowledge. the chapters use a range of qualitative methodologies to critically explore the role of language and discourse in educational contexts in which various and sometimes competing forms of knowledge about hiv/aids are constructed. the authors draw on discourse analysis, ethnography and social semiotics to interpret meaning-making practices in hiv/aids education around the world, analyzing formal and informal educational practices in australia, burkina faso, cambodia, hong kong, india, south africa, tanzania, thailand and uganda. the contributors examine both the forms of knowledge that are present among communities affected by hiv/aids and the forms of knowledge conveyed by health experts that are meant to help prevent the spread of hiv. by exploring both sets of knowledge, the chapters explore how ‘professional’ discourses of sexual health and prevention interact with ‘lay’ discourses, and they highlight important practical concerns that result from the gaps between these two sets of knowledge. many of the chapters demonstrate that target audiences do have an awareness of official knowledge about hiv/aids, but they also reveal the salience of local knowledge for these populations. the analyses offered seek to make sense of the challenges that educators, health practitioners and target populations face because of these co-present forms of knowledge, and to make recommendations for change. in this introduction, we begin by locating the volume within a broad literature on language and public health, and then turn to a consideration of research on hiv/aids and applied linguistics, more specifically. next, given researchers’ interest in the intersection between local and global discourses on hiv/aids, they turn to a consideration of the ways in which applied linguists have addressed local knowledge across diverse research sites, and the implications this research has for investigations of hiv/aids. we conclude the chapter with a discussion on the organizing principle of the volume and its overall structure, with chapter summaries. the chapters broadly conclude that local knowledge is always present, sometimes even in the form of authorized discourses about hiv/aids. however, most of the chapters demonstrate that local knowledge remains in competition with official discourses about hiv/aids in formal and informal domains of education, and most of the chapters reveal that local knowledge is largely obscured in favor of official discourses about hiv/aids. while a volume of this nature does not strive to make grand generalizations about the place of local knowledge in the prevention of hiv/aids, the contributors propose that understanding how knowledge is constructed among various populations can helpfully inform any effort to prevent the spread of hiv. the findings presented here do seem to have in common is that greater inclusion of unauthorized voices can lead to deeper understandings about why some educational practices have greater success than others do. the contributors hope that this bunch of articles will inspire those working in the field of hiv/aids prevention to listen carefully to these voices. maya khemlani david, aliyyah nuha faiqah azman firdaus, & syed abdul manan border crossings: use of linguistic studies across subject disciplines 54 alzheimer talk, text and context: enhancing communication davis’s (2008) collection of articles entitled “alzheimer talk, text and context enhancing communication” argued that the ad speaker retains a number of communicative competencies which may or may not be identifiable in clinical studies, and that these competencies can be built upon in ways that benefit the persons with ad and their caregivers by supporting interventions to enhance communication. this collection augments clinical inventories of alzheimer’s discourse with an emphasis on how caregivers and researchers can focus on communication enhancement and personcentered care. specialists from linguistics, speech and communications disorders, gerontology, nursing, and artificial intelligence analyze retained competencies for social and linguistic interaction by speakers with alzheimer’s disease, keyed to a corpus of naturally-occurring conversation, collected over several years. the contributors examine discourse boundaries and social relationships, gender-cued interaction and life-course analysis, online text by and about alzheimer’s speech, ways alzheimer’s speakers co-construct stories, in more than one language, with caregivers and conversation partners. they explore ways that might help alzheimer’s speakers and ourselves communicate better by knowing more about some of the ways they can continue to display their communicative skills, and by designing innovative enhancements and interventions. the collection includes contributions from scholars in several fields, such as applied linguistics, gerontology, geriatric nursing, computer science, communication studies and communications disorders. all share a common concern, if not always the same terminology: a concern with how people with alzheimer’s disease and their unimpaired conversation partners produce, interpret and understand language used in specific contexts and situations. accordingly, the articles incorporate findings from multiple disciplines and draw on interrelated research areas, such as aphasia or dementia. boyd davis and cynthia bernstein focus on one specific speaker in the corpus to examine how the impaired speaker sustains relational goals in discourse when the ability to produce information is reduced. their analysis of specific features in the conversational interaction is linked to two threads of research: that which shows the alzheimer’s speaker increasing their use of pragmatic constructs as their language declines, and that which suggests rapport, relationships and positioning as crucial components of conversation with impaired speakers. later, davis uses a review of functions of some discourse markers retained in the talk of ad speakers in the corpus, to look at the use of so to preface statements and declarative questions. given that caregivers, at least in agency or institutional settings, spend a good bit of effort asking questions of ad speakers, she suggests that corpora could expand our understanding of the kinds of usage that may be easier for ad speakers to handle and the variation they present. ellen bouchard ryan, hendrika spykerman and ann anas review how people with dementia use reading and writing for a variety of personal satisfactions to argue that these activities are both possible and desirable. their review expands empirical findings with reports of lived experience to demonstrate the creativity and courage displayed by persons with dementia, as they use writing to maintain their sense of self. lisa russell-pinson and linda moore are concerned with the way internet websites establish a context for discussing ad. although patient education is a priority, the amount of web-based information, even good information, can be overwhelming to persons and family members who think they are going to have to deal with a particular disease or condition. russell-pinson and moore’s review of how the flagship alzheimer’s association site uses interrogatives to guide readers through http://www.palgraveconnect.com/pc/browse/advancedsearchresults?authoreditor=boyd%20h.%20davis indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 55 complex information also offers implicit suggestions for writing to the lay reader. formal linguistics and law linguistics and law are deeply intertwined. the cross-disciplinary nature of linguistics and law make it a prolific site for researchers of both the fields to collaborate and share knowledge. law is all about language—legal coding and encoding, explanation, interpretation, analysis, argument, and so on. courtroom and the discourse of the trail provide one particularly important site to observe the way violence and pain enters language (scarry, 1985). it is language in the end which remembers, it is language that bears tradition and it is through language…that we remember not simply the appearance of the past, but also its discourse. in discourse, we read language to recollect not simply what was said, but the context of what was said, a copious linguistic context (goodrich, ‘language of law’). the implications if legal verdicts and their wording are profound in emotional and psychological terms. robert (1986) in an essay ‘violence and the word’ writes that, legal interpretations take place in a field of pain and death. this is true in several senses. legal interpretive acts signal and occasion the imposition of violence upon others: a judge articulates her understanding of a text, and as a result, somebody loses his freedom, his property, his children and even his life. when interpreters have finished their work, they frequently leave behind victims whose lives have been torn apart by these organized, social practices of violence. language and law—new applications of formal linguistics by grewendorf and rathert (2009) the aim of this book is to show how different formal linguistic disciplines can fruitfully contribute to legal issues. the book wants to show the many interfaces between linguistics and jurisprudence (grewendorf, 2009). law and linguistics are intertwined. according to grewendorf and rathert (2009), law always has a linguistic form; there would be no law without language. there would be no way to establish legal validity without language, as justice needs communication. in this respect, the laws of society and the laws of nature differ. the laws of nature are valid although their correct formulations are not known entirely; they would also be valid if nobody had ever tried to put them in formulas. the laws of society are different, they only come about via human communication; they depend on communication and do not exist as such. the laws of nature are truly universal and eternal whereas the laws of society are state-bound and prone to be changed. imagine a society without any law or rules; sooner or later someone will feel disturbed by what someone else does and he will communicate this. rules of living together will be negotiated and law comes into a previously lawless society. law is mediated through language, partially through spoken language (e.g. at court) and partially through written language (e.g. written statutory regulations, ordinances). litigation is a process that is oriented towards the text of the written law and that results in new texts, judgments. language and law are intimately linked, and so are linguistics and jurisprudence. one of the major sections of the book focuses on the understanding of the law— the contribution of semantics and psycholinguistics. according to grewendorf and rathert (2009), the interpretation of law is as old as law itself. jurists and laypersons always ask for the precise meaning of a certain piece of the law, they are engaged in a steady process of understanding the law. in linguistics, the discipline investigating ‘meaning’ (of words or sentences or texts) is semantics; thus, it is to be expected that semantics can contribute to a correct understanding of the law. this part also investigates the alleged incomprehensibility of legal language. many features are claimed to be responsible for this: embeddings, complex noun phrases, nominalizations, etc. it is the task of psycholinguistics to investigate these features. maya khemlani david, aliyyah nuha faiqah azman firdaus, & syed abdul manan border crossings: use of linguistic studies across subject disciplines 56 law matters, syntax matters and semantics matters by carl vogel in this chapter, the author argues that the formal semanticist can usefully interact with legal experts during the process of formulating legal texts, and that the semanticist can provide relevant advice for interpretive purposes. vogel addresses a huge set of examples from irish constitutional and statutory issues. judges often explicitly appeal to linguistic principles of interpretation in justifying legal opinions and decisions, yet they do so inconsistently. the linguistic topics vogel highlighted as relevant for the interpretation of legal texts include the meaning relation between conjunction (and) and disjunction (or), readings of the plural (collective versus distributive readings), the interpretation of relative clauses, under specification and vagueness, aspectual ambiguity, and lexical semantics. obviously, the lawyers responsible for the interpretation statute did not see the role of negation in de morgan, they only saw that conjunction and disjunction enter an equivalence relation. vogel also elucidates the merits and limitations of recent attempts in ireland’s legislation to provide semantic interpretation 6 günther grewendorf and monika rathert principles, among them the guidelines of the law reform committee (2000) and the rules supplied by the interpretation act (2005). the paper phonetic cues to speaker age: a longitudinal study by angelika braun and sefan friebis the study presented by braun and friebis focuses on the development of famous voices over time, the recordings of whom are readily available over a considerable time span. the voices of eight male german politicians were selected for the study. recordings extending over a period of 20–30 years were obtained from the archives of various german radio stations. the variables studied were speech rate, mean fundamental frequency, its standard deviation, voice onset time (vot), and jitter and shimmer. the main results indicate that the speech rate clearly decreases with advancing age. the vot measurements demonstrate a decrease with increasing age. shimmer shows a statistically significant increase with age. with respect to the forensic setting, the results of the present study demonstrate that certain changes within the vocal apparatus as well as changes in speech timing can reliably be linked to the age of a given speaker. interactional norms in the australian police interrogation room by david yoong in this study, yoong (2010) examines the interaction that takes place in a police interrogation room that follows certain conventions which are not evident in other settings, like school or home domains. this study which uses data derived from the questioning the australian police conducted with dr. mohamed haneef — a terrorist accomplice suspect aimed to show how the norms of interaction in the australian police interrogation room are established through protocols and codes of conduct. another aspect of norms of interaction analyzed in this article was the way power relations are created and maintained by looking at recurring discourse markers like the use of address and referent terms, interruptions, topic switching and latching. by identifying these linguistic devices, the author is able to see the patterns of interaction conducted by the australian police with persons of interest. courtroom discourse: expert witness testimony in a criminal case in malaysia by nooraini ibrahim (2007) in another research conducted within the court, noraini (2007) surveyed the kuala lumpur criminal courts to study the usage of language in the proceedings, especially the use of languages other than bahasa malaysia against the backdrop of the language act, which deemed that bahasa malaysia is the national language and the language of the court. professional world englishes: a case of legal report genre analysis by maya khemlani david & neda saeipoor (2014) this study by david and saeipoor (2014) aimed to investigate the malaysian english judgment reports on rape cases from a linguistic perspective. it also sought to http://das.sagepub.com/search?author1=david+yoong&sortspec=date&submit=submit indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 57 identify court of appeal judgment reports of rape cases as a genre and to identifying the genre moves conducted within this genre. reports of malaysian courts of appeal on rape cases were identified as a specific genre. the movements within the genres were identified by studying two controversial reports. a comparison with contexts in which english is used as a first language showed that the judgments might suffer from relying on pathos argumentation in one critical move. the study concluded that the moves and sub-moves were similar in the two cases, allowing to call the judgment reports of court of appeal for rape cases in malaysia “a genre” which law professionals and their audience use and understand. the rhetorical arguments were used only in the move named “arguing the case”. the analysis of the reports showed the tendency of the judges towards “pathos” backed up with “ethos” emphasizing on the emotional aspects to raise the audience’s sympathy to approve the judgment. the judges also emphasized their authority to justify the sentence. “logos” on the other hand is used only in 2 or 3 sections in each report. the rhetorical argument pattern in the “arguing the case” move may help professionals to avoid the risk of the effect of personal and emotional view of the judges on the justice system which can cost the system the trust of its audience. linguistics and anthropological sciences ageing in africa: sociolinguistic and anthropological approaches by makoni and stroeken (2002) this work covers the dramatic expansion of african gerontology as a discipline focusing aging and its consequences for societies and for individual experiences all over the continent. therefore, the edited volume brings together some of the most prolific and skillful researchers working on ageing in africa. the book is grounded on sociolinguistic and anthropological research conducted in different regions of southern africa, west and east africa, and in different types of communities, rural, urban and nomadic. hence, the book is able to adopt a pan-african slant to issues about ageing. the data and their interpretation are characterized by the richness, typicity and authenticity of both narratives and ethnographical fieldwork. because the authors aim to present insider views and experiences of ageing in africa from these diverse contexts, the book is able to distil common and variable aspects of ageing in africa. these permit a formulation of critical models of ageing which are sensitive to the elderly person’s experience and to the dynamics of the historical contexts in which are sensitive to the elderly person’s experience and to the dynamics of the historical contexts in which elderly persons have lived. critical models of ageing appear to shed a new light on the social change that affects all of the contemporary african society (e.g. post-apartheid, postcolonialism). the contributions to this volume demonstrate the acutely ambivalent position of elderliness in postcolonial society. lying at the very heart of globalizing, monetarizing and nation-building pressures in african south of the sahara, social relations between elders and youth have undergone radical changes in the last decades. in its richly detailed, multidisciplinary approach, the volume not only demonstrates how diverse the outcomes have been in different societies on the continent, but also poignantly elicits the current agility of ‘elderhood’ in offering contemporary strategies to cope with societal crises. this adeptly compiled work is an important contribution to the emerging field of african gerontology and should be of major interest to both scholars and policy makers concerned with africa and its prospects. the volume vividly portrays the shifting roles and experiences of the elderly, both male and female, in africa south of the sahara. stimulating and accessible reading for anyone interested in the spectrum of specificities and continuities of the elderly in the increasingly divided or wounded local worlds of entangled modernities. maya khemlani david, aliyyah nuha faiqah azman firdaus, & syed abdul manan border crossings: use of linguistic studies across subject disciplines 58 linguistics and business englishes in advertising by azirah hashim hashim (2010) summarizes international research into the topic and then illustrates her chapter with examples of print and radio advertisements used in malaysia. she discusses how certain languages are used to advertise certain products and how a mix of languages is also often used to attract the attention of listeners and readers. hashim illustrated and discussed the respective roles of standard and local englishes as well as other languages in advertisements from different parts of the world and especially in malaysia, and how they are used to appeal to a wide range of ethnic, national, and regional audiences. in bilingual and multilingual populations, the choice of language or variety can be a complex issue. innovations in the form of code switching and choice of language for different functions indicate that the choice of language plays a crucial role in the advertising industry. the illustrations show that a mixture of two or more languages is commonly used in advertisements, as advertisers try to reach out to potential clients using both global and local strategies. in the illustrated malaysian advertisements, the use of standard and local varieties of english, alongside one or more of the ‘local’ languages, such as malay, chinese or tamil, can be found. the study of english in advertisements shows that english can be said to be embedded inside complex language habitats that determine its form, functions and status vis-à-vis other languages. conclusion this paper demonstrates the crossdisciplinary character of linguistics and the potential role it plays in various disciplines, such as health sciences, law, business, and numerous other sciences. the data showed that language and law are inextricably linked in several ways—rules are framed, encoded and interpreted in language. similarly, legislations are coded in words; so are judge’ opinions expressed in words. how the judgments are framed, interpreted and articulated offer rich data for linguistic analysis as illustrated in the rape cases in malaysia courts. in addition, the study is an attempt to situate the potential for a cross-disciplinary approach between linguistics and other disciplines in malaysia where several studies across disciplines have already set the tone. some observations can be made in the context on the kind of research that has so far surfaced. research across linguistics or applied linguistics, as we observe, is mainly undertaken with a uni-dimensional purpose of contributing towards the body of knowledge within the same disciplines. drawing on theoretical framework and the actual realities in malaysian context within the academia, particularly linguistics, we emphasize that applied linguists can make more dynamic and vigorous contribution by crossing over to other disciplines and domains as highlighted. the crossing over makes potential promises for broadening both the applied and pure dimensions of the disciplines, and can constructively result in the services for society. as sarangi and candlin (2010, p. 2) propose applied linguists can embark upon “active engagement in sites from a variety of other professional domains, such as law, healthcare, counseling, journalism and media, business and management, and alliances with cognate disciplines.” besides, by establishing platforms for ‘interrelationality’ between applied linguistics and professional studies, the malaysian researchers can help develop what sarangi and candlin envision as “inter-disciplinary and inter-professional collaboration, integrating methodological diversity, and a commitment to exploring connectivities among the values, procedures and knowledge bases of those with whom we seek to collaborate in achieving purposeful action.” references collins, s., peters, s., & watt, i. (2011). medical communication. in j. simpson (ed.), the routledge handbook of applied linguistics (pp. 96-110). london: routledge. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 59 davis, b. h. (2008). alzheimer talk, text and context : enhancing communication. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. grewendorf, g. (2009). formal linguistics and law. berlin: mouton de gruyter. grewendorf, g., & rathert, m. (2009). language and law: new applications of formal linguistics. in g. grewendorf & m. rathert (eds.), formal linguistics and law (pp. 1-22). berlin: mouton de gruyter. hashim, a. (2010). print advertisements in malaysia. world englishes, 29(3), 378-393. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-971x.2010.01661.x. ibrahim, n. (2007). courtroom discourse: expert witness testimony in a criminal case in malaysia. unpublished thesis. university of malaya, kuala lumpur malaysia. higgins, c., & norton, b. (2010). language and hiv/aids. bristol: multilingual matters. makoni, s., & stroeken, k. (2002). ageing in africa: sociolinguistic and anthropological approaches. burlington, vt: ashgate. norton, b. (2000). identity and language learning: gender, ethnicity and educational change. harlow: pearson education. pope, c., & ripich, d. (2005). speak to me, listen to me: ethnic and gender variations in talk and potential consequences in interactions for people with alzheimer’s disease. in b. davis (eds.), alzheimer talk: text and context (pp. 37–59). new york: palgrave. ramanathan, v. (2009). bodies and language: health, ailments, disabilities. bristol: multilingual matters.. sarangi, s., & candlin, c. n. (2010). applied linguistics and professional practice: mapping a future agenda. journal of applied linguistics and professional practice, 7(1), 1-9. sarangi, s. (2012). applied linguistics and professional discourse studies. veredas on-line– temática, 16(1), 1-8. shenk, d. (2005). there was an old woman: maintenance of identity by people with alzheimer’s dementia. in b. davis (ed.), alzheimer talk, text and context (pp. 3–17). new york: palgrave. yoong, d. (2010). interactional norms in the australian police interrogation room. discourse & society, 21(6), 692-713. doi: 10.1177/0957926510381223. maya khemlani david, aliyyah nuha faiqah azman firdaus, & syed abdul manan border crossings: use of linguistic studies across subject disciplines 60 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 13 listening anxiety among indonesian efl students vina agustiana department of english education, faculty of teachers training and education, universitas kuningan, indonesia email: v.agustiana08@gmail.com apa citation: agustiana, v. (2018). listening anxiety among indonesian efl students. indonesian efl journal, 5(1), 13-26. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v5i1.1607. received: 14-09-2018 accepted: 24-11-2018 published: 01-01-2019 abstract: listening skill is essential in efl learning. experiencing more than three years in teaching listening, the researcher covers that efl students face problems in comprehending what people say in target language. through this study, the researcher aims at exploring efl students’ experience in learning to listen to spoken english text which covers (a) students’ attitude towards learning to listen to spoken english texts, b) listening anxiety in listening to spoken english texts, and (c) students’ effort in improving their listening skill in listening to spoken english text. to meet the research objectives, the researcher used a quantitative research through applying a survey design. a closed ended questionnaire containing 50 questions were distributed to 58 efl students of a private university in west java, indonesia. the questionnaire was tested its validity and reliability. moreover, the data were analyzed descriptive statistically. data revealed that students show (a) a positive attitude towards learning to listen to english spoken text (3.56); (b) students’ listening anxiety is in high level (3.52); and (c) students have a high effort in improving their listening skill (3.74). to conclude with, in spite of the high level of students’ listening anxiety, they show the high level of attitude in learning to listen to english spoken text and the high effort in improving their listening skill as well. keywords: attitude; listening anxiety; listening skill. introduction listening skill is essential in efl learning. it has, indeed, an important role in the communication process (gilakjani & ahmadi, 2011). this is because the primary key in the acquisition of a language is to understand the information received as input. relation to listening skills, input received is in the form of spoken language. rost (2002) states that listening activities are vital in the language class because the class provides input for the students. this is in line with hamouda (2013) who states that listening skill is very important in acquiring understandable input. thus, language acquisition occurs when a person understands the input received, and the listening skill is a key component affecting the input understanding process. variety of listening is divided into two, namely extensive and intensive listening. extensive listening is emphasized in listening activities more freely and more generally, while the intensive listening is directed at a much more controlled activity on a particular subject (harmer, 2001). the way people listening to, either extensive or intensive listening may influence people’s ability in comprehending the message taken from the spoken language. there are various factors that become obstacles in the process of achieving listening comprehension. obstacles in listening are defined as external and internal characteristics that may affect the understanding of an oral text relating to cognitive procedures at each stage of listening comprehension (goh, 2000). hermawan (2012, p. 49-54) describes that motivation, hearing problem, physical condition, and limitation of self in vina agustiana listening anxiety among indonesian efl students 14 maintaining focus of thinking belong to internal factor, while material, environment, speaker, style and speech technique are external factors that hinder the success listening. in teaching english skills in indonesia, listening is one of the skills that are considered difficult but neglected (adnan, 2012). in fact, listening skills are one of the basic skills of language, so teaching listening skills deserve the same priority as other basic language skills, i.e. reading, speaking, and writing. hasan (2000) states listening comprehension is an appropriate effort in the acquisition of language and in the effort to improve the ability of other languages. thus, it can be said that listening skill is not only related to the ability to accept input, but also related to the development of language skills, especially the speaking skill. this is in line with rost (2002) who states that the development of skills in listening is the key to getting the speaking skill. according to hamouda (2013), listening and speaking skills are not significant parts of many books and teachers do not consider these skills in their classes. osada (2004) states that listening is not very important for both teachers and learners and teachers test not to teach listening and learners learn listening not listening comprehension. given the importance of listening in foreign language learning, it is precisely that teaching listening comprehension tends to be ignored in various efl programs. this is certainly one of the problems faced by students who learn a foreign language (efl learners) in improving the understanding of listening. efl learners have crucial problems in listening comprehension because universities pay attention to grammar, reading, and vocabulary (hamouda, 2013). this neglect is the result of the debate over which language skills are the most important in learning foreign language acquisition. in addition, most teachers assume that the listening activity is a spontaneous activity as well as breathing activity (thomas & dyer, 2007). in the classroom, teachers tend to assess listening skills, not teaching listening, while students tend to learn to listen instead of listening comprehensively (hamouda, 2013). based on this, in an effort to improve the comprehension of listening, teachers should understand the difficulties experienced by students in listening first. thus, teachers are able to create strategies to help students solve the difficulties they experience in listening. based on the experience of the writer who has taught listening courses to the english department students for more than three years, the author concludes that students who learn a foreign language experience many obstacles in the effort to understand the spoken language spoken by native speakers. this is based on the final test results in each semester in the listening courses which indicate that students’ listening skills are at low levels. this is also experienced by several other researchers, such as hayati (2010), muljanto (2012), and hamouda (2013). this is also in line with goh (2000) who argues that students have difficulty in identifying familiar words, whereas students know the words but they find it difficult to understand the meaning of the words. based on this, the author would like to express the experience of the indonesian efl students which includes (a) students’ attitude towards learning to listen to spoken english texts, b) listening anxiety in listening to spoken english texts, and (c) students’ effort in improving their listening skill in listening to spoken english text. method this research used quantitative research method through applying survey research design. sugiyono (2012, p. 8) states that “quantitative method is a research method based on positivism philosophy, used to examine in a particular population or sample, data collection using research instruments, quantitative/statistical data analysis, with the aim to test the hypothesis has been established”. meanwhile, survey research design is a design in which indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 15 researchers describe quantitatively the trends, attitudes, or opinions of a particular population by examining the sample of the population (cresswell, 2014). this study used a questionnaire in data collection, with the aim of generalizing populations based on predetermined samples (babbie, 1990, in cresswell, 2014). the questionnaires used include statements about difficulties and difficulty factors in the comprehensive listening experienced by indonesian efl students. this research involves 58 second semester students of english department in a private university in indonesia. the selection of respondents of this study is based on two reasons. first, the author is one of the teachers in the study program. obviously, this can help the authors to get easy access to the research site. second, the result of the students’ final test in listening course which indicate that students’ listening skills are at low levels. therefore, the author tends to cover the students’ problem in learning to listening. questionnaire is the main instrument in this research. questionnaires are used to collect data in the form of phenomena that are not directly observed, such as experience, opinions, values, interests, etc. (gall, borg & gall, 2003). of course, this questionnaire is used to collect specific data about the student’s experience in learning listening comprehension. the questionnaire is used to explore the efl students’ learning experiences in learning to listening to spoken english text which includes: (a) students’ attitude towards learning to listen to spoken english texts, b) listening anxiety in listening to spoken english texts, and (c) students’ effort in improving their listening skill in listening to spoken english text. in this case, all respondents filled out one of the answer options based on the statement provided according to what they felt. the distribution of questionnaires was carried out at the last meeting in the listening for academic purposes courses conducted in the second semester. the authors assume that after students have a 2-semesters learning to listening experience, students will provide more accurate data on what factors are their obstacles in listening to the comprehensive english oral test. the questionnaire is likert-scale consisting of 50 statements that are divided into three themes, namely (a) attitudes of students learning to listen to spoken english texts, (b) difficulties faced by students related to listening comprehension, and (c) students’ effort in improving listening skills of spoken english text. the first theme consists of six statements divided into two topics, namely (1) students’ attitudes toward the importance of listening to spoken english texts, and (2) the attitude of students to the difficulty in listening to spoken english texts. the second theme consists of 38 statements divided into two topics, namely (1) internal issues that include (a) the material, (b) language, (c) concentration, (d) psychological aspects, and (e) student listening skills, (2) external issues that include (a) the speaker, and (b) the physical or environmental aspects. while the third theme consists of six statements that are divided into two topics, namely the efforts of students conducted (1) inside the campus and (2) outside the campus environment. there are 5 scales on each statement in the questionnaire. however, the choice of scale is tailored to the research objectives, where the choice of scale in each statement on theme 1 and theme 2 has that (sa) strongly agree, (a) agree, (n) neutral, (da) disagree, and (sda) disagree. on theme 3, the scaling options include always (a), often (o), sometimes (s), rarely (r) and never (n). each questionnaire item is arranged based on three aspects, namely affective, behavioral, and cognitive (oskamp & schultz, 2005). this questionnaire was adapted from hamouda (2013). the questionnaire was analyzed statistically descriptively. descriptive statistics are used to infer data (malik & hamied, 2014). before the questionnaire is calculated, the questionnaires were sorted. if each item is not filled, then the questionnaire would not be used. this is done to avoid vina agustiana listening anxiety among indonesian efl students 16 invalid data. questionnaires have been through the feasibility test by using the validity and reliability test. the concurrent and convergent validity of the questionnaire has been tested through factor analysis, and it is found that the validity is already within a reasonable level (eligible). reliability of factors has also been tested through alpha coefficient and it is known that reliable research instruments with strong level. results and discussion students’ attitude towards learning to listen to spoken english texts this section describes the research data relating to the difficulties of indonesian efl students in learning to listening which is divided into three parts. based on the results of data analysis on questionnaire presented in diagram 1, it can be seen that the attitude of students in learning to listening to spoken english text (theme 1) is at a high level with the average of 3.46. even so with the difficulties faced by students in learning to listening to spoken english text (theme 2) which is at a high level in which the average score is 3.52. in addition, it is also known that the efforts of students in improving their listening skill to listening to spoken english text (theme 3) are also at a high level with a mean of 3.74. this suggests that although students perceive that the difficulty in comprehending comprehension is high; students continue to address these lessons well as well as the high effort of the students to improve the comprehension of comprehensive english-language oral texts. diagram 1. the mean of each theme on the questionnaire diagram 2. the average of each item on theme 1 based on diagram 2, it can be seen that the students showed a very high attitude towards the importance of listening to spoken english text (topic 1 on theme 1) where the average was at 4.29, and the students showed a normal attitude to the difficulty in learning to listening to spoken english text (topic 1 on theme 1) where the average is at 2.64. the identification of students’ attitudes toward the importance of indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 17 listening to spoken english text is divided into two topics. the first topic is the students’ attitude toward the importance of listening to spoken english text which is at very high level with the average of 4.29 reflected in three aspects of attitude, that is affective, behavior, and cognitive. based on the existing data, students thought that listening comprehension was important to be studied (4.46), so they were happy (4.46) and would learn a listening comprehension of spoken english texts (4.14) to improve their listening skills. thus, students also agree with some experts who say that listening is important to learn. among them is adnan (2012) which states that the teaching of listening skills so as not to be neglected. in addition, wallace, hand, and prain (2004) argue that listening skills are a very important skill because these skills make a person gain insight, definition, knowledge, and information, and achieve success in communicating with others. of course, there are several reasons why listening is important, including in which facts suggest that students receive 90% of information in school from listening from both teachers and from others (schwartz, 2004, cited in adnan, 2012). this is in line with rost (2002) who states that listening activities are vital in the language class because the class provides input for the students. furthermore, jafari and hashim (2015) add that listening is a channel for comprehensible input and more than 50 percent of the time learners spend in learning a foreign language is devoted to listening. given that listening is related to oral communication that aims to obtain information and understand the content of information, so that information obtained from listening activities is the basis for developing other language skills. therefore, listening skill is one of the language skills that must be mastered properly in order to improve the acquisition of other language skills (hasan, 2000). relation to feelings of pleasure and desire of students to follow learning listening, it certainly illustrates the motivation from within the students themselves to improve their listening skills through learning listening. with the motivation, students will listen more effectively, and consciously select what is being heard especially when the need or want the information (hermawan, 2012). in addition, the lack of motivation in listening can be difficult in listening (wilson, 2008). thus, the high motivation in students is expected to reduce the difficulties faced them in listening. the second topic is the attitude of students to the difficulty in listening to spoken english text in normal level with the mean of 2.64. this topic is reflected in three aspects of attitude, namely affective, behavioral, and cognitive. students’ opinions about the difficulty of listening to spoken english texts are at normal levels (3.29). this indicates that students are not too concerned with the challenges they face in listening. this is slightly different from hamouda (2013) where 76.7% of the 60 students who become the object of his research argue that listening to the english oral text is difficult. in addition, as a result of the difficulty of listening to spoken english texts, the level of boredom of students towards listening was at normal levels (2.67). even attempts to avoid listening courses are at a low level (1.95). in this case, the research findings are in line with hamouda (2013) where only 25% of participants think that listening is a tedious activity. thus, it can be said that students are less affected by the difficulties they face and feel in listening activities. this is closely related to the experience of students in learning to listen. however, this is certainly different from adnan (2012), where the teaching of listening is sometimes neglected, and the teacher is not creative in packing teaching material to listen. in other words, it can be concluded that, students’ learning to listen provides an impressive experience for students so that the motivation to follow the learning listening came up. vina agustiana listening anxiety among indonesian efl students 18 thus, there is an inconsistent relationship between students’ attitudes toward the importance of listening to spoken english text that is at a very high level while students’ attitudes toward difficulty in listening to spoken english texts are at normal levels. this indicates that, students are not too concerned with the challenges they face in listening even they have a high motivation in doing listening activities. difficulties faced by students in listening to spoken english text this section describes the research data relating to the type of difficulty faced by students in listening to spoken english text which is the theme 2 of research data that is at a high level in which the average score is 3.52. of the 50 items of statements in the questionnaire, there are 38 statements divided into two topics, namely (1) internal issues that include (a) matter, (b) language, (c) concentration, (d) psychological aspects, and (e) student listening skills, and (2) external problems that include (a) the speaker, and (b) the physical or environmental aspects. this exposure is based on the average of each topic in theme 2 presented in diagram 3. diagram 3. the average of each topic on theme 2 based on diagram 3, it can be seen that the effect of internal problems that become difficulties faced by students in listening comprehension is at a high level in which the average is at number 3.45. meanwhile, the influence of external problems that become difficulties faced by students in listening comprehension is at a very high level in which the average is at number 3.78. furthermore, internal problems in listening comprehension includes concentration (average 3.79), teaching materials (average 3.59), and students’ listening skills (average of 3.44) are at a high level. meanwhile, the psychological aspects (mean 3.09) and language (mean 3.03) are at normal levels. the first topic identifies the effect of internal problems which become the difficulties faced by the students in listening comprehension which is at a high level with the average of 3.45. there are several aspects that fall into the internal problem. the author discusses the highest order in this aspect. the first is the concentration at the high level (3.79). listening activities require continuous concentration, as there is no chance to repeat (nurhidayati, 2004). this is in line with wilson (2008) and hermawan (2012). in addition, if the listener is worried or disturbed and unable to concentrate, it can affect the listener to understand accurately what has been observed (bloomfield, wayland, rhoades, blodgett, linck, & ross, 2011). of course, the quality of one’s understanding in listening is influenced by the concentration in listening. there are some things that affect concentration, that is, the first is poor sound quality (4.38) which is at very high level. 69.3% of 60 students agree that sound quality can interfere with concentration in listening (hamouda, 2013). recorded material that is less clean, or from a poor audio device will cause other difficulties for students (case, 2012 quoted in adnan, 2014). poor audio quality will certainly disrupt the concentration of students in listening due to student discomfort caused by the quality of the bad audio. obviously, indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 19 this shows that teaching facilities have a role in determining the success of students in learning. this is in line with nurhidayati (2004) where the quality of facilities and teaching media is one aspect that becomes difficult in listening. the second thing that affects the concentration is when hearing a new word in the english spoken text is listened (3.76) which is at high level. when a listener has limited ability in vocabulary, grammar and other linguistic elements, this will make it difficult for the listener to understand spoken language (adnan, 2012). in addition, nurhidayati (2004) argues that the linguistic aspect that causes the most difficulty in listening is the aspect of vocabulary limitations. thus, the limitations of vocabulary can affect the concentration of students in listening. the third thing that affects the concentration is the long spoken text (3.72) that is at very high level. the length of the notion of an oral text is one of the main difficulties for listeners because they can lose focus on listening due to having to listen to long texts (hamouda, 2013). according to gilakjani and ahmadi (2011), if an oral text is too long, it would be better if the text is broken down into shorter text by dividing it into shorter parts or pause it. the fourth thing that affects the concentration is to think of the right answer (3.67) which is at a high level. 70% of the 60 students stated that once they had the answer to the questions that surrounded the text, they also tended to lose concentration in listening (hamouda, 2013). the fifth thing that affects the concentration is thinking of the possibility of the next question (3.41) which is at a high level. this is also in line with hamouda (2013) which revealed that 71.7% of 60 students feel that when thinking of questions that may be asked. from the above explanation, it can be pointed out that five things can influence the aspect of concentration in listening, namely (1) thinking of the right answer, (2) thinking about the possibility of the next question, (3) listening to the long spoken english text, (4) hearing a new word in spoken englishspoken text, and (5) poor sound quality at high levels, so that both the teacher and the student should pay more attention to these things. the second internal aspect that becomes the difficulties faced by the students in listening comprehension is the ability to understand teaching materials (3.59) which are at a high level. teaching material is one of the difficulty factors in listening because it involves several things, including new vocabulary, complex sentence structure, and the length of oral text (hamouda, 2013). one effort to overcome this is to activate students’ schemata so that students can predict the listening material that will be heard (adnan, 2012). this can be applied at the pre-teaching stage (wilson, 2008). there are three subjects on internal issues related to teaching materials, namely the first, length of english oral text (3.83) which is at a high level. students argue that a long spoken english text is difficult to understand because they have difficulty in interpreting meaning, as well as in understanding complex and lengthy sentences. in line with hamouda (2013) which suggests that 83.3% of 60 students stated that the length of oral text is a major obstacle for students to understand the text. this is in line with hasan (2000) which states that the length of the oral text makes students bored and interferes with their concentration in listening. in other words, the length of the spoken text affects the students’ understanding of listening. the second thing is the problem with the existence of a new vocabulary (3.59) which is at a high level. this is in line with hamouda (2013) where 85% of the 60 students stated that the new vocabulary that includes jargon and idioms becomes one of the revelations in listening. in line with that, butt, sharif, and naseer-ud-din (2010) and hanoi (2010) quoted in hamouda (2013) state that the main obstacle in listening is too many words that are not understood. this is in accordance with hasan (2000) that the vina agustiana listening anxiety among indonesian efl students 20 lack of vocabulary is a major obstacle for most students in listening. thus, given the essence of the vocabulary, the teacher should be able to introduce vocabularies that may be considered new to the student before the listening activity takes place. the third is the problem with the topics used in spoken english text (3.10) at normal levels. in this case, the student states that a new topic will be more difficult to understand. in line with hamouda (2013) which identifies that 88.4% of 60 students think that students are keen on listening, when the topic used in oral text is a new topic. of course, the introduction of a topic relates to the level of understanding of students in listening. this is also in line with wilson (2008) which states that students’ ignorance of the topic affects listening activities and the results. in this regard, in relation to the teaching materials used, the teacher should make a good introduction to the topic or vocabulary contained in the oral text to be presented to the student, so that this difficulty can be overcome. furthermore, the third aspect of internal issues is the students’ listening skill which is at a high level (3.44). good listening skills are an important component of communication (adnan, 2012). this is because listening comprehension is the various processes of understanding and making sense of spoken language which involve knowing speechsounds, comprehending the meaning of individual words, and understanding the syntax of sentences (nadig, 2013). there are several things related to students’ listening skills. first, the mastery of english vocabulary (3.65) is at a high level. in this case, students find it difficult to understand every word they hear, understand new vocabulary, and guess the word being heard. in line with the findings that the existence of new vocabulary is able to inhibit the students in understanding oral text, so the students also argue that mastery of english language vocabulary becomes important to note. secondly, the availability of audio transcripts (3.50) is at a high level. vandergrift (2004) and walker (2014) indicated that oral passages exist in real time and should be processed rapidly and when the passage is over, only a mental representation remains. here, it implies that the listener is required to understand every word hears, not the one read. audio transcripts tend to familiarize the students to focus on writing, not to speakers. no audio transcript availability. this is similar to nunan (2008) which states that media that can be used in helping listeners understand messages delivered like images, diagrams, or other visual media. however, it does not include audio transcripts. third, the inability to guess what will be discussed (3.22) is at normal level. this is in line with hamouda (2013) where 63.3% of the 60 students find it difficult to understand the meaning of every word in the text that is being listened to. butt et al. (2010) add that trying to understand and listen to foreignlanguage texts at the same time is impossible. this shows that the difficulties not only come from listening activities, but also about what and how the student listened to the oral text. fourth, the inability to gain an understanding of english oral text at the first occasion (average 3.21). of course, in listening activities, there is no chance to repeat (nurhidayati, 2004). this indicates that on the first occasion listening, students should understand the oral text used. although, in practice, teachers always provide the opportunity to replay the spoken text used. fifth, the ability to remember (3.16) is at normal level. limitations of memory cause students to face difficulty in recalling the details of the texts being reviewed (nurhidayati, 2004). meanwhile, in listening, students are required to remember every detail or important information in spoken text that is heard. obviously, this makes it another difficulty in listening. sixth, the questions asked about the spoken english spoken text (3.05) are at indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 21 normal levels. in this case, students have difficulty in answering any questions raised about the spoken english text they have seen. meanwhile, the fourth aspect of internal problems is the psychological aspect which is at normal level (3.09). when a person feels nervous or worried, then he cannot concentrate, as well as when someone feels uncomfortable, then the ability to listen will decrease (hamouda, 2013). in other words, the psychological aspect also contributed to the success of the process of listening. there are several things related to the psychological aspect. the first is the lack of interest in spoken english-language spoken text at a high level (3.43). in this case, students have difficulty understanding spoken english texts. lack of interest in learning will certainly lead to boredom. this boredom is a factor inhibiting the listening, because, when the sense of boredom appears the concentration of students in listening down (hamouda, 2013). thus, how important the selection of teaching resources in the continuity of the learning process listening is. the second thing is students’ uncertainty about the ability to understand spoken english text on student difficulties in listening comprehension at normal levels (2.98). in this case, before the listening activities take place, students feel that they will not be able to understand the spoken english text, so there is a sense of worry that they will not be able to understand the text. this sense of worry triggers student desperation, because students can choose not to continue their listening activities. so, even with hamouda (2013) which says that 41.7% of the 60 students are in doubt and worried about their ability to listen. the last aspect of the internal problem is the aspect of language that is at normal level (3.03). in relation to the linguistic aspect, students have difficulty in comprehending the reduced word (3.21), the use of conjunction (3.03), and everyday language and the use of slang (2.86) are at normal levels. in relation to linguistic aspects, this can be a revelation for non-native speakers in understanding oral texts (hamouda, 2013). thus, it can be concluded that the internal problem in listening comprehension was influenced by (1) concentration (3.79) which includes poor audio quality (4.38), new vocabulary (3.76), long spoken text (3.72), thinking of appropriate answers (3.67), and consider the possibility of the next question (3.41); (2) teaching material (3.59) which includes the length of the spoken english text (3.83), problems relating to the existence of new vocabulary (3.59), and topic selection (3.10); (3) students’ listening skill (3.44), which includes the mastery of english vocabulary (3.65), the availability of audio transcripts (3.50), inability to guess what will be discussed (3.22), inability to gain an understanding of spoken english text at the first opportunity (3.21), ability to remember (3.16), and unable to answer questions raised about spoken english spoken text (3.05); (4) psychological aspects (3.09) which include a lack of interest in spoken english-spoken text (3.43), students’ self-confidence in the ability to understand oral spoken english (2.98); and (5) language (3.03) which includes the comprehension of reduced words (3.21), use of conjunctions (3.03), colloquial and slang languages (2.86). external problems that become student difficulties in listening comprehension include: that the physical /environmental aspects are at very high level with the average of 4.21, while the speaker aspect is at a high level with the average of 3.66. the first aspect of external related issues is the physical and environmental aspects, in which the effect on listening comprehension is at a very high level with a mean of 4.21. facilities and teaching media can influence how students understand the texts they hear. bloomfield, et al. (2011) state that audio noise or clarity is related to students’ understanding of listening. the first thing related to this problem is the audio quality that is at very high level (4.40). poor audio quality affects the vina agustiana listening anxiety among indonesian efl students 22 students’ understanding of listening to spoken english text. hamouda (2013) revealed that the majority of students have difficulty in listening when the audio quality is playing bad. this may be because the audio or cassette used has been used for a long time. the second thing is the environmental factor (4.02) which is at a high level. students have difficulty in understanding spoken english text if the surroundings are noisy. noise can come from outside the classroom or in the classroom, where students think the noise interferes with their activity in listening. hamouda (2013) revealed that 96.9% of the 60 students have difficulty concentrating in listening because the circumstances at the glance of the keys are noisy. of course, if the noise cannot be reduced, it will negatively affect the students’ understanding of listening. furthermore, the second aspect of the external problem involved is the aspect of the speaker, which effect on listening comprehension is at a high level with a mean of 3.66. this problem is related to speaker style, pronunciation, speech, and sound heard without seeing the speaker directly (hamouda, 2013). this is also reinforced by yagang (1993) who states that listening ability is the ability to identify and understand what others are talking about, including the understanding of the speaker’s accent, the spelling, the grammar, and the vocabulary used, and the understanding of meaning at the same time. the first thing that appears in the research data is the aspect of pronounced speech speech (4.09) which is at a high level. students have difficulty in listening when the speaker pronunciation is unclear. hamouda (2013) revealed that 36.7% of 60 students have difficulty in understanding a word whose pronunciation is less clearly heard. the second thing is the chance of repeating audio playback (4.05) which is at a high level. students have difficulty understanding oral english text if they are given only one-time listening. this is also in line with aspects in understanding teaching materials, where students have difficulty in understanding an oral text in the first opportunity to listen to the text. this is because listeners cannot always ask speakers to repeat what they have to say (nurhidayati, 2004; hamouda, 2013). moreover, 75% of 60 students have difficulties to understand the material if not given the opportunity to repeat the playback of the text (hamouda, 2013). this is certainly a serious problem, where in the learning process, whether or not the audio is repeated certainly based on the consideration of the teacher. the teacher decides the purpose and the right time to play back the audio, even though the teacher himself cannot ascertain in which part the student has not understood (underwood, 1990). the third thing is the speed of speech (3.98) which is at a high level. students have difficulty in understanding spoken english text when speakers speak too fast. high speaking speed certainly affects the understanding of the meaning being said. 90% of the 60 students thought that when the speaker had high speech speeds, the students had difficulty understanding what the speaker was saying even if the students were familiar with the word being said (hamouda, 2013). thus, students certainly have difficulty when listening to speech from speakers who have high speaking speed (underwood, 1990). this is in line with flowerdew & miller (1992) and hayati (2010) who identify that speech speed is the biggest obstacle in the process of understanding a text. the fourth is the pause of speech (3.95), which is at a high level. students have difficulty understanding spoken english text when the speaker does not pause the conversation. pause is another factor that inhibits the understanding of the listeners. hamouda revealed that 83.7% of 60 students have difficulty in understanding an utterance when the speaker does not give a pause in the conversation. pause in talk will give the opportunity to the listener to think. in addition, pause in speech also provides an indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 23 opportunity for listeners to understand speech (yousif, 2006) and provides them with the opportunity to record (dunkel, 1988) in accordance with the quotation in hamouda (2013). the fifth is a speech accent (3.62) which is at a high level. students have difficulties in understanding spoken english text when the speaker has a different accent. based on hamouda (2013), 73.3% of the 60 students have difficulty in listening when the speaker has a different accent. this is because students are not accustomed to hearing various accents of speech. the sixth aspect is the smoothness of speech (3.31) which is at normal level. students find it difficult to understand spoken english texts in which the speaker is hesitant or there are many pauses in speech. a natural conversation certainly contains hesitation, speech pause and speech intonation. 70% of 60 college students have difficulty understanding a conversation that has many doubts in speech or a lot of lag (hamouda, 2013). this is also in line with hasan (2000) who states that the hesitations and pause in speech are obstacles for nonnative speakers in understanding an utterance. thus, harmer (2001) suggests for teachers to train students with different types of oral text, which contain redundancy, doubt, and irregular grammar. the last thing is the visual aid (2.62) which is at normal levels. students have difficulty in understanding oral english text without seeing the speaker’s gestures. hamouda (2013) suggests that 90% of the 60 students have difficulty in understanding the text regardless of the gestures of the speaker. of course, gestures and mimics of the speaker will help the listener in understanding the texts being uttered. thus, visual aids, whether in the form of images, photos, or videos help students understand oral text. based on the discussion, it can be argued that the physical and environmental aspects affect the listening process, which is caused by the audio quality (4.40) and ambient noise (4.02). while the speaker aspect influences the students in listening to include several aspects, namely the pronunciation aspect of fluent speech (4.09), the chance of repeating audio playback (4.05), speaking speed (3.98), speech pause (3.95), speaking accent (3.62), and visual aids (2.62). students’ efforts in improving their ability in listening to spoken english texts this section describes research data relating to the students’ efforts in improving their listening skill in listening to spoken english text which is the theme 3 of research data at a high level with a mean of 3.74. diagram 4. students’ efforts to improve listening comprehension based on diagram 4, it can be seen that the efforts undertaken by students are at a high level with the average of 3.77 for efforts made outside the campus, and the average of 3.68 for the efforts made on campus. students’ efforts in improving their listening skill in listening to spoken english text done on campus are at a high level with a mean of 3.68. this includes listening to every english utterance of lecturers or friends who are speaking as an effort to improve their listening skill in listening to spoken english text at a high level with a mean of 4.05. this is in line with hamouda vina agustiana listening anxiety among indonesian efl students 24 (2013) who identified that 66.7% of 60 students practice their listening skills by communicating with both teachers and friends on campus. while the effort made by the students by attending special training to listen comprehensively the english oral text is at normal level with the average of 3.31. the second topic is the efforts of students in improving their listening skill in listening to spoken english text conducted outside the campus at a high level with a mean of 3.77. this effort includes listening to english-language songs that is at very high levels (4.57); watching non-text english video is at high level (4.00); elearning via cassette or cd is at normal level (3.38); and listening to foreign radio channel (3.14) is at normal level. thus, the students did efforts to improve their listening skill in listening to spoken english text, both oncampus and off-campus. conclusion based on the results of the discussion, it is known that students are addressing listening comprehension as important to learn, so they are happy and will learn to listen to the spoken english text comprehensively to improve their listening skill. in addition, due to difficulties in listening comprehension, students are not too concerned with the challenges they face in listening. in other words, it can be said that students are less affected by the difficulties they face and feel in listening activities. of course, this is closely related to the experience of students in learning to listen. thus, there is an inconsistent relationship between students’ attitudes toward the importance of listening to spoken english text that is at a very high level while students’ attitudes toward difficulty in listening to spoken english texts are at normal levels. this indicates that students are not too concerned with the challenges they face in listening even they have a high motivation in doing listening activities. in addition, with regard to efforts made by students in improving their listening skills, students showed a high attitude. this indicates that there are efforts made by students to improve their listening skill both on and off campus. based on the results of exposure, the most high effort done by the students is to listen to english songs, followed by watching videos in english without text. this is certainly worth doing considering these two things are fun. of course, with the pleasure of doing something, then the benefits of these activities will be more leverage. students’ efforts in improving their listening skill in listening to spoken english text done on campus are at a high level with a mean of 3.68. this includes listening to every english utterance of lecturers or friends who are speaking as an effort to improve the ability to listen to spoken english text at a high level with a mean of 4.05. this is in line with hamouda (2013) who identified that 66.7% of 60 students practice their listening skills by communicating with both teachers and friends on campus. while the effort made by the students by attending special training to listen comprehensively the english oral text is at normal level with the average of 3.31. the second topic is the efforts of students in improving their listening skill in listening to spoken english text conducted outside the campus at a high level with a mean of 3.77. this effort includes listening to english-language songs that are at very high levels (4.57). watching english nontext video is at high level (4.00); e-learning via cassette or cd is at normal level (3.38); and listening to foreign radio channel (3.14) is at normal level. thus, the students’ efforts in improving their listening skill to listen to spoken english text is at a high level. this have been done, not only on campus, but also off-campus. acknowledgement this paper would not have come into existence without significant contribution from so many stakeholders. therefore, in this opportunity, i would like to express my gratitude and deep appreciation for those who have helped and supported me in indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 25 writing this paper. my first and foremost thanks go to lppm universitas of kuningan as funding supporter of my paper. i would like also to thank all participants involved in my study for their willingness and kindly without which i would not able to finish my research. my special thanks are also due to my co-author, afifah husnul badriah, for her help in composing the paper. i am also so grateful to my husband, brigadir fajar gumilang, sh., my beloved sons, muhammad abidzar bani akbar and muhammad arsy al-ghiffari, as well as my lovely daughter, azahra linggar aulia, as my spirit and inspiration of life for their kindness, willingness and support in finishing this paper. references adnan, a. 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(2015). a comparison of normal and moderately slow speech rates: listening to students’ voices in listening comprehension classes in efl context. international journal of foreign language teaching in the islamic world (fltj), 3(3), 511. malik, r. s., & hamied, f. a. (2014). research methods. bandung: upi press. muljanto, s. (2012). analysis of barriers in listening comprehension among junior high school students. english review: journal of english education, 1(1), 78-85. nunan, d. (2008). practical english language teaching: reading . new york: mcgraw hill. nurhidayati. (2004). jenis dan sebab kesulitan yang dihadapi oleh mahasiswa dalam menyimak teks bahasa. bahasa dan seni, 32(1). osada, n. (2004). listening comprehension research: a brief review of the last thirty years. japan: talk. oskamp, s., & schultz, p. w. (2005). attitudes and opinion (3 rd ed.). london: lawrence erlbaum associates. rost, m. (2002). teaching and researching listening. london: longman. sugiyono. (2012). metode penelitian kuantitatif, kualitatif dan r&d. bandung: alfabeta. thomas, i., & dyer, b. (2007). the problem of poor listening skills. retrieved from: http/ faculty.weber.edu/. vandergrift, l. (2004). listening to learn or learning to listen? in cambridge university press (ed.), annual review of applied linguistics (pp. 325). cambridge: cambridge university press, usa. wallace, c. s., hand, b. b., & prain, v. (2004). writing and learning in the science classroom. netherlands: springer. walker, n. (2014). listening: the most difficult skill to teach. encuentro, 23, 167-175. wilson, j. j. (2008). how to teach listening. edinburgh: pearson longman limited. vina agustiana listening anxiety among indonesian efl students 26 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 139 using gibbs’ reflective cycle in making reflections of literary analysis ikin syamsudin adeani department of indonesian language education program, faculty of teachers training and education, universitas galuh, indonesia e-mail: ikinsyamsudinadeani@gmail.com r. bunga febriani department of english education program, faculty of teachers training and education, universitas galuh, indonesia e-mail: bunga.febriani@gmail.com syafryadin department of english education postgraduate program, faculty of teachers training and education, universitas bengkulu, indonesia e-mail: syafryadin@unib.ac.id apa citation: adeani, i. s., febriani, r. b., & syafryadin. (2020). using gibbs’ reflective cycle in making reflections of literary analysis. indonesian efl journal, 6(2), 139-148. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v6i2.3382. received: 12-12-2019 accepted: 02-04-2020 published: 01-07-2020 abstract: in english as foreign language (efl) classroom context, it is compulsory for the students to make reflections of literary works. the current study is aimed at examining how the students implement gibbs’ reflective cycle in making reflections of literary analysis. the qualitative study employed a document analysis upon the students’ reflection artefacts. the students’ reflections are their responses to a short story written by amy tan. the findings of the study revealed that gibbs’ reflective cycle is a good framework to be used by the students in writing reflections upon literary works they are working on. the well-structured framework of writing reflection helped the students explore the literary work deeply, since the reflective cycle accommodates important aspects that can be explored from the literary work by the students. it can be concluded from this study that among the models of reflective writing developed by kolb, johnson, and gibbs, the latest model is considered the most suitable to be used in literary classroom since its wellstructured model enables the students to write better reflections of literary works. keywords: reflective writing; gibbs’ reflective cycle framework; literary works; literary analysis. introduction literary works are designed to conceal the authors’ intention so that readers need to interpret these intentions by making some kinds of analysis and evaluation of the works. reading literary works means attempting to reveal the authors’ true intentions to us, as readers. to understand and to interpret a literary work, it is necessary that a reader possesses the ability to think critically. this ability helps the reader in analyzing and giving evaluation towards the literary works. reading literary works and writing responses towards them are two interrelated activities. when one reads a novel, for instance, he/she might feel something about it, question things that happen in the story, analyze the story to answer his/her own questions, relate the characters of the story with his/her own life, and so on. on the other hand, as rosenblatt (1988) called it, a reader is making a transaction with the literary text. as for writing, in the context of responding to literary works, writing plays an important role since it becomes something that a reader puts his/her thoughts in. roberts and jacobs (2004) stated that the goal of writing is to show a process of thought. he emphasized that as a reader writer needs to realize that the aim of writing is to explain something that she/he is analyzing. he suggested that a reader does not simply restate the events in the works. the interrelationship between reading and writing the literary works is in accordance with rosenblatt’ transactional theory which said that reading and writing is involved with text. as also explained by febriani (2019), that echoed rosenblatt that writing and reading is distinguished that a writer starts with a blank page and must produce a text, and a reader starts with already-written or printed text and must produce meaning. similar to the reading and writing analogy, the term mailto:ikinsyamsudinadeani@gmail.com mailto:bunga.febriani@gmail.com mailto:bunga.febriani@gmail.com ikin syamsudin adeani, r. bunga febriani & syafryadin using gibbs’ reflective cycle in making reflections of literary analysis 140 transaction, as she explained, is used to explain the relationships in which each element conditions and is conditioned by the other in a mutually constituted situations. (febriani, 2019; p.37)” one of the ways the readers of literary works manifest their interpretation and opinion towards literary works is by writing a reflective journal, or reflection. in expressing out what one had in mind while and after reading a story or a literary work, some researchers suggest that he/she writes his/her reflection towards the literary work. reflection offers a writer reader the opportunity to consider how his/her personal experiences and observations shape his/her thinking and acceptance of new ideas. it encourages one to explore his/her own ideas about a text, to express his/her opinion rather than summarize the opinions of others. by putting his/her personal experiences and observation into written work, a reader can revisit and reconsider their thoughts in the future. in the context of english as foreign language classroom, in literary subject classes, making reflections of literary works is compulsory for the students. this is one of the ways to acknowledge what the students have learned and interpreted after they have been assigned to read literary works. through the students’ reflections, the teacher can assess and examine how the students respond to literary works; the teacher can notice whether the students have got the author’s implied intention; the teacher can anticipate when the students appear to misinterpret the stories of the literary works, and so on. bubnys (2010) believed that making reflection is a basic for successful learners’ activity analysis and the learning from one’s own experience. he also stated that in the context of higher education, it is a continuous educational process that encompasses the content, process, and premises. this study is important to be carried out considering literary works demands language learners to be able to comprehend literature not merely from its intrinsic features. moreover, they need to be able to revisit the works and relate them to their own experience. in other words, the language learners should understand things beyond what is stated in the literary works. previously, there have been research on the manifestation of reflective writing on literary analysis. one of the previous related research was conducted by febriani (2019). she conducted a research that examine how reflective writing is manifested in the students’ reader-response literary analysis. the study revealed that readerresponse prompts were helpful for the students that it gave the students ideas to write down their thoughts after reading literary works. another study was conducted by middleton (2017). he sought to explore why critical reflection is difficult for some students. she also shared her personal experience of struggling with reflective models to critically reflect in a meaningful way. the findings revealed that critical reflection was a challenging task, since its process included a personal reflection that brought enlightenment, empowerment, and transformation that was not easy for anyone. hussein (2018) conducted a research which was aimed at examining the effect of reflective journals on students’ learning, how they improve the growth mindset of the students, and the students’ perceptions of the journaling process. the results of the study showed that the writing of reflective journal had a significant impact on efl learners’ concept comprehension. furthermore, sekarwinahyu, rustaman, widodo, riandi (2019) carried out the research on problem based learning and reflection skills of biology, the researchers used gibbs model as an adopted model to be implemented in the classroom. choo, abdullah, nawi (2018) also did a research on patterns of reflective practice in written journal. the result showed that gibbs as good model to be implemented in reflective practice in writing a journal. another researcher was holder, sim, foong, pallath (2019) who conducted the research on developing a reflection guiding tool for underperforming medical students. they applied gibbs model in their research and the result showed that this gibbs reflecting could cause awareness of the students regarding their skills. depart from the need for the students to write reflections to literary works and previous research, in the present study the writer is keen on conducting a study to examine how the students make reflections of literary works by using gibb’s reflective cycle. this current research is different from the previous research, even though the previous research implemented gibbs model, but the current research implemented it in literary works and it would may cause different findings. among some other frameworks for writing reflection, the writer finds gibb’s reflective cycle is suitable to be implemented in the efl literary subject classes, since it facilitates the students indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 141 with a kind of more structured forms than the other frameworks. in other words, gibb’s reflective cycle has more clearly defined sections than other frameworks. regarding such reasons, the writer formulates a research question for the current research: “how the students implement gibbs’ reflective cycle framework in writing reflections of literary works?“ literary works means the products of literature. in other words, literary works are the authentic materials of literature. in the study, literary works refers to the products of written literature. literary works plays an important role in the teaching of literature to students, especially the students of english as foreign language. widyahening and wardhana (2016) described the functions of literary works according to moody in 1984. they explained that there are four functions of literary works; firstly is to train four language skills; secondly, to add knowledge about human life experience such as customs, religion, culture, and so on; thirdly, to develop creation and feeling; lastly, to support character building. to begin with, there are three genres of literature, namely prose, poetry, and drama. the first literary genre to be discussed in the present study is prose. prose is a genre of literature that takes the form of narrative text. the literary works that belong to the first genre are short stories and novels. since the genre takes the form of narrative text, it belongs to fiction. thus, it has the elements of fiction. the elements of fiction cover the plot, characters, setting, point of view, theme, writing style, and symbolism. plot in literary works means the events that make up a story. the events relate to each other in a sequence. there are two kinds of plot, chronological plot and flashback plot. the chronological plot moves according to the time sequence, meanwhile the latter means the kinds of plot that moves backwards and onwards in the time sequence. the characters in short stories and novels means the ones (any person, animal, or figures) represented in a literary work. the dominant character(s) in a story is called a protagonist, while the characters that are opposites to the protagonists are called antagonist characters. setting in stories means the time and place where the story happens. it also includes the historical background, in which the author describes the situation and condition at the time and place when the story is told. in prose (both in short stories and novels) the story is conveyed from the author to the reader through the story teller called narrator. point of view in a short story is conveyed through the narrator’s five senses. there are three kinds of point of view in prose: the first person’s point of view, the third person’s point of view, and the omniscient person’s point of view. the story that uses the first person’s point of view means that the narrator acts as one of the characters in the story. he tells the story based on what he sees, he hears, and he feels when he is interacting with other characters. thus, the narrator in the first person’s point of view story uses the pronoun “i” when delivering the story. in the story that uses the third person’s point of view, the narrator delivers a story by choosing one character as the chosen character. in other words, he acts as an observer in the story. the story is delivered based on the chosen character’s feelings. the narrator knows what happens in the story based on the interaction between the chosen characters and other characters. the last but not least kind of point of view is omniscient person’s point of view. it can be said that the narrator in the point of view is aknow-everything substance. he delivers the story without choosing one character as his eyes and ears, instead he knows everything on ever characters’ mind. the narrator knows it all. this is why he is called omniscient. the next element of fiction is theme. it is the main idea of the whole story. it is usually stated in one complete sentence that summarize the entire story. the author’s writing style is another element of fiction. it refers to how authors select the words they use in the stories. the last but not least element of fiction is symbolism. this is in accordance with the purpose of literature and literary works, that to conceal the real meanings to the readers. literary works convey its messages implicitly so that readers need to be literature literate to be able to reveal the authors’ messages through this kind of symbolism. glencoe (2010) sums up the differences between short stories and novels, as one of the literary genre, as follow. firstly, that short stories encourage the readers to focus on one setting and a small numbers of actors. this means that the novels has the opposite characteristics, that it possesses more than one conflicts and a big number of characters. secondly, that the plot development in short stories tends to be very compact, especially the exposition stage, the falling action stage, and the resolution stage. next, when reading a short story, the readers need to determine the theme, by paying attention to what happens to the main character. besides, the short story contains the point of view, in which ikin syamsudin adeani, r. bunga febriani & syafryadin using gibbs’ reflective cycle in making reflections of literary analysis 142 the reader can notice whether the narrator is inside the story (first person’s point of view) or outside the story (third person’s point of view) the second genre of literature is drama. the literary works of drama is play. plays are composed or written by so called playwrights (the writers of drama). actually drama can be seen from two perspectives, one as a literary genre and the other as performance. in this study, the writer focus on the discussion of drama be seen from literature perspective. drama or play is the kind of literary work that resembles prose, in the sense that it takes the form of literary text. one thing that distinguishes drama from prose is that drama uses dialogues rather than using a story teller or narrator. in other words, the story in drama is conveyed directly to the readers by using dialogues. the third genre of literature is poetry. the works of poetry is called poems. poems are written by poets (the writers of poems). it is quite easy to differ poems with other literary genres, since it does not take the form of narrative text, and it also consists of patterns and forms which is obviously visible. since poems have certain patterns of writing, they can be analyzed in two ways, firstly by content, and secondly by the poetic devices. poetic devices covers the patterns in the poems, such as stanza, verses, lines, rhymes, rhythm, figurative languages, and so on. meanwhile content describes what the poet tells on his poem (subject), what he feels towards the subject of his poem (feelings), what readers feel towards the poem (tone), and the what the poet aims by writing his poem (intention). literary works are different with those of other kinds of writings, such as news and factual texts like manual books, etc. reading literary works needs the ability to think critically in order to understand what the authors intend to convey through their works. in other words, the readers need to be able to find the implied meanings beyond the stated ones. analyzing literary works fulfills one of the purposes of teaching literature to the english as foreign language (efl) students, which is that teaching literature to the students encourages their critical thinking about plots, themes, characters, and so on. van (2009) reviewed and elaborated six approaches to literary analysis. the approaches are new criticism approach, structuralism approach, stylistic approach, reader-response approach, language-based approach, and critical literacy approach. other approaches in broader context of readers include historical approach, philosophical approach, formalism approach, psychological approach, feminist approach, marxist approach, and cultural approach. recently, reflective writing, or also known as reflective journal, or reflection, has been widely used in the context of education and language learning. for the current research, the writer believes that reader-response approach is the most suitable approach to work with literary works by using gibbs’ reflective cycle, since the approach to literary analysis encourages students to draw on their personal experiences, opinions, and feelings in their interpretation of literature, as described by van (2009). generally, reflective writing is defined as a kind of academic writing that accommodates a reader writer to express his thoughts upon the literary works that he is reading. a reflective writing is a kind of personal academic writing; it is different with other kinds of academic writing. in this kind of writing, a reader writer does more than merely describing what has happened and how he is feeling when reading a literary work. the emphasis lies on the reader writer’s analysis and exploration of the literary work. also, the writer of a reflective writing usually use the first person (“i”) to describe his analysis and feelings. thus, in responding to literary works, a critical reflection must be considered. as watton et.al. (2001) asserted that even simple and basic questions such as “what is thesis?” and “what is the evidence?” are important to demonstrate one’s understanding. such questions interrogate one’s own assumption and knowledge in order that he can deepen his analysis of the literary works. one’s reflective thinking towards a literary work can be manifested in a reflection. to mention some of the importance of writing reflection of literary works, there are some advantages to consider concerning the reflective writing. one of the purposes that one reflects is in order to consider the process of his own learning, to critically review something, in this case literary works, to build theory from observations, to engage in personal or self-development, to make decisions or resolve uncertainty, and to empower oneself as an individual. regarding to this, ross (2011) supported this view, stating that students are able to connect discrete pieces of information into meaningful ideas through this process of critical analysis. as aforementioned, reflective writing or also known as reflection encourages the readers to explore their own ideas about a text. this means that after reading a text they do not merely indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 143 summarize the text, instead, they express their opinion towards the text. hussein (2018) supported this view by stating that reflective journals is a tool for alerting and guiding students in developing their learning. by referring to some previous studies on this field, he emphasized the importance of reflective journals focusing on the process of learning. generally speaking, there are some purposes of making reflection towards literary works. to mention some of them, first of all, readers of literary works reflect in order to consider the process of their own learning. secondly, by making reflection, they critically review the works. also, readers can be engaged in personal development with the literary works they are working on. in writing reflections, there are some models to follow. as described by hegarty (2011), practitioners reflect in different ways depending on the access that they have and also their existing skills for reflection. the models, or frameworks, encourage a well-organized process that guide the reflective writing activity. although there are some models for making reflection, there is not so-called right model, or reflection. a reader writer may choose one model that is more suitable and able to assist him/her to learn from the literary works. as when one reflects, he/she evaluate and relate one event to his/her own experience. some of the fundamental questions of reflective writing in any model include (1) what am i learning?, (2) how am i learning?, (3) how am i using what i am learning?, (4) what are my strengths and weaknesses? (5) what are my learning priorities? (6) how can i improve my learning, and (7) how well i am working towards my goals? (university college cork) some of the models are driscoll’s model, john’s model for structured reflection (2006), and gibbs’ model (1988). the first model of reflection to be discussed in the present study is driscoll’ model. he developed driscoll’ reflective cycle which consisted of three phases, which he called “what”, “so what” and “now what”. the three models for writing reflections are actually acceptable for any fields of knowledge, not only for the context of education. however, in the present study, the writer narrows down the discussion by relating the models of reflective writing for educational purpose. reflection model is used as it provides a structure that enables the learners to evaluate learning, allow theories and concepts, and implement them in the practice (wain, 2017). in her study, wain (2017) also considered some other models including kolb’s and johnson’s which she considered particularly relevant to midwifery and education. the first model of reflection is developed by driscoll. he developed the cycle into three phases which he called “what” as the first phase, “so what” as the next phase, and “now what” as the last phase. in the first phase a reader writer describes the event, situation or incident that he/she is reflecting on. in the context of making reflection of literary works, a reader writer writes the story/the subjects of the literary works (short stories, novels, poems, and drama) that he/she is reading. in “so what” phase, a reader writer tells what happened in the story, and also describes if the story is good or not, and the reasons why it is good or not. the next phase in driscoll’s model of reflective cycle is called “so what”. in this phase, the reader writer writes his/her analysis of the literary work. the phase is also called the analysis phase, which consists of how he/she feels when reading the literary work, how he/she reacts and the reason why he/she reacts that way when reading literary works, personal values and the ethics that influence him/her after reading the literary work, and other persons’ feelings and reactions when reading similar literary works. the last but not least phase of driscoll’s reflective cycle in the context of reading and analyzing literary works is the phase called “now what”. the phase is also called action planning stage. in the phase of reflection, a reader writer elaborates what he/she has learned from reflecting upon the literary work, explain what he/she might do if the events in the story happens to his/her own experience, and what he/she will do to help him/herself prepare for similar situations. the second model of reflection is one that was developed by john (1993). the model or framework consists of four stages of cycle, namely description of experience, reflection, alternative actions, and learning stages. in the context of making reflections to literary works, in the first stage, description of experience stage, the reader writers explain the literary work they are working on (short stories, novels, drama, or poems). he/she explains the essential factors that contribute to the events happened in literary work. moreover, he/she provides the significant background factors to the events in the work. in the second stage, reflection stage, the reader writer thinks of what he/she is trying to achieve ikin syamsudin adeani, r. bunga febriani & syafryadin using gibbs’ reflective cycle in making reflections of literary analysis 144 by reading the work. also he/she may think of the reasons that influence his/her thinking. the reflection stage also includes the reader writer’s feelings about the literary works, and the reasons why he/she feels that way, etc. after sharing his/her reflection towards the literary work, a reader writer moves on to the third stage, that is alternative actions. in this stage, he/she thinks of the choice that he/she made in the previous stages and the consequences that may occur if he/she made the other choices. the last but not least stage in john’s reflective cycle is called learning stage. this stage contains some moral lessons that a reader gets after reading literary works, and how he/she will react when he/she is faced to similar situations in the future. the last but not least reflective cycle is developed by gibbs (1988). gibbs called his framework for writing reflection gibbs’ model of reflection. this cycle consists of six stages, which will be elaborated in the next part of the study. the writer believes that in the context of writing a reflection upon a literary work in a language class (in english as foreign language context), the reflection should be written in a formal form since it is supposed to be assessed. in this case, it is important that a reader writer uses a framework of reflective writing. actually, there are several models of reflection that can be used. one of the models is called gibb’s model of reflection (1988). gibb’s model of reflection consists of six stages, covering description, feelings, evaluation, analysis, conclusion, and action plan. in description stage, a reader writer explains what he is reflecting on, including background information. he then discusses his feelings and thoughts about the literary works in feeling stage. in this stage, he can discuss his emotions honestly. as the next stage of the model, in evaluation, a reader writer discusses his reaction and also other people’s reactions towards the story. this part is a good place to include theories and others’ opinion. it has to be noted that it is important to include references in this academic writing. in analysis stage, the reader writer relates to others’ experiences and theories. in conclusion, he acknowledges everything that he has written in the previous sections. the last but not the least stage is action plan. in this last part, a reader writer sums up anything and what he has to do to improve for next time. the literary works that was selected to be discussed in the present study is a short story entitled “two kinds” which was written by amy tan. the short story was chosen by considering some aspects. firstly, the story brings a theme that is familiar for every one, which is a story about family. “two kinds” tells about a chinese mother and her daughter in san francisco. the mother who was an immigrant in united states, gave birth to her daughter, the first generation who was born in the usa. that aspect encouraged the writer to choose the short story to be discussed the present study that the story may be experienced by everyone. almost every mother has conflicts with their daughters. in the story, conflicts of a mother and her daughter aroused by the different views and different choices. another aspect to be considered when choosing the story in the study was that there were many to think of by the readers. it was not merely a short story to be read as a pleasure, but it was also fruitful of concealed meanings and contemplation. another aspect came from the consideration that readers were able to relate and notice the life of chinese immigrants san francisco at that time. to be noted, a crowd of immigrants from china came to united states in the middle of 1840s, when a series of natural catastrophes emerged in china resulting in famine, peasant uprising and rebellions. thus, it was understandable that when there was the news of gold and opportunities in faraway land reached china, many chinese took the opportunity to look for their fortune (chinatown resource guide. 2019). by administering the students (as the participants in the present study) to read the short story, the writer expected that the readers could reveal the true intention of the author from the short story, considering that one of the purposes of literary works was that they provide access to cultural background, as suggested by lazar (1993). the next aspect that triggered the writer to choose the short story entitled “two kinds” by amy tan was that it contained symbolism. as previously explained, symbolism in reading literary works plays an important role since it conceals the author’s true intention. by administering the students to read this story, the writer expected that the students could improve their critical thinking when reading literary works. glencoe (2010) reminded that “in literature, a symbolism is an ordinary object that has a larger meaning” (p.95). this echoed the previously described that the author of literary works concealed their true intention behind this kind of symbolism. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 145 method at the english department of universitas galuh ciamis, literary subjects are among those subjects taught to the students. there are actually three subjects belong to literary subjects, namely introduction to literature, literary criticism, and literature for language education. the first literary subject aims at introducing the students to literary genres and at exposing them to reading literary works, such as poems, short stories, novels, and drama. the second literary subject introduces literary analysis to the students and acknowledges to them the approaches to literary criticism. the last literary subject is to give the students insights of using literature in the language classroom; the subjects teaches how to implement the kinds of teaching methods by using literature. discussing how the students make use of gibb’s reflective cycle in writing reflections of literary works, the writer employed a qualitative research design. qualitative method emphasizes on describing a particular activity, situation, field, behavior of people in-depth and a detailed way, as described by fraenkel and wallen, 2012). the present study examines how the students implement gibb’s reflective cycle (1988) in writing reflections of literary analysis. the qualitative study employed a document analysis upon the students’ reflection artefacts. the students’ reflections are their responses to a literary work (a short story) entitled “two kinds” written by amy tan. therefore, document analysis is used as the qualitative research design, by using the students’ reflective essays as the instrument to seek for how the students implement gibb’s reflective cycle in writing reflections of literary works. the study was conducted upon nine students enrolling literary criticism subject class. one short story entitled “two kinds” written by amy tan was administered to be read by the students. the short story was chosen considering it brings a theme which might occur to everybody since the story reveals the relationship between a mother and her daughter. the students’ reflective journals or reflection were analyzed to examine how they implement gibb’s reflective cycle in writing reflections of literary works. the students’ reflection which used gibb’s cycle were compared to those that did not use gibb’s cycle of reflection. comparing the reflections which used and which did not use gibb’s reflective cycle was considered helpful in examining how the students implemented the gibbs’ reflective cycle when making reflections of their literary analysis. results and discussion a brief explanation of reflective writing and gibb’s reflective cycle had previously explained in the previous section. the methodology for conducting this study had also been stated. in this section of the study, the writer presents the findings and discussion to the current study. as aforementioned, this study is aimed at examining how the students implement gibb’s reflective cycle in writing their reflections towards literary works. the students’ artefacts of their reflections of literary works have been analyzed in order that the writer is able to find out how they implemented gibb’s cycle in writing literary. by comparing the students’ reflection which used gibb’s reflective cycle with those that did not use the cycle, the writer examined the difference of the result that the students make between those that implemented gibbs’ reflective cycle and those who did not making literary analysis of a literary work. in the attempt to answer the research question addressed in the present study, “how the students implement gibbs’ reflective cycle framework in writing reflections of literary works?”, the writer compared some extracts of students which did not use gibb’s reflective cycle with those which used gibb’s reflective cycle. the following is an extract of a reflection of the first student. in the reflection, she did not implement gibbs’ reflective cycle as explained by wain (2017, p. 663). a beautiful kid named jing-mei believed that she can be anything in america. jing-mei believed that she could become rich, famous and smarter than other, just like what her mother always said. her mother always wanted her daughter to be an american prodigy. hence, her mother prepared and coached jing-mei into becoming a chinese shirley temple. her mother fully believed that jing-mei can make her dreams come true. to be a perfect person. every night after dinner her mother always test jing-mei's knowledge and abilities. become of that, jing-mei grows resentful as she saw the disappointment on her mother’s face as she failed to measure up to her expectations. and the test got harder and header in every single day. one evening while watching the ed sullivan show on television, her mother saw a young chinese girl playing the piano with great skill. ikin syamsudin adeani, r. bunga febriani & syafryadin using gibbs’ reflective cycle in making reflections of literary analysis 146 then her mother thought to make jing-mei able to playing piano, she forced her daughter to take piano lesson with mr. chong, who agrees to give jing-mei piano lessons in exchange for weekly house cleanings. from the extract of the student’ reflection upon the story “two kinds” by amy tan, it appeared that the student did not explore the short story deeply. instead, she merely retelling the story. the student only described a girl named jing mei who had faith that she could be anything she wanted in america. she described that the girl’s faith was in contrary to the mother of the girl, who expected her daughter to be someone beyond she was capable of, such as to be a prodigy. this expectation led the mother to push her daughter to be as successful as she wanted without willing to notice that her daughter had limitations in doing what her mother expected of her. the following is the reflection made by the second student. the students implement the reflective cycle in the reflection. reflective writing of two kinds by amy tan. as we know that briefly, this story was telling us about a daughter named jing-mei who was forced by her mother to be the her best. but then the story turns badly when jing-mei try to disobeyed her mother. it seems so complicated then. however her mother was angry and their relationship turn badly. what i was feeling about this story are, first i'm so sad knowing that jing-mei's mother had bad memories in china. but then when jing-mei's mother forced jing-mei to do what her want i feel a little bit disappointed with jing-mei's mother. however whole story in this text was completely made me feel so many emotions. hence it made me ask why them didn't tell each other about their feeling (?). the bad things that i can got from this story was probably the bad communication between mother and her daughter. parents and their children must be honest to each other, they must be think to decided something wisely before the bad and unpredictable things happen. in fact, we shall find this kind of story in real life. when parents forced us to do something that they think good regardless their daughter's skill and competent. in conclusion i should say that this story is worth to read. this story already taught me how to be better daughter and better mother in the future. how we have to respect our mother more than anything. how we have to know our children feel when we decide something for them. if this story happened to me. i as a daughter would say about my feeling wisely to my mother. so there aren't misunderstanding between us. in the extract of the second reflection of the same student, it was quite obvious that the student explored the story deeper than that in the first extract. in the second extract, it could be noticed that the student had included her thoughts in it. the description stage was found in the sentence: “as we know that briefly, this story was telling us about a daughter named jing-mei who was forced by her mother to be the her best. but then the story turns badly when jing-mei try to disobeyed her mother.”. the student’s reflection began with a brief description to help build the context to the reflection as a whole. the feeling was found in the sentence: “what i was feeling about this story are, first i'm so sad knowing that jing-mei's mother had bad memories in china. but then when jing-mei's mother forced jing-mei to do what her want i feel a little bit disappointed with jing-mei's mother.” in this part, the student acknowledged her reaction towards what happened to the main characters in the story. the evaluation was found in the sentence: “the bad things that i can got from this story was probably the bad communication between mother and her daughter. parents and their children must be honest to each other,…”. in this part, the student’s effort of evaluating the story was quite visible clearly. it appeared that the student had quite properly used her critical thinking. the analysis was found in the sentence: “parents and their children must be be honest to each other, they must be think to decided something wisely before the bad and unpredictable things happen. in fact, we shall find this kind of story in real life. when parents forced us to do something that they think good regardless their daughter's skill and competent.” the student concluded what she had explained in the reflection in the conclusion section. the conclusion was found in the sentence: “i should say that this story are worth to read. this story already taught me how to be better daughter and better mother in the future.“ the last but not the least, the student wrote “if this story happened to me. i as a daughter would say about my feeling wisely to my mother. so there aren't misunderstanding between us.” as her action plan stage in case she had to face the situation in her real life. the following is the last student’s extract of reflection (wain, 2017; p. 662). in this story it is told that there is a mother who has forced her desire too much on her child (jingindonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 147 mei). jing-mei's mother greatly obsessed her child into a successful child. i have felt very sorry for jing-mei for accepting coercion from her mother to do what her mother wants. i also felt sorry for them because of the lack of communication between them. if there is good communication between them there will definitely be no such thing. even i felt that they had failed, jing-mei's mother failed to be a mother who understood her child and jing-mei failed to be a successful child like what her mother wanted. at first i felt sorry for jing-mei, but after reading to the end i felt annoyed. why is communication between them so bad? shouldn't the communication between mother and child be good so that something fun happens? jing-mei should say if he wants to be himself and not want what her mother wants. likewise, with her mother, she should also her daughter what she wanted first. in the end, regret happened, but i still felt salute to jing mei who wanted to learn piano again when their mother was gone. regret made him rise, not slump. i have felt a little scared and sorry to read this story. the life of a mother and child who are out of sync with each other. a mother who has forced her own will and a child who has continued to do what her mother wants without seriousness. i personally have felt what jing-mei’s felt. because my father was a sports teacher, my father had demanded that i take part in sports-related activities. to be honest, i was the type of person who didn't like sports. i tried to be what my father wanted. i started participating in badminton, table tennis, volleyball, pencak silat and futsal at school, doing routine and serious training in school, sports arena, even at home with my father. and then, when i was in high school i took part in a high school sports match in the field of mixed doubles badminton to the provincial level and until i was runner up. my parents have been proud of what i have achieved, and i am satisfied and i enjoy it. now i like sports. then when compared to this story, actually it's just about what jingmei’s wants, if jing-mei want it, then do it seriously. but if not, then leave and pursue what jing-mei’s want. if it is like that, then all will feel simple and pleasant. actually this is just about communication. if communication between them is good maybe this will not happen. if i was in a jing-mei’s position, i guess i would say in a good way to my mother that i didn't want to do what my mother wanted if it really came out of my passion. i will try to earnestly pursue what suits my passion and be successful in a way that i want and make my mother proud instead of following my mother's will but not with seriousness. action plan i will discuss this matter seriously with my mother. i will ask for my mother's opinion what should i do when my mother's wishes do not match my passion. if my mother still wants what she wants, then i will try to be the best according to what my mother wants. and if my mother allows me to pursue what i want according to my passion, then i will try my hardest, show if i am able to succeed with the way i want. the last student’s reflection showed that the student had also succeeded in implementing the reflective cycle developed by gibbs (1988). there were description, feelings, evaluation, analysis, conclusion, and action plan, administered in each paragraph of the reflection. reading a literary work, as aforementioned previously, is not merely reading a text for pleasure. literary works of literature contained concealed meanings in the stories or drama or poems. literature is meant to convey things implicitly. most of times, readers must think beyond the ordinary meanings to find out the authors of the literary works’ true intention in making such works. comprehending literary works need the ability to think critically so that the readers can find the meanings beyond those that are not stated in the texts. besides finding the authors’ true intention, readers of literary works should be able to interact with the works as well. this is in accordance with the readers’ critical thinking ability when being exposed to literary works. for instance, when reading a short story, the readers might interact with the story by questioning things, by feeling what the characters of the story feel, so that they will be able to analyze and evaluate the story. having compared nine extracts out of nine students upon one short story above, the writer can draw a conclusion that the most of students (eight) students implemented gibbs’ reflective cycle when making reflections of a short story written by amy tan, while one other did not implement the reflective cycle, or at least, he tried to do so yet the writing showed that he was not properly implement the gibbs’ reflective cycle. comparing the reflections that implemented gibbs’ reflective cycle with the one that did not, the writer noticed that the well-structured framework of writing reflection helped the students explore the literary work deeply, not merely from the surface, since the reflective cycle accommodates important aspects that can be explored from the literary work by the students. this is visible that the one which did not implement the reflective cycle appeared to merely ikin syamsudin adeani, r. bunga febriani & syafryadin using gibbs’ reflective cycle in making reflections of literary analysis 148 retelling the story without expressing out his own enjoyment (feelings) and opinion and judgement towards what happened in the story (analysis, evaluation, conclusion). thus, he was unable to make an action plan of what he might be doing when similar situation happens in his own life in the future. conclusion the present study has explored how the students implemented gibb’s reflective cycle (1988) in making reflections which respond to literary analysis. the focus of the study lies on how the students of a literary subject acknowledge the results of their reading on literary works. the reflection writing is emphasized merely in the content of their interpretation of literary works; the linguistic aspect in the literary reflection is indeed unconcerned. therefore, we recommend the further researchers to not only pay attention to the content, but also to the language structure in writing reflection to literary works. the writer expects that by doing so, research on reflective writing in literary analysis can be fruitful and various in meaning. references bubnys, r. & žydžiūnaitė, v., (2010). reflective learning models in the context of higher education: concept analysis. problems of education in 21 st century. 20 (1), 58-66. choo, y.b., abdullah, t., nawi, a.m. (2018). learn to teach: patterns of reflective practice in written journal. lsp international journal, 5(2), 50. febriani, r. b. (2019). the students’ reflective writing manifestation of reader-response literary analysis. journal of english education, literature, and culture. 4(1). 35-44 gibbs, g. (1988). learning by doing: a guide to teaching and learning methods. oxford: oxford further education unit glencoe. (2010). literature: teacher edition. new york: mcgraw-hill companies, inc. hegarty, b. (2011). a framework to guide professional learning and reflective practice. university of wollongong thesis collection. wollongong: university of wollongong. holder, n.a.k., sim, z.l., foong, c.c., pallath, v. (2019). developing a reflection guiding tool for underperforming medical students: an action research project. tuning journal for higher education, 7(1), 115-163 hussein, h. (2018). examining the effects of reflective journals on students’ growth mindset: a case study of tertiary level efl students in the united arab emirates. iafor journal of education, 6(2), 33-50. johns, c. (1993). achieving effective work as a professional activity in towards advanced nursing practice (ch11) eds: schober, je., and hinchliff sm., arnold. lazar, g. (1993). literature and language teaching. cambridge: cambridge university press. middleton, r. (2017). critical reflection on practice development: the struggle of a practice developer. international practice development journal, 7(1), 41-46. roberts, e.v. & jacobs. h.e., (2004). literature: an introduction to reading and writing. new jersey: pearson prentice hall. rosenblatt, l. (1988). writing and reading the transactional theory. wahington dc: the national institute of education. ross, n. (2011). reflective writing: an approach to developing critical thinking & proficient writing. new york: united states military academy. sekarwinahyu, m., rustaman, n., widodo, a., riandi, r. (2019). problems based learning skills and reflection skills of biology education students through the problem based online tutorial. journal of physics: conference series 1280 (2019) 032004 tan, a. (2006) the joy luck club. new york: penguin print van, t.t.m., (2009). the relevance of literary analysis to teaching literature in the efl classroom. english teaching forum, 47(3), 2-9. wain, a. (2017), learning through reflection, british journal of midwifery, 25(10). 662-666 watton, p., collings, j., moon, j., (2001). reflective writing: guidance notes for students. england: exeter university widyahening, e. t. & wardhana, n. e. (2016). literary works and character education. international journal of language and literature, 4(1) 176-180. chapter i indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 56 problems in using language laboratory in english listening instruction feby akhdiyati pendidikan bahasa pascasarjana universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail: febyakhdi@yahoo.com apa citation: akhdiyati, f. (2018). problems in using language laboratory in english listening instruction. indonesian efl journal, 4(2), 56-62. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v4i2.1376. received: 11-03-2018 accepted: 27-05-2018 published: 01-07-2018 abstract: this study is aimed at describing problems faced by both teachers and students in learning listening using language laboratory in sma sandikta, bekasi and providing solutions to overcome those problems. the participants of the study are the eleventh-grade students of sma sandikta. the results of the analysis showed that there are some problems faced by the teacher and the students. the problems faced by the teacher include (1) the problems related to the teacher’s proficiency like being unable to identify the error of machine, (2) insufficient collection of master tapes which makes problem for the teacher to accommodate the material, (3) too long material make the students bored, the teacher has difficulties to select of material, and (4) the attitude of the teacher and students toward language lab. on the other hand, the problems faced by the students are (1) students’ lack of vocabulary, (2) physical aspects of students like boredom, and (3) the teacher did not give the tapescript, the students just memorize the dialog. for that reason, it was suggested to all parties to improve the knowledge in optimalizing the language laboratory. keyword: ability; language laboratory; listening; action research. introduction language is important for human being to communicate each other. today english is the world’s most widely studied foreign language. english has also played a more important role in the globalization era and culture than other international languages. moreover, there are four language skills that should be mastered by students to accomplish the basic language skill namely: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. all of those skills should be practice and learned by students which cannot be separated to each other mariana c. murcia (2000) said listening well is an important part of learning. to understand spoken english, people need to exercise to practice listening spoken english. in fact, listening is the most frequently used language skill in everyday life. in fact, listening is the most frequently used language skill in everyday life. as morley (1991) said “we listen to twice as much language as we speak, four times as much as we read and five times as much as we write’. developing the ability to understand the foreign language takes time and continuous process. the ability to understand the foreign language should be taught and it does not happen automatically. one of the most important tasks is to provide a variety of technological aids. according to the information above, the writer is interested in writing the research that focus on “some problems in using language laboratory in english listening instruction at eleventh grade students of sma sandikta bekasi” language laboratory english is one of the important foreign languages to be learned in indonesia. to minimize the difficulties in teaching and learning process of english language at school, https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v4i2.1370 feby akhdiyati problems in using language laboratory in english listening instruction 57 especially listening, it needed a facility such as language laboratory to improve students' listening skill. lindsay (1973) said that language lab is essentially an aid to practice. 1987) according to oxford advanced learner's dictionary of current english language laboratory is classroom where languages are taught using tape recorder. some theorists maintain that a language laboratory should be a purely phonetic instrument and that there is no need for any live contact between pupils and teacher. lado (1960) states that the language laboratory is a special room for practice with sound equipment. in other definition, hayes (1963) language laboratory is a classroom or other area containing electronic and mechanical equipment designed and arranged to make foreign language instruction more effective. according to e.m stack (1966) the language laboratory is a special room designed and used primarily for foreign language learning with the aid of electronic equipment. the laboratory includes facilities to allow the teacher to listen to each individual student without being detected, to make announcements to all students or to select groups of students, and to carry on, a private conversation with any individual. the language-teaching laboratory usually contains playback and recording equipment for students to practice the language they are studying. language laboratory normally consist of a room or suite room containing a number of booths in which each of them is provided with a tape recorder and a head-set attached to it. and generally in front of the room there is a control desk which is operated by the teacher or instructor. according to lado (1964) the components of a language laboratory usually include earphones, microphones, preamplifiers, tape recorders, booths, central console, monitoring system, control switches, tape duplication facilities, recording studio, tape library and supply, and sound conditioning. the laboratory is furnished with booths for the students. each booth is a specially constructed table with high sides and front, shielding the occupant from the sight and sound of other students. the students sit behinds the booths and put on their head-sets. then they usually listen to a tape recorder or teacher voice played by the teacher from the master panel desk. the equipment in each booth is then a set of headphones, a microphone, and a tape recorder, preferably a dual-channel one, with one recording head for the student band and two playback heads, one for the program band and the other for the student band. the student can control volume through the tape recorder. lado (1964) states there are four main models of language laboratory systems: audio passive (ap), audio active (aa), audio active comparative (aac), and audio active distributive (aad). a. audio passive (ap) the teacher has at his one or more tape recorders and switchboard, the students each have a 'headphone', but not a microphone. the teacher can broadcast lessons to all students or to groups of students. the students practice in essentially the same way as they do in the classroom, but there is a difference: because of the headphone they cannot hear their classmates, and they can only hear a distorted version of their own speech utterances. learner activity is restricted to listening in isolation during the presentation phrase, and to non-interactive production or reproduction during the explanation phase. b. audio active (aa) in this model of language laboratory students have headphones with microphone, which means that they can hear their own voices undistorted. this also makes it possible for the teacher to play back the voices of each individual student. this model of language laboratory supplements the possibilities for the recording of the utterances of individual students with some facilities for selfcorrection on the part of the students, correction of the utterances produced by individual students by the teacher. c. audio active comparative (aac) in the audio active comparative systems, the students can do all activities as those of audio system and audio active system. the system provides tape recorders and head-sets indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 58 (headphone and microphone) in each student's booth. d. audio active distributive (aad) there is one tape recorder available for a small group of students but which in other respect has all the characteristics of the aac laboratory, there are such laboratories as the open access and dial-access laboratories. some common problems displayed by students and teacher in the language laboratory are: a. working straight through a whole unit without stopping, then going right through again listening, thus leaving too big a time gap for effective identification and correction of errors. b. finishing the work before the language laboratory tine is up. c. being unable to do the language laboratory exercise. d. being unable to identify their mistakes on tape. e. a commonly held error maintains that audio equipment for speech requires much less fidelity than for music. listening skill listening, as one of the language skills, is of great importance in communication as there will be no communication unless what is being said is comprehend by another person. as hornby (2000) defines listen or listened or listening as "... to pay attention to somebody something that can you hear.... to take notice of what somebody says so that you can follow their advice or believe them.. " listening is assuming greater and greater importance in foreign language classroom. as rost (1994) points out, listening is vital in the language classroom because it provides input for the learner. without understanding input at the right level, any simply cannot begin. listening is thus fundamental to speaking. stack states the steps in teaching language are: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. the first two are audio-lingual skills; the last two are graphic skills.listening is first because the students must be able to recognize the sounds of language, and differentiate among its various components. michael d. bush and robert m. terry explained concerning with the general concept of listening: the status of listening began to chance from one of neglect to one of increasing importance, as instructional programs of the 1970s expanded their pragmatic skill-focus on reading, writing, and speaking, including listening. to improve their listening skill in listening english language, it is important for students to increase their language input by practicing extensive and intensive listening. wright (1976) states that “extensive listening is the students’ attempts to understand the gist of what he hears.” jeremy harmer explained in detail about extensive listening as follows: students can improve their listening skill – and gain valuable language input – through a combination of extensive and intensive listening materials and procedure. listening of both kinds is especially important since it provides the perfect opportunity to hear voices than the teacher’s, enables the students to acquire good speaking habits as a result of the spoken english absorb, and helps to improve their own pronunciation and listening skill. extensive listening (where a teacher encourages students to choose for them what they listen to and to do so for pleasure and general language improvement) can also have a dramatic effect on a student’s language learning. extensive listening will usually take place outside the classroom, in the student’s home, car, or on personal stereos as they travel from one place to another. the motivational power of such an activity increases dramatically when students make their own choices about what they are going to listen to. in order to encourage extensive listening teacher also needs to present the material in the classroom or language laboratory and its known as intensive listening. michael rost also said that: “the prototypical intensive listening activity is dictation, the transcription of the exact words that the speaker utters. dictation is often claimed to be an excellent integrative test (e.g. feby akhdiyati problems in using language laboratory in english listening instruction 59 cohen, 1994; buck, 1992) because it involves listening, vocabulary, grammar, and the ability to make inferences from the context”. intensive listening is the students’ attempts to understand a high proportion of what he hears or a high proportion of a certain part of the text. furthermore, there are at least three more intensive listening activities such as: a. intensive listening: using taped material intensive listening by using taped material or material on disk allows students to hear a variety of different voices apart from just their own teacher’s. it gives them an opportunity to meet a range of different characters, especially where real people are talking. but even when tapes contain written dialogues or extracts from plays, they offer a wide variety of situation and voices. b. intensive listening: ‘live’ listening a popular way of ensuring genuine communication is live listening where teachers and or visitors to the class talk to the students. this has obvious advantages since students can interrupt speakers and ask for clarification. above they can see who they are listening to ‘live’ listening can take the following forms: 1. reading aloud: this allow them to hear a clear spoken version of written text. 2. story-telling: teachers are ideally place to tell stories which, in turn provide excellent listening material. 3. interviews: one of the most motivating listening activities is the live interview, especially where students themselves dream of the questions. in such situation, students really listen for answers they themselves have asked for, rather than adopting other people’s questions. 4. conversation: if we can persuade a native speaker or someone who competent to come to our class we can hold conversation with him or her about english or any subject. students then have chance to watch interaction as well as listen to it. c. intensive listening: the role of the teacher all activities for listening we need to be active in creating student engagement through the way we set up the task. we need to build up students’ confidence by helping them listen better than by testing their listening abilities. in particular, we need the focus on the following roles: 1. organizer: tell students exactly what their listening purpose is, and give them clear instruction how to achieve it. 2. machine operator: when we use tape or disk material we need to be as efficient as possible in the way we use the tape recorder. in listening activity, some students have problems in finding the message or the information. many students who have difficulties in listening mostly resist their problems in some aspects. harmer (1991) said listening can cause problems as panic and difficulty. students often panic when they see the tape recorder when they see the tape recorder because they know that they are faced with a challenging task. two things are guaranteed to increase that panic, the first is to refuse to play a tape more than once and the second is to expose an individual student’s lack of success in the listening task. some teachers and students find that listening to tapes is extremely difficult, especially when tapes are fairly long. buck (2001) states that second-language listener could have difficulties in listening, such as unknown vocabulary, complex syntax, or the text could be just too fast, background of knowledge, and different motives for listening. method the design of this study is descriptive evaluative. albert j. miles (2010) said that a descriptive case study is one that is focused and detailed, in which propositions and questions about a phenomenon are carefully scrutinized and articulated at the outset. the phenomena described in this study are related to the some problems which faced by the teacher and the students when teaching and learning listening skill through language laboratory. this study is also called evaluative because it tries to evaluate objectively about some problems faced by the teacher and the students in using language laboratory in teaching learning listening skill. the object of indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 60 the study includes the english teacher as a main object and the third year students of sma sandikta. this research based on random sampling system. she took one class randomly from the population of four classes. for this sample the researcher hopes get the representative data. in completing the data, the writer used two techniques, namely interview and observation. interview was used to get more details about some problems in using language lab, the writer did an interview to the english teacher and the students concerning the research. besides, the writer entered the classroom while the students and teacher were teaching and learning in language laboratory. she observed the using of language lab in teaching learning listening skill directly. the observation sheet is used to observe the teaching and learning process. the observation included the activities of the teacher and the students in the language laboratory. in analyzing the data, the writer used the comparative technique. comparative technique is an analysis of the technique that is used by the teacher in teaching listening through language laboratory and the theory of teaching listening to the experts. results and discussion at least there are two important elements as source of the data in this research. first comes from the teacher and the second come from the students. teacher’s problems as results of the analysis, there are several problems faced by the teacher in using language laboratory. first, the teacher’s preparation related to checking the condition of machinery before he used the language lab. the teacher had to assure good sound quality. this is crucial. if the sound quality is poor, the students will have difficulty in listening and understanding. the teacher in some cases being unable to identify the mistake of using language lab. the fact is that language labs require better prepared teachers who can put the new equipment and techniques to good use as well as conduct a class. second, during listening activities the students often ask the teacher to slow down or to stop and replayed the video over and over again. the teacher did what his students asked; it is not helping them to learn to cope with real life situation. the students should be exposed and familiar to as much spontaneous informal talk as they can comprehend successfully. if the texts are to be played only once, repeating or re-phrasing important point, and it should generally aid comprehension. however, too much redundancy can become very unnatural. third, insufficient collection of master tapes and material in the language lab. it makes problem for the teacher to accommodate the materials. the collection of master tapes needs to have a special accessible only to the teachers and the lab technician and not to the students. blank tapes of copies of the master tapes used by the students should be stored in a contiguous space with a window to the general lab space so that students may receive tapes there. the school does not have enough money to buy expensive sets of materials. however, for the standard lab which used for junior school students the school has good equipments. fourth, the teacher made the conversation too long. too long conversation made students bored. the materials for the language lab should be partial materials rather than complete lesson. labs materials have to prepared with as much if not more care than any other materials for teaching; they must be clear, graded, purposeful, and based on linguistic facts and physiological laws of learning. last, the class is too large for listening class. there are 39 students in a class makes students difficult to pay attention. students’ problems on the other hand, the problems faced by the students in using language laboratory are; 1) students need to hear more than twice. during listening class, students often request the teacher to slow down or stop the video over and over. it does not help them actually if they in real communication. it is always a good idea to play a tape all the way through on a feby akhdiyati problems in using language laboratory in english listening instruction 61 first listening so that the students can get an idea of what it sounds like; 2) the teacher did not give the tapescript when he took the material from the lab’s collection. students just memorized the dialogue; it always makes the students difficult to follow the lesson; 3) students’ lack of vocabulary. they think they have to understand every word. this is very common problem faced by the students. when they are listening, they believe that they have to understand every word, if they are missing something, they feel failed and stressed. the individual’s lack of success can be extremely demotivating; and 4) physical aspect of students. the information and exercises was overloaded, and the time took more than one hour, students feels bore and tired. that can make more difficult to concentrate. when they feel difficult to concentrate they begin to talk each others. acknowledgement in this occasion, the writer would like to express her greatest gratitude to prof. dr. zainal rafli, m.pd. and dr. aceng rahmat, m.pd. as the writer’s advisor, who has patiently given valuable help, guidance and corrections to finish this manuscript. m. nor abdullah, s.pd., m.si the headmaster and the english teachers of sma sandikta, who was sincere to spend his spare time and gave much help in doing her research. conclusion teaching listening through language laboratory is not only one of teaching aids used to improve the students’ listening ability. in many ways, language laboratory gives the students and the teacher some advantages in teaching listening skill. by using language laboratory, the students not only study about listening but they can say something with correct pronunciation, produce language without disturb other students, and study about how native speaker speaks. a language laboratory is especially useful for speaking and listening practice in that students have access to an environment that fully exposes them to native english pronunciation. in order to create this environment, the language laboratory is specially constructed to assist students in the acquisition of english by the use of english language tv and radio programmes, podcasts, www programmes, and other non-online video sources. however, there are some problems faced by the teacher and the students in using language lab in teaching learning listening skill. among those important problems, the writer may identify some of them as follows: (1) the problems faced by teacher are managing time, the students’ motivation, and the students’ ability, (2) the problems related to teacher’s preparation before he used language lab. in some cases, he was being unable to identify the error of machine. he did not check the language lab before he used it. the problems related to the teacher’s proficiency like being unable to identify the error of machine.(3) insufficient collection of master tapes, it makes problem for the teacher to accommodate the material.(4) too long material make the students bored, the teacher has difficulties to select of material. (5) the attitude of the teacher and students toward language lab. (6) students’ lack of vocabulary. (7) physical aspects of students like boredom. the writer has some suggestions related to the study. the suggestions are as follows: (1) the english teachers have to be trained how to handle and manage their laboratory to meet it effectiveness. and also given the language laboratory handbook that available for easy reference. it gives teachers sufficient confidence in operating the controls when they are actually confronted with the laboratory class. (2) before listening task, teacher should give clear instruction and explanation about should students do and don’ts. (3) teacher should give an interesting material, not too long and suitable with the students’ need.(4) the english teacher should have to be trained and make preparation including the material and check the instruments before using the language laboratory. because the application and the effectiveness of using language laboratory depends on both the quality of instrument and in which it is used. (5) the continuity in using language laboratory in teaching english can make the students to improve their english knowledge and skill. indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 62 not only for listening activities but also others aspects of english. (6) the teacher should manage the time effectively, choosing the way to make the students who have different ability in learning listening fell enjoyable, and giving motivation to the students. (7) the students are given more practicing answering in english, increasing vocabulary, note taking, improving self-confidence, and practicing listening skill. (8) for the future researcher who wants to conduct research with the some subject or different discussion, the writer hopes that this research may be useful as an addition reference. references buck, g. (2001). assessing listening. cambridge: cambridge university press. celce-murcia, m. (2000) discourse and context in language teaching. cambridge: cambridge university press. celce-murcia, m. (1991). teaching english as second or foreign language (2nd ed.). new york: heinle and heinle publisher. freankel, j. r., & wallen, n. f. (1993). how to design and evaluate research in education (2nd ed.). new york: mc. graw hill. harmer, j. (2001). the practice of english language teaching (3rd ed.).. kuala lumpur: longman. hayes, s. a. (1963). what is language laboratory? saturday review, 70. oxford. (1974). advanced learner’s dictionary of current english. oxford: oxford university press. lado, r. (1964). language teaching: a scientific approach. new york: mc. graw hill. lindsay, p.c.s. (1973). “language labs: some reflexions after ten years. elt journal, xxvii(1), 6. richards, c. j., & rodgers, t. s. (1986). approaches and methods in language teaching. cambridge: cambridge university press. stack, m. e. (1966). the language laboratory and modern language teaching. new york: oxford university press, van ek, t., & van os, c.(1977). applied linguistics and learning and teaching of foreign language. london: edward arnold a division of hodder and stoughton.. wright, a. (1976).visual materials for the language teacher. london: longman group. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 77 the effect of ms photo story 3 on students’ speaking achievement dila charisma english education department, teacher trainer and education faculty, muhammadiyah university of cirebon, indonesia e-mail: dilla.charisma@umc.ac.id khomarudin english education department, teacher trainer and education faculty, muhammadiyah university of cirebon, indonesia e-mail: oemarbakrie0231@gmail.com apa citation: charisma, d., & khomarudin. (2018). the effect of ms photo story 3 on students’ speaking achievement. indonesian efl journal, 5(1), 77-84. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v5i1.1613. received: 12-09-2018 accepted: 28-11-2018 published: 01-01-2019 abstract: technology information and communication now takes the best attention from educators. it plays to be good or even better media in teaching and leraning process. therefore, prospective english teachers should have good skill in creating new class atmosphere toward technology. they need to use technology to be the suitable media in learning english, especially speaking, since speaking is considered to be one of difficult skill. ms photo story 3 is one of many computer applications that can be used as a media in teaching speaking. this present study focuses on the effect of ms photo story 3 in improving prospective english teachers’ speaking and the response of using ms photo story 3 in learning english, especially speaking. experiment with one group, pre-test, treatment and post-test were employed in this study. the results showed that there are increasing prospective english teachers’ scores. it can be seen from the comparison score of pretest and posttest. furthemore, the result from the questionaire revealed that the participants’ response after using ms photo story 3 in speaking class is categorized good. thus, it can be concluded that ms photo story 3 is effective in giving prospective english teachers experiences to create digital speaking. keywords: ms photo story 3; prospective english teachers; speaking; teaching media; technology. introduction today, information and communication technology (ict) is very popular in language teaching and learning. teachers as facilitators are required to have the ability to provide technology-based learning media. technological integration forces the teacher to improve the lesson and support students’ learning (mouze, 2011). therefore, teachers, especially english teachers must be responsive to technology. ict is a required and important asset of citizens in modern society (wikan, 2010). thus, all lines of society including teachers living in a modern environment should be able to understand technology. further, wikan (2010) states that in particular with the introduction of the internet in the 1990s, the belief in modern technology, as a kind of miracle cure for the enhancement of learning, increased considerably. this statement shows that technology is able to improve the quality of learning and change the classroom atmosphere to be more enjoyable accompanied by the ability of a teacher in the field of ict and the introduction of students about computer science. sadik (2008) explains that within the last 10 years, digital cameras, editing software, authoring tools and electronic media outlets have encouraged teachers to utilize many more approaches and tools than ever before mailto:dilla.charisma@umc.ac.id mailto:oemarbakrie0231@gmail.com dila charisma & khomarudin the effect of ms photo story 3 on students’ speaking achievement 78 to help students to construct their own knowledge and ideas to present and share them more effectively. it is in line with the trend that is rife in the lives of students that must be considered and used as a positive input for designing enjoyable learning activities. the generation that will be taught by prospective english teachers is young learners which are categorized into generation who are aware of technology at a very young age (supri, 2015). in other words, the young learners are z generation, the generation which was born after 2000. the characteristcs of z generation is developing mature in the era of computerization and internet networks. therefore, learning strategies using computers and software applications as learning media are very popular with students. as a result, second and foreign language teachers have the options to use technology in the classroom (insani, suherdi, & gustine, 2018). therefore, technology is indicated as one of factors in the 21st century education. one of the computer software application is ms photo story 3 where students are allowed to do speaking practice and create video strips with pictures and sounds in the project. speaking is considered to be difficult compared to the other skills. therefore, to be able to speak fluently, students should have enough opportunities to speak the language. yet, students who have low participation in speaking activity in the classroom lose their opportunity to practice their speaking skill which may cause poor speaking skill and achievement (prabawa, 2016). besides, junior and senior high school students are getting bored with monotonous language learning which does not contain technological elements. this is evidenced by many facts occur in the class, one of which is that students prefer to open a cellphone rather than listen to the teacher’s explanation. continuedly, at home, students prefer to play online games rather than repeat the lessons learned at school, students are also more interested in seeing youtube, taking own pictures, making videos and uploading them on social media they have. in accordance with the problems of students who are less interested in language teaching and learning due to the lack of teacher skills in technology to prepare learning media, this present study introduces one of the language learning media to promote students’ speaking skill, ms photo story 3. this computer application software can be used as digital media in storytelling or digital storytelling. as haigh and hardy (2010) explain that digital storytelling is an integrated application of multiple media and software that utilizes the art and techniques with new methods, contributing to helping learners become involved in the learning situation. besides, the potentials of digital storytelling for reflective, active, emancipative, and enjoyable learning, digital storytelling has been applied in the classroom as both a teaching tool and a learning tool in many innovative ways (wang & zhan, 2010). thus, it can be clonculded that teachers can use digital stories to deliver instructional content, including the presentation of an idea, illustration of a procedure, reinforcement of understanding, and a review of materials. besides, students can create a story to share experiences, report findings, and reflect on understandings. directly proportional to the explanation, ms photo story 3 is the appropriate medium in attracting students’ speaking enthusiasm in the context of storytelling. ms photo story 3 is software that can be applied to produce stories using digital photos, effects, sound tracks and narratives or descriptions that come from users’ recorded voice. hung (2012) in her study noted that ms photo story 3 is reviewed and recommended to esl or efl teachers in speaking class for digital storytelling freely and easily. it can be ascertained that using ms photo story 3 as a medium in learning speaking skill is able to create a pleasant digital experience in the classroom. cohen (2012) also notes that the option of using indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 79 photographs eases any reticence felt by participants to express their opinion. accordingly, photo story is the form of presenting photo images taken based on the topic or event needed so that it is arranged and each photo is able to "tell" with the intention of taking a meaning in those images. the emphasis of the photo image is the main element of photo story. in the learning process, the use of photo story is very effective, especially to explain an event and also be able to use as an enrichment of the material that has been given. stories or events in the photo story allow students to learn gradually from simple to complex problems. reflecting on the previous studies, this present study aims to know whether ms photo story 3 is effective or not to improve prospective english teachers’ speaking skill. furthemore, this study also aims to describe prospective english teachers’ response in learning speaking skill using ms photo story 3. to achieve those purposes, this present study addresses the following research questions: 1) is ms photo story 3 effective to improve prospective english teachers’ speaking? and 2) how is prospective english teachers’ response in learning speaking using ms photo story 3? method to achieve the purposes of the study, quantitative method was selected and an experiment with one group, pre-test, treatment and post-test proposed by sugiyono (2011) was employed. the faculty of teacher training and education of kuningan university and muhammadiyah university of cirebon were selected to be research location. furthemore, the study was conducted in the classroom of english education department. the research subjects were students of prospective english teacher who contracted speaking subject in semester 2, totally 50 prospective english teachers. instruments used in this study were test and questionaire. the test was divided into two parts, namely pre-test and post-test. the scoring system is fundamental to represent three elements of speaking skill that should be mastered by the students. they are idea, fluency, and vocabulary (brown, 2010). besides, the questionnaire was designed to figure out students’ perception toward ms photo story 3 in improving their speaking skill. data analysis was done to determine the effect of ms photo story 3 in speaking achievement based on three criterias and calculate using the following formula: score = x 100 furthermore, the data were analyzed by comparing the scores of pre-test and posttest, then the n-gain is obtained with the formula: <g> = results and discussion during the course of the lecture, gradual study activities were carried out with the following stages: a) doing situation analysis and literature study, b) developing research instruments, c) testing instrument validity, d) giving pretest to prospective english teachers in speaking skills, e) implementing the learning process with ms photo story 3, f) giving posttest to prospective english teachers in speaking skills using ms. photo story 3, and g) analyzing data. the results of this study get various data related to the skills of prospective english teachers in speaking through ms photo story 3 and prospective english teachers’ response towards the use of ms photo story 3. the effectiveness of ms photo story 3 to improve prospective english teachers’ speaking the results on the effectiveness of ms photo story 3 on the speaking achievement of prospective english teachers were assessed from the results of pretest and posttest. furthemore, some aspects of indicators assessed from the effectiveness of speaking skills using ms photo story 3 were the feasibility of idea descriptions with images imported into the application, fluency of dila charisma & khomarudin the effect of ms photo story 3 on students’ speaking achievement 80 speech in describing images, and vocabulary development. ms photo story 3 was effective if the media has an influence on the prospective english teachers’ speaking achievement, there is an increasing results of speaking skills seen from the assessment of idea development, fluency of speech, and the use of vocabulary variations. the rubric of the speaking skills assessment used in this study was adapted from brown (2010) as presented in table 1. table 1. speaking scoring rubric score idea fluency vocabulary 5 excellent level of description; additional details beyond the required smooth and fluid speech; few to no hesitations; no attempts to search forwords; volume is excellent. excellent control of language features; a wide range of well choosen vocabulary 4 good level of description; all required information included smooth and fluid speech; few hesitations; a slight search for words; inaudible word or two good language control; good range of relatively well-chosen vocabulary 3 adequate description; some additional details should be provided speech is relatively smooth; some hesitation and unevenness caused by rephrasing and searching for words; volume wavers. adequate language control; vocabulary range is lacking 2 description lacks some critical details that make it difficult for the listener to understand speech is frequently hesitant with some sentences left uncompleted; volume very soft. weak language control; basic vocabulary choice with some words clearly lacking 1 description is so lacking that the listener cannot understand speech is slow, hesitant & strained except for short memorized phrases; difficult to perceive continuity in speech; inaudible. weak language control; vocabulary that is used does not match the task students’ pretest were carried out at the beginning of learning before ms photo story 3 is implementated. result of pretest showed that the average value of the indicator in the photo with the idea was 2.98, the average value of the indicator on fluency was 2.88, and the average indicator on vocabulary use was 3.06. thus, the average score of speaking skills was 2.97 (skilled enough). the details can be seen in table 2. table 2. students’ pretest score no name criterias average idea fluency vocabulary total 149 144 153 148,667 average 2,98 2,88 3,06 2,973 precentage 59,6 57,6 61,2 59,467 in accordance with table 2, the average score of idea development was 2.98, categorized in less skilled. in term of fluency in speaking, received an average score 2.88, categorized in less skilled. most students have shown good value in straightforward, indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 81 communicative, dialogical and interactive aspects. yet, in the aspect of conformity with the language rules was still considered lack. in term of vocabulary development, the score obtained was 3.06, categorized skilled, but this category tends to be much better than other aspects. this is due to quite a lot of students’ vocabulary mastery. after idenfying each indicator of pretest scores, the next step was adding up the scores for each indicator and get the final score of the pretest. the final score of pretest was analyzed using microsoft excel 2010. the result of the analysis can be seen in table 3. table 3. pretest analysis statistic statistic pretest score sampel 50 minimum score 2,00 maximum score 4,67 averages 2,97 based on table 3, it can be seen that from 50 students, the minimum score on the pretest result was 2.00 (skilled enough category) and the maximum pretest score was 4.67 (skilled category), while the average of pretest result wasa 2.97 (less skilled category). in addition, the frequency of obtaining pretest scores on the speaking skills of prospective english teachers can be seen in table 4. table 4. pretest score frequency scores categories frequencies precentages 4,01 – 5,00 very skilled 1 2 % 3,01 – 4,00 skilled 16 32 % 2,01 – 3,00 skilled enough 32 64 % 1,01 – 2,00 less skilled 1 2 % 0,00 – 1,00 unskilled total 50 100 % after conducting pre-test, the second step was to carry out the treatment using ms photo story 3 for 4 meetings in order to introduce the digital media to prospective english teachers. this treatment was carried out in accordance with the learning steps in using ms photo story 3. the steps of using ms photo story 3 can be seen from charisma’s (2018), they are: 1) creating students’ own video stories by simply choosing “begin a new story”, 2) importing pictures which students selected to use in the story and arranging in the correct order on the film strip, 3) adding a title by simply selecting a picture then typing in text to add a title, 4) narrating pictures and customizing motion by clicking the record button, then the motion of digital story can be changed by clicking “customize motion”, 5) adding background music to selected picture by clicking either “select music” or “create music”, and 6) saving the story to be the final step in creating a digital story through ms photo story 3. after conducting the treatments, the writers gave posttest. the posttest results were then directly processed by using microsoft excel 2007. the results of the posttest were seen from each indicator of speaking skills, namely the description of ideas from the picture, fluency in speaking, and vocabulary feasibility. the results of the average value of the development of ideas in speaking skills was equal to 4.4 (highly skilled), fluency of speech skills was 3.94 (skilled category), and the average value of vocabulary feasibility was 4.22 (highly skilled). viewing from the results of posttest average score, it can be seen that there was dila charisma & khomarudin the effect of ms photo story 3 on students’ speaking achievement 82 an increasing score in each indicator. the comparison of pretest and posttest speaking skills can be seen in table 5. table 5. the comparison of students’ pretest and posttest assessment categories categories idea fluency vocabulary pre test post test increasing pre test post test increasing pre test post test increasing total 149 220 71 144 197 53 153 211 58 averages 2,98 4,4 1,42 2,88 3,94 1,06 3,06 4,22 1,16 presentages 59,6 88 28,4 57,6 78,8 21,2 61,2 84,4 23,2 based on table 5, it can be expalined that the development of ideas increased by 1.42, the fluency of speech increased by 1.06, and the vocabulary increased by 1.16. the significant increased was the category of ideas creativity. after knowing the results of the pretest and posttest, both the average and the standard deviation, the next step was to calculate the normalized gain (n-gain) to see the increasing after the treatment. calculating n-gain in this study was using microsoft excel 2010 which was adjusted to the n-gain formula. after calculating, it can be seen that the average score of n-gain for each indicator of prospective english teachers’ speaking skill was 0.71, categorized in high level. to conclude with, ms photo story 3 is effective in improving speaking skill. ms photo story 3 motivates prospective english teachers in arranging ideas meaningfully. prospective english teachers’ response in learning speaking using ms photo story 3 as has been stated before, the data collected was not only from the test, but also from the questionnaire. the questionnaire was prepared and distributed for the purpose of securing responses. in the end of the meeting, the questionaire was distributed to get the data about students’ perceptions and responses to ms photo story 3 in teaching english especially as an effort to improve speaking skills. the questionnaire consisted of 5 questions using likert scale with a scale of 1–4. observation data using a rating scale with a range of values in the form of numbers (4,3,2,1) for the assessment of the learning process carried out by the teacher and students in learning, which means number 4 is very good, number 3 is good, number 2 is enough, and number 1 is less. the questionnaire mainly focused on the response of prospective english teachers about making digital storytelling using ms photo story 3 and its impact on developing english language skills. the questionnaire was given to 50 prospective english teachers and the result is shown in the following table. table 6. recapitulation of prospective english teachers’ response in learning speaking using ms photo story 3 no ms photo story 3 to increase students’ speaking achivement averages 1 ms photo story 3 makes users easy in conveying/describing something verbally 3,64 2 ms photo story 3 provides an exploration of the images that are imported into the application to be retold 3,42 3 feeling helped in speaking skills by imported images into ms photo stroy 3 application 3,4 4 ms photo story 3 presents a menu in accordance with the wishes of users in sorting images so that they can convey stories systematically 3,42 5 ms photo story is very helpful in learning speaking skills 3,4 total 17,28 averages 3,46 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 83 table 6 showed that the question number 1 got 3.46 as the average score. it means that the question number 1 was categorized good. from the question number 2, the average score was 3.42 which was categorized good. going to the question number 3, the average score was 3.4. it means that the good category was also achived. looking at the question number 4, the average score was 3.42 which was categorized good. then, from the question number 5, it got 3.4 as average score. it means that the category of the question number 5 was also good. from the table, it can be seen that good categories are achieved in each statement. furthermore, the total averages were 3.46 which as categorized good. thus, it can be concluded that learning by using ms photo story 3 in speaking skills got a positive response. it means that ms photo story 3 was very good to be implemented in the classroom to improve prospective english teachers’ speaking skills. accordingly, ms photo story 3 offers a practical and meaningful way to learn new technology such as how to use a digital camera, to get pictures and import to ms photo story 3 by texting and voicing, which also motivates students and promotes independent learner. furthermore, based on the result of questionaire, ms photo story 3 also help prospective english teachers in creating idea based on the photos they arranged so that prospective english teachers are easy in describing something verbally. in accordance with the result of the questionaire, ms photo story 3 also fasilitates prospective english teachers in conveying stories sistematically. it is because by using ms photo story 3, the photos or images can be changed and sorted easily. conclusion reflected from present findings, it can be concluded that ms photo story 3 is effective to improve prospective english teachers’ speaking skills. it can be seen from the score of pretest and there is increasing posttest score. after implementing ms photo story 3 in speaking class, the prospective english teachers can convey their ideas in making story meaningfully in a good film strips. based on the questionaire result, ms photo story 3 is good to be used in learning speaking, since it can motivate prospective english teachers to produce their digital storytelling. this statement is in line with charisma & khomarudin (2018) who state that ms photo story 3 not only gives the students digital experiences in speaking and enhances students’ information and communication technology knowledge, but also improves students’ motivation, activeness and interest in speaking class. furthermore, ms photo story 3 also gives experiences to prospective english teachers in speaking digitally beyond their classromm wall. it is in line with yang (2015) who notes that students can create their digital stories anytime and anywhere at their convenience. in addition, heo (2009) states that learners not only achieve a high degree of student autonomy but also exhibit improved motivation and enhanced skills in visual and digital literacy. ms photo story 3 is also recommended to use in improving writing skill. this statement is directly proportional to limbong’ (2010) view that ms photo story 3 provides many different types of story maps to help students at all levels to further develop their imagination to enhance their writing ability based on story maps and being narrative interest catcher. acknowledgement the present study is supported by the ministry of research and technology of higher education for research grant to novice lecturer no. 095/sp2h/lt/drpm/ii/2018. references brown, h. d. (2010). language assessment: principles and classroom practices. new york: pearson education. charisma, d., & khomarudin. (2018). speaking through ms photo story as digital storytelling. proceedings of the 1 st international conference on elt (conelt) “teaching and learning dila charisma & khomarudin the effect of ms photo story 3 on students’ speaking achievement 84 english: current trends, issues & practices”, pp. 6-9. cohen, b. b. (2012). conducting evaluation in contested terrain: challenges, methodology and approach in an american context. evaluation and program planning, 35, 189– 198. haigh, c., & hardy, p. (2010). tell me a story – a conceptual exploration of storytelling in healthcare education. nurse education today. doi: 10.1016/j.nedt.2010.08.001. heo, m. (2009). digital storytelling: an ampirical study of the impact of digital storytelling on preservice teachers’ self-efficacy and dispositions towards educational technology. journal of educational multimedia and hyptermedia, 8(4), 405-428. hung, c. m., hwang, g. j., & huang, i. (2012). a project-based digital storytelling approach for improving students’ learning motivation, problem-solving competence and learning achievement. educational technology & society, 15(4), 368-379. insani, h. n., suherdi, d., & gustine, g. g. (2018). undergraduate students’ perspectives in using edmodo as an educational social network. english review: journal of english education, 6(2), 61-68. doi: 10.25134/erjee.v6i2.1254. limbong, e. (2015). digital storytelling of microsoft photo story 3 for windows to improve the involvement of students in the process of learning english in the classroom. the journal of english literacy education, 2(2), 108-111. mouze, c. (2011). promoting urban teachers’ understanding of technology, content, and pedagogy in the context of case development. journal of research on technology in education, 44(1), 1-29. prabawa, w. p. (2016). speaking strategies used by indonesian tertiary students. english review: journal of english education, 4(2), 231-242. sadik, a. (2008). digital storytelling: a meaningful technology-integrated approach for engaged student learning. education tech research dev, 56, 487–506 . doi: 10.1007/s11423-008-9091-8. sugiyono. (2011). metode penelitian pendidikan. bandung: alfabeta supri, i. z. (2015). multimedia-based activity in young learners’ english class: implementation and outcome. english review: journal of english education, 3(2), 210-222. wang, s., & zhan, h. (2010). enhancing teaching and learning with digital storytelling. international journal of information and communication technology education, 6(2), 76-87. wikan, g. (2010). does ms photo story 3 make a difference? the views and experiences of a group of norwegian secondary school teachers. seminar.net-international journal of media, technology and lifelong learning, 6(1), 136147. yang, r. (2011). microsoft photo story for digital storytelling in the language classroom. electronic journal for english as a second language, 15(2). indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 197 moving class as classroom management for efl learners m fatkhu arifin (corresponding author) english department, faculty of education and teacher training, universitas tidar, magelang, indonesia email: mf_arifin@untidar.ac.id lilia indriani english department, faculty of education and teacher training, universitas tidar, magelang, indonesia email: indriani@untidar.ac.id apa citation: arifin, m. f., & indriani, l. (2022). moving class as classroom management for efl learners. indonesian efl journal, 8(2), 197-204. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v8i2.6456 received: 17-03-2022 accepted: 16-05-2022 published: 31-07-2022 introduction this study was anchored on the two main variables, those are english language teaching (elt) and classroom management. elt is defined as teaching english to individuals whose first language (l1) is not english (hall, 2017). while classroom management according to wolff, jarodzka, & boshuizen (2017), refers to a system of activities to support an effective learning environment. the expected classroom is one that supports the goal of the learning process. less experienced teachers tend to associate good classroom management with student discipline; while experienced teachers focus more on the class’ engagement (isa, 2020). several studies had been conducted in the field of elt. for instances, the study by sucuoğlu, bayrakli, karasu, & demir (2017) who evaluated the management of preschool teacher classes using turkish teacher strategy questionnaire form (tsq-t) and found it reliable to investigate preschool classroom management, soydan, pirpir, ozturk, & angin (2018) who found that 81% of teachers need to be supported in terms of classroom management, and wills, wehby, caldarella, kamps, & swinburne (2018) examined the effects of the class-wide-function intervention team program (cw-fit) and confirmed that it can be used to improve on-task behavior and reduce students' disruptive behavior with or at risk for emotional behavioral disorders (ebd). beside, eldar, ayvazo, & hirschmann (2018) conceptualized classroom management as an instructional stimulus control that is manifested by superior identification of discriminatory stimuli, repertoires of responses, time, and latency. while lopes, silva, oliveira, sass, & martin (2017) investigated the relation between 5th through 9th grade perceived portuguese teacher’s classroom management, teacher’s perceived time spend with misbehavior, teacher’s self-efficacy, and teacher’s perceived classroom misbehavior. then, buchanan, mynatt, & woodside (2017) examined the classroom management experience of the seven school counselors in their first year of work. abstract: this study was addressed to answer the following questions; 1) what is the role of moving class in english language teaching? and 2) what are the advantages and disadvantages of the moving class system? the research method used in this study was descriptive qualitative with observation as the data collection technique. beside observation, focus group discussion and interview were also taken to strengthen the data. the data were analysed, interpreted and were used in the presentation and discussion of the findings. from the result, it can be concluded that moving class system has a significant role in english language teaching. it gives the elt teachers more space to control their classroom to be in accordance to the subject they taught. a fully-controlled classroom will provides an effective and efficient learning process. implementing moving class system can be beneficial for the implementer especially in boarding school. it can reduce the possibility of sleeping students during the class. besides that, moving class system can be as an orientation to the college system. keywords: moving class; classroom management; efl. mailto:mf_arifin@untidar.ac.id m fatkhu arifin & lilia indriani moving class as classroom management for efl learners 198 classroom management study was also conducted by ahmad, hussain, ayub, zaheer, & batool (2017) who investigated the relationship between classroom administration methodology and the scientific implementation of students and revealed that there is a positive relationship between the teaching methods used and the achievement of students. several studies were also conducted in the term of elt, one is by aşıksoy (2018) who identified web 2.0 tools used by students and found that most are aware of web 2.0 tools in language learning and they believe this tool helps them in learning english. another study was conducted by doğan & cephe (2018) who investigated creative drama effects on eight teaching skills and perceptions from 15 elt teachers who took part in a 30-hour creative drama workshop and revealed that the workshop improves all target teaching skills, especially body language, affective atmosphere, and spontaneous decision making. the study also conducted by belli (2018) who explored the attitudes of turkish university students in the department of english language teaching (elt) towards their culture and integration into their language teaching and cultural awareness. furthermore, özer (2018) explored the attitude of future english language teachers to use computer technology in language teaching and found that prospective teachers use computers mostly for simple tasks such as sending e-mails and presentations. while sa-ngiamwibool (2018) proposed keys to elt for the 21st century and fithriani (2018) revealed the discrimination between native english-speaking teachers (nests) and non-native english-speaking teachers (nnests) in elt. in addition, the study conducted by hanum (2021) examined the use of piclits and kahoot! in english language teaching (elt) to improve students' vocabulary and showed that the use of ict in elt was effective in improving students' vocabulary. still in the same concern, isnawati (2017) examined students' perspective on the use of web-based materials in elt classes and concluded that the students had more positive views on the use of web-based materials. all researches reviewed were very helpful in strengthening and showing prominent findings in the acquisition of additional knowledge found for this study. information about insights gathered from previous writings and studies made a noteworthy difference. there are several studies that have similar insights with this study in particular the terms of classroom management and elt. the studies conducted by sucuoğlu et al. (2017), soydan et al. (2018), wills et al. (2018), eldar et al. (2018), lopes et al. (2017), buchanan et al. (2017), and ahmad et al. (2017) were focused on practicing classroom management in which can help students in enhancing their achievement, students’ social competence and their behaviour. those studies discussed the impact of the classroom management and the need for developing teaching routines. the other studies were on elt as conducted by aşıksoy (2018), doğan & cephe (2018), belli (2018), özer (2018), sa-ngiamwibool (2018), fithriani (2018), hanum (2021), and isnawati (2017). those studies discuss generally about the issues related to elt. those issues are in the field of strategies, methodologies, teachers and students’ psychology, and policies. these have given significant views to this study. all previous studies both in the field of classroom management and elt showed that each is different from each other. notably, there was no study yet conducted on the classroom management particularly on moving class system in elt. while similarities and differences existed in the previous studies, the connection between those studies and the present is in the terms of classroom management and elt. however, it is noticeable that none of those studies conducted on moving class system as an elt classroom management that became the focus of this study. this is the gap that this study attempts to bridge. however, moving class is not commonly practice in indonesian educational system. it is mostly implemented in college, but it is not implemented as subject-focused classroom. moving class system which is implemented in college not only requires students to move, but also the lecturer. with the advantages of moving class, the authors’ hopes to provide a significant view of the system. thus, the study is conducted in order to describe the implementation of moving class system in the form of subject-focused classroom. method the researcher utilized the descriptive qualitative method. qualitative research emphasizes the indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 199 condition of natural objects (as opposed to experiments) where the researcher is the key instrument, data collection technique is triangulated, data analysis is inductive, and research results emphasize meaning rather than generalization (habsy, 2017). qualitative usually deals with human mind and actions, therefore it is considered as more complex than quantitative (mohajan, 2018). the technique of collecting data used in this research was observation. observation is considered as a process of determining the characteristics of an object or event in a precise, planned, systematic, and generally empirical manner by creating literary data (elmas, pamuk, & saban, 2021). in some research observation of people is not required but observation of the environment. this can provide valuable background information about the environment where a research project is being undertaken. in this study, observaion was used as the data collection technique. it was conducted by observing the learning process through cctv record. focus group and interview were also conducted to enrich the accuracy of the data. focus group is a group discussion that centralizes on the issues being studied. the purpose of focus group is to bring the various perspective in one forum. the expected amount of collected information in focus group is wider and larger (ghony & almanshur, 2017). in the group discussion process, group members can evaluate each other and exchange ideas so that the message in the discussion theme is very likely to be conveyed (logren, ruusuvuori, & laitinen (2017). interview was also used in this study. interview is one method of collecting data to obtain information by asking directly to respondents (nugroho, 2017). qualitative interview can be conducted more flexible. qualitative interview makes the interviewee unaware that (s)he is being interviewed. (ghony & almanshur, 2017) in this study, focus group discussion and interview were utilized to verify the data taken from the observation through the cctv record. data analysis in qualitative research is carried out before, during, and after conducting research (anggreni & suartini, 2021). data analysis includes testing, selecting, sorting, categorizing, evaluating, comparing synthesizing, and reflecting on recorded data, as well as reviewing raw and recorded data. (ghony & almanshur, 2017) the data were analyzed using desciptive qualitative technique. qualitative data analysis is the classification and interpretation of linguistic (or visual) material to make statements about implicit and explicit dimensions and structures of meaningmaking in the material and what is represented in it. meaning-making can refer to subjective or social meanings. qualitative data analysis is also applied to discover; describe issues in the field or structures and processes in routines and practices. in the process of data analysis, the researcher needs to think critically. since, data analysis is needed in a research as a process for organizing the data in order to get patterns of other explanation forms (flick, 2013). results and discussion from the data that have been analyzed and interpreted, the findings of the study were as follows. results the teacher is given full authority to manage the classroom in relation to the need of the lesson without any disruptions. as in the common classroom system where the teacher is the one who comes to the class, where the class is set in such a way that it will be used again by the next teacher who will enter the class. while in moving class system, such a problem does not occur because the class is permanently occupied by the teacher handling the subject. some advantages of moving class are: reduce the possibility of sleeping students during the class; as an orientation to the college system; counterboredom exercise; acknowledge positive attitude to students; maintain students discipline in joining the lesson; training students’ social aspect; building a collaborative work among teachers, staffs and students. on the other hand, there are also disadvantages of moving class system such as: it consumes more energy; it is applicable only in a high level institution; it reduces sense of responsibility for students to take care of the class; it sometimes have a confusing subject mapping; it can also create gaps in class facilities. the data collected through focus group discussion and interview reflected the advantages and disadvantages of implementing moving class system as a classroom management. both the m fatkhu arifin & lilia indriani moving class as classroom management for efl learners 200 students and the teacher perspective are provided in the following discussions discussion the role of moving class in english language teaching supports social participation of all students, being able to maintain behavior and/or independently move between classrooms reduces stress, maximizes instructional time and creates opportunities to interact with school staff. the cctv record shows how the teacher and students handle moving from one classroom to another. moving class system requires physical assistance (e.g. assistance with mobility) and/or individual support to ensure student safety and/or to facilitate appropriate behavior when transfering to different classrooms within the school. it also requires frequent (i.e. more than three times per week) reminders and/or support to demonstrate appropriate behavior when transfering to different classrooms within the school. and may require occasional (e.g. less than twice per week) reminders but generally demonstrates appropriate behavior when transfering to different classrooms within the school and as the students enter the classroom the learning activity immediately be facilitated by the teacher. in moving class, students will leave the classroom to other classroom according to the schedule, so students come to the teacher, not vice versa. the teacher no longer needs to instruct students to learn. since students learn self-initiative thus students are able to master the concept completely. it means that students must play an active role in receiving lessons from the teacher. the learning activity recorded in the cctv was in english classroom taken on thursday, august 16th 2018. the topic of the lesson was to make and produce a greeting card where the learning goal is for the students to be able to understand and make a simple greeting card with english language as a text. the setting of the seats was in conference model as the students’ seats are divided into small groups arranged in a circle. at the start of the learning process, teacher divided students into small groups. after that teacher showed the picture of the example of greeting cards. those were contextual greeting cards which are often found and seen by students in their daily life. in this step, the teacher asked the students to look at the picture and observe what the greeting cards are telling about. then, the teacher shared a sheet of paper to the groups in order to help them understand the topic. next step was the questioning session. in this step, the teacher moved around the students and tried to help them by giving a chance to ask questions. during the process, the teacher made sure that the students understood what they are learning by looking at students’ work. after that, the teacher asked the students to share to each other about what they know about a greeting card. the learning activity recorded in the cctv was in english classroom taken on thursday, august 16th 2018. the topic of the lesson was to make and produce a greeting card where the learning goal is for the students to be able to understand and make a simple greeting card with english language as a text. the setting of the seats was in conference model as the students’ seats are divided into small groups arranged in a circle. at the start of the learning process, teacher divided students into small groups. after that teacher showed the picture of the example of greeting cards. those were contextual greeting cards which are often found and seen by students in their daily life. in this step, the teacher asked the students to look at the picture and observe what the greeting cards are telling about. then, the teacher shared a sheet of paper to the groups in order to help them understand the topic. next step was the questioning session. in this step, the teacher moved around the students and tried to help them by giving a chance to ask questions. during the process, the teacher made sure that the students understood what they are learning by looking at students’ work. after that, the teacher asked the students to share to each other about what they know about a greeting card. after they discussed with each other, the students were given an ice breaker by the teacher in order to refresh their minds so that they would be ready to continue to the next step. the next step was the process of making the greeting card. before they made the greeting card, the teacher gave the students marker to help them in creating and developing their ideas to be printed on their own greeting card. in addition, the teacher facilitated the activity as the students did it by themselves. the teacher continuously reminded the students about the language structure they need to remember, the indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 201 language feature and also the generic structure of the text. in the last step, the teacher asked the students to show what they had made. in this step, students presented the topic of their greeting card as their output. the teachers assessed the students’ ideas and appropriateness of the greeting cards created by them. finally, the class was ended with the teacher giving the students homework in addition to the greeting card. then, the teacher asked the students to leave the class and keep the setting as what have been set because there would be a next class in the same classroom. from the description above, it can be implied that the role of moving class system is giving the english teacher full authority to manage the classroom in relation to the need and development of english lessons without any disruptions. as in the common classroom system where the teacher comes to the class, where the class is set in such a way that it will be used again by the next teacher who will enter the class. while in moving class system, such situation does not occur because the class is permanently occupied by the teacher handling the subject. discussion the advantages the data collected through focus group discussion and interview reflected the advantages of implementing moving class as a classroom management. both the students and the teacher perspective are provided in the following discussions: reduce the possibility of sleeping students during the class. as a boarding school occupant, students have many activities in their dormitory that make them active. and when students do not move from one classroom to the other this drives them to be sleepy as they attend to their formal lessons. while conducting moving class system, students have more physical movement making them active in the class. as an orientation to the college system. the concept of moving class refers to learner-centred learning and provides a dynamic environment in accordance with what they learn. even though the moving class system is more suitable for sks like college, it does not rule out the possibility of being implemented on the package system like schools. counter-boredom exercise. the implementation of moving class provides the students various classroom setting where each is unique. this can reduce the boredom that might be felt by students when conducting common classroom system that allows them to stay in only one classroom setting. while in moving class system, different classroom setting will give different atmosphere. besides, the moving activity can also refresh students mind after they join a previous subject. formation of positive attitude. moving class corrects students’ attitude by inculcating discipline and patience as the students move from one class to the other. it facilitates the movement easier and faster so that the teaching and learning process run well. students need to prepare everything needed as they transfer to another class and the teacher makes sure that all instructional preparation are ready for the next class. both teacher and students develop in themselves the right attitude of readiness for teaching and learning process. maintain students discipline in engaging in the learning process. discipline means students are responsible in the learning process. it deals with the students’ punctuality in coming to the class. it means that in the process of the class movement, students need to consider how long they will move to the next class to avoid waste of time and is made ready for the next class. it will increase the opportunity for the students to have time to rest and to prepare for the lesson. enhance students’ social interaction. the process of movement from one class to another class expose the students to other class aside from their classmates. it also gives the positive impact for students’ social development since they will regularly meet their friends from another class. in addition, the moving class system also trains students’ social aspect in term of socialization. it is clear that, say for example, english class is not only for students of grade vii, but also for all graders at the boarding school. it will give a positive impact on students in developing the value of cleanliness and orderliness by keeping their room clean, safe and comfortable to learn. building a collaborative work among teachers, staffs and students. it will foster the creation of a supportive environment. the supportive environment could be in a form of the collaboration among the internal stakeholders and the students, and the non-teaching staff. the general advantage is m fatkhu arifin & lilia indriani moving class as classroom management for efl learners 202 that moving class can improve the quality of teaching and learning process as they collaborate with each other. the disadvantages besides, the implementation of moving class as a classroom management has also some disadvantages. both the students and the teacher perspective are provided in the following discussions: consume more energy. moving class requires students to move from one class to another class. it is because classes are divided based on the subject matters that should be accomplished based on the curriculum. the number of the class will depend on the number of subjects. meanwhile, there are 4 subjects that students need to have in a day. it means that students need to move four (4) times in a day within different distances. the problem is that the distance between the classrooms might be far. there are 3 main buildings in which students may need to move from building 1 to building 3. thus the need for more energy for students to get to the room. besides, students also have to bring their own school things that sometimes are too many to be brought moving to the next classes. applicable only in a high level institution. in moving class students need more attention from the room and the subject matter timetable. each subject requires a lot of available classrooms to be used. it also depends on the curriculum adopted by the school. that is why moving class is more appropriate from the high educational institution than lower class educational institution since it needs a numerous available classrooms and policy from some aspects. reduce sense of responsibility for students to take care of the class. moving class means that the students are the one who move, not the teacher. it makes the students lack responsibility to keep up the room since they feel that they don’t have their own classroom. they think that the class is the teacher’s class, so the responsibility to keep the room clean is the teacher’s responsibility. moreover, students lack the responsibility to keep the classroom properties as well. confusing subjects’ mapping. the number of the rooms in a moving class system depends on the number of subjects. because there are a number of subjects, it considers more attention from class division since it should fulfill the whole subjects taught in that school. the varied sizes of the classrooms contribute a problem in classroom division. in some subjects, it needs bigger classroom than the other. say for example science classroom, it needs bigger room than the other in order to save and structure the science classroom property. it contributes to the problem of classroom division. creating gaps in class facilities. every subject has its own requirements. say for example, the language classroom should be designed different from math classroom with regards to properties and equipment needed. in language classroom, there are sound speakers, microphone and multimedia property which are not available in math classroom. in some cases, it contributes to a gap between one classes to another class. conclusion in the light of the findings, it can be concluded that: 1) moving class system has a significant role in english language teaching. it gives the elt teachers more space to control their classroom to be in accordance to the subject they taught. a fullycontrolled classroom will provides an effective and efficient learning process; 2) implementing moving class system can be beneficial for the implementer especially in boarding school. it can reduce the possibility of sleeping students during the class. besides that, moving class system can be as an orientation to the college system. as a system, moving class can also as a counter-boredom exercise. furthermore, it acknowledge positive attitude to students. it also maintains students discipline in joining the lesson as well as training students’ social aspect. and the most important is that it builds a collaborative work among teachers, staffs and students. even though, moving class system also has some disadvantages such as consuming more energy; it is only applicable in a high level institution; it can also reduce sense of responsibility for students to take care of the class. sometimes, a confusing subjects mapping can be occurred; it is also used to prevent gaps in the use of classroom facilities; 3) the policy guidelines for moving class system was formulated to help the stakeholders in any institutions, especially in boarding school to implement moving class system. besides, the policy guidelines also provides a recommendation to elt classroom management in moving class system. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 203 references ahmad, s., hussain c. a., ayub, a., zaheer, m., & batool, a. 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(2017). see and tell: differences between expert and novice teachers’ interpretations of problematic classroom management events. teaching and teacher education, 66, 295–308. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2017.04.015 indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 90 cultivating critical thinking ability in bti in china yuehong wei english department, north china electric power university, baoding, hebei, china e-mail: wyh231@163.com apa citation: wei, y. (2018). cultivating critical thinking ability in bti in china. indonesian efl journal, 4(2), 90-98. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v4i2.1380. received: 28-03-2018 accepted: 29-05-2018 published: 01-07-2018 abstract: it is very vital for students in bti to grasp the critical thinking ability, but how to cultivate this ability in the fundamental courses is a big problem to be solved. this study is to employ the teamwork, such as group discussion and group representation, and reflection log in the teaching process, investigating the dynamic situation through questionnaires. the results showed that group discussion, group presentation and reflection log are the effective ways to promote students’ critical thinking skills; however it cannot improve the critical thinking promptly in such a short time and it will be a successive process. therefore, carrying out some class activities can enhance students’ critical thinking skills in english reading class. keywords: bti, english reading, critical thinking, teamwork, reflection log introduction the recent years have seen the rapid development of bti in china and scholars have attached increased importance to the cultivation of critical thinking in the stage of accumulating fundamental knowledge（lei， 2015; tao & xiao, 2015). in western education, critical thinking has caught wide attention (bailin & siegel, 2003; tsui, 2002; moon, 2008) and has become the main educational objectives through elementary education even to university education. in china, the critical thinking cultivation, especially of undergraduate, has roused much attention of many scholars（liu, 2013; sun, 2013; ren, 2013; lin, 2014; wen, 2014) focusing on research on combining critical thinking with language ability development. meanwhile, some scholars pointed out that the critical thinking of students majored in foreign languages needs to be developed. cultivating critical thinking ability is the important part of enhancing the translation ability（zhong, 2013; miao, 2007). through researches for many years, miao (2007) further proposed that translation ability not only involves bilingual competence, transfer competence and world/subject knowledge, but also other competence, which refers to applying strategies to solve problems and displaying mental quality and skills. the transfer competence and the strategies of solving problems are tightly related to analysis of critical thinking competence and problemsolving competence. the effect of mental quality and skills are consistent with the personality trend in critical thinking competence. we can find out that in the stage of fundamental course of bti, we should not only cultivate students’ language knowledge but also strengthen their critical thinking competence. domestic researches on critical thinking are on the increase day by day. though domestic scholars have different explanations about the definition of critical thinking competence, yet most researches adopt the term “critical thinking competence” suggested https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v4i2.1370 yuehong wei cultivating critical thinking ability in bti in china 91 by wen (2009). it means that students should have various thinking competence such as analysis and synthesis, abstract and generalization, analyzing problems from many perspectives and innovation competence such as finding problems and solving problems. elder and paul (2005) argued that critical thinking should be defined as applying appropriate evaluation standard and conscious thinking to decide the true value of something and finally making a reasonable judgment. it includes three dimensions: analysis, evaluation and improvement (wen, 2008). at abroad, the statement which has influence on critical thinking competence is the twodimensional critical thinking competence model in american delphic program and three-dimensional critical thinking competence model of elder and paul (2005). in china, wen (2013) constructed the theoretical model of critical thinking competence level and triangular structure model of psychological. however, critical thinking competence level theory is different from other three models. it includes metacritical thinking competence and critical thinking competence, which emphasizes on distinguishing self-regulation competence from general critical thinking competence. it is higher than general critical thinking competence, which means the skills of examining, regulating and evaluating one’s critical thinking plan. the critical thinking competence we refer to is the first-level competence, which includes skills and standard of critical thinking and emotional qualities displaying personality trend. its cognitive skills include three core aspects, which are analysis, inference and evaluation. the cognitive standards include clarity, relevance, logic, profundity and flexibility. the emotional dimension in the model includes five emotional characters which are curiosity, open, confidence, integrity and firm (wen, 2013). this theory model materializes the abstract critical thinking competence, making the cultivation of critical thinking more manipulative and standardized. the critical thinking competence involves independent consideration, verifying spirit and innovation spirit as well as general mental competence such as analysis, contrast, synthesis, inference, speculation, examination and evaluation. cognitive scientists proposed that reading comprehension is a complex cognitive process (anderson & pearson, 1984; afflerbach, 1990; green, 2005). yang (2015) pointed out that the cognitive character and critical thinking competence of reading comprehension should be of highly coincidence. if teaching reading involves the guidance and examination in aspects of interpretation, analysis, evaluation, reasoning and explanation for students, then it involves the cultivation on critical thinking competence. the purpose of cultivating critical thinking competence in the reading course of bti is to help students set foundation of enhancing translation competence. translation is a complex process of language conversion. it not only contains language code conversion, but also the decision-making process of translator in language conversion. therefore, cultivating the critical thinking competence of students of bti is the presupposition of promoting translation competence. the autonomous university of barcelona in spain has put forward the model of translation capability in terms of translation capacity project. it is constructed by a series of related, hierarchical, changeable components including communicative ability, non-verbal ability, psycho-physiological factors, professional operation ability, transformational ability and strategic ability. in 2003, translation competence is further defined as communicative ability, non-verbal ability, transfer ability, psycho-physiological factors, professional operation ability, and strategic ability. among them, strategic ability is the operation knowledge which guarantees the efficiency of translation and solves the indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 92 appeared problems. strategic ability is of great importance in that it controls the translation process, effects other translation competence and coordinate the relationship among them to fill the gap. it can also solve problems once it discovers them. so, in the stage of fundamental knowledge, we could meet the demand of competence cultivation on the senior students of bti through reading course, laying a foundation for translation competence of bti. in other words, in the stage of basic knowledge cultivation, we should not only put emphasis on the cultivation of applying language knowledge but also on the skills like analysis, contrast, synthesis, inference, speculation, examination and evaluation and the cultivation on emotional character of personality trend. having those backgrounds, this study aims to cultivate the critical thinking competence of bti in reading class as its medium and lay a foundation for the study of advanced translation courses. the specific research questions are as follows: 1) what are effective ways of cultivating critical thinking competence of students of bti in english reading course? 2) what’s the trend of students’ critical thinking competence of english reading course? 3) what are the problems in the development process of students’ critical thinking competence in reading feedback? method taking the students of one class majored in bti as research object, this study conducted the survey lasting three semesters. this class has 26 students including 4 boys and 22 girls. these 26 students come from 24 different provinces across the country with ages from 16 to 18 years old. about 50% of the students in this class are willing to be majored in translation and 25% of the students follow others’ advice. others were adjusted to this major. this study adopts some data collection techniques including questionnaire, reflection log, group cooperation, wheel display, and class report. in this study, the reading courses were chosen for the two semesters of fresh year and the first semester of sophomore year, which are the main content of this research. in the fourth semester, mock exam is arranged for tem4, so it is not suitable for this teaching research. in these three semesters, the learning plan and time schedule are introduced for students at the beginning of each semester. the content of textbook runs through the whole semester and special reading activities are held in stages. in the first semester, two questionnaires are made at the beginning and the last. the first questionnaire aims to make a survey of students’ reading experience before and the last questionnaire aims to make a survey of critical thinking process of students’ feedback for class and reading. besides regular textbook, this semester includes three “special reading activities”: choosing the old man and the sea, newspapers and magazines of foreign language and short novel in english selected by students themselves. each activity are completed in three weeks with 6 periods. the first two thematic activities involve a group discussion and a group report. the content of discussion consists of problems, difficult points and analysis of language styles that need to be concerned in reading. the content of report consists of the cultural background of reading materials, the solution of difficulties in reading, accumulation of language knowledge and enlightenment of real life. the third one is completed independently by students based on the first two theme and students should submit a written reading report. in every week, students are required to submit the reflection logs according to their own reading condition. in the second semester, the reading content is added with series of newspapers and extracurricular autonomous reading. report yuehong wei cultivating critical thinking ability in bti in china 93 form is changed from reading feelings into scenarios show. newspaper reading and textbook learning run through the whole semester and after-class learning is combined with class discussion according to teaching schedule. another two reading thematic activities are held, which refer to the reading of english original novel far from the madding crowd and the shakespeare tales. in this semester, reflection logs are demanded to submit after thematic activities and meanwhile reflect on thematic activities and daily reading activities. in the third semester, the theme of newspaper reading and textbook learning run through the whole semester. the group of two persons should complete independently three task presentations including background knowledge, language knowledge and putting forward questions of reading comprehension. reading theme refers to reading english original novels and having group discussion in reading process. the main content of discussion is to comb the details of the novel and discuss the author's intention and the effect of language based on it. this semester has added reading materials of the discussion activities and designed the reading teaching materials in groups results and discussion analysis of statistical results of questionnaire survey from the first eight questions in the first questionnaire survey, it was found that the students' english reading habits in high school: 85% of the students chose "never" or "sometimes" reading english books and two of the students chose "often" reading english newspapers. english newspapers mainly refers to the high school english learning newspaper, while only 15% of the students chose "often" or "always" reading english books. but 100 percent of students chose "often" or "always" in the title of in high school learning, english reading mainly refers to exercises reading. the result suggests that students have a narrower range of english reading, which is an obvious deficiency in the cultivation of bti students. therefore, in english reading course of fundamental course stage, we should expand students’ reading range and develop good reading habit, separating appropriately reading from reading comprehension for exam. after finishing class activities and questionnaire, we found out that class reading helped a lot for forming right reading habit of students and efficient group activities will promote students’ reading interest and result. students come to know the native english expression and writing character of newspaper report by reading newspapers and magazines. and the translation practice accompanied by reading has also laid the foundation for the translation of political subjects. in this study, the questionnaire data was gathered in excel, and the change analysis chart was drawn. figure 1 shows a comparison of the statistics of 26 students in the three questionnaires. figure 2 shows the trend of each questions’ change in the three questionnaires’ results. the final examination results of students in three semesters were collected as the reference data to find out whether reading ability is related to critical thinking competence. final exam papers contain 50% reading ability and 50% basic words and grammar. since the basic vocabulary and grammar are the foundation of reading ability, then the final result can reflect the students' reading ability. indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 94 figure 1. students’ learning attitude to analyze the correlation of the results of grade average point in the three semesters and questionnaire results, pearson correlation inspection was conducted to get the data: correlation coefficient r of 0.202, | | r < 0.3, suggesting that relationship between two variables is very weak so there is no correlation. in addition, the p value was 0.3445 and the p value was much higher than the average confidence level 0.05. the results of the analysis showed no correlation between the reading grade and the mean of the questionnaire survey. students' critical thinking ability and reading ability displayed in scores of reading class have no correlation. for example, some students have high reading scores, but not necessarily have good critical thinking ability. some students have low reading scores, but have relatively strong critical thinking ability. the problem is that their language comprehension is not high, so they should increase their vocabulary mastery, become familiar with grammar knowledge and increase their reading quantity. the comparison between table 1 and figure 2 shows that the results of reading courses are not completely relevant to the investigation of critical thinking competence. in table 1, the lowest points are: 60 in the first semester, 69 in the second semester, and 67 in the third semester. moreover, the highest points are 89 in the first semester, 91 in the second semester, and 95 in the third semester. seen from the highest points, the trend and grade are positively correlated. in other words, for students doing well in study, critical thinking ability and reading scores have certain correlation. table 1. the average score of three semesters std. no. 1 st semester 2 nd semester 3 rd semester std. no. 1 st semester 2 nd semester 3 rd semester 1 60 70 67 14 67 82 90 2 70 82 93 15 60 69 84 3 71 78 94 16 76 88 95 4 62 71 71 17 79 81 94 5 70 87 94 18 71 69 77 6 73 79 92 19 84 90 94 7 70 79 93 20 75 87 93 yuehong wei cultivating critical thinking ability in bti in china 95 8 84 84 94 21 75 76 91 9 82 91 97 22 67 78 89 10 60 73 86 23 67 80 88 11 87 91 95 24 60 71 91 12 76 75 91 25 89 85 92 13 80 83 91 26 68 76 87 figure 2. the tendency of each item in questionnaire the change trend in figure 2 shows that the survey results in the third semester basically showed a steady trend, but the changes of the three semesters did not change significantly. questions 2, 13, 18, 20 have obvious changes. the third term is superior to the former two semesters and the results are closely related with three semesters of teaching contents and teaching forms. in this semester, reading activities are carried out including english newspaper reading and collecting the materials of reading background. question 3, 6, 7, 8, 11, 17 and 19 are steadily rising and the part can reflect that learners have promoted preliminary critical thinking ability. the change is the result of carrying out activities such as group activities in class, reading skills training and communication of reader response. analysis of reflection logs reflection logs have been acknowledged by most students. in this process, students can analyze and explain their reading course. they can find the problems and then solve them so as to assess and improve themselves. analyzing one’s learning condition is the beginning of cultivating analysis competence. try to find solutions to problems after clarifying them. this point has been indicated in reflection logs. some students reflect on the progress of reading and remind themselves of their constant adjustments; some students reflect on the harvest in group activities and find their own shortcomings and correct them in later reading activities; some students write specific reading skills and language knowledge in the reflection log, which can strengthen the memory and highlight the key of learning; some students reflect on the thinking process of reading, including the approbation and disapprobation of the content of the novel, and state reasons; some students reflect on their emotional changes when they read a novel, resonating with the author or becoming curious about something mentioned indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 96 in the novel, which stimulate their own reading interest; however, some students think that reflection log is a mission, holding a view that reading class highlights reading instead of reflection. it makes sense to some extent, but if we just take reading as an understanding of characters, not considering the aim of reading and the effect of reading, it will definitely effect the cultivation of translators’ critical thinking competence. it just as the translation emphasizes the meaning of the word, regardless of the context, even the cultural background and other related factors. analysis of group activities group activities are divided into group discussions and group reports. reading report was carried out in the form of group report, which contains two types: five-person group report and two-person group report. fiveperson group report was carried out in first and second semester to promote communication and writing among students. group activity is an efficient way of enhancing students’ critical thinking competence. most students in the reflection log reported that, in the group discussion, the communication with the other students opened their own thinking space and made them reflect on their own reading habits and ways of thinking. in the third semester, with reinforcement of students’ self-study ability, two-person group report was carried out. it was more difficult in that it contained selected report of knowledge and put forward the questions in reading materials. then, the questions would be organized to be discussed. this part was a challenge for students. some students failed to analyze deeply the article and just lingered on the knowledge points and characters, while other students were able to propose some extended and profound questions. in addition, many students could not discuss focusing on the main topic. the reason lies in that the individual knowledge accumulation is limited, so increasing reading quantity should be the prerequisite of enhancing critical thinking competence. there also exist problems in the process of group report. in the first semester, group members will show their ppt after finishing it. in the class, the group members focused on the task of the group, and were indifferent to the report of other groups, so they were unable to achieve the purpose of communication learning. one of the reasons is the difference between group reading materials. also, teacher did not raise a specific claim of paying attention to other groups’ report and the group reports are not so much attractive. therefore, the form of group report was changed in the later two semesters. in the three semesters of teaching experiment, sufficient group discussions were carried out in class. firstly, in the study of textbook reading, students discussed about organized structure of articles in reading discussion and analyzed sentence hierarchy relation. they agreed that this kind of form is very beneficial for them. in this activity, students could understand article structure without the form of preparing for an exam, which embodies the basic competence of students who will be a translator in the future. secondly, in the form of wheel-type group discussion, each group should prepare their own computer and watch in turn and evaluate other groups’ report. each member in the group should seriously think about it and put forward questions. they should also take their group report into consideration and the real effect was good. the disadvantage of original groups’ low participation has disappeared. this form develops students’ competence of interpretation, analysis, comparison and evaluation, which strengthen students’ curiosity in reading content. though group discussion in some extent enhances the analysis competence of students, yet they fail to know how to analyze in the process of it. when showing in wheel type, yuehong wei cultivating critical thinking ability in bti in china 97 they cannot give a deep evaluation after group discussion but stay in the surface of questions. the reason is that the students’ knowledge is limited and they cannot form comparative inference and judgment. so, a rich fund of knowledge must be precondition of the cultivation on the competence of critical thinking. in the competitive group activity of asking words, students tend to prefer the objective form of activities. the process does not demand consideration but testing memory effect. so, the cultivation of critical thinking competence also needs teachers’ positive orientation and encouragement. it is necessary to carry out efficient class activities. in group activities, teacher’s evaluation is combined with group members. teacher appraises each group and evaluate performances of each student according to the teacher's evaluation form. this form can direct students to carry out group activities fluently and serves as a standard which student should follow in reading activities and group discussion. it is conducive to the development of classroom activities and the cultivation of integrity and self-confidence. in this research, reflection log, group report and group discussion are effective ways to achieve the improvement of thinking skills, meet the thinking standard and cultivate the positive personality tendency. conclusion this research took a long time, permeating the spirit of cultivating critical thinking competence in every class activity. the cultivation of ability is not achieved overnight, so we adopted a quiet way to make the students gradually form the competence of analysis, comparison, comprehension, reasoning, conjecture, inspection, evaluation, and cultivate positive personality tendency. critical thinking competence is invisible, which is a form of cognitive ability. though many scholars designed many measuring tools in an attempt to present objectively, which is a good try as well as a research direction, yet in actual teaching, especially in the competence cultivation of bti, learners’ critical thinking competence probably won’t emerge as soon as learning finishes. it might require a lot of translation practices. by combining theory with practice, the effect of cultivating critical thinking competence will be displayed in translation practices. this research is devoted to developing the critical thinking competence of bti by means of reading class, thus laying the basis for senior translation course. such group activities as group discussion, group reports and reflection logs are proved to be effective ways of cultivating critical thinking competence of bti in english reading course. in these activities, students can learn to think, analyze, reason, judge and evaluate in their pre-reading, while-reading and post-reading activities. english reading course has a positive effect on fostering critical thinking competence. it is an abstract notion and an intellectual activity in the brain. it cannot be objectively detected. however, the present research aims to specifically foster abilities and the results reveal that reading process can improve critical thinking competence, which is a slow and gradual process and is implicit in a short time. the research also finds that the reading effects reflected in the improving process of students’ critical thinking competence is not always linear but fluctuated with a positive general tendency. therefore, to some extent, to carry out classroom activities consciously in reading course can improve students’ critical thinking competence. yet, there are also some shortcomings in this study. as a concrete process, teachers work out the structure of development of critical thinking competence, but some students are unable to really think critically. for example, the questions and evaluations they issued are too superficial to present insightful suggestions on their reading indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 98 contents; the questions they asked about other groups’ reports are lack of logic. meanwhile, their profound and logical standards in critical thinking should be improved. the researches in this field are hoped to continue in-depth studies and solve these problems. references bailin, s., & siegel, h. (2003). critical thinking. in n. blake, p. smith, & p. standish (eds). the blackwell guide to the philosophy of education (pp. 181-193). oxford, uk: blackwell. elder, l., & paul, r. (2005). critical thinking: learn the tools the best thinkers use. new jersey: pearson prentice hall. liu, x. (2013). on the construction of thinking ability training model in college english teaching. foreign language world, 3(5). miao, j. (2007). the study of translation competence: the basis of constructing translation teaching model. foreign language and foreign language teaching, 7(4). sun, y. (2013). innovating the evaluation system of english specialty, leading the development of students' speculative ability. foreign languages in china, 4(1). wen, q. (2008). on the cultivation of high level thinking ability of foreign language majors postgraduates. academic degrees and graduate education, 8(10). wen, q. (2009). constructing the theoretical framework of speculative measuring instruments for foreign language students in china. foreign language world, 9(1). wen, q., lingli, z., & hao, s. (2014). do foreign language majors have less speculative skills than other majors? modern foreign languages, 4(6). wen, r. (2013). rethinking about the ability of critical thinking of foreign language majors: "absent" or "presence"?--taking the english speech class as an example. foreign languages in china, 3(1). yang, l. (2015). cognitive characteristics of questioning in reading classroom and cultivation of speculative ability. foreign languages in china, 5(2). zhong, w. (2013). requirements for undergraduate teaching of translation major in colleges and universities. chinese translators journal, 3(3). indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 113 teachers’ beliefs on teacher-students interaction in young learners’ english class maria setyaningsih nernere faculty of business and economics, universitas atma jaya yogyakarta, yogyakarta, indonesia e-mail: maria_setyaningsih@staff.uajy.ac.id apa citation: nernere, m. s. (2019). teachers’ beliefs on teacher-students interaction in young learners’ english class. indonesian efl journal, 5(2), 113-120. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v5i2.1903. received: 14-03-2019 accepted: 23-05-2019 published: 01-07-2019 abstract: researchers find that teacher plays dominant role in managing the teacherstudents interaction, the important aspect affecting the language acquisition process in young learners’ class. hence, to make sure that the teacher-students interaction goes well for achieving the classroom goals, how the teacher manages the interaction should be investigated further. as beliefs can affect how people act, this research aims to investigate the teachers’ belief on teacher-students interaction in young learners’ english class. this is a qualitative research using direct observation in two english classes at two different elementary schools and in-depth interview with two english teachers as the data collecting techniques. the data revealed that the teachers’ beliefs affecting how the teacher-students interaction goes consist of beliefs about goals, process, and source of teacherstudents interaction. overall, the interactions were done to achieve two goals namely promoting language acquisition and controlling learning atmosphere. the source of interaction namely teacher talk was adjusted to young learners’ characteristics to make the process of learning meaningful. this finding gives conceptual insight about how the system of teacher-students interaction in english learning process in elementary schools works. then, it may be beneficial for the teachers as a means supporting self reflection, schools’ evaluation and also for the educational practitioners who want to investigate the tss interaction in more details. keywords: english class; teachers’ beliefs; teacher-students interaction; young learners. introduction the importance of classroom interaction for english learning has been acknowledged by english for young learners’ practitioners. it motivates them to analyze the pattern, causal factors, effects, and other aspects of interaction by researching the interaction in different setting, subject learnt or age level of participants and using different research methodology. in indonesia, many practitioners have concerned on researching young learners’ classroom interaction. many of them focused on analyzing the surface of interactions such wibowo (2017) who described the pattern of classroom interaction and ani (2017) who analyzed the type of classroom interaction. from those researches, it was found that each pattern of classroom interaction namely teacherstudents (tss) interaction, teacher student (ts) interaction, and student-student (ss) interaction plays its own role for the success of english learning. chowdhury and rashid (2014) found that young learners are willing to engage in learning only if the teaching and learning process is meaningful to them. here is the role of tss interaction. how the interaction can accommodate meaningful learning is very important in young learners’ language classroom. young learners do not directly learn from textbooks but they practice and tend to learn indirectly through the interaction that they experience in classroom. thus, interaction has role for effectual learning environments and in shaping of individual learners’ development. due to hammond’s model of language teaching, tss interaction plays big role during the process of teaching learning before the students produce the text independently. believing that tss plays bigger role for the success of language production, makasau (2015) went into details by researching the adjacency pairs occurring maria setyaningsih nernere teachers’ beliefs on teacher-students interaction in young learners’ english class 114 in the teacher-students interaction. hoque (2016) also emphasized that tss interaction has essential role for promoting success in efl education pedagogy affects. acknowledging the importance of investigating tss interaction for the learning success from the previous researches, it is needed to investigate further the reality of tss interaction in english classroom in indonesia. the existing investigations mainly focused on researching the surface of the tss interaction. the fact is that tss interaction in young learners class is dominantly managed and initiated by the teacher (makasau, 2015). teachers may have purpose in mind so that they lead the interaction, guide the process and evaluate the result. in fact, what people believe affects what they do. it happens also in education in which what teachers believe was also applied in their teaching practices (utami, 2016). it means that all decision that teachers have for tss interaction is affected by their knowledge and belief. in classroom setting, belief affects the teachers’ decision on holding the teaching and learning process as proven by fajrinur (2018). considering the important of belief, puspitasari (2013) investigates the teachers’ belief in english teaching in elementary stage to find out how the teaching goes. considering the importance of tss interaction for the success of learning and the dominant role of belief in influencing the teacher who dominantly takes part in the tss interaction, this current research focuses on investigating the teachers’ belief in tss interaction. many researchers have concerned on tss interaction. they were petek (2013) investigating the teachers’ belief in classroom interaction and chu (2014) discussing the belief of tss interaction in kindergarten. unfortunately, they have not investigated teachers’ belief in tss interaction in elementary stage deeper. this is the gap that this research tries to concern on. the findings from the existing theories are used as the references for this research. pattern and forms of interaction that the teacher believes to work in constructing meaning in the real english class are observed. the reasons behind having such interaction are also investigated further. specifically, this research focuses on investigating the tss interaction in young learners’ classrooms in private schools. by researching the teachers’ belief, the concept of tss interaction in elementary schools can be illustrated especially related to the system of tss interaction consisting of the goals, process, and its sources. method considering belief as a value, qualitative research methodology was chosen to be applied in this research. the data was collected by doing direct observation in four and five graders in two different sd kanisius in yogyakarta resulted into observation notes and having depthinterview to two teachers teaching those english classes recorded in interview transcript. the last interview was done to crosscheck the result of data analysis. in this research, the process of analyzing data was adopted from creswell (2014). it consists of collecting data, preparing data for analysis, reading through data, coding the data, and coding the text for themes and description to be used in the research report. here is the example for template of the coding and theme. num subject script coding theme 11.55 the teacher came into the class and get prepared. the teacher started the lesson by greeting the students. the students answered it using the pattern that they have accustomed to. initiatio n process 1 t attentions please, get set. giv inst 2 ss get set (stand up). 3 t good afternoon, students. 4 ss good afternoon, ms nana 5 t how is everything with you? ask inf 6 ss i am fine, thank you, and you? 7 t i am fine too, thank you. sit down, please. giv inf, inst 8 ss thank you indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 115 results and discussion after analyzing the data, it is found that teachers consider their beliefs on the goals, the process, and the sources of tss interaction while managing the tss interaction. here are the details. goals of tss interaction tss interaction existed when the teacher and his/ her students exchanged their ideas. based on the observation, the interaction was dominantly initiated by the teachers. as teachers, they might have goals in mind when they acted in classroom, including managing the tss interaction with their students. based on the data gathered, it is analyzed that the teachers believe that tss interaction is aimed for promoting english language acquisition and increasing positive attitude toward learning. promoting english language acquisition and learning based on the observation, the teachers promote english as a language used to interact with their students. by exposing english to the students, the teachers expect that the students will acquire it. it is more preferable to be called as acquisition process than learning process since it happens through ‘subconscious process’ (krashen, 1982 in castello, 2015) during the interaction. on the other words, teachers do not merely see english as a means of communication but they also consider it as an input for language acquisition. having the same belief about english as input, hoque (2016) states that through interaction with the teachers, the students can increase their language store. as a result, they can improve their language proficiency as the implicit knowledge. it is in line with input hypothesis proposed by krashen (1985, 1994 in castello, 2015) in which through understanding input that contains structures a little bit beyond the students’ current level of competence, students may progress in acquisition. by acquiring language, the students can develop their speaking skill. later on, it is expected that they are able to communicate easily in the future. besides promoting english acquisition through exposing input, in tss interaction, the teachers also promote acquisition through giving chance to the students for producing output. producing output can be in the form of responding their teacher or initiating their ideas. the teachers consider that by producing output, the students may construct their understanding about the language. found on the observation, the students were guided to process what they know and create it to be a new one. they created an interaction and produce language. the teachers have role in this interaction to assist the students’ production. mayer (2002) in pianta, hamre and allen (2012) supports it by stating that this kind of process facilitates the ability to access and apply the language acquired which is needed in learning. if the students construct the language by themselves, the students will learn the language better. based on the data, the teachers believe that students who participate on the interaction will understand and learn better than those who do not participate. this is why they often encourage the students to participate actively on the interaction. making mistakes during the production is acceptable. consequently, the teachers may give corrective feedback as the follow up. increasing students’ positive attitude toward learning besides aiming to develop students’ cognition through english language acquisition, tss interaction is also aimed to increase the students’ positive attitude toward learning. attitude in this research refers to the students’ engagement and students’ motivation. first, in tss interaction, teachers may manage their students’ behavior verbally. it can be done by giving instructions to the students, reminding them about time allocation, and giving verbal warning to the misbehaved students. those actions are aimed to keep the students engaged on the learning. pianta, hamre and allen (2012) also agree on the benefit of tss interaction for the behavior management. they state that tss interaction “promote positive behavior and prevent or maria setyaningsih nernere teachers’ beliefs on teacher-students interaction in young learners’ english class 116 terminate misbehavior in the classroom (p.374)”. if the behavior management is successfully done in class, the teacher may achieve an efficient learning since the students may understand at once. the teachers consider that their students are having short span of attention. it has been young learners’ characteristic that is confirmed by pinter (2011). therefore, teachers often give verbal “reminder” to make the students aware and engaged in learning. second, the teachers may also increase students’ attitude by communicating ideas e.g. sharing opinion and feeling in tss interaction. they also spend time for talking about any ideas related to the students. one of the examples is when the teacher communicates with the students about the consequence of being noisy in class. they share and tolerate each other. pinter (2011) states that negotiating class rules can bring students and the teacher closer together and also build warm and friendly relationship. consequently, they may build a positive learning atmosphere. through sharing ideas, the teachers may know their students’ condition. once the teachers notice that the students are feeling demotivated, they will motivate their teachers verbally. in tss interaction, the teachers also boost the students’ confidence verbally to participate actively during the interaction. nugent (2009) has also found that tss interaction have role in influencing the students’ motivation. consequently, the students will feel that the teachers care to them. puspitasari (2013) states that this kind of affective supports may be beneficial for decreasing the students’ language ego that can create a sense of fragility, defensiveness, and a rising of inhibitions. by creating supporting atmosphere, the students may feel comfortable in learning. then, the students will be active and more engaged in learning english without worrying things e.g worry of being blamed if they make mistakes. this is why teachers do not only focus on learning for the whole session. as a result, there is a good communication resulting in positive relationship between the teachers and the students. then, the students may have positive attitude toward learning. zhu (2013) confirms this belief by stating that in the learning environment, teacher-students interaction plays a major role both in influencing the cognitive and affective development of students. third, the teachers may increase the students’ attitude toward learning through creating supportive learning atmosphere. if the focus of the learning is only about discussing the materials, the students may feel bored. this is why in tss interaction, the teachers sometimes make jokes to build fun atmosphere. besides, sometimes the teacher uses javanese language during the interaction to break the ice. using javanese language in english classroom is considered as funny thing by the students. puspitasari (2013) states that if the students are happy, they will enjoy and benefit from their language learning. process of tss interaction in fact, interaction and acquisition do not happen simultaneously. acquisition only happens if the input in tss interaction is comprehensible. it is in line with comprehensible input proposed by krashen (1985) in ellis (2008). if the students do not understand the ideas, there is no language acquisition. this is why the teachers often asked the students’ understanding in indonesian language to make sure that they have understood. based on the data, there are many ways to make input comprehensible. first, the teachers interact using simple english. the teachers realized that they are talking to elementary students who consider english as foreign language. thus, the level of complexity should be adjusted to the students’ proficiency. second, the teachers interact by using language that the students are familiar with. this is why the teachers only use english for classroom language instruction and any usual expressions. according to nation (2007), to be learnt, an input should be the one that the indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 117 students are familiar with. only small numbers of unknown words are allowed. in fact, exposing simple language does not guarantee that the students will understand. sometimes, there are some students who misunderstand or even do not understand although the teachers have made their explanation simple. third, the teachers use clues to help the students in comprehending the unfamiliar input. it aims to avoid the students’ misunderstanding. besides, it may make the language more understandable so the students can catch the meaning easily. due to the input hypothesis proposed by krashen (1985) in ellis (2008), to come up in comprehension, the teachers should combine the simplifying input with the help of contextual and extra linguistic clues. nation (2007) also supports on the use of clues in tss interaction by stating that the learners can gain some knowledge of the unknown language items through contextual clues like reality, pictures, or situation and background knowledge. fourth, the teachers interact using english as a routine such as for greeting, closing, and other usual activity. it aims to make the students are accustomed to the language exposed to them. this strategy is in line with the time-on-task principle. this principle shows that the higher the frequency for doing something, the better the students are likely be at doing it (nation, 2007). thus, it is reasonable that the interaction done in a usual activity goes smoothly. if the language is exposed to the students for many times, the process for gaining it is easier. this is what hatch and gough (1976) in ellis (2008) call with frequency hypothesis. realizing the importance of gaining input in tss interaction, the teachers always demand their students to involve in. the teachers consider that learning happens only if the students involve in the interaction. thus, on the beginning of the interaction, teachers often demand the students verbally to pay attention and participate on the interaction. in fact, makasau (2015) also finds ‘asking attention’ as one of typical adjacency pairs found in tss interaction. by paying attention on the talk, the students may be aware of the function, how it was pronounced and how to respond it. it is in line with noticing hypothesis proposed by schmidt (2001) in ellis (2008) who emphasizes the importance of noticing input and noticing the gaps as essential processes in l2 acquisition. he states that learners only learn what they consciously attend to in the input. pinter (2011) also supports the importance of participating on the interaction since she considers that the students may get english exposure. as a result, the students may have the opportunity to acquire the language exposed to them. once they do not pay attention, they will not get the idea about what is being learnt. on the other hand, if they notice, they will learn. this is why teachers do some effort to get their students’ attention, e.g. calling names and writing the important talk on the whiteboard. they realize that their students belong to young learners who have short span of attention as what pinter (2011) confirms. in fact, there is no guarantee that the students who involve in the interaction will exactly acquire the language exposed to them. according to the teachers, the students who successfully acquire the language are those who can describe it in their first language (indonesian language). as they respond on the interaction, it shows that they understand. the opportunity for learning will be bigger. during the observation, the teachers did not force the students to respond in english. the important point is that the students understand. as the followup, they will teach their students how to respond in english. what is true is that students’ responses in tss interaction are useful for the teachers. the responses can be right or wrong. both of them give valuable information. by acknowledging this error, the teachers can notice who have acquired and who have not and how far they have acquired the input. later on, they can give followup. if the students do mistakes, the teacher can give corrective feedback. maria setyaningsih nernere teachers’ beliefs on teacher-students interaction in young learners’ english class 118 at other time, learners’ correct responses can be used as input for other students. since it happens during tss interaction, other students can notice. consequently, everybody has the same chance to acquire the language. however, the teachers realized that not all students could notice and participate actively during the whole tss interaction. they considered about students who were difficult to focus. as what has been discussed above, the focus of tss interaction is not merely on learning content but also providing the learning atmosphere. since it is a young learners’ classroom, students’ affective development is really concerned. if the students are demotivated, there will not be an acquisition. this is why teachers are aware of the students’ motivation level. thus, javanese is preferred. sources of interaction teacher talk based on the results, teacher talk dominates the tss interaction. according to kumpulainen and wray (2002), the role of the teacher was more salient and explicit in the whole class period. they may have their own purposes when delivering a talk to the students. as a result, it makes them play different roles in tss interaction during the learning in the classroom. besides affected by the goals, teacher talk exposed to the students is also affected by the students’ proficiency. according to chu (2014), the students’ proficiency affects teacher in deciding which role that they play in the tss interaction. based on the observation, the teachers position themselves into three roles. first, the teachers position themselves as a controller. they give direction to the students and manage them to follow the instruction as what they expect. they decide what the students should do and discuss. they evaluate the students’ response to be as same as what they expect. on the other words, they control everything to get the expected results. it is the same as what pujiastuti (2013) describes about the controller in classroom who is mainly giving direction, lecturing and asking question by which she led the flow of interaction. they may think that young learners need guidance during the learning. if there is no controller during the learning, the goal of learning cannot be achieved. second, the teachers also position themselves as manager. they guide the students to the goals by informing the goals on the early meeting and give freedom to the students in responding but keep monitoring by giving followup during the ongoing process if needed to keep the right track. here is the explanation for irf pattern found during the observation. they also keep motivating the students’ performance by appreciating students talk, accepting student’s feelings, praising the student’s performance, and using student’s ideas. third, instead of playing role as resource, the teachers consider themselves as facilitator. they think that the students may have the ideas already. thus, they only need to facilitate the learning and guide the students to find what should be learnt. besides considering different roles in tss interaction, teacher also consider about the language used there. based on the findings, the distribution of the use of bahasa indonesia, english, and javanese language during the tss interaction is 70%: 25%: 5%. the teachers agree that the preference of language depends on the students’ proficiency, students’ motivation, and the purpose of talk. pinter (2011) also supports it by stating that teachers vary widely in how much english they use in their classroom. it may depend on how comfortable they feel using english, the level of their pupils’ language or the purpose of the talk. consequently, the teacher should be sensitive about their students’ proficiency. english is aimed for acquisition process in which the language should be comprehensible. while bahasa indonesia is aimed for helping the students understand the unfamiliar ideas. at the same time, javanese language is also used for creating more relaxed atmosphere. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 119 student talk though the teachers dominate the talk, it does not mean that the students are passive. in fact, the teacher talk may either boost the students’ responses or motivate the students to initiate the interaction. it happens because the students are type of young learners who are keen to talk (pinter, 2011), especially if they are interested to the topic. they will ask questions until they get clear understanding. besides, they can be motivated to learn so that they can perform better. they might give statement or raise further question. based on the observation, once the students knew the answer, they would respond to the teachers’ questions. moreover, if the teacher asked about the students’ experiences or real information, the students would directly respond it. the teacher assumed that students would respond easily only if they had fun on it. on the other hand, students would remain silent if they did not understand what the teacher said. they might also ask the teacher to explain again on what the teacher meant. another fact was that students might vary their language. if they wanted to ask question or give comment, they would speak in bahasa indonesia. at other time, they would speak in english once they knew how to say it in english. conclusion as confirmed by the teachers, their first belief is that through tss interaction, they can promote english acquisition by exposing comprehensible input and facilitating the students to produce output. the teachers consider that english acquisition is better proposed in the early stage. thus, the teachers often communicate the input in english, encourage their students to produce output and give corrective feedback during tss interaction. besides, tss interaction may facilitate the teachers to increase the students’ engagement and motivation. as what has been agreed by the teachers, tss interaction cannot merely be focused on the materials. building relationship is needed to make them engaged and motivated in learning. it can be done by managing students’ behavior verbally, increasing students’ attitude by communicating ideas and creating supportive learning atmosphere. the second belief is that for achieving the goals of tss interaction, during the process, the input should be comprehensible. it is done by providing language that is suitable to the students’ proficiency and using some expressions as a routine. the last belief is related to the components of the tss interaction. one of them is the teacher talk. first, the teachers believe that their talk should be dominant only for controlling the activities and the content learnt. however, it should support the students in learning the language. it may not block the students to speak more. thus, teacher talk in tss interaction mainly functions to facilitate the students to speak more. these three beliefs have affected how the teachers manage the tss interaction. by realizing the goals, the teachers can evaluate whether their verbal interaction works effectively to achieve those goals. sometimes they have the ideal goals but the implementation does not go effectively. further researchers on evaluating the implementation and developing the effective model of verbal interaction between teacher and the students are needed. references ani. (2017). the analysis of young learners’ classroom interaction at an english course in asia duta wonomulyo. unpublished bachelor’s thesis. english education department of tarbiyah and teaching science faculty, uin alauddin makassar. castello, d. (2015). first language acquisition and classroom language learning: similarities and differences. retrieved june 3, 2019 from https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/documents/colle ge-artslaw/cels/essays/secondlanguage/firstlanguage-acquisition-and-classroomlanguage-learning-similarities-and differences.pdf. chowdhury, m. k., & rashid, m. a. (2014). classroom interaction: tension between belief and practice (a case study of a university teacher. global journal of human-social science: g linguistics & education, 14(3). chu, y. w. (2014). teachers’ beliefs in teaching english for kids at a kindergarten: a case study maria setyaningsih nernere teachers’ beliefs on teacher-students interaction in young learners’ english class 120 of students from the department of applied english. english language teaching, 7(10), 100-112. creswell, j. w. (2012). research design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches (4th ed.). california: sage publication. ellis, r. (2008). the study of second language acquisition. oxford: oxford university press. fajrinur. (2018). the beliefs of english teachers and their impacts. english education journal, 9(1), 145-165. hoque, m. e. (2016). the effect of the teacherstudents interaction: an evaluation of an efl classroom. the journal of efl education and research, 1(1), 23-27. kumpulainen, k., & wray, d. (2002). classroom interaction and social learning: from theory to practice. london: routledge falmer. makasau, r. (2015). adjacency pairs in teacherstudents interaction in english day program at mutiara persada elementary school yogyakarta. unpublished master’s thesis, sanata dharma university. nation, p. (2007). the four strands, innovation in language learning and teaching. retrieved from https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2167/ill t039.0. nugent, t. t. (2009). the impact of teacher-student interaction on student motivation and achievement. florida: university of central florida. petek, e. (2013). teachers’ beliefs about classroom interaction and their actual practices: a qualitative case study of a native and a nonnative english teacher in class application. procedia-social and behavioral sciences, 70(1), 1195-1199. pianta, r. c., hamre, b. k., & allen, j. p. (2012). teacher-student relationships and engagement: conceptualizing, measuring, and improving the capacity of classroom interactions. in s.l. christenson et al. (eds.), handbook of research on student engagement (pp. 365-386). berlin: springer. pinter, a. (2011). children learning second languages. london: palgrave macmillan. pujiastuti, r. t. (2013). classroom interaction: an analysis of teacher talk and student talk in english for young learners (eyl). journal of english and education, 1(1), 163-172. puspitasari, e. (2013). teachers’ beliefs about teaching english in a bilingual primary school. unpublished master’s thesis, sanata dharma university. utami, d. n. (2016). the efl teachers’ beliefs and their teaching practices. okara journal of languages and literature, 2(1), 135-144. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 85 project-based learning to develop students' ability and creativity in writing narrative story eva fitriani syarifah english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas majalengka, indonesia e-mail: eva.fsyarifah@gmail.com raynesa noor emiliasari english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas majalengka, indonesia e-mail: raynesanoor@gmail.com apa citation: syarifah, e. f., & emiliasari, r. n. (2018). project-based learning to develop students’ ability and creativity in writing narrative story. indonesian efl journal, 5(1), 8594. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v5i1.1627. received: 22-09-2018 accepted: 29-11-2018 published: 01-01-2019 abstract: in english language teaching, project-based learning is not only able to optimize language skills but also other skills such as critical and creative thinking. this study tries to investigate the use of project-based learning to develop students’ abilities and creativity in writing narrative text and the students’ perception towards the implementation of project-based learning in writing course. this study employed a qualitative approach by involving second semester students who take writing course. the results of this study indicated that project-based learning can help the students to develop their ability and creativity in writing narrative text in several point including their understanding of the topic, their knowledge about narrative genre namely social function, structure of text, and language feature. in addition, the students also showed their creativity through creating their story line and designing the illustration of the story. furthermore, the students gave positive views toward the implementation of project-based learning. they mentioned that they learned networking, collaborative learning, and team work through pbl. thus, projectbased learning can be one of alternative ways to teach writing in higher education. keywords: narrative text; project based learning; student creativity; teaching writing; writing skills. introduction writing is an essential skill that should be well mastered by students in higher education. through writing, students are able to convey their thoughts and communicate their ideas. in addition, writing can foster students’ creativity and critical thinking. moreover, writing skill is important because it determines students’ ability and success in learning english. however, based on the preliminary observation conducted at english education study program where researchers teach, among four english language skills, writing is a skill that is challenging to master by the students. from the results of interviews with some students, it can be concluded that the factors that cause students’ difficulties in writing an english essay are lack of understanding of the topic, the purpose of writing, and how to organize ideas into writing. this is in line with walker and rı´u (2008) who mention that many of the language learners are lack of confidence and interest in writing. in addition, lack of feedback from lecturers also influenced low enthusiasm of students in writing. dealing with the problems described above, a solution is needed to facilitate the students to develop their ability and mailto:eva.fsyarifah@gmail.com mailto:raynesanoor@gmail.com eva fitriani syarifah & raynesa noor emiliasari project-based learning to develop students’ ability and creativity in writing narrative story 86 creativity in writing. in this study, narrative essay becomes the focus of students’ writing. narrative essay is chosen based on the level of complexity since the participants of this study are the second semester students who can be categorized as beginners. the purpose of narrative is to entertain the reader or listener through the stories conveyed (derewianka & jones, 2012). considering the advantages and disadvantages which have been explained by some researchers, such as andrea and florica (2013), bell (2010), and castaneda (2014), project-based learning (pbl) can be an alternative that is possibly used to solve problem in writing. project-based learning has been applied in teaching and learning process in various levels of education in various countries, such as malaysia, australia, singapore and america. the implementation of projectbased learning is able to facilitate students in developing certain skills such as writing, providing learning processes that can be significantly beneficial for students, increasing creativity and motivation, and increasing discipline and collaboration of students (syahmadi, 2014). project-based learning (pbl) is a learning method that emphasizes students to deal with real issues and problems that are useful for them (fragoulis, 2009). in the learning process, projects or activities are used as media (bell, 2010). here, learners explore, evaluate, interpret, synthesize, and convey information about the project carried out. project-based learning is an activity carried out in the long term, studentcentered, and integrates real problems and practices. in project based-learning, students acquire knowledge and skills through collaboration in an agreed period of time to produce a real product and then present it. project-based learning makes it possible for teachers or lecturers to conduct authentic assessments during learning and project activities (collier, 2017). this is advantageous for the teacher or lecturer to assess the ability of students as a whole and conduct evaluations to improve subsequent learning activities. in general, project-based learning is divided into three stages namely planning, implementing, and presenting (educational technology division, 2006; essien, 2018; kalabzová, 2015). in planning stage, students are divided into groups then choose topics, conduct literature studies, look for sources of information needed, and arrange the resources needed. then, during the implementation, the students develop project ideas, collect data, share roles in groups, and carry out projects. last, the students in group presents the results of their project, and then the feedback obtained is used as individual reflection. fragoulis (2009) and bell (2010) mention that there are many benefits that can be obtained from the application of projectbased learning in teaching english as a foreign language, including; 1) providing useful learning and, in accordance with student needs, project-based learning produces products that benefit students in real contexts. what is produced by them can be used in their lives in accordance with the field of study; 2) creating optimal conditions for students to improve their english skills. project-based learning can help students to optimize english language skills comprehensively. not only writing, but also other language skills, such as speaking can be optimized when they present the final results of their project; 3) facilitating students to be actively involved in projects designed. students are required to be active in completing projects and learning activities so that no students are expected to be passive and apathetic; 4) increasing interest and motivation in learning english that is fun projects are carried out based on the interests and agreement of students and lecturers so that students are expected to complete the project voluntarily; and 5) improving the ability to work together since the project is done together so that good cooperation is expected between students. basically, there have been studies concerning the implementation of projectindonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 87 based learning which conducted by hasani, hendrayana, and senjaya (2017), larasati (2015), and zaki and rosa (2014). the studies showed that project-based learning enables students to improve their writing skills. hence, this study tries to investigate whether project-based learning can help students in higher education to develop their ability and creativity in writing. furthermore, it also tries to explore students’ perceptions towards the implementation of project-based learning in writing course. method this study is a qualitative study which can be specifically categorized as qualitative research evaluation program. as explained by emilia (2005), in this type of study, the researcher acts as designer and implementer of learning activities. thus, in this study, the researcher was the lecture who designed the teaching and learning program and implemented the project-based learning in writing course. this study was conducted at a private university in majalengka, west java. the site was chosen because the researchers were teaching staffs at the university so that the results of this study were expected to make a real contribution to better learning activities. the participants of the study were the second semester students of the english language education study program who take writing course. the data were obtained through field note, final product of the project, and interview. field notes were used to get data about learning activities, especially to see the development of students’ abilities in writing and working on projects. then, interviews were conducted twice, at the beginning and at the end of the learning activity to find out the students’ prior knowledge about narrative essay and students’ perception regarding the implementation of project-based learning in writing course. last, the final product of the project was the final result developed by students. the final project was a book containing narrative stories written by students in groups. the data gathered from the field notes were coded, categorized, and interpreted. then, the obtained data from the diagnostic test and final product of the project were analyzed by using genre analysis which includes the element of narrative essay. last, the results of interview were transcribed then coded, categorized, and interpreted. results and discussion there are two issues covered in the analysis, namely; 1) the development of students’ ability and creativity in writing narrative essay during the implementation of projectbased learning, and 2) the students’ perception towards the implementation of project-based learning. with regards to the development of students’ ability and creativity in writing narrative essay during the implementation of project-based learning, there are several main points covered, namely students’ understanding about the topic, students’ knowledge about narrative genre namely social function, structure of text, and language feature. in addition, the students also show their creativity through creating their story line and designing the illustration of the story. furthermore, the students give positive views toward the implementation of projectbased learning. they mentioned that they learned networking and collaborative learning through pbl. students’ ability and creativity in writing narrative essay with regards to the development of students’ ability and creativity in writing narrative essay during the implementation of projectbased learning, there are several main points covered, namely; 1) students’ understanding about the topic, 2) students’ understanding about the social function of narrative essay, 3) students’ understanding about the structure of narrative essay, and 4) students’ understanding about the language feature of narrative essay. in addition, related to students’ creativity, there are two points highlighted in this study, namely; 1) creating eva fitriani syarifah & raynesa noor emiliasari project-based learning to develop students’ ability and creativity in writing narrative story 88 story line and 2) designing the illustration of the story. during the implementation of projectbased learning in teaching writing, there are ten activities done. first, students and lecturer agreed on the theme of the project to be implemented. the theme is adjusted to the learning material being discussed or based on the syllabus. besides, themes can also be chosen based on students’ interest. second, students and lecturer determined the final outcome of the project. at the beginning of the project, after determining the theme, the final results of the project must also be determined, such as what projects will be made by students and the benefits of the project. then, students and lecturers drew up the project’s framework which includes drafting the framework of the project and making a timeline for each activity that must be achieved. fourth, lecturers helped students to map the collection of information needed. in projectbased learning, information is the main source for project completion. therefore, the lecturer or teacher must accompany students in mapping information that is needed for the project. fifth, students collected necessary information regarding the project. in this case, information related to the project must be collected as much as possible so that the project can run smoothly without lack of information or reference sources. the lecturer prepared students to compile and analyze data. the lecturer provided direction to compile and analyze data based on information or data that has been obtained. next, students compiled and analyzed data and information obtained. data and information that have been obtained were used to complete the project. students then chose information and data to be used. eight, the lecturer prepared students for the final activity. lecturers and students discussed the final project activities. it includes what would be done next or would the results be presented or made as exhibition depending on mutual agreement after the project was completed. then, students presented the final results of the project. students presented the final results of the project so that they could show their knowledge about the project that has been done. in addition, other aspects of skills could be seen when students present the final project. last, students evaluated projects that have been implemented. in project-based learning, students were required to evaluate the project that has been done. this was useful for them going forward, they could find out the shortcomings. in addition, the evaluation process was also be used as a reference by lecturers to improve the future teaching and learning process. understanding and developing topic based on the result of preliminary study, one of the problems mostly faced by the students in writing an essay was developing topic. some of them seemed to misunderstand several topics given. they did not have prior knowledge about the topic and did not know how to develop the topic. therefore, as what have been mentioned by emilia (2011), asking students to explore more about the topic will be very useful for them. during the implementation of projectbased learning, the students were encouraged to explore the topics that they are going to write. in this study, the topics were related to narrative story which include folklore, fairytale, fable, myth, legend, and others. thus, the students were asked to find information as many as they can, relating to folklore, fairytale, myth, fable, and legend. then, after they have understood about each of them, they needed to select a category that most interesting for them. the project was accomplished in a group. thus, the students were grouped based on their interest. after that, all of the students and lectures discussed about the final product of the project. then, it was determined that the final product of the project would be a story book for young learners. the story presented should reflect good moral values and originally from indonesia. the stories written by the students were mostly fable and legend. some of the stories written by them were “the legend of rawa pening”, “the rabbit and indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 89 the turtle”, “the grasshopper”, and “the stupid dog”. the results drawn from the interviews before and after the implementation of project-based learning indicated that students understand the topic that they were going to write. it was because they tried to explore more information and data about the topic before they started writing. they selected the data and information that they needed. thus, they can be able to have a good prior knowledge related to the topic. in the final product of the project, it can be seen that story book created by the students can be understood by others. this was proven during the presentation and evaluation session of the project where each group presented their book and it was well appreciated by others. below are the excerpts taken from the interviews with the same student before and after the implementation of pbl. student’s answer from interview before pbl excerpt#1 r : “what do you know about narrative?” s : “narrative is about fiction. the story is not real and fantasy.” student’s answer from interview before pbl excerpt#2 r : “what do you know about narrative?” s : “narrative is one of the genres that used to amuse the reader. the stories can be about legend, fairytale, myth, fable, and folklore.” the excerpts indicate that after the project was accomplished, the student knew narrative genre better than before. the students can create the stories well because they know the topic. they understand what should be developed in the stories, how the stories go on, and how to open the stories, create the conflict, give the resolution, and others. understanding the purpose or social function of narrative genre knowing the purpose of our writing is very important because it leads direction for us as the writer where we are going to. in this study, the purpose or social function of narrative texts was discussed by the students and lecture during collecting comprehensive data on narrative story. the students were not told explicitly about the purpose of narrative genre but they explored by themselves. in the beginning, most of the students did not know the purpose of narrative. some of them mentioned the purpose is to describe, to tell, or to explain a story. however, in the final results of the project, the stories developed by students have fulfilled the social function of a narrative text that is to entertain the reader. this is supported by data obtained from interviews where students can explain well about the social function of a narrative text. excerpt#3 r : “do you think that your story fits for young learners?” s : “yes, because i think, the elementary students or children who read our book story will be happy. r : “why do you think so?” s : “they will enjoy reading because the story that we made is easy to understand. and illustrations support the story and the kids will love it.” the excerpt shows that the students know the target readers so they create the story based on the characters of the readers. in this study, the stories written by the students were dedicated for young learners. understanding the structures of narrative genre as what have been explained by derewianka and jones (2012) and martin and rose (2008), the structure of a narrative genre consists of orientation, complication, and resolution. based on the results of the interview in the beginning of this study, there were still many students who did not know the structure of a narrative genre. the story books that they have written reflect their understanding of the structures of narrative story. the stories consist of what a narrative should be. it consists of orientation, complication, and resolution. some of stories were also added by moral values. some of students show their understanding during the interview session. excerpt#4 r : “what makes it difference, your understanding about the structures of narrative after this project?” s : “after this project, i know many about narrative genre. before, i do not care about the organization of it. “ eva fitriani syarifah & raynesa noor emiliasari project-based learning to develop students’ ability and creativity in writing narrative story 90 r : “so, what are the structures of narrative?” s : “well, it should consist of orientation, complication, resolution.” r : “can we have more than one complication in a story?” s : “yes, of course we can.” the excerpt shows that the students know the structure of a narrative text that makes it different from other genres. knowing and understanding the structure of genre is important to make a correct writing. understanding the language features of narrative genre the result drawn from the interview before the implementation of project-based learning showed that most of the students did not know the language feature of narrative text. some of them did not realize when they were asked to write some sentences as a part of narrative. they used present tense and did not use relevant conjunction. during writing the draft of story line, it was also found that the students needed time to learn more. therefore, feedbacks were really important. feedbacks were given by the lecture and peer. the storybooks created by the students indicate that the students have learned more about language features of narrative genre. they used simple past tense. they selected suitable conjunction to link the story lines. for example, in the orientation, they used “once upon a time”, “long time ago”, or “one day” to begin the story. to continue the story they use “then”, “after that”, and others. some examples can be seen in the following excerpts. excerpt#5 however, he was expelled by the villagers. all the people there were laughing at him and threw stones at him. excerpt#6 finally, the whole village turned into a large lake known as rawa pening. excerpt#7 in the middle of the journey the rabbit was so exhausted then he leaned on a tree with thick grass and he fell asleep there. while the turtle continued his journey until he reaches the finished line. in the excerpts, the italics words show the example of conjunction and the underlined words show the example of past tense that exist in students’ works. previously, in writing their draft, the students still used simple present. however, after revising for several times, the stories reflect their understanding to use appropriate tenses in writing narrative stories. creating story line writing becomes difficult for most of the students when they were asked to write long essay. however, in this project, they were asked to write a children book story. they were asked to create a good story line in each page. in the beginning, when the students were asked to write a draft, some groups write the story line in a long paragraph which consists of complicated sentences. the example can be seen in the following excerpt. excerpt#8 a long time ago, a mouse deer lived on the edge of the forest. the mouse deer liked to eat fruits, roots and branches. but he preferred vegetables at the farmer’s field. one day the mouse deer went into farmers’ field. he saw cucumbers that were ready to be picked. he immediately took one and ate it. then he saw the farmer stared at him. the mouse deer tried to escape but his feet hit the snare. the mouse deer struggled but he failed to escape. the mouse deer laid down on the ground and pretended to be dead. this paragraph was written in a page. the paragraph is quite long for elementary school students. therefore, after several revisions through feedback from their peers and lecturer, they can do better. excerpt#9 a long time ago, a mouse deer lived in the forest. he likes to eat and vegetables fruits. he took the vegetables from the farmer’s field. those excerpts gave examples of story lines that created by the students. for the students, it was not easy to create the story line but still they enjoyed the process. the students were find difficulties to link the story from one to other pages. designing illustration in the project, the students were agreed to make their own illustration manually. thus, they need to make illustration based on the story in each page. some of the students are good at drawing but some of them were not. however, they worked together to create the best illustration based on their own. all of indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 91 the students’ works meet their expectation. some of the students thought that they became more creative because they need to create the illustration that meet the story line. they were all satisfied with the final product of the project. here are some examples of the illustration on the students’ works. figure 1. examples of the illustration on the students’ works the examples show that the students tried to write children friendly story. they create colorful illustrations that explain the story lines in each page. in the interview, the students were asked about how they got the inspiration for the illustration. they mentioned that they discussed together with the members of the group. they shared their ideas so it became the draft. then, they tried to revise it for several times to make it better. students’ perception towards the implementation of project-based learning in writing course the results of the interview which was conducted after implementing project-based learning indicate that almost all students gave positive responses. they argued that working on projects was more fun because they could determine the final project output based on their interest and agreement. in addition, project that accomplished in groups can ease their difficulties, increase collaboration in groups, and share roles according to the strengths of each member. in other words, through project-based learning, they learn networking and collaborative work in joyful teaching and learning process. this in in line with kimsesiz, dolgunsöz, and konca (2017) who mentioned that project-based learning promotes students’ active involvement and cooperation during the teaching and learning process. the students’ perception towards the implementation of project-based learning can be seen in the following excerpt. excerpt#10 “i enjoy work in project because i can do the project together with friends. we can share our idea. if i cannot do “a”, the member of the group will help. for me, it really helps me because i cannot learn alone.” excerpt#11 “doing project is fun. i can do better. i understand the steps. i like work together. i like project better than written test.” excerpt#12 “this project is cool. someday i want to be a children story writer. i love drawing and writing the story line. it makes me happy” the excerpts indicate that the students were really enjoyed doing the project. through the project, they learned networking, collaborative learning, and team work. in addition, they did not feel alone to eva fitriani syarifah & raynesa noor emiliasari project-based learning to develop students’ ability and creativity in writing narrative story 92 accomplish the project. they can share their ideas, they can argue to each other, and so on. moreover, students thought that projectbased learning has a significant impact on developing their ability and creativity in writing narrative essay. in terms of writing skills, they acknowledged that there was an increase in their understanding of the topics they write, social functions, structures, and linguistic features of narrative essay. this is also supported by larasati (2015) who mentions that applying project-based learning in teaching writing can help the students to improve their writing ability. in addition, in developing the projects they agreed on, students were required to be creative in presenting stories through the illustrations they made so that the target readers who were elementary school students or junior high school students could better understand the contents of the story. conclusion from the analysis, it can be concluded that project-based learning contributes positively to the development of students’ ability and creativity in writing. in terms of students’ ability, it can be concluded that there are some aspects that are developed after implementing project-based learning which include students’ understanding of the topic, the purpose, the structures, and the linguistic features of narrative genre. then, in terms of creativity, the students reflect their creativity through creating story line and designing illustrations. the students argued that it was not easy to create the illustration that fit to the story line. however, they can do it well because they share and discuss together in group. moreover, related to students’ perception towards the implementation of project-based learning in writing course, it received positive responses from students. most students tend to prefer the final test in the form of project rather than the written test. besides, they mentioned that they learn more about networking, collaborative learning, and team work through projectbased learning. then, some students who were reluctant and assume that they were not good in writing can share and discuss well during the project. they did not feel like left behind by others. thus, project-based learning is very useful in teaching and learning writing. hence, it can be an alternative method that can be implemented either by lecturers or teachers in the process teaching and learning writing. acknowledgement we would like to extend our sincerest gratitude to dprm kemeristekdikti for fully funding this research, to english education study program of majalengka university that has always been supportive so that this study could be done, and also to the first year students who participated in this study. references andrea, p., & florica, m. (2013). project-based learning in technical higher education. applied mechanics and materials, 371, 739–743. bell, s. (2010). project-based learning for the 21st century: skills for the future. the clearing house, 39–43. doi: 10.1080/00098650903505415. collier, l. d. (2017). using a project-based language learning approach in the high school spanish classroom: perceived challenges and benefits. brigham young. derewianka, b., & jones, p. (2012). teaching language in context. oxford: oxford university press. educational technology division. (2006). projectbased learning handbook: educating the millennial learner. kuala lumour: ministry of education malaysia. emilia, e. (2005). a critical genre-based approach to teaching academic writing in a tertiary efl context in indonesia. melbourne: university of melbourne. emilia, e. (2011). pendekatan genre based dalam pengajaran bahasa inggris: petunjuk bagi guru. bandung: rizqi press. essien, a. m. (2018). the effects of project-based learning on students’ english language ability (pp. 438–443). the 2018 international academic research conference, vienna. fragoulis, i. (2009). project-based learning in the teaching of english as a foreign language in greek primary schools: from theory to practice. english language teaching, 2(3), 113–119. hasani, a., hendrayana, a., & senjaya, a. (2017). using project-based learning in writing an indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 93 educational article: an experience report. universal journal of educational research, 5(6), 960–964. kalabzová, m. (2015). the application of project based learning in the english classrooms. university of west bohemia. kimsesiz, f., dolgunsöz, e., & konca, m. y. (2017). the effect of project based learning in teaching efl vocabulary to young learners of english: the case of pre-school children. international journal of languages’ education and teaching, 5(4), 426–439. larasati, a. (2015). improving students’ writing skills through project-based learning technique at grade xi of sman 2 sleman in the academic year of 2014/2015. yogyakarta state university, yogyakarta. martin, j. r., & rose, d. (2008). genre relations, mapping culture. london: equinox publishing ltd. syahmadi, h. (2014). bedah curriculum 2013 bagi guru bahasa inggris. bandung: cv. adoya mitra sejahtera. walker, r., & rı´u, c. p. (2008). coherence in the assessment of writing skills. elt journal, 62, 18–28. doi: 10.1093/elt/ccm074. zaki, a., & rosa, r. n. (2014). using project based learning in teaching writing a procedure text to senior high school students. jelt, 2(2), 1–7. eva fitriani syarifah & raynesa noor emiliasari project-based learning to develop students’ ability and creativity in writing narrative story 94 indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 39 reflective reading journal in teaching writing yanuarti apsari department of english education, faculty of language education, ikip siliwangi, indonesia e-mail: yanuar.apsari1@gmail.com apa citation: apsari, y. (2018). reflective reading journal in teaching writing. indonesian efl journal, 4(2), 39-47. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v4i2.1374. received: 18-03-2018 accepted: 20-05-2018 published: 01-07-2018 abstract: a number of studies suggested that journal writing is a supportive tool that encourages learners’ reflective activity and that reflective thinking skills can be taught and learned. accordingly, this study investigated the implementation of reflective reading journal in teaching writing as well as the benefits that the students obtained after writing reflective reading journal. this study employed a case study research design which used three data collection including observation, interview and students’ texts. the results of the study revealed that reflective reading journal can be used effectively to improve students’ writing skill through several ways. first, the students were required to produce clearly defined paragraphs which include two sections. the first section included referencing data, such as author and title, and a paraphrase of the reading. the second section contained a response to a specific aspect of the reading. second, the participants of the research were involved in decision making of topics for reading. third, they wrote reflective reading journal weekly. fourth, teacher gave feedback to students’ journal entries. in addition,the study also showed that there were some benefits, namely development of ideas, improvement of textual coherence, and improvement of textual cohesion. keywords: reflective reading journal; writing; benefit; efl; elt. introduction writing is one of the important skills in teaching english. harmer (2004, p. 31) states that writing has always formed part of the syllabus in the teaching english. as one of the four language skills, writing has always occupied place in most english language course. one of the reasons is that more and more people need to learn to write in english for occupational or academic purposes, especially for english department students, they need to learn writing and prepare themselves for the final academic assignment. therefore, in terms of student’s needs, writing ability is necessary. according to gebhard (1996), writing involves several components which have to be considered including word choice, use of appropriate grammar, syntax, mechanics, and organization of ideas into coherent and cohesive form. accordingly, in producing writing students need to focus on how to generate ideas, how to organize them coherently, how to use discourse markers, and rhetorical conventions to put them cohesively into a written text, how to revise text for clearer meaning, how to edit text for appropriate grammar, and how to produce a final product (brown, 2001). for that reason, writing is difficult to be acquired by students (alwasilah, 2001). referring to the problem above, hamp and heasley (2006, p.5) suggested that the most obvious way you can help yourself become a good writer is by writing. additionally, zamel (cited in nunan, 1991, p. 88) believes that writing skill can develop rapidly when students’ concern and interests are acknowledged and they are given numerous opportunities to write. thus, journal writing can be used as teaching and learning tool to develop students’ writing skill (harmer, 2001, p. 339 & 2004, p. 127, alwasilah, 2005, p. 105). many studies have been done to investigate the effectiveness of journal writing in language teaching to increase students’ yanuarti apsari reflective reading journal in teaching writing 40 academic achievement. a research by campbell (1998) on journal writing proved that journal writing can help the second language learners develop their oral and written skill. in addition, another study conducted by chung (2001) revealed that journal writing helped to improve students’ writing fluency in korean, and created a positive attitude toward writing in korean. furthermore, gallagher’s study (1997) indicated that journal writing practice developed cohesion and text organization among the japanese students studying english as a foreign language. reflective reading journal is a form of journal writing. zamel (1992) states that reflective reading journal is the place where students’ reactions to text are first recorded and reflected upon; where students’ progress association, questions, and thought are written; and with which students make immediate connections between reading and writing. zanichkowsky (2004) suggests that in writing reflective reading journal, students are required to produce clearly defined paragraphs which include two sections. the first section included referencing data, such as author and title, and a paraphrase of the reading. the second sections contained a response to a specific aspect of the reading, rather than a general reaction to the reading as a whole. producing written response to text requires the student to analyze, from a number of different perspectives, the issues, themes, or concepts presented in that text. in composing a response, the student must think and rethink the text, focusing attention on the global elements of text, that is, on its overall meaning. attending to the global elements of a text means that the student comes to understand its meaning by drawing connections to personal experience, knowledge, and other texts read. accordingly, journal writing helps to train students to express their ideas (lazarus, 1999). relating to the response to the reading text,the students are also encouraged to reflect on the learning event and exercise their judgement about the content and the process of learning that enable them to think critically (norris and ennis, 1989, p. 35). this means that having students compose a response also teaches them critical thinking skills, such as analysis, interpretation, inference, and synthesis of knowledge. each of these has been identified as a major component of the process of meaning construction (spires, huntley-johnston, and huff-man, 1993). moreover, cooper & kiger (2003) propose that for the effective implementation of reflective reading journal, the teacher should take the several stages into consideration. they are: 1) the teacher should explain the idea of journal writing to students; 2) the teacher writes a journal entry in the classroom in order to show students how this process is done; 3)with students, the teacher sets how frequently they should write in their journals and how often they should turn in their journals so that he or she can read andcomment on them; 4) students should be free to write on any topic that interests them; 5) during the initial stages of journal writing, teachers should set some group processing sessions in order to evaluate how the process is going and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of journal writing. based on the description above, it can be implied that in the procedure in writing reflective reading journal is in line with the suggestion of harmer (2004) that it is useful to provide the students opportunity to express their feelings and opinion freely. considering the importance of journal in teaching writing, this study aims to investigate the implementation of reflective reading journal in teaching writing as well as the benefits that the students obtained after writing reflective reading journal. method this study employed a qualitative approach which is considered appropriate to understand the process of reflective reading journal by which events and actions take place (maxwell, 1996, p. 19). moreover, this study can also be considered as a case study since it was conducted in a small scale, a single case, focus indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 41 on one particular instance of educational practice that is teaching reading with the researcher acted as the teacher (stake, 1995 cited in emilia, 2005). the study was conducted in english education study program at stkip siliwangi bandung, where the researcher is one of lecturers. the participants of this studywere second semester students in english department who are taking the subject of writing for general purposes. in gaining the data, this study employed various techniques such as classroom observation, interview and students’ texts. in this study, interview was used to gain specific information or very useful data about students’ feeling or opinion which is notaccessible through observation (merriam, 1998). finally, students’ reflective reading journal during the study were collected and analyzed to gain information regarding the development of their writing skills after writing reflective reading journals. the students’ journals were analyzed by focusing on three aspects of writing such as development ideas, textual coherence, and textual cohesion (gebhard, 1996). in analyzing the data, the researcher integrated and related the findings to the background of the study, mainly to the research questions, theories, and the methodology for classifying the data into manageable units as suggested by emilia (2008, p. 201). results and discussion relating to the research questions, the data from each source is presented under two themes: the implementation of reflective reading journal and the benefits that the students obtained from writing reflective reading journal. the implementation of reflective reading journal the teaching program consists of a series of activities: 1) one session of a preliminary phase; 2) one session of explicit teaching of reflective reading journal and 3) ten sessions of practicing writing reflective reading journal. 1) preliminary phase of the teaching program the activities in the preliminary phase comprised the introduction to reflective reading journal and negotiating the topics for the reading texts. each activity will be discussed below. in the first meeting, the lecturer introduced the students to the program. it was conducted mainly for providing overall information and explicit direction regarding the course, and for giving explanation of the purpose of classroom activities. the information covered the length of the course that would take 12 meetings at least 90 minutes for each session. other requirements necessary for the study such as taking part in interview, filling in questionnaires and writing reflective reading journal weekly were also clarified. as recommended by peyton & staton (1991) that the journal is written at least once a week. furthermore, in this program, ten topics for the teaching program were offered to the students, including will net replace thinking?, till death do us part, new discoveries in psychology, modern trend in management, staying healthy, the hawaian island, shopping malls in the united stated, how disease spread?, electronic mail, and elephant.these topics were offered because they represents several genres such as description, article, short story, argumentative, report and news item. the respondents under this research were involved in decision making of topics for reading. this is inline with gebhard’s (1996) statement that students are much more likely to read with enthusiasm if they have made the decision about what they read. the teaching program conducted in this study was adopted from the work of cooper & kiger (2003). it was set out for twelve sessions starting from february to may 2016 and the duration for each meeting was 90 minutes.the teaching phase of this program can be broken down into two sections comprising the explicit teaching of reflective reading journal writing and practicing of yanuarti apsari reflective reading journal in teaching writing 42 reflective reading journal writing and this will be elaborated further below. 2) the explicit teaching of reflective reading journal writing in the attempt to make the explicit teaching well-organized, the first notion to explain was its definition. this explanation was followed by explaining the components of reflective reading journal. reflective reading journals generally consist of frequent, short, formal writing assignments that document students’ reading process (chick, 2004). it consists of three sections, including: 1) a title and some form of referencing for the material,2) an outline of the material, and 3) a personal reaction or response to the content of the material. the students were required to include a personal reaction or response to each article. it is a central component to the support for reflective reading journal. in composing written response to text,the studentswere required to analyze from a number of different perspectives, the issues, themes, or concepts presented in that text. in other words, the students must think and rethink about the text, focusing attention on the global elements of text, that is, on its overall meaning. attending to the global elements of a text means that the student comes to understand its meaning by drawing connections to personal experience, knowledge, and other texts read. this is in accordance with enright et.al’s (1998) statement that they must integrate and connect the information presented by the author with what they already know. 3) the practicing of reflective reading journal writing this section particularly describes the implementation of reflective reading journal. the concept of reflective reading journal adopted in this study was drawn from chick (2004) and zanichkowsky (2004). the students were required to produce clearly defined paragraphs which include two sections. the first section included referencing data, such as author and title, and a paraphrase of the reading. the second sections contained a response to a specific aspect of the reading, rather than a general reaction to the reading as a whole. regarding the activities of text modelling, the students were distributed some copied of text and showed them how to make a journal. by providing students with a model or example, they can better understand how to compose a piece of writing more effectively and appropriately (seow, 2002). furthermore, the teacher carefully read what students have posted in their journals in order to provide appropriate responses. the teacher wrote a comment at the end of journal entries which showed that they have been read. for example, a teacher wrote, ‘well done’, ‘i enjoyed reading your journal’, which is supportive comment but not very informative. in the final journal entries, it was found that most students’ writing quality developed. this might due to the effect of the feedback that they received on their journal entries. the students were frequently asked to elaborate on ideas they addressed when the meaning was not clear. thus, teachers’ response to students’ journal entries is important as can enhance students’ motivation to write more and provides them with other points they can address (peyton & reed, 1990, p. 3). the benefits of writing reflective reading journal based on the data from interview and students’ journal entries, there are a lot of benefits that the students obtained after writing reflective reading journal. it is in line with alwasilah’s (2005) statement that journal provides a variety of benefits that might be obtained by the students. the benefits are related towriting skill development such as development of expressing ideas and opinion, improvement of textual cohesion and coherence. the discussion of which will be presented below. 1) development of ideas with regard to writing ability, all respondents said that reflective reading journal helps them develop their writing skill. as confessed by r#3 that before practising to write reflective indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 43 reading journal she cannot develop the ideas in writing. she also did not understand the gramatical rules. but, now she can understand how to compose a good writing. her understanding in grammar is also developed. then, she got a lot of vocabularies from the activity.it is relevant with the findings of song (1997), chung (2001), and farrah (2012) that journal writing developed students’ writing quality. this finding also is supported by the data from document analysis. one of the main areas of improvement that can be found in the first entry compared to the final entry is development of ideas. in the first entry, it was found that most students produced short sentences in simple language to expose their feelings or to reflect on their understanding on the text they read. it can be seen in the following excerpt: in her entry entitled “will the net replace thinking?”, r#3 she did not write the journal based on their understanding on the text they read, but they just made the text shorter. she just picked and copied one paragraph in the introduction. furthermore, in that introduction she did not develop the idea stated by bernard cooperman. that was an important point on which she could have elaborated giving her opinion about the good side of internet. rather, she abruptly move to another point stating about plagiarism. she said, “the problem is no longer plagiarism of huge fownloaded block of text-software can detect that now, when the teacher enters a few lines of a paper.” this finding indicates that she did not read some resources such as textbooks and articles to collect information about the topics that they were writing about. this is irrelevant with the recommendation of enright et al. (1998) that the reader should integrate and connect the information presented by the author with what they already know. however, in the final journal entries most students had more developed ideas.it can be seen from the body of their entries, they developed the main ideas that they presented in the introduction.it can be seen from the following exceprt, r#3 tried to connectthe information from the text with the information from other sources: this finding is relevant with the statement of lazarus (1999) that journal writing helps to train students to express their ideas.this might due to the effect of the feedback that they received. the students were frequently asked to elaborate on ideas they addressed when the meaning was not clear. this is in accordance with taylor’s (1991) suggestion that in order to achieve considerable improvement students require feedback on their writing work. 2) improvement of textual coherence the analysis of students’ journal entries revealed the differences between the first and the final entries in terms of textual coherence. in the first entry, most students did not present unified pieces of writing as they frequently made sudden shifts without preparing the reader for doing so, which negatively affected the overall meaning. an example of this can be found in r#8 entry, represented low achiever. will the net replace thinking? net thinkers are said to generate work quickly and make connections easily. “they are more in control of fact than we were 40 years ago” says bernard cooperman, a professor at the university of maryland. but they also value information from gathering over deliberation, breadth over depth. (r#3) the pollution in the ocean can spread disease. the pollutant such as chemicals from fertilizers and human waste can pollute the ocean and it can cause the increase of algae. according to oxford dictionary, algae is a very small plants that are mainly found in water and it provides a home for cholera. according to www.wikipedia.com, cholera is an infection in the small intestine caused by bacterium vibrio cholera. it can grow in the dirty water and in uncooked food such as selfish. (r#3) yanuarti apsari reflective reading journal in teaching writing 44 in this quote, r#8 indicated the effect of computer technology on young thinking skills. but, she did not explain to the reader in what ways it can influence the thinking skills and why it is important for the net thinkers to value breadth over depth and other people’s argument over their own. r#8 abruptly shifted to another point proposing several research findings on the effect of internet. it can be seen below. in this quote, it is clear that one paragraph tells about several topics. the occurance of these shifts sounds confusing to the readers as it distract their understanding on the point that the writer is highlighting. this finding is in accordance with the view of nunan (1999) that in term of skills, producing coherent, fluent and extended piece of writing is probably the most difficult thing to do in language learning. in the final journal entries, students writing ability showed the improvement. their writng tended to show logical sequence in presenting their arguments. their writing appeared more coherent in that they started with a clear introduction and supported in with relevant information. this made their entries develop sequentially while their arguments sound more organized and convincing to the readers. for example, r#6 represented low achiever began her final journal entry on the topic, “how disease spread”, with the following paragraph: in the subsequent paragraph, r#6 discussed the people’s movement as the cause of disease spread, with the following paragraph: in the third paragraph, r#6 explained the solution of the problem stated above. she said, “for example, by injecting the sterilization of pilgrims who will travel to the holy land of mecca. so they will not carry the virus when leaving and when returning from mecca”. then, she explained another causes of the spread of disease and its solution. she concluded her entry by commenting the importance of cleanliness. this finding is relevant with the statement of dorn and soffos (2005, p. 47) that writing helps students integrate different sources of information and organize their thought, thus, their thinking is more fluid, flexible and tangible. 3) improvement of textual cohesion the analysis of students’ journal entries revealed the differences between the first and the final entries in terms of textual cohesion. in the following text, the special attention is used for cohesion devices. analysis of daniel davis says, we can find a whole pages of stuff (many kinds of subject matters). we need to know on the web fast. computer technology has the biggest influence to the shape of young thinking skills. net thinkers at school appear to value breadth over depth and other people’s arguments over their own. (r#8) kenneth kotovsky, a psychology professor at carnegia-mellon university in pittsburgh who has examined the study habits of young people says that the students first recourse for any kind of information is the web. it is absolutely automatic. according to bernard cooperman, a history professor at the university of the maryland on the good side net thinkers are said to generate work quickly and make connection easily. they are more in control of fact than we were 40 years ago. the educators woried if the net thinkers at school appear to value breadth over depth and other people’s arguments over their own. (r#8) there are many things that cause diseases spread easily. howeover, people are often unaware of it. but, this should be avoided to prevent the spread of disease. this article is about the cause that may lead to the spread of disease that need to be known by the reader. thus, things that can trigger the spread of disease can be avoided. (r#6) this is how the disease spreads from one country to another. when people move from one place to another, they bring the germs, bacteria and viruses. they spread the virus easily since infectious disease spread through direct contact, food, insect or airbone method. (r#6) indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 45 students’ first entries showed that their writing lacked cohesion devices. more specifically, students rarely used transition markers which resulted in making their writing less connected. as a result, their journals were difficult to understand. it can be seen from the following journal entry: the above excerpt from r#9 seemed to lack transition devices. she tended to start every sentence with the same noun phrase “the internet”. it would be more cohesive if she instead replaced “the internet” with the subject pronoun “it”. similarly, using enumeration devices such as first, second, third, and finally makes text more cohesive and easier to understand. in the final entry, students used more cohesion devices that made their writing more tied together and, in turn, coherent. an example of a cohesive excerpt from the final entries can be found in r#3’s entry where she used some cohesion devices such as for example, before, as a result, and therefore: another example can be reviewed in r#9 entry about the aging population in industrialized countries. r#9used some cohesion devices such as now, in the past, but, and thus to connect his ideas together. she said: for practicality reason, the analysis was limited to transition markers such as “on the other hand, on the contrary, in fact, therefore, as a result, for example, for instance, in addition” and enumeration devices like “firstly and finally.” the results revealed that the nine students included in the analysis used a total of 19 transition markers in the first journal entries and 128 markers in the final entries. the average number of transition devices each student used in the first entry was 2.1 compared to an average of 14.2 in the final entry. this means that the number of the transition markers used in the final entries was almost seven times as much as the number of those used in the first entries. the findings above were in accordance with the finding of gallagher (1997) that journal writing practice developed cohesion and text organization among the japanese students studying english as a foreign language. conclusion this study investigates the implementation of reflective reading journal in teaching writing. the concept of reflective reading journal adopted in this study was drawn from chick (2004) and zanichkowsky (2004). in this study, the students were required to produce clearly defined paragraphs which include two sections. the first section included referencing data, such as author and title, and a paraphrase of the reading. the second sections contained a response to a specific aspect of the reading, internet has contributed so much to society, company/industry, and government. internet presence has been supporting the effectiveness and efficiency of company operations, particularly its role as a means of communication, publication and the means to obtain information needed by a business entity and form a business entity or other organization. role the internet is currently the most commonly used by people of relatively young age, students rely heavily on the internet to complete their task. (r#9) let’s begin with the explanation about the spread of germ from person to person. germ can spread easily from person to person. for example, if people move from one city or country to another, they often bring a new germ that may not have been present in the region before. as a result, people who already live there become ill more easily and die more often because they don’t have an immunity to protect their body from the spread of germ. therefore, to solve the problem we have to protect our bodies with giving immunization. (r#3) now the country is very different from developed countries. in the past, older people live with their family members and have responsibility to work or just taking care of work around the house. but now the married children prefer to leave the elderly and living alone. thus, older people may be cut off from family ties. (r#9) yanuarti apsari reflective reading journal in teaching writing 46 rather than a general reaction to the reading as a whole. furthermore, this study revealed that there are a lot of benefits that the students obtained after writing reflective reading journal. the benefits are related to writing skill development such as development of expressing ideas and opinion, improvement of textual cohesion and coherence. this means that reflective reading journal writing develops the students’ writing quality. based on the conclusions above, some recommendations are suggested to the teachersand other researchers. teachers need to provide the students opportunity to select the reading material in applying reflective reading journal. students are much more likely to read with enthusiasm if they have made the decision about what they read (gebhard, 1996). as a result, they can select the reading material that can meet students’ need and that are interesting to them. furthermore, concerning the benefits that the students obtained from writing reflective reading journal, it is better for the students to get into the habit of writing regularly. in this case, they should be encouraged to write continuously on any topic of their choice. finally, as this research only concerns with the use of reflective reading journal at university level, it will be beneficial if there will be other research on the use of reflective reading journal for lower levels. references alwasilah, a. c. (2001). language, culture, and education: a potrait of temporary indonesia. bandung: andira. alwasilah, a. c. (2005). pokoknya menulis. bandung: kiblat buku utama. brown, h. d. (2001). teaching by principles: an interactive approach to language teaching. white plains, ny: addison wesley longman. campbell, c. (1998). teaching second-language writing: interacting with text. pacific grove: heinle & heinle. chick, n. (2004). reading logs. retrieved february, 28th, 2016 from: http://www.uwc.edu/uwc/depts/english/teaching_ tips/chickrlogs.htm chung, h. y. (2001). reflective journal writing in the foreign language classroom (korean ii). unpublished ma thesis, faculty of rosier school, university of southern california. cooper, j. d., & kiger, n. d. (2003). literacy: helping children construct meaning (5thed). boston: houghton mifflin. emilia, e. (2005). a critical genre based approach to teaching academic writing in a tertiary efl context in indonesia. australia: the university of melbourne. emilia, e. (2008). menulis tesis dan disertasi. bandung, indonesia: alfabeta. enright, m., grabe, w., mosenthal, p., mulcahy-ernt, p., & schedl, m. (1998). a toefl 2000 framework for testing reading comprehension: a working paper. princeton, nj: educational testing service. gallagher, c. (1997). journal writing in efl: a systemic functional account. language research bulletin, 12, 57-73. gebhard, j. g. (1996). teaching english as a foreign or second language. ann arbor: the university of michigan press. hamp, l., & heasly, b. (2006). study writing (2nd ed.). cambridge: cambridge university press. harmer, j. (2001). the practice of english language teaching. england: longman. harmer, j. (2004). how to teach writing. uk: pearson education limited. lazarus, k. (1999). journal writing: a path to academic writing for basic writers. journal for teachers of at-risk college writers (pp. 7-18). portsmouth nh: boyntory cook publisher, inc. maxwell, j. a. (1996). qualitative data analysis: a source book of new methods. london: beverly hills. merriam, s. b. (1998). qualitative research and case study applications in education. california: josseybass, inc. norris, s. p., & ennis, r. h. (1989). evaluating critical thinking. victoria: midwest publication. nunan, d. (1991). language teaching methodology: a text book for teachers. london: prentice hall international (uk) ltd. nunan, d. (1999). second language teaching and learning. boston: heinle & heinle publisher. peyton, j. k., & reed, l. (1990). dialogue journal writing with nonnative speakers: a handbook for teachers. alexandria: teachers of english for speakers of other languages, inc. peyton, j. k., & staton, j. (1991). writing our lives: reflection on dialogue journal writing with adults learning english. englewood cliffs, nj: a simon & schuster company. seow, a. (2002). the writing process and process writing. in j. c. richard, & w. a. renandya (eds.), methodology in language teaching: an anthology of current practice (pp. 315-320). cambridge: cambridge university press. indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 47 spires, h. a., lu h. j., & lois e. h. (1993). developing a critical stance toward text through reading, writing, and speaking. journal of reading, 37, 114–22. zamel, v. (1992). writing one’s way into reading. tesol quarterly, 26(3), 463-485. zanichkowsky, e. (2004). reading logs: instructions and grading guidelines. retrieved from http://www.uwc.edu/uwc/depts/english/teaching_ tips indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 27 l1 and l2 reading attitudes and their contribution toward reading habit sri rejeki murtiningsih english language education department, faculty of language education, universitas muhammadiyah yogyakarta, indonesia e-mail: jackie.murt@umy.ac.id apa citation: murtiningsih, s. r. (2020). l1 and l2 reading attitudes and their contribution toward reading habit. indonesian efl journal, 6(1), 27-34. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v6i1.2635. received: 22-07-2019 accepted: 21-09-2019 published: 01-01-2020 abstract: the aims of the study are threefold. the first is to investigate the reading attitudes toward first language (l1) and second language (l2) in an english as a foreign language (efl) context. the second aim is to find out the correlation between both variables. the last objective of the study is to find out the contribution of l2 reading attitude toward reading achievement. this study involved two sets of questionnaires adapted from yamashita (2004) and mikami (2016) and 177 freshmen, sophomore and junior english language education department students. the data revealed that means of reading attitude toward l1 and l2 are not significantly different with 2.60 and 2.65 respectively, and that reading attitude in l1 is strongly correlated with reading attitude in l2 (r = 0.637). an interesting finding of the present study pointed out that although students have positive attitude in l2, it does not automatically motivate them to spend their time reading. external factors such as teachers and specific reading programs both in l1 and l2 seem to play bigger roles in shaping students’ reading attitudes. pedagogical implications are also discussed keywords: reading attitude in l1; reading attitude in l2; reading habit; external factors. introduction a plethora of research has indicated that reading in l1 and l2 are strongly correlated to each other (yamashita, 2007; akbari, ghonsooly, ghanzanfari, and shahriari, 2017; sparks, patton, ganschow, and humbach, 2012). a number of research had been conducted in different contexts in which english was considered as a foreign language. yamashita (2007), for instance, asserts that if students have positive attitude to reading in l1, they will more likely have the same attitude toward l2 reading. this study coincides with mori’s (2002), who like yamashita (2007), also conducted his study in japan. similarly, granena, munoz, and tragant (2015) contend that positive attitude toward reading l1 has a positive impact on reading attitude in l2. this is in line with akbari et al’s (2017) study which argues that reading attitude in l1 and l2 among iranian language learners is strongly correlated (r = 0.7). studies also show that reading, both intensively and extensively, can lead to positive results. nation (2007, 2009) asserts that the more reading students do, the larger their vocabulary would become, which in turn, will improve their english competence. a similar notion is proposed by krashen (2004). these studies indicate that students who read a lot will likely have better achievement compared to those who read less. in terms of academic achievement, akbari et al (2017) maintain that although l1 and l2 reading attitudes are highly correlated, only l2 reading attitude had significant contribution toward l2 reading achievement, not the l1. reading interest in indonesia has been considered low. claims have been made by many politicians about this issue as issued in newspapers, and said claims were based on the frequency on public library visits (cnn indonesia, march 27, 2018). while this is a strong statement, credible and reliable research on the reading in indonesia has been quite scant – if not none. iftanti (2012) and masduqi (2014)’s studies are among the very few research regarding reading areas in indonesian contexts. iftanti (2012) conducted a survey on students’ habit in reading english books in and the results show that indonesian students’ reading habit is low. another research in reading was conducted by masduqi (2014) and claims that reading in university level in indonesia is also low. although claims have been made, there has been very limited study on the level of reading attitude in l1 and l2 in indonesia. an extensive study on reading habits, however, was conducted by iftanti (2012) in university contexts with over 500 participants involved. the study mentions that “although the students have read english since elementary school, they do not indicate to have good reading habits” (p. 149). the particular study presented quite interesting data. for example, more than 50% of the participants showed that they read english books and other types of literature at least an hour every day, around 17% read less than an hour every day, more than 20% did not always sri rejeki murtiningsih l1 and l2 reading attitudes and their contribution toward reading habit 28 read every day, and only 7% seldom read. in addition, the study also found that the participants read different types of english texts, e.g. comics, textbooks, nonfiction, poems, etc. both in printed forms or e-books. while iftanti’s claim that the amount of time spent to read is one of the most important things to measure one’s reading habit might be true, agreement has not been reached among scholars on how much time for someone to read to fall on the category of having a good or bad reading habit. reading a book for an hour every day for pleasure can be a great achievement for a typical indonesian student who spend 8 hours or more a day on campus or school. on one hand, iftanti’s (2012) study reveals that indonesian students showed positive attitude toward reading efl because the majority of the participants had considerably high reading habits. on the other hand, iftanti’s study also lacks information of the participants’ reading habit or attitude in l1 and how they relate to their language achievements. based on the above arguments, the present study aims to answer the following research questions: 1. what is students’ reading attitude toward l1? 2. what is students’ reading attitude toward l2? 3. how does l1 reading attitude correlate with the l2 reading attitude? 4. how does l2 reading attitude contribute to the l2 reading habit? the study is expected to shed the light on the reading attitude of indonesian students and investigate how the attitude in l1 and l2 play a role in their reading achievement. theoretical framework the theory underlining this study is a functional approach of attitude offered by katz (1960) who defines attitudes as a tendency in which someone assesses some objects in a certain way. attitude is observable because it can be expressed in verbal and nonverbal ways. when a person has a positive attitude toward something, he would have positive opinions and his behavior shows that he favors it. katz (1960) argues that attitude comprises of three main components: affective, beliefs or cognitive, and behavior or action. affective refers to “the intensity of feeling of [an] individual for or against” something (p. 168), which can be verbally expressed; therefore, it would be an opinion. meanwhile, cognitive deals with the complexity of beliefs that an individual holds. lastly, behavior or action is the manifestation of the attitude. according to katz (1960), an individual with a favorable attitude may show different types of behavior. for example, two students may have positive attitude toward reading, but one would go and find books to read whenever he feels like reading, while the other students would read only if someone gives him a text. similar studies on interaction between the components were also conducted by ajzen and fishbein (1977) and lee and schallert (2014). out of these three components, affective and cognitive components play bigger roles on l2 proficiency compared to other predictors, i.e. personality and demographic components (onwuegbuzie, bailey, and daley, 2010). a myriad of research had been conducted in the affective components of l2 learning (horwitz, horwitz, & cope, 1986; martinez, aricak, and jewell, 2008). one of the most influential studies in this area deals with l2 learning anxiety (horwitz et al., 1986), which found that the intensity of anxiety can influence l2 learners’ proficiency. sparks et al (2012) conducted a longitudinal study on the influence of cognitive components in l1 and l2. the research shows that cognitive ability in l1 played an important role in cognitive ability not only in l1, but also in l2 proficiency. in the context of reading attitude in l1 and l2, yamashita (2004), did not clearly state that he uses katz’s theory of functional approach of attitude, but he employed the three components to base his study. yamashita’s (2004) questionnaires, which is adapted in the present study, only used two components of katz’s (1960) theory, i.e. affective and cognitive components. reading in l1 and l2 reading, while it is considered as a receptive skill, needs several skills to work at the same time. to be able to understand a text, an individual needs to accurately recognize what the words mean and understand how they work together (babayigit, 2014). many would find reading l1 texts to be easy; this, however, may not be necessarily true in reading l2 texts. those who use characters in their l1 like chinese, korean, or arabic language learners, for example, may have to learn to read the alphabetical letters when they learn other languages. thus, they will have additional challenges to understand a totally different orthography. those who use alphabets when learning an l2 will still have to deal with a grammatical structure which might be totally different from their l1. a longitudinal study was conducted by sparks et al (2012) which provided extensive exposure to their participants in their l1. it turns out that the exposure did not only improve their l1 reading achievement during a time span of 10 years, but their reading achievement contributed significantly toward their l2 reading achievement. this means indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 29 that if a teacher exposes his students with l1 reading, this will somehow contribute to their l2 achievement. their findings show that cognitive components (e.g. reading skills) used in l1 can be employed in the l2 reading. transfer of reading skills in l1 and l2 has been vastly researched. keung and ho (2009) argue that cognitive skills in l1 reading like phonological and letter-recognition are transferred to l2 reading. their research revealed that students’ knowledge in pronouncing words is quite useful when they read in l2. a similar notion is suggested by edele and stanant (2015) who state that two different languages might have a certain level of similarity which may allow an individual to transfer the knowledge from one language to another more easily. this will help an l1 reader to understand l2 texts better. relations between reading attitude toward reading habit the notion of attitude influence behavior, such as engagement and frequency in reading, will highly likely lead to higher achievement (mckenna, kear & ellsworth, 1995; onwuegbuzie et al, 2010). reading engagement and frequency is something that is observable and replicable, which refers to behavior. research has shown inconsistent results regarding the relation between attitude and achievement. martinez et al (2008) found that reading attitude is strongly positively correlated with reading achievement within a four month period. on the other hand, an interesting finding is offered by camiciottoli (2001) which showed that despite a favorable reading attitude, the engagement shown by the participants was quite low. lee and schallert (2010) argue that reading frequency in l1 is strongly correlated with l1 reading achievement, and so is l2 reading frequency with l2 reading achievement. this is also in line with spark et al (2012). factors influencing reading attitude to understand reading attitude better, it is important to understand factors that influence them. an array of research found that several external factors significantly contributed to l2 reading attitude. factors that can become the predictors include access to reading materials, teachers’ support, reading instructions, and examination (lee & scharllert, 2012; briggs & walter, 2016; spark et al, 2012). access to reading materials can improve students’ attitude toward reading because students can exercise their preference towards the types of texts that they want to read. in addition, encouragement from the authority figures like teachers can change students’ attitude toward reading. teachers’ support can be in the form of reading programs or pedagogical practices that provide an environment for students to read. meanwhile, internal factors like gender, personality, and students’ self-concepts, also influence reading attitude. martinez et al (2008) surveyed 4,000 students and found that female students tend to have more positive attitude toward reading than male students, but the reasons for the differences remained unclear. apparently, gender also became an internal predictor toward l2 achievement. onwuegbuzie et al (2010) found that male students tend to have a lower level of l2 achievements. in addition to gender, students’ personality is also one of the factors that influence reading attitude. briggs and walter (2016) and onwuegbuzie et al (2010) mention that student autonomy and their willingness to work collaboratively with other people became predictors of reading attitude. kartal (2011) found that some l2 learners felt that they were not able to perform well in l2 reading, which leads to learners having a negative attitude toward reading. on the other side, martinez et al (2008) also found that internal factor such as age does not influence reading attitude. this finding is inconsistent with mackenna et al’s (1995) in which they maintain that as the students get older, their positive attitude toward reading can decline because “their beliefs that reading can be pleasurable are likely to compete with beliefs that other activities may be even more pleasurable” (p. 941). method participants a total of 177 participants consisting of freshmen, sophomore, and junior students of an english language education department at a private university in indonesia were involved in the study. from these participants, 20 students were interviewed to get richer data and to find out further about their attitude in reading in l1 and l2. instruments the reading attitude questionnaire was adapted from yamashita (2004). the instrument consisted of two parts, affective reactions and cognitive reactions with seven and eight items respectively. the original questionnaires were written in english and was translated into the participants’ l1. the translated version was consulted to two experts with doctorate degree and piloted to several undergraduate students, and some suggestions were given. after the questionnaires were revised, they were then tried out again to a different group of undergraduate students who were not potential participants. no suggestions were offered. sri rejeki murtiningsih l1 and l2 reading attitudes and their contribution toward reading habit 30 two sets of the same questionnaires were administered to find out participants’ l1 and l2 reading attitude. the questionnaire used to investigate the l1 reading attitude was specifically written texts in the indonesian language and the other set was stated texts in the english language, to avoid confusion among the participants. the questionnaires used to measure l2 reading attitude had four addition questions adapted from mikami (2016). the questions were also translated into participants’ l1. mikami’s questionnaire was an instrument that requires participants to write their answers. in general, the questions were related to participants’ time spent to read english books outside the classroom, their motivation to read, and challenges they face when reading english books. with regard to the score of participants’ reading achievement were taken from a standardized english test used by the institution. the test was a multiple choice format that consisted of 50 questions. procedure and data analysis. the questionnaires were administered to potential participants a few days apart because the items in the questionnaire were only slightly different, distributing questionnaires a few days apart was aimed to minimize the participants’ ability to remember the exact answers they had given in the first questionnaires. results and discussion to answer the research questions previously proposed, the data are presented below: reading attitude toward l1. table 1 shows the computation results of the data in which the total mean of students’ reading attitude toward l1 is 2.60. this means that although in general the students showed a positive attitude towards reading in l1, their attitude might not be strong enough to initiate reading an indonesian book. the highest mean of the results of the l1 reading attitude questionnaire of the affective factor were affective 3: reading is enjoyable (3.01) (sd = 0.715). as for the cognitive factor, the item cognitive 6: i think reading many books [written in bahasa indonesia) enables us to acquire depth of knowledge and sophistication scored 3.24 (sd = 0.615). an interesting finding from the data was that although the students were enrolled in a department where most of the books used for classes were written in english, and the language of instruction was english, the participants still showed strong positive attitude toward indonesian texts (affective 3: reading indonesian books is enjoyable = 3.01). another interesting finding about the students’ reading attitude on the cognitive factor show that while all students were native indonesians, they did not think that their reading ability was in advanced level (cognitive 4: i think my reading level [in indonesian] is advanced = 2.81). in addition, the participants did not think that they could read in l1 quickly. as shown in cognitive 1: i can read [in indonesian] quickly, the mean was 3.08. this finding is quite surprising considering that they had been using the indonesian language in their daily lives. table 1. reading attitude toward l1 n sum mean std. deviation affective 1 177 330 1.86 .726 affective 2 177 281 1.59 .695 affective 3 177 533 3.01 .715 affective 4 177 359 2.03 .829 affective 5 177 464 2.62 .752 affective 6 177 381 2.15 .836 affective 7 177 461 2.60 .860 cognitive 1 177 546 3.08 .760 cognitive 2 177 484 2.73 .668 cognitive 3 177 487 2.75 .635 cognitive 4 177 497 2.81 .646 cognitive 5 177 523 2.95 .629 cognitive 6 177 574 3.24 .615 cognitive 7 177 498 2.81 .702 cognitive 8 177 486 2.75 .737 valid n (listwise) 177 2.60 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 31 reading attitude toward l2 the data revealed that the total mean of students’ reading attitude toward l2 or reading english books was, surprisingly, not significantly different from the l1 reading attitude, which is 2.65. as the participants were english language education department, needless to say that the statement cognitive 3: i think reading many books is advantageous to the study of my major received the highest mean (3.40). similar to the l1 reading attitude, students also found that reading in l2 was enjoyable (mean = 3.40, sd = 0.650). the complete results of the l2 reading attitude questionnaire can be seen on table 2 below. in the case of how students perceived their language skills, their perception of their l2 skills was quite similar to theirs of l1 skills with mean scores of 2.51 and 2.81 respectively. this particular statement is depicted in cognitive 4: i think my reading ability [in english language] is advanced. table 2. reading attitude toward l2 n sum mean std. deviation affective 1 177 465 2.63 .713 affective 2 177 290 1.64 .686 affective 3 177 521 2.94 .637 affective 4 177 464 2.62 .729 affective 5 177 429 2.42 .679 affective 6 177 398 2.25 .816 affective 7 177 442 2.50 .762 cognitive 1 177 416 2.35 .604 cognitive 2 177 508 2.87 .648 cognitive 3 177 601 3.40 .650 cognitive 4 177 445 2.51 .623 cognitive 5 177 550 3.11 .517 cognitive 6 177 575 3.25 .626 cognitive 7 177 450 2.54 .707 cognitive 8 177 485 2.74 .739 valid n (listwise) 177 2.65 correlation between reading attitude toward l1 and l2 to answer the third research question, a correlational analysis was run. the results show that there is a strong positive correlation between l1 and l2 reading attitude (r = 0.637). also, the l1 and l2 reading attitude do not have a statistically significant linear relationship (p = 0.619 > 0.001). table 3. paired sample correlations n correlation sig. pair 1 mean_english & mean_indonesian 15 .637 .011 table 4. paired samples test sri rejeki murtiningsih l1 and l2 reading attitudes and their contribution toward reading habit 32 contribution of l2 reading attitude toward l2 reading habit. to find out the contributions of l2, mikami’s (2016) questionnaire was used. the results of the questionnaire were quite interesting. of the 177 participants, 62 wrote that they did not read any english books aside from the ones assigned by their teachers for classes, although almost all of them stated that they had high interests in reading english books in their free time. the rest of the participants wrote that they read english books outside their class; however, 12 of them mentioned the novels that were read for classes, while the others wrote a wide array of books. of those who wrote they read books for pleasure, 19 of them spent more than 5-12 hours a week to read. with regard to the participants’ reading achievement of the university’s english proficiency test, it was found that their average score for this particular area is 410, which is equal to 34 of toefl ibt or 4.5 of ielts band. in the meantime, based on the rules and regulations set up by the department where the participants studied, the participants were required to obtain at least 500 of the university’s english proficiency test to graduate. the score equals to 61 of toefl ibt or 6 of ielts band. discussion based on the findings presented, there are some important notes to take regarding reading attitudes toward l1 and l2. first of all, it was quite surprising that while the participants had been using their l1 in all aspects of their life, their attitude toward l1 and l2 was not significantly different. evidently, their attitude toward l1 may have contributed to the attitude toward l2, which means that if someone already has a positive attitude towards their l1, he will likely have a positive attitude toward the l2 they are learning. this is shown by the strong correlation between the two sets of data. this study was in support with spark et al (2012) and yamashita (2004). in addition, yamashita (2004) states one’s l1 reading attitude forms their l2 reading attitude. another important point to note from this study is that positive attitude in reading can manifest in a different form of behavior shown by the participants. for example, students who have positive attitude or have high interests in reading english texts did not automatically have a high motivation to read outside the class. this is in favor with katz (1960) who suggests that students would display a variety of behavior although they have favorable attitude toward something. one student may decide to take charge of their own learning by making efforts in finding their own l2 reading texts, while others would wait for their teachers or parents to tell them to read and hand them the texts. the interaction between attitude and these different types of behavior can be found in this study, where students stated that they had high motivation to read and that they were aware that reading l2 texts would improve proficiency, and yet they did not read books other than what their teachers gave. in other words, the interaction between the affective factor (high interests in reading l2 books) may have been influenced by the cognitive factor (l2 vocabulary mastery), which then discourages many of these students to spend time to read english books. the finding is also in support with yamashita (2004), “merely thinking that reading is good for oneself does not constitute a sufficiently a strong motivation” (p. 13). this statement actually reflects what this present study found. the fact that some students listed the books used by the teachers for class purposes as the book(s) they read outside the class shows that those students still depend on teachers’ instruction to read, which in turn would shape their reading attitude in the future. it gives a strong indication that although students were fully aware that they could have found free l2 books online, they waited until their teacher asked to read and provided them the books so they could read. this may have contributed to the mastery of l2 vocabulary, which eventually would influence their performance in reading tests. apparently, a positive reading attitude do not always relate to the awareness of improving the size of l2 vocabulary. for example, many of the participants stated that despite having high interests in reading in l2 to improve their l2 vocabulary, the participants did not make any or very little time to read. as a matter of fact, krashen (2004) and nation (2007, 2009) assert that the fastest way to improve l2 vocabulary is by reading. thus, the interaction between reading attitude and awareness to read as shown by the data needs to be investigated further. the implications that can be drawn from this study is that there should be a systematic effort from teachers and institution to maintain a positive reading attitude. action can be taken to nurture the attitude, such as by providing them a variety of reading texts both in l1 and l2. the fact that reading attitude in l1 correlates with the one in l2 can be a starting point for teachers to encourage their students to read in l1, especially when the students state that their lack of l2 vocabulary indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 33 mastery was the reason they spend very little time or no time to read. teachers can include reading a wide variety of literature in their classes as assignment. it is also important to take external factor, e.g. culture into account when it comes to reading. in many contexts in indonesia, students’ dependence on teachers or other influential figures can be a major challenge to foster or shape a positive attitude toward reading. although students are expected to be more independent in the university contexts, the culture in which teachers become the center of learning can present a particular barrier to promote positive reading attitude. while this study offers some interesting findings, it has some limitations that can be the focus of future research. the data for this study, i.e. reading performance were collected only at one point of the participants’ study; therefore, the development of their l1 and l2 reading attitude and reading performance was unknown upon the data collection. a longitudinal study can be taken to see how the two major issues develop or fluctuate over time. the study only looked at reading attitude from affective and cognitive factors. future research can explore other contributing factors toward reading attitude conclusion this study presents the l1 and l2 reading attitude and how they correlate to each other as well as the contribution of l2 reading attitude toward students’ reading achievement. the study comes to a conclusion that l1 and l2 reading attitude found that there was no significantly different mean between l1 and l2 reading attitude and that they have a strong relationship with each other. the study also found that the positive reading attitude toward l2 can manifest in a different way for different individuals. apart from the affective and cognitive factors, other influencing factors especially external factors, such as teachers, book collection both written in l1 and l2, and classroom instructions also play an important role in shaping the reading attitude. acknowledgements the author would like to thank to universitas muhammadiyah yogyakarta for the research grants to conduct this study. references ajzen, i., & fishbein, m. (1977). attitude-behavior relation: a theoretical analysis and review of empirical research. psychological bulletin, 84(5), 888-918. akbari, h., ghonsooly, b., ghanzanfari, m., & shahriari, h. (2017). attitude toward reading: l1 or l2 or both. sage open, 1-10. babayigit, s. (2014). the relations between word reading, oral language, and reading comprehension in children who speak english as a firs (l1) and second language (l2): a multigroup structural analysis. reading and writing, 28, 527544. briggs, j. g., & walter, c. (2016). read on! extensive reading and young second language learners' motivation and attitudes. oxford: university of oxford department of education. camiciottoli, b. c. (2001). extensive reading in english: habits and attitudes of a group of italian university efl students. journal of research in reading , 24(2), 135-153. edele, a., & stanat, p. 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(2014). literate actions, reading attitudes, and reading achievement: interconnections across languages for adolescent learners of english in korea. the modern language journal, 98(2), 553-573. martinez, r. s., aricak, o. t., & jewell, j. (2008). influence of reading attitude on reading achievement: a test of the temporal-interaction model. psychology in the school, 45(10), 10101022. masduqi, h. (2014). efl reading in indonesian universities: perspectives and challenges in cultural contexts. journal of teaching and education, 03(03), 385-397. mikami, a. (2017). students' attitudes toward extensive reading in the japanese efl context. tesol journal, 8(2), 471-488. mori, s. (2002). redefining motivation to read in a foreign languae. reading in a foreign language, 14(2), 91-110. nation, i. (2009). teaching esl/efl reading and writing . ny: routledge. sri rejeki murtiningsih l1 and l2 reading attitudes and their contribution toward reading habit 34 onwuegbuzie, a. j., bailey, p., & daley, c. e. (2010). cognitive, affective, personality, and demographic predictors of foreign-languae achievement. 94(1), 3-15. pratiwi , p. s. (2018). minat baca masyarakat indonesia masih rendah [indonesian's reading rate still low]. cnn indonesia. https://www.cnnindonesia.com/gayahidup/20180326160959-282-285982/minat-bacamasyarakat-indonesia-masih-rendah. sparks, r. l., patton, j., ganschow, l., & humbach, n. (2012). do l1 reading achievement and l1 print exposure contribute to the prediction of l2 proficiency? language learning, 62(2), 473-505. yamashita, j. (2004). reading attitudes in l1 and l2, and their influence on l2 extensive reading. reading in a foreign language, 16(1), 1-19. yamashita, j. (2007). the relationship of reading attitudes between l1 and l2: an investigation of adult efl learners in japan. tesol quarterly, 41(1), 81-105. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 215 idioms translation analysis in the dubbing of mulan movie dedeh ariska english language education department fkip kuningan email: dedehariskaaa@gmail.com muhammad aprianto budie nugroho english language education department fkip, universitas kuningan email: muh.apriantobn@uniku.ac.id nida amalia asikin english language education department fkip universitas kuningan email: nida.amalia.asikin@uniku.ac.id apa citation: ariska, d., nugroho, m. a. b., & asikin, n. a. (2022). idioms translation analysis in the dubbing of mulan movie. indonesian efl journal, 8(2), 215-222. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v8i2.6458 received: 09-03-2022 accepted: 17-05-2022 published: 31-07-2022 introduction nowadays, watching movies is a very enjoyable activity. every country around the world produces movies for entertainment. according to wahyuni, ariyaningsih, & jendra (2021), tmoviemakers frequently use english as one of the languages in their productions. english movies will get a large audience because english is spoken all across the world. besides entertainment, watching movies also has many benefits such as increasing knowledge, honing analytical skills, and motivating ourselves. the movie and entertainment industry in hollywood is regarded for producing the greatest movie in the world. some famous hollywood film companies include 20th century fox, marvel studios, disney, pixar, etc. people who want to watch a foreign movie have problem in understanding the content of the movie. translation can be a bridge of communication between people around the world, this is in line with the statement of ali and al-rushaidi (2017) which said that translation can be seen as a necessary tool for people all over the world to exchange information, news, literature, culture, and science, among other things. however, translating is more complicated than just changing the meaning of a word depending on its literal context. some cases often put translators in difficult situations, such as when they come into words that do not represent a literal meaning, which is known as an idiom. an idiom or also called idiomatic expression is one of the most challenging semantic factors for translators to deal with. translating the idioms is one of the challenging tasks for the translator, especially if they are unaware of the cultural differences between the abstract: the aims of the research are to find out how english idioms are translated into indonesian in the dubbing versions as well as translation equivalence, and the strategies used when translating the idioms in the movie. the data are collected from the dubbing in the movie entitled mulan (2020) in order to achieve the research objectives which are dubbing translation how idioms are translated from english into indonesia. the researcher applied research design of qualitative method by using document analysis. the researcher found 28 idioms in the dialogue of the movie. for the results, and the number of idioms were translated equivalently into idioms (39.29%) and into non-idioms (60.71%). secondly, the researcher found that there are 3 from 8 types of translation strategies are used to translate idioms they are: translation by more general word (25%), translation by a neutral/less expressive word (7.14%), and translation by paraphrase using a related word. (67.86%). from the result of the research the translator is successfully translating the idioms properly, even though changing the sentence by paraphrasing but it was able to find the suitable synonyms to convey the real meaning of the idioms. keywords: translation strategies; idiomatic expression; dubbing translation. dedeh ariska, muhammad budie aprianto nugroho, & nida amalia asikin idioms translation analysis in the dubbing of mulan movie 216 source and target languages. according to larson in widyadhana, widiastuti, & tika (2017) translating those idioms into another language word for word will not make sense. idioms cannot be translated literally or word for word since the meaning of the individual composing the idiom is different. when translating idioms into their literal meanings, the learner must contextualize them. as a result, the purpose of any idiomatic translation is to make it suitable and acceptable in the target language. to recreate meaning in terms of the sl context, a translator must make some adjustments. according to nida in chen (2020), idioms are the most evident forms in which semantic adjustments are required in the translation because the fact that they are idioms suggests that difficult to have the same meaning in another language. the adjustments fall into three categories: idioms from the source language were translated into non-idioms in the receptor language. during the transfer process, idioms are frequently switched to non-idioms. idioms from the source language into idioms in the receptor language. in some cases, it is possible to match one idiom with another. non-idioms into idioms in the receptor language. while translation inevitably results in the loss of many idioms, it also has the potential to gain idioms. each translator employs a different strategy while translating a text, because different people may comprehend a word in a different way. to translate some language, there are several strategies that can be used by a translator. translators should learn not only the essential cultural aspects, also some basic translation techniques in order to make the text more understandable and useful. the translator must employ the proper strategy to be able accurately to translate. baker in junining & kusuma (2020) suggests several strategies. they are described further down. translation by a more general word (superordinate). this strategy is one of the most often used translation procedures, and it works in almost all languages. the translator just translates the source-language particular word into a general word in the target language. translation by a neutral/less expressive word. a translator might decrease the expressive meaning of a word during translation if it required. by reducing the expressive meaning of the word or making it seem more neutral/common, a less expressive word can be used to solve the non-equivalence problem. the expressive meaning of the word skyscrapers in english using a word like “bangunan yang tinggi” can be downgraded the meaning in translation. translation by cultural substitution. the translator can use cultural substitution to substitute a culture-specific item or expression with a target language element, which may have an influence on the reader. the key benefit of employing this strategy is that it offers the reader with an idea that is easily recognized. the translator's decision will be largely based on the authority supplied, the aim of the translation, and the translator's judgment when using this strategy. translation using a loan word plus explanation. in translation, a word can be translated simply by adding the explanation after the word. a loan word is a translation strategy in which the translator leaves the word exactly as it is in the source language, but adds an explanation in the target language. it is possible to adopt the loan word alone after it has been explained. there's no need to reexplain the word because the length of the explanation may cause the reader to become distracted. translation by paraphrase using a related word. the translator uses paraphrase to lexicalize the concept expressed in the source language by using a related word in a different form. this strategy is simply substituting synonyms in the target language for the source language word. translation by paraphrase using a unrelated word. when the original item is not lexicalized at all in the target language, translation by paraphrase using unrelated words is used. this strategy is a little awkward to use since an explanation consisting of some words in the target language will fill one slot of a word from the source language. translation by omission. translation by omission is a strategy of translation in which the translator can leave out a word or phrase that isn't necessary for conveying the meaning to the target language. the translation product will most likely become quite smooth if this strategy is used. however, it is possible that it will be less expressive. furthermore, the translation process may result in a loss of meaning. as a result, this strategy should only be used as a last option. translation by illustration. the translator can use illustration to answer a non-equivalence problem indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index involving a physical thing. the word is simply replaced with a visual representation of it in the form of an image. for example, the word tagged as in tagged teabag, is difficult to translate without a lengthy explanation. instead of paraphrasing, an illustration of a tagged teabag can be used. from the several previous studies of idiomatic expression or known as idioms, almost all of them use the novel translation to become an object in their research such as in the research conducted by floranti & mubarok (2020), lijun & qiao (2019), widyadhana, widiastuti & tika (2017), and premasari & widodo (2021). then, idiom translation research was conducted by destaria & rini (2019), and idiom translation research was conducted by pratama & damara (2018) using subtitles of the movie as their object research. in the other idioms translation research conducted by sari (2021) using instagram captions, idioms translation research conducted by wicaksono & wahyuni (2018) using the story of indonesia legends, and idioms translation research conducted by roswana & nurdiawati (2021) using song lyrics. another research in idioms translation are conducted by several researchers such as; fitri, faridi, & hartono (2019) focuses on baker’s strategies used in translating english idioms into indonesian in crazy rich asians by kevin kwan. kang and yang (2022) focus their research on study on english translation of chinese fourcharacter idioms: strategies and problems. hastűrkoğlu (2018) incorporation of conceptual metaphor theory in translation pedagogy: a case study on translating simile-bases idioms. simanjuntak (2019) also conducted research on quality assesment of translation of abstract text english idioms error made by jordanian efl undergraduate students by google translates. marsheva, sigacheva, peretochkina, & martynova (2019) conducting research on some issues in translation of idioms from english into russian. ohorella, ali, & adam (2021) conducting research on the accuracy of idioms translation from english into indonesian in the tangled movie. renchin and amgalan (2021) focus their research on the translation of idioms in the novel “david copperfield” by charles dicken. chen (2020) conducted research related with other research conducted by several researchers such as; manispupika and winzami (2021) conducted research on translation of idioms: how they are reflected in moving subtitling. chen (2020) conducted their research on application of explanational translation approach to english idioms. wicaksono & wahyuni (2018) an analysis of the strategies used in translating idioms in indonesia into english found in indonesian legend. liu (2019) conducted research on comparating on chinese and english animal idioms and translation strategies. rasul (2018) was conducting research on translation of idioms across languages. chen (2020) conducted research on application of compensatory translation approach to english idioms. while nurkasiyati (2018) conducted research the translation strategies in idiomatic translation in j. k rowling’s novel entitled harry potters and the philosopher stone. another research come from supardi and putri (2018) who conducted research on subtitle and dubbing technique in ost frozen movie. in previous studies, many researchers used novel, storybook translations and film subtitles, or translation works by students as research objects. in this research, the researcher prefers to use dubbed translation products in the movie, because the translation content in dubbing is more communicative and adapts to the visual-lip movements of native speakers. this study also chose the mulan movie because it shows chinese cultural background in an american movie, played by chinese actors and actresses. therefore, this study aims to know how idioms are translated from english to indonesia and also to determine the strategies are used by translators in translating idiomatic expressions in the original movie entitled mulan and its dubbed indonesian version. method the researcher employed the qualitative research method by applying case study design research to achieve the research objectives. according to creswell & creswell (2017), a case study is an approach employed to gain an in-depth understanding of a bounded system such as activity, events, processes, or individuals, based on extensive data collection. this research used document analysis to collect the data which is dubbing versions in the movie entitled mulan. according to morgan (2022), document analysis is a method that consists of analyzing various types of documents containing text or material as a potential source. dedeh ariska, muhammad budie aprianto nugroho, & nida amalia asikin idioms translation analysis in the dubbing of mulan movie 218 the data are in the form of descriptions the idioms analysis results in the dubbing of the movie. the researcher collects the data by the following steps: searching and downloading the movie entitled mulan in disney+ hotstar platform. watching mulan movie several times both in original and dubbing versions. this step has been used to evaluate the movie to gain a better understanding of the storyline and the context of each conversation. transcribe existing data into a text. the researcher transcribes the original and indonesia dubbing version of mulan movie using aegisub application to make it easier in analysis the data. after all the data is collected, the data is read once more to make sure that all the data is correct. then, the researcher starts to analyze the data by using nida semantics adjustment theory and baker’s translation methods. in analyzing and validating the data found, the researcher involved nugroho and asikin. results and discussion the research has two important findings in the research. first, this research is intended to find the translation equivalence of idioms in the original version and dubbing version of the movie. second, after the process of classifying idioms in the movie, the researcher tried to find what kind of strategies are used in translating idiomatic expression in the movie. how idioms are translated into indonesia after conducting the analysis, it can be found that there are 28 idioms. they are categorized into two types of semantics adjustment as proposed by nida’s theory in chen (2020). those idioms are classified into idiom and non-idiom. which are summarized in the table below. table 1. how idioms are translated type of semantics adjustment frequency percentage idiom into idioms 11 39.29% idiom into non-idiom 17 60.71% total 28 100% based on the table above it can be seen that mostly the idioms in the dubbing of mulan movie are translated not equivalence from english into indonesia, it means that most of the idioms in english are translated into non-idiom in indonesian. idiom into idiom the equivalence of translation occurs when the translation's meaning matches the source language's sentence context and brings the real meaning from the source language. it will be necessary for the translator to translate idiom into idiom if there are idioms in the tl that match with the idioms in the sl, a good translation or translation equivalence may be built. in this situation, the translator must acquire an awareness of the idioms used in the tl and utilize them naturally to make the translation dynamic while maintaining the sl's style. for example: datum 3 (0:12:14) sl: we will crush every garrison until the imperial army is on its knees. tl: kita akan hancurkan setiap garnisun sampai prajurit kekaisaran berlutut. the dialogue happens between xianniang and bori khan, they are planning their next attack on the imperial city. bori khan hope after this the imperial soldiers will lose, it can be seen in the expression “until the imperial army is on its knees”. according to oxford idioms dictionary “on its knees” implies someone or something in a kneeling position,or in the other words on the verge of collapse if it translated literally, it would be “di lututnya” but it sounds inappropriate. in this context, what the actor said was not actually done, but only a figurative meaning which means to give up or lose. the translator chooses the word “berlutut” to make it sounds natural and related to the context. in indonesian, there are idiom “bertekuk lutut” that implies submit, lose or surrender to lose, this has the same meaning with “on its knees”. this translation is equivalence because the translator tried to translated it into idiom in indonesian. datum 28 (1:42:50) sl: the entire kingdom is in her debt. tl: seluruh kerajaan berhutang budi padanya. the dialogue took place in mulan’s village when commander tung tells to mulan’s father and also announced in front of the people there that mulan was saved the dinasty. it can be seen in the expression that “the entire kingdom is in her indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index debt.”. it would be meaningless if translated literally, and the reader would be confused about the real meaning, therefore the translator utilized the meaning-based translation method to discover the idiom's closest natural equivalent meaning in the target language. according to dictionary, in someone’s debt means to feel grateful for something someone did for you (cambridge dictionary). “utang budi” was equivalent with “in her debt” because means someone feels very grateful for the help or assistance that has been done by others in other words makes someone feel like repaying the kindness. idiom into non-idiom during the translation process idioms are often shifted to non-idiom, it happens because the translator cannot find idioms in the target language that have identical or equal meaning in the source language. this condition makes the translation nonequivalence because there is a change in the form of a word or sentence. for example: datum 4 (00:12:19) sl: and then the imperial city will be laid bare. tl: dan kemudian kota kekaisaran akan mudah untuk diserang. the dialogue happened between xianniang and bori khan in a mountain, they are resting and planning their next attack to take over the dynasty. bori khan arranged his plan with xianniang to make all the imperial soldiers to leave and no one to guard the dynasty thus making it easier for him to take over the dynasty, it can be seen in the expression “the imperial city will be laid bare”. if it translated literally, it would be ‘berbaring terlanjang’ but it sounds weird and far from what the sl author intended. according to oxford dictionary, ‘laid bare’ means to show something that was covered. in translating this idiom, the translator used a meaning-based translation method, which resulted in a clear and natural translation that was based on the context of the whole story in the movie. the translator used the word ‘mudah untuk diserang’ to make the dialogue are natural. in this case, the expression's meaning should be related to the situation or position, but this meaning is not idiom in indonesia, and make the translation is nonequivalence. datum 25 (1:35:41) sl: i invite you to take your place with our greatest decorated warriors. tl: aku mengundangmu untuk bergabung dengan para pendekar kami yang paling hebat. the dialogue happens between the emperor and mulan in the kingdom. the emperor felt very grateful to mulan because she had saved him. so, the emperor gave mulan an offer to become an officer in the emperor's guard, it can be seen in the expression “i invite you to take your place”. according to oxford dictionary, the idiom “take your place” means to go to the physical position that is necessary for an activity, or to take/accept the status in society that is correct or that you deserve. the translator tried to transfer the meaning with “bergabung”, it contains the real meaning of that english idiom and this is an expression commonly used in indonesia in such contexts. this is not an idiom in indonesian and makes this translation is non-equivalence. translation strategies to determine translation strategies used by the translator to translate idioms in this movie, this research refers to the theory by baker in junining & kusuma (2020). however, in this research it was only found three translation strategies to translate the idioms in mulan movie dubbing. the table below shows the frequency and the percentage of translation strategies used by the translator to translate the idioms. table 2. translation strategies type of translation strategy frequency percentage translation by a more general word 7 25% translation by a neutral/less expressive word 2 7.14% translation by cultural substitution 0 0% translation using a loan word plus explanation 0 0% translation by paraphrase using a related word 19 67.86% translation by paraphrase using unrelated word 0 0% translation by omission 0 0% translation by illustration 0 0% total 28 100% dedeh ariska, muhammad budie aprianto nugroho, & nida amalia asikin idioms translation analysis in the dubbing of mulan movie 220 based on the table 2, it can be seen that paraphrase using a related word strategy is used by the translator in translating idioms from english into indonesia. this represents 67.86% or 19 data out of 28. the second type is translation by a more general word with 25% or 7 data. the last is translation by a neutral/less expressive word 7.14% data out of 28. translation by a more general word this method allows the translator to move up one level in a semantic field to find a more general word that covers the receptor language's basic proportionate meaning of the missing hyponym. for example: datum 6 (0:13:21) sl: that nothing and no one stands in my way. tl: tak ada apapun dan siapapun yang menghalangi jalan ku. in this case, the idioms are translated use the meaning in general word in indonesian because the translator tried to transfer the meaning with “menghalangi jalanku”. the translation has the same meaning with the english idiom which means to prevent someone from doing something. the word “menghalangi” is a more general word because it can be used in the sentences, while it is not appropriate if it uses “berdiri di jalanku”. datum 17 (0:44:12) sl: make no mistake... tl: jangan salah. the data above shows that the used of translation by using more general word in translating the idiom. it can be seen from the example above the participant translated the idiom “make no mistakes” into “jangan salah”. the word “jangan salah” it sounds more general or common in indonesia, while it is not appropriate with the context if it uses “jangan berbuat salah”. the translation contains the real meaning of the idiom which means to warn somebody about something. 2) translation by a neutral/less expressive word this strategy is used when the word in sl has no direct equivalent in tl and is difficult to translate. the translator uses this strategy to replace the sl word with tl near-equivalents that are less expressive but more formal. for example: datum 13 (0:38:32) sl: how to talk to a woman... let alone be married to one? tl: bagaimana kau berbicara dengan seorang wanita... apalagi menikah dengannya? the idioms “let alone” in the source language that actually has meaning “biarkan saja” but it sounds weird. the idioms “let alone” implied to emphasize that because the first thing is not true or possible, the next thing cannot be true or possible either. the translator tried to replace by the translator becomes “apalagi” that conjunctions between clauses and clauses to strengthen or add to what has been said before. in this strategy, it has to do with differences in expressive meaning. datum 26 (1:35:41) sl : i left home under cover of darkness... tl: aku meninggalkan rumah diam diam saat gelap the word “under cover of darkness” is translated into “diam-diam”. under cover means working secretly to obtain information (cambridge dictionary). the idioms “under cover of” implies hidden or protected by something. the literal translation of the word “under cover”, which is “rahasia” or “di bawah penutup” will be weird to be applied in this context. that’s why the translator chooses a more neutral word that does not sound stiff. translation by paraphrase using a related word this strategy involved using different sentence or form to convey the meaning of words in the source language. it's employed when the concepts revealed in the source language have a dictionary meaning in the target language but are expressed in a different way, and the word's frequency of occurrence in the source language is higher. there were 19 idioms that translated by paraphrase using related word. for example: datum 5 (0:12:34) sl: i could tear you to pieces before you blink. tl: aku bisa menghancurkanmu dengan sangat cepat. the idiom “before you blink” is translated into “dengan sangat cepat”. if ‘before you blink’ easily translated it would be “sebelum kamu berkedip” but it sounds weird to be applied in this context. the translator tried to paraphrase with a related word “dengan sangat cepat” to adjust the context, this indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index translation conveys the meaning of idioms that implied very quickly. datum 11 (0:29:42) sl: need a hand, little man? tl: butuh bantuan, pria kecil? the idiom “need a hand” is translated into “butuh bantuan”. the literal translation of the idiom which is “butuh sebuah tangan”, it will be weird to be applied in this context. this idiom “need a hand” implied to offer or give someone help. the word “bantuan” means help or to make it possible/easier for someone to do something, by doing part of the work yourself or by providing advice, money, support, etc. the translator tried to paraphrase this idiom by using a related word and replace the word “hand” with “bantuan” to adjust the context. conclusion based on the results of the research, it can be concluded that mostly the idioms in the dubbing of mulan movie are translated not equivalence from english into indonesia, it means that most of the idioms in english are translated into non-idiom in indonesian. the translator has omitted the idioms and replaced them with non-idiomatic expressions because cannot be found the equivalence of the idiomatic expressions in the target language. however, in this research, it was only found three translation strategies to translate the idioms. the strategy that is often found is translation by paraphrase using a related word strategy with the occurrence 19 times if in percentage becomes 67.86%. the translator was successful in translating the idioms properly, even though the idioms are translated into non-idiomatic expressions and changing the sentence by paraphrasing it but were able to find suitable synonyms to convey the real meaning of the idioms. this is also connected to the dubbing technique, which essentially matches the actor's voice to the scene in the movie. as a result, the translator chooses the other proper word that fits with the actor's voice in the movie must be filled in. acknowledgement the authors expressed sincere gratitude to the analysis and validator data contributors to m. aprianto budie nugroho and nida amalia asikin. references ali, h., & al-rushaidi, s. m. s. 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(2017). the translation of english idioms in novel new moon and their translation equivalents in dua cinta. jurnal humanis, fakultas ilmu budaya unud, 18(2), 112-119. indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 71 refusal and acceptance strategies realization in sundanese context sartin t. miolo language education, post graduate of universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail: sartinmiolo@yahoo.co.id; sartin@ung.ac.id emzir language education, post graduate of universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail: emzir.pb@gmail.com asep supriadi department of english education, universitas kuningan, indonesia e-mail: asep.supriadi13@yahoo.com apa citation: miolo, s. t., emzir, & supriadi, a. (2018). refusal and acceptance strategies realization in sundanese context. indonesian efl journal, 4(2), 71-79. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v4i2.1378. received: 16-03-2018 accepted: 21-05-2018 published: 01-07-2018 abstract: this study investigates the refusal and acceptance strategies realization in sundanese context among students of a private university in kuningan. the study is purposely designed to investigate the types of refusal and acceptance strategies used in sundanese context. this study employed a qualitative method as a research design. a discourse completion task (dct) was used to collect the data which was spread into 30 respondents. the questionnaire was in bahasa sunda because the respondents were sundanese people, so it can be easier to be analyzed. the findings showed that there were 240 utterances consisted of 150 utterances of refusal and 90 utterances of acceptance. the refusal strategies consisted of 12 strategies and the acceptance strategies consisted of 6 strategies. most of the respondents which are sundanese are polite as it can be seen from their responses when they were asked to accompany their lecturer or when they refused to the person with higher power. they always say punten, hapunten sateuacana or it can be called ‘sorry’. the term ‘sorry’ showed that they try to be polite when talking with the higher power and distance. yet, they use different talking when they talk to their friends who have the same power. so, they can place where they should be polite and to whom they talk. keyword: acceptance strategy, refusal strategy, sundanese culture. introduction in a real life, someone will feel satisfy when they are meeting people and can communicate with them through speaking. the communication can be various depends on the aim or the context of their speaking. it can be request, statement, command or other through direct or indirect. we may have to use indirectness because of some performance error. the use of indirectness in these circumstances may lead the hearer to infer all sorts of thing about you, but you can not be said to have generated any impicature (thomas, 1995, p. 120). when we request someone to take something, there will be “pangmeulikeun” or “pangmeserkeun”. as the sundanese people, learning sundanese language is more difficult that learning english or using indonesia language. there are many rules in sundanese that should be obeyed if we want to speak sundanese. it is a proof that there are cultural differences between sundanese and other. according to oatey (2010, p. 50), culture can https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v4i2.1370 sartin t. miolo, emzir, & asep supriadi refusal and acceptance strategies realization in sundanese context 72 be characterized as a system of cultural representations. a cultural representation is a particular type of metarepresentation (i.e. representation of a representation). this study is focused on refusal and acceptance realization in sundanese culture at a university in kuningan. this research investigates the refusal and acceptance strategies in sundanese context in kuningan. indirectness is best regarded as part of the speaker’s wisdom. when we will refuse somebody request, we can not be direct to refuse it because the sundanese will more focus on the politeness. they will refuse indirectly to save their face and also the speaker’s face. requesting is an utterance frequently used by speakers in daily conversation. in using requesting, the speaker attempts to make hearer do what speaker wants but the hearer feels free to choose wheather refuse or accept it. thirdly is because requesting are used to get greatest attention from listener in communication. through requesting the speaker utterances make hearer do something and can refuse or accept what people ask for. there are 746 languages in indonesia such as sundanese, balinese, javanese, etc. sundanese becomes the main topic because we know that mostly indonesian people used sundanese as their habitual language. besides, the background of the researcher is also sundanese. to do this, the sundanese culture especially in language should be studied to give deeply understanding to the people. to make clear about refusal and acceptance strategies realization in sundanese context, this study involved 30 respondents of students at a university in kuningan to get the answer of two research questions: (1) what are the types of refusal strategies used in sundanese context? and (2) what are the types of acceptance strategies used in sundanese context? all languages have different way of refusing and use various strategies while refusing in order to make themselves and others comfortable. a refusal can be expressed either explicitly or implicitly. in indonesia, an explicit refusal is always marked by negator tidak “no” or its (non-standard) variants such as nggak, ndak, ogah, etc (aziz, 2000, p. 81). an acceptance is a response provided by respondents will be categorized as an acceptance if the headact of the sequence of the response or the illocutionary point indicates the speaker’s willingness to fulfill the request addressed to him/her (aziz, 2000, p. 77). the refusal strategies consist of 12 strategies such as hesitation and lack of enthusiasm, this strategy is said when the person wants to refuse something by manipulating their refusing. offer an alternative means that when the speaker regards the interlocutor’s request as being in need of immediate fulfillment but on the other hand he/she is already committed to complying with his/her schedule, the speaker is inclined to offer an alternative to his/her interlocutor (aziz, 2000). postponement means that the speakers do not immediately accept or refuse the interlocutors’ requests, but they deliberately delay their answer (aziz, 2000, p. 84). put the blame on a third party explain, in order to protect themselves from either immediate or subsequent consequences, speakers scapegoat a third party or state of affairs which prevents them from fulfilling the interlocutors’ requests (aziz, 2000, p. 85). general acceptance of an offer but giving no details tell about indefiniteness implies the speaker’s unwillingness to act on the request and the speaker’s hesitation to directly refuse the request (aziz, 2000, p. 85-86). general acceptance with excuse explain that the speaker seems to have accepted the interlocutor’s request, but she/he eventually negated it in the concluding sequence for some reason (aziz, 2000, p. 86). giving reason and explanation tell about although this strategy clearly indicates a refusal, it is quite different from the direct refusal using the negotator tidak , in some cases the speakers appear to be vague in his/her refusal (aziz, 2000, p. 87). complaining and criticizing tell about the manner in which the expressions are uttere, this indirect refusal will be perceived by the interlocutor as a blunt refusal. indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 73 conditional yes give an explanation that the speaker is willing to carry out the request expressed by his/her interlocutor if certain conditions are fulfilled. questioning the justification of a request, as an indirect refusal which employs rhetorical questions, this strategy is mainly aimed at convincing the interlocutor that his/her request is unacceptable (aziz, 2000, p. 89). threatening tell the speaker does not accept and refuse the interlocutor’s request directly, but she is instead threatens the interlocutors not to request something to her. comments without exemplification explain the responses clearly indicated that the respondents would either accept or refuse the request uttered by their interlocutor. while, the strategy of accepting consists of 6 strategies such as general yes or ifid that a response provided by respondents will be categorized as an acceptance if of the sequence of the response or the illocutionary points indicates the speaker’s willingness to fulfill the request addressed to him/her (aziz, 2000, p. 77). a rethorical response which refers to the strategy in which the speaker gives a rhetorical answer to his/her interlocutor as arespons to the request addressed to him or her (aziz, 2000, p. 78). expression of solidarity means that there are occasions in which the speaker found that fulfilling his / her interlocutor’s request was equally important to that of fulfilling his / her scheduled plans (aziz, 2000, p. 79). acceptance with reservations tell the respondent agreed to perform an act as requested by their interlocutors if particular conditions are meet (aziz, 2000, p. 79). noncommittal responses, this category refers to a category of responses that the speaker does not give a spesific answer. comments without exemplification, this strategy can be acceptance and also refusals because the responses clearly indicated that the respondents would either accept or refuse the request uttered by their interlocutor (aziz, 2000, p. 94). method in this research, qualitative research is used as research design. geerts (1976, p. 235) in maxwell (1996,p. 4) described design in qualitative research is an interative process that involves “tacking” back and forth between the different components of the design, assessing the implications of purposes, theory, research question, methods and validity threats for one another. the object of this research need 30 students of the university in kuningan which comes from sundanese. data source of this research were chosen by using purposive sampling. sugiyono (2012, p. 124) defines purposive sampling is a technique of determining a sample with certain consideration. in line with sugiyono, maxwel (1996, p. 70) states that purposeful sampling is a strategy in which particular settings, persons or events are selected deliberately in order to provide important information that can not be gotten as well from other choices. the participants chosen because of some consideration such as: even they are pointed out from different background, but they should be sundanese which come from every district in kuningan. the different background indicates the variety of using sundanese language. besides different background, they are also pointed out from every faculty, they should have quality in speaking and writing because this requesting strategy are shown both in speaking and writing. dct (discourse completion task) is used to collect data. dct data can, therefore, be regarded as indirectly representing “a participant’s accumulated experience within a given setting” (golato 2003, p. 92). responses to written questionnaires have been shown to “reflect the values of the native culture” (beebe & cummings 1996, p. 75), and defined as metapragmatic on the grounds that they represent culture-specific beliefs about what constitutes appropriate behaviour (golato 2003, p. 111) in ogeirmann (1984, p. 69). this type of questionnaire enabled the researcher to reach large number of respondents and make statistical control for variables and analyze the data accordingly. sartin t. miolo, emzir, & asep supriadi refusal and acceptance strategies realization in sundanese context 74 the questionnaire consisted of eight hypothesized situations. generally, a dct consists of descriptions of situations to which the subjects are expected to react and thereby provide the desired speech act (open dct) (ogeirmann,1984, p. 81). sometimes the description is followed by an incomplete dialogue consisting of an initiating or a closing line of dialogue. dcts with several turns requiring the respondents to provide two answers or both interlocutors’ conversational turns have also been used to collectspeech act data. there are 8 situations in this study that describe the different level of the speaker. the situations are given in bahasa sunda to find out sundanese’s habit in using the indirectness of requesting in sundanese culture. the respondents should fill out the answer based on the questions which is aimed to equal to equal, younger to elder and elder to younger. results and discussion based on the data, from eight situations spread out to 30 respondents, there are 240 utterances that also consist of 150 utterances of refusing and 90 utterances of accepting. the refusal strategies consist of 12 strategies such as hesitation and lack of enthusiasm, offer an alternative, postponement, put the blame on a third party, general acceptance of an offer but giving no details, general acceptance with excuse, giving reason and explanation, complaining and criticizing, conditional yes, questioning the justification of a request,threatening and comments without exemplification. while, the strategy of accepting consists of 6 strategies such as general yes or ifid, a rethorical response, expression of solidarity, acceptance with reservations, non-committal responses and comments without exemplification. the detail description of refusing and accepting strategies are shown in the table below: table 1. the description frequency of refusal strategies no strategies frequency 1. hesitation and lack of enthusiasm 32 2. offer an alternative 19 3. postponement 10 4. put the blame on a third party 4 5. general acceptance of an offer but giving no detail 3 6. general acceptance with excuse 26 7. giving reason and explanation 34 8. complaining and criticizing 1 9. conditional yes 3 10. questioning the justification of a request 5 11. threatening 4 12. comments without exemplification 8 frequency 150 table 2. the description frequency of acceptance strategies no strategies frequency 1. ifid 10 2. expression of solidarity 9 3. a rhetorical response 21 4. acceptance with reservation 12 5. non-committal responses 33 6. comments without exemplification 5 frequency 90 refusal strategies all languages have different way of refusing and use various strategies while refusing in order to make themselves and others comfortable. indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 75 hesitation and lack of enthusiasm this strategy is said when the person wants to refuse something by manipulating their refusing. the person feel more impolite by doing this strategy rather than using the negator “tidak”, the people choose to save their face (aziz, 2000, p. 83). the following sample are taken from the respondents : hapunten sateuacana, manawi abdi kirang sae dina nyandakeun acara anu sakral ieu (r3,s1). (sorry maybe i was not verygood in bringing an event). aduh punten, keenjing na abdi bade uas upami nonton piala dunia teh bilih ke enjing nundutan. (r8,s7). (oh sorry i will get final exam tomorrow if i watch the world cup, i fear that i will be so sleepy tomorrow). the samples above clearly explain their responses, let the interlocutors know their answer implicitly. they give the signal like “manawi abdi kirang sae” and “ke enjingna abdi bade uas”, both of it showed the signal of the speakers that the interlocuter’s request are uncceptable. offer an alternative when the speaker regards the interlocutor’s request as being in need of immediate fulfillment but on the other hand he/she is already committed to complying with his/her schedule, the speaker is inclined to offer an alternative to his/her interlocutor (aziz, 2000, p. 83). these are the following examples are taken from the respondents which answered the offer an alternative situation. haduh, hapunten anu dipikasuhun, manawi abdi teh bade aya kagiatan di kampus janten teu tiasa nurutkeun kahoyong baraya. kumaha lamun si udin bae pan si eta mah tos sering (r28, s1). (oh sorry, i have events in my campus so i can not follow your wishes. what if udin because he's smart in bringing an event). hapunten, abdi teu wantun kangge mawakeun acara lantaran abdi tara biasa. ke wae abdi miwarang pun raka anu tos biasa (r21, 21). (sorry i can not be a host because i have not been accustomed to. let me ask my brother because he is experienced in bringing the show) from that three data above, the respondents showed their regret by saying ‘punten kang’. they feel regret because they can not fill what the interlocutor asked for. thus, the speaker offer an alternative to save both the speaker’s face and the hearer’s face. when the speaker wants to refuse the interlocutor who asked them for being a host, they might give an alternative way such as “ke wae abdi miwarang pun raka anu tos biasa” or “kumaha lamun si udin wae pan si eta mah tos sering”. postponement the speakers do not immediately accept or refuse the interlocutors’ requests, but they deliberately delay their answer (aziz, 2000, p. 84). these are the following examples are taken from the respondents which answered the postponement situation. bade aya pamengan abdi teh, kedah dongkap ka bumi mamah ongkoh (r23, s6). (i will have an activity, then i should go to my mother’s house). abdi teh teu acan ngerjakeun tugas teras dipiwarang ngajajap mamah (r23, s3). (i haven’t finished my task yet then my mom asked me to accompany her). the data above tell that the speakers do not accept also do not refuse the interlocuters’ requests. the data 6 showed that the speaker delay the answer by giving the answer in a long-winded. when they were asking for having dinner with their new neighbour, they said that they will have an activity then go to their mother’s house. put the blame on a third party this strategy has a less respons from the respondent. only 4 utterances that using this strategy. in order to protect themselves from either immediate or subsequent consequences, speakers scapegoat a third party or state of affairs which prevents them from fulfilling the interlocutors’ requests (aziz, 2000, p. 85). these are the following examples are taken from the respondents which answered put the blame on a third party situation. hapunten pa, kaleresan abdi aya peryogi ka bumi sepuh. janten teu tiasa sumping (r1, s6). (sorry sir, in advertent i have an event in my parent’s house. so i can’t come). punten poe eta teh abdi bade aya tamu ka rompok (r30, s1). (sorry, that day i will have a guest). general acceptance of an offer but giving no detail this strategy is simply because such indefiniteness implies the speaker’s sartin t. miolo, emzir, & asep supriadi refusal and acceptance strategies realization in sundanese context 76 unwillingness to act on the request and the speaker’s hesitation to directly refuse the request (aziz, 2000, p. 85-86). this can be said that the speaker implies to accept but she/he does not accept it in a whole. these are the following examples are taken from the respondents which answered general acceptance of an offer but giving no detail situation. kaleresan abdi teh tos tuang di rompok, muhun atuh sakedik wae hun (r8, s5). (i happened to have eaten at home. let me eat a little). hapunten ibu abdi teu tiasa dongkap ka bumi ibu lantaran aya acara husus. tapi insaallah ke ku abdi diusahakeun dongkap sakedap (r15, s6). (sorry mom, i cannot come to your home because i had aspecial event. but insha allah i'll try to come up briefly). the data told that the speaker accept the interlocuter’s request but they did not promise to make it happen fully. they did not ensure their answer wheather refuse or accept it clearly. general acceptance with excuse in the first sequence of his/her utterance, the speaker seems to have accepted the interlocutor’s request, but she/he eventually negated it in the concluding sequence for some reason (aziz, 2000, p. 86). it can be concluded that this strategy make the speaker like to accept but at the end she/he refuse it. these are the following examples are taken from the respondents which answered general acceptance with excuse situation. nampi pisan undangan tuangna, mung pun ibu kaleresan nuju ngayakeun acara kulawargi (r7, s6). (i accept it but my mother is held the family event). abdi saleresna hoyong dongkap ka acara ibu mung abdi ke wengi kedah ka bumi pun biang (r29, s6). (exactly, i want to come to your event but i should come to my wife’s house tonight). giving reason and explanation although this strategy clearly indicates a refusal, it is quite different from the direct refusal using the negotator tidak , in some cases the speakers appear to be vague in his/her refusal (aziz, 2000, p. 87). the speaker gives the reason and explanation why they can not accept the interlocutor’s request indirectly. these are the following examples are taken from the respondents which answered giving reason and explanation situation. hatur nuhun sateuacana tos nawisan ka abdi kaleresan sim kuring parantos tuang nembe pisan dirompok (r30, s5). (thanks already offered me, but i have already eaten in my house). hapunten pisan abdi teu tiasa kumargi aya tugas kangge ke enjing (r27, s3). (i’m really sorry, i can’t because i have task for tommorrow) complaining and criticizing the speakers avoided using the negator tidak or its variants, yet they used other means of expressing their off-record refusals. there is only 1 utterance which used this strategy. that utterance is in the situation 3 used by the last respondent. nuhun mih da atos emam tuda wareg (r30, s3). (thanks mom, i have eaten, still full). looking at the manner in which the expressions are uttered, this indirect refusal will be perceived by the interlocutor as a blunt refusal (aziz, 2000, p. 88). conditional yes the speaker is willing to carry out the request expressed by his/her interlocutor if certain conditions are fulfilled. however, from the interlocutor’s point of view , such reserved condition can be regarded as being unfairly proposed (aziz, 2000, p. 88). they can accept something with a specific reason that the exact is that the speaker can not do it. these are the following examples are taken from the respondents which answered conditional yes situation. padahal abdi teh gaduh padamelan nu sanes tapi teu nanaon tiasa ke wengi ngadamelanna (r21, s3). (exactly, i have another task but it’s never mind. i can do it tonight). nuhun pa tapi panginten abdi mung sakedap wae dongkapna kumargi aya kaperyogian (r9, s6). (thanks sir, but only for a while i came because i have an event). questioning the justification of a request as an indirect refusal which employs rhetorical questions, this strategy is mainly aimed at convincing the interlocutor that his/her request is unacceptable (aziz, 2000, p. 89). the speaker does not believe the interlocutor’s request. these are the following examples are taken from the respondents indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 77 which answered questioning the justification of a request situation. kabener? geuning urang sih? (r17, s1). (really? why should i?). sugan ke peuting piala dunia? kabener? (r21, s7). (is the world cup tonight? really?). the speaker used ‘really?’ or kabener? as their respond to the interlocutor’s utterance. threatening the speaker does not accept and refuse the interlocutor’s request directly, but she is instead threatens the interlocutors not to request something to her. these are the following examples are taken from the respondents which answered threatening situation. duh kumaha nya! teu tiasa heh upami dipaksakeun bilih ngarusak acara (r10, s1). (ouch, sorry i can’t. if i am forced, i’m afraid that i will destroy the event). the speaker threats the interlocutor that if the interlocutor forced him to do what he wants, the speaker will destroy the event. comments without exemplification the responses clearly indicated that the respondents would either accept or refuse the request uttered by their interlocutor. these are the following examples are taken from the respondents which answered comments without exemplification situation. hapunten pa nuju aya peryogi nu sanes, kedah ngumpulkeun tugas kangge ke enjing ........ (r4, s3). (i’m sorry sir, i have another task, i should collect my task for tomorrow .....). hapunten pa, margi abdi teu tiasa ngarencangan bapa rapat kumargi abdi teh nuju seueur tugas sareng waktosna tos meped (r17, s3). (sorry sir, i can’t accompany you meeting because i have alot of task and i have no time). acceptance strategies a response provided by respondents will be categorized as an acceptance if the headact of the sequence of the response or the illocutionary point indicates the speaker’s willingness to fulfill the request addressed to him/her (aziz, 2000, p. 77). ifid a response provided by respondents will be categorized as an acceptance if of the sequence of the response or the illocutionary points indicates the speaker’s willingness to fulfill the request addressed to him/her (aziz, 2000, p. 77). it can be known that this strategy make the speaker accept the interlocutor’s request explicitly. these are the following examples are taken from the respondents which answered ifid situation: mangga (r6, s2). (okay). abdi nampi pisan pa (r27, s8). (i really accept it sir). the term mangga and abdi nampi pisan pa explicitly tell that the speaker really accept the request directly to the interlocutors. expression of solidarity there are occasions in which the speaker found that fulfilling his / her interlocutor’s request was equally important to that of fulfilling his / her scheduled plans (aziz, 2000, p. 78-79). these are the following examples are taken from the respondents which answered expressin of solidarity situation. teh saleresna mah abdi teh sibuk, tapi tos teu nanaon. insya allah, abdi teu enak ka teteh. mung ka teteh bae abdi kersa (r9, s2). (actually i’m busy but it’s ok. insya allah i will). abdi isin mang, tapi pami nolak abdi henteu enak ka mamang (r22, s4). (uncle, i’m shy. but i will not refuse because of you). a rhetorical response this strategy refers to the strategy in which the speaker gives a rhetorical answer to his/ her interlocutor as arespons to the request addressed to him or her. the speaker used this strategy as their respons by giving rhetorical answer means they accept the interlocutor’s request implicitly. these are the following examples are taken from the respondents which answered a rhetorical answer situation. kaleresan abdina nuju rineh. dikawitan dinten iraha? (r16, s2). (i am free exactly. when it will be held?). bade dinten naon ngawitana? (r28, s2). (when it will be started?). dianggo henteu ku mamang laptopna? (r8, s4). (do you use your computer?). the speaker asked the interlocutor as their respond of acceptance. when the interlocutor sartin t. miolo, emzir, & asep supriadi refusal and acceptance strategies realization in sundanese context 78 ask them to teach his/her little brother, the speaker ask when it will be started so they implicitly accept to teach the interlocutor’s little brother. acceptance with reservation the respondent agreed to perform an act as requested by their interlocutors if particular conditions are meet (aziz, 2000, p. 79). this strategy must be regarded more as an acceptance than a strategy of declination. these are the following examples are taken from the respondents which answered acceptance with reservation situation. nya pami teu aya nu keursaeun, abdi oge teu nanaon nu ngajar mah asalkeun budakna nurut (r20, s2). (well, ifyour sisteris willingialsodo not mindas long ashe keepsme). mangga tapi hapunten pisan pami abdi nuhunkeun artos bayarana dipayun kumargi abdi butuh pisan (r13, s2). (of course, but what ifiasked forpayment at the beginningbecausei really need it). the speaker actually accept it but she/he gives a requirement for the interlocutors to make them obey the interlocutor’s request. non-committal responses this category refers to a category of responses that the speaker does not give a spesific answer. the speaker deliberately left up in the air his/ her responses and allowed the interlocutor to make decisions (aziz, 2000, p. 80). these are the following examples are taken from the respondents which answered non-committal responses situation. aruh punten tos ngarerepot (r12, s4). (oh sorry, i’ve made a difficulties for you). hatur nuhun pa sateuacana, abdi ngaraos henteu enak panginten atos bantosanana. (r14, s8). (thanks before sir, i am shy for your help). they give the answer but they do not tell it spesifically wheather they accept or refuse it. they think that the interlocutors might interpret their answer without the direct answer from the speaker. comments without exemplification this strategy can be acceptance and also refusals because the responses clearly indicated that the respondents would either accept or refuse the request uttered by their interlocutor. these are the following examples are taken from the respondents which answered comments without exemplification situation. abdi narima. da abdi butuh teras abdi oge dicarekan ku bapa pami nolak maksad sae mamang, pan lamun teu nurut ka kolot matak dosa (r13, s4). (i accept because i need it, then my father will be angry to me if i refuse your kind purpose. it will be sin if i don’t obey my father). abdi narima mang nu tos nambutkeun leptop ka abdi jadi abdi tiasa nyusun skripsi tur enggal – enggal (r15, s4). (i accept that you had borrowed your computer so i can do my thesis as soon as possible). conclusion based on findings above we can see that the refusal strategies consist of 12 strategies such as hesitation and lack of enthusiasm, offer an alternative, postponement, put the blame on a third party, general acceptance of an offer but giving no details, general acceptance with excuse, giving reason and explanation, conditional yes, questioning the justification of a request,threatening and comments without exemplification. while, the strategy of accepting consists of 6 strategies such as general yes or ifid, a rethorical response, expression of solidarity, acceptance with reservations, non-committal responses and comments without exemplification. most of the respondents which are sundanese are polite because it can be seen from their respond when they are asking for accompanying their lecturer or when they refused to the person with high power, they choose the polite words. they always say punten, hapunten sateuacana or it can be called ‘sorry’. the term sorry shows that they have a polite when talking with the higher power and distance. but they used different talking when they talk to their friend whih has same power. so they can place where they should be polite and to whom they talk. references aziz, e, a. (2000). refusing in indonesian: strategies and politeness implications. unpublished dissertation in department of linguistics. australia: monash university. jailifar, a. (2009). request strategies: cross-sectional study of iranian efl learners and australian native speakers. www.ccsenet.org/journal.html, 2(1). indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 79 kreidler, c, w. (1998). introducing english semantics. london and newyork: routledge press. leech, g. (1983). principles of pragmatics. new york: longman group inc. maxwell, j, a. (1996). qualitative research design: an interactive approach. california: sage publications, inc. oatey, h, s. (2000). culturally speaking: culture, communication and politeness theory (2nd ed.). london: continuum international publishing group. ogiermann, e. (2009). on apologizing in negative and positive politeness culture. amsterdam: john benjamin publishing company. reiter, r, m. (2000). linguistic politeness in britain and uruguay: a contrastive study of requests and apologies. amsterdam: john benjamins publishing company. shelley, c. (1992). speech acts and pragmatics in sentence generation. university of waterloo: canada. sugiyono. (2012). metode penelitian pendidikan. bandung: alfabeta. thomas, j. (1995). meaning in interaction: an introducing to pragmatics. new york: longman publishing. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 43 the use of praat in learning english debate in indonesian efl classroom wulan rahmatunisa universitas kuningan e-mail: wulan.rahmatunisa@uniku.ac.id syahrul syarifudin universitas kuningan e-mail: syahrul.syarifudin@uniku.ac.id apa citation: rahmatunisa, w. & syarifudin, s. (2021). the use of praat in learning english debate in indonesian efl classroom. indonesian efl journal. 7(1), pp. 43-50. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i1.3989 introduction debate does not only convey a series of words or sentences, but also the meaning behind each utterance phonologically. basically, debate is one part of language skills that are used systematically to accomplish or achieve certain goals (abidin, 2013). in practice, the expression of debate is not only reflected in body language, but also in the phonological systematics of speech. the phonological aspect is called suprasegmental, namely phoneme sound that is influenced by speech, pressure, and intonation (truesdale, 2018). the suprasegmental aspects related to speech or sound segments (phonemes), namely tone, pressure, joints, intonation. then, styler (2017) said that suprasegmental morphemes occur from segmental phonemes, such as phonemic pressures, tones, or pauses. furthermore, simpson (2012) stated that suprasegmental or prosody is an aspect that must be included in phonology. it means suprasegmental study is the domain of phonological area that in the discourse is intended to examine the production of meaning or ideology. in mastering debate as a means to sharpen communication and argumentation skills, an understanding of the use of intonation is needed, which is one of the important suprasegmental elements. intonation is very instrumental in distinguishing sentence intentions (muslich, 2008; kridalaksana, 2009). differences of intonation, pressure, or the tone of the teaching of a morpheme in the text can bring different meanings if those are spoken in different ways so that phonological speech is strongly influenced by the context of speech, in this case the context of discourse. on the other hand, suprasegmental is something that accompanies the phoneme, which can be in the form of sound pressure (intonation), long-short (pitch), and sound vibrations that indicate certain emotions. suprasegmental is the element that "accompanies" and influences the sound of language, and not the true sound. suprasegmental elements are also called prosody (muslich, 2008: 81). in contrast to marsono (1999) suprasegmental sounds are sounds that accompany segmental sounds. verhaar (2010) explains that the suprasegmental sounds received: 29-09-2020 accepted: 27-11-2020 published:31-01-2020 abstract: this study aims to analyze the elements of suprasegmental sound in english debates consisting of stress and intonation by using the praat computer program and students' perceptions toward the use of praat in learning english debate. the data of this study were taken from the practice of debate in the general english class which is a compulsory course in universitas kuningan. a total of 30 students from one class of general english were involved in this study. the method used is a mixed method. several instruments were used to collect data including observation and documentation for qualitative data, and questionnaires for quantitative data. praat program version 6.0.33 was used to analyze the stress and intonation patterns, while questionnaire was used to determine students’ perceptions toward the use of praat in mastering english debate. the results showed that the use of intonation and stress can affect the meaning of speech, especially in debate. furthermore, students gave a positive response to the use of the praat application in understanding the correct intonation patterns and pressure in speaking english. keywords: praat; debate; efl classroom mailto:wulan.rahmatunisa@uniku.ac.id https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i1.3989 wulan rahmatunisa & syahrul syarifudin the use of praat in learning english debate in indonesian efl classroom 44 include intonation, tone, accent and pressure. in fact, the phonetic description of suprasegmental sounds is only the basis for a phonemic description. however, in many ways the phonetic and phonemic aspects are not easily distinguished. the easiest way to understand the suprasegmental element is through an acoustic phonetic approach. there are two acoustic properties that influence the suprasegmental elements, namely frequency and amplitude (nespor and vogel, 2007). these two elements are very influential in the suprasegmental elements and they are very related. the difference between the two sounds is based on whether or not the sound is segmented. sounds that can be segmented, like all vocal and consonant sounds are segmental sounds. while sounds or elements that cannot be segmented, accompanying segmental sounds, such as pressure, tone, pause and duration (elongation) are called suprasegmental or non-segmental sounds or elements (chaer, 2013; ladefoged, 2015). to measure the frequency of air vibrations in the form of waves, a device called an oscillograph is used. similar tools then appeared, such as spectrograms, which allowed us to know the acoustic quality of the sound of the words to be analyzed (yusuf, 1998). next came a tool called the praat program. if a speech after recording is then entered into the praat program, the sound waves can identify the characteristics of the sound image of the speech. praat is a program created by paul boersma & david weenink from the phonetic sciences department of the university of amsterdam (www.praat.org). with the catchphrase "doing phonetics with computer", praat is a software to perform flexible sound analysis and reconstruction. praat can be used to do many things, from spectrogram analysis to reconstructing the sound itself and creating diagrams or drawings that can be used in scientific work. the praat program is needed by researchers who use acoustic data. accurate and complete acoustic information can be generated by empowering the praat program. a recent study on voice analysis by using praat software and classification of user emotional state was conducted by magdin, sulka, tomanova, and vozar in 2019. the paper deals with the user's emotional state classification based on the voice track analysis, it describes its own solution the measurement and the selection process of appropriate voice characteristics using anova analysis and the use of praat software for many voice aspects analysis and for the implementation of own application to classify the user's emotional state from his/her voice. the results show that the emotions determining from the user’s voice is a complex issue and its solution used to be ambiguous and complicated. different people have different voices and the creation of general rules for emotions determining is not elementary. the best results in this area are achieved by neural networks and the systems that combine the emotions determining from voice, from facial expression and other biometrics. moreover, several studies have aimed at exploring the effectiveness of computer software (praat) in helping students to acquire prosodic features of english language. the results also showed that learners that practiced stress and intonation through call approach were more successful than the students who were taught through traditional method (gorjian et.al, 2013). another study regarding praat analysis have been conducted by wulandari in 2016. this research has revealed that the second semester students of the study program of english universitas brawijaya have typical segmental features which are different from that of native speaker. the typical segmental features were detected through voice spectrogram software namely praat. other papers have highlighted the implementation of the widely used speech analysis tool praat as a web application with an extended functionality for feature annotation (hayati, 2005; dominguez, latorre, farrus, and filba, 2016; octavia, 2018). in particular, praat on the web addresses some of the central limitations of the original praat tool and provides (i) enhanced visualization of annotations in a dedicated window for feature annotation at interval and point segments, (ii) a dynamic scripting composition exemplified with a modular prosody tagger, and (iii) portability and an operational web interface. speech annotation tools with such a functionality are key for exploring large corpora and designing modular pipelines. as differences in intonation, stress, and tone of speech of a morpheme in the utterance can bring differences in meaning, therefore, this study aims to investigate the use of praat in learning english debate in indonesian efl classroom. method the method used in this research is a mixed method. mixed methods research is a research method that indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 45 combines or combines qualitative methods and quantitative methods to be used together in a research activity, so that the data obtained is more comprehensive, valid, reliable and objective (nunan, 1993; stake, 2010; creswell, 2014). the design used is concurrent embedded where the second method strengthens the first method. the data of this study were taken from the practice of debate in the general english class which is a compulsory course in universitas kuningan. a total of 30 students from one class of general english were involved in this study. the method used is a mixed method. several instruments were used to collect data including observation and documentation for qualitative data, and questionnaires for quantitative data. praat program version 6.0.33 was used to analyze the stress and intonation patterns, while questionnaire was used to determine students’ perceptions toward the use of praat in mastering english debate. in analyzing qualitative data, the first step is transcribing from the recorded sound. then the transcription data that contains phonetic copies in the form of english spelling along with the tone spoken by the subject is processed into a graphic praat. praat program version 6.0.33 is used to analyze intonation patterns. praat is a program created by paul boersma & david weenink of the university of amsterdam's phonetic sciences department (www.praat.org). with the slogan 'doing phonetics with computer', praat is a software for flexible sound analysis and reconstruction. praat can be used to do many things, from spectrogram analysis to sound reconstruction itself and making diagrams or drawings that can be used in scientific work. the praat program is highly needed by researchers who use acoustic data. accurate and complete acoustic information can be generated by empowering the praat program. the spelling used is ipa phonetic spelling. as said by miles & huberman (1992: 87), that the data scattered across various utterances can be analyzed, the usual method used as a solution is to give a code to the observational field notes. code numbers, subjects, and types of sentences are written in the data transcription sheet. while, the questionnaire was used to determine students’ perceptions toward the use of praat in mastering english debate. the questionnaire used in this study was adopted from a questionnaire compiled by davis (2003). the measurement used in this study was a likert scale with five options, namely strongly disagree (sd), disagree (d), neutral (n), agree (a), and strongly agree (sa). the results of answering descriptive questions on the questionnaire were reported in the form of percentage as supporting data. results and discussion stressing and intonation patterns in english debate the display settings in praat can be set as expected (by adding / removing handles) via the view-sub-menu show analysis from the second sub-menu display. the researcher can remove the handles in the show spectrogram, and add the checkpoints to the other three options, namely show pitch (blue line), show intensity (green line), and show formants (red dots). the display is as shown in the following praat figure which is equipped with pitch (blue line), intensity (green line), and formant (red line). figure 1. praat analysis of stressing pattern wulan rahmatunisa & syahrul syarifudin the use of praat in learning english debate in indonesian efl classroom 46 in the praat analysis figure above, we can see a stressing pattern which is marked by black wave lines in the form of density and stretch. stressing in english speech serves to distinguish meanings at the sentence level (syntax) as well as to distinguish meaning at the word level (lexis). at the sentence level, not all words are stressed the same (roach, 2002). only words that are emphasized or considered important get stress (accent). therefore, listeners must know the meaning behind the meaning of the speech they hear. at the word level, the stress on syllables or syllables affects the differentiation of meaning. for example, the word "import" when pronounced with stress on the first syllabic ['im] means different from when pronounced with stress on the second syllable [' port]. the stress at the beginning of the syllabic means belonging to the class of nouns, while the stress in the second syllabic means a verb. thus it can be stated that the stress on the syllable in english is phonemic. figure 2. praat analysis of intonation pattern meanwhile, the figure above shows the image of the consonant and vowel segmental elements. the lower part of the figure 2 shows the image of the suprasegmental element in the form of tone, intonation, formant (is a collection of sound energy around a certain frequency on a sound wave). formant is an acoustic phonetic term which has the meaning of a classification of the characteristics of the transitional vowel sound and the sound between these vowel connectors. we can add words to the praat image using the ms word program. after editing is complete, the data is saved in the sound recording graphics folder (which is set up in the task bar) and give it a name, for example sound recording graphics k1. then a similar operation continues for the rest of the sentence (k2 and so on). the red longitudinal line is the indication of the length of time of the speech, the display line that appears initially will be in the center of the image, representing half of the complete time of the utterance, as shown in figure 2. the result is coherence with wulandari et.al (2016) who reveals that due to the lack of how to disambiguate the correct pronunciation of vowel sounds within the given words, the participants tend to produce inaccurate pronunciation. which are reflected by the result of the spectrum score range: f1 and f2. some proposed techniques of teaching segmental were drilling, teaching minimal pairs, chanting with jazz chant and rhyming with tongue twisters, to modify learners segmental features (joaquin, 2009). automatic annotation of speech often involves dealing with linguistic and acoustic information that needs to be conveniently organized at different levels of segmentation (i.e., phonemes, syllables, words, phrases, sentences, etc.) (christodoulides, 2014). even though laboratory experiments on speech are controlled to a certain extent (e.g., minimal word pairs, short sentences, read speech) and are usually annotated manually, the increasing trend to analyze spontaneous speech, especially in human-machine interaction, requires tools to facilitate semi-automatic annotation tasks with a compact visualization for manual revision, presentation of results and versatile scripting capabilities (dominguez, 2016). after displaying the praat image, a contrastive analysis can be carried out to compare the shape of the tonal motion expressed with the blue line in the praat figure. to see in more detail about the shape indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 47 of the tone lines of each word, researcher can cut the sound waves of a sentence into words per word with goldwave, then enter it into the praat program and display the image shape like the praat figure above. in this study, the utterances in english debate were examined. debate is a process of oral communication expressed in language to defend opinions. each team in the debate will state an argument, give reasons in a certain way in order to convince the audience so that the opposite team is arguing or listening. differences of intonation, stressing, or the tone of a morpheme in the text can bring different meanings if those are spoken in different ways. therefore, phonological speech is strongly influenced by the context of speech, in this case the context of discourse. students' perceptions toward the use of praat the questionnaire was used to determine students’ perceptions toward the use of praat in mastering english debate. it was adopted from a questionnaire compiled by davis (2003). the measurement used in this study was a likert scale with five options, namely strongly disagree (sd), disagree (d), neutral (n), agree (a), and strongly agree (sa). the following is data from the distribution of questionnaires regarding the use of praat in learning english debate. table 1. students’ perception toward the use of praat figure 3. students’ perception toward the use of praat no. statements sd d n a sa 1 using praat application helps me to know the appropriate intonation in english utterance 10% 83,3% 6,7% 2 using praat application helps me to know the appropriate stressing in english utterance 10% 83,3% 6,7% 3 praat application enables me to control my speech tempo 46,7% 46,7% 6,7% 4 praat application supports my ability in speaking english 53,3% 33,3% 13,3% 5 using praat application increases my english pronunciation 3,3% 43,3% 43,3% 10% 6 using praat application increases my productivity in speaking english 63,3% 26,7% 10% 7 praat application improves my motivation to learn english debate 56,7% 36,7% 6,7% 8 using praat application helps me to know the speakers’ emotion in english debate 43,3% 50% 6,7% 9 using praat application helps me to know the sentence types in english debate 3,3% 20% 66,7% 10% 10 overall, i find praat application useful in my learning 16,7% 73,3% 10% 0 0,1 0,2 0,3 0,4 0,5 0,6 0,7 0,8 0,9 item 1 item 2 item 3 item 4 item 5 item 6 item 7 item 8 item 9 item 10 sd d n a sa wulan rahmatunisa & syahrul syarifudin the use of praat in learning english debate in indonesian efl classroom 48 for item 1, which is related to the statement "using praat application helps me to know the appropriate intonation in english utterance" it is known that the majority of students, namely 83.3% agree that the praat application helps to understand the correct intonation in english. the difference in the concept of intonation that english and indonesian have makes there are several difficulties faced by students in learning english as a foreign language (alwi et.al, 2003). with the help of the praat application which displays different color graphics for intonation markers, it makes it easy for students to understand appropriate intonation of english. for item 2, which is related to the statement "using praat application helps me to know the appropriate stressing in english utterance" it also shows the same percentage of student perceptions, as many as 83.3% agree that the praat application helps in understanding pressure in english speech. students can understand the concept of phonemic english stress with praat's help because each different stress in english can give a different meaning to a word. it is consistent with ladefoged (2005) who stated that a term that stresses two ideas at the same time, namely that you change things by grabbing them or typing, and that these changes are effective without confirmation. for item 3, which is related to the statement "praat application enables me to control my speech tempo" shows that there are 46.7% of students agree that the praat application helps control the tempo of speech in english. however, it was also found that 46.7% of students were unsure about the concept that praat helps in mastering the tempo or duration of speaking english. this is based on the fact that the tempo or duration of speaking is complex because the tempo depends on the speaker's emotion, context, situation and cultural background (hart, 1990). for item 4, which is related to the statement "praat application supports my ability in speaking english", it is known that 53.3% of students are unsure whether the praat application supports their ability in speaking english. meanwhile, 33.3% of students agree and 13.3% strongly agree that praat helps in speaking english skills. this is because speaking ability is a verbal ability which not only includes expertise in producing sound, but also the ability to convey messages that are meaningful and can be understood by listeners. so that vocabulary mastery in english orally holds a larger portion compared to phonetic studies that were explored through the praat application. for item 5, which is related to the statement "using praat application increases my english pronunciation", it is known that 43.3% of students agree that the praat application can improve english pronunciation skills. meanwhile, the same number, namely 43.3% of students, also expressed doubts about improving english pronunciation skills because of praat's assistance. this means that students' pronunciation skills of consonants and vowels can be helped by praat. however, it cannot be denied that some students still have difficulty pronouncing complex syllables or syllables even with the help of the praat application. it is relevant with mathew (2005) in his study about errors in pronunciation by learners of english as foreign language whose first language are indonesia. he stated that the indonesian sound system affects to some extent for indonesian student who learn the english language. for item 6, which is related to the statement "using praat application increases my productivity in speaking english" as many as 63.3% of students have the opinion that they doubt that the praat application can increase productivity in speaking english. this cannot be denied because productivity in speaking should be supported by a strong language environment so that the help of tools is not enough. meanwhile, 26.7% of students agree that the praat application helps in increasing their productivity in english. these results indicate that students feel more confident in speaking english because of the understanding of intonation and stress which they get through praat. for item 7, which is related to the statement "praat application improves my motivation to learn english debate" it is known that 56.7% of students doubt that the praat application can motivate them to learn english debate. it cannot be denied that debate requires complex abilities. the english debate requires students not only to be able to express ideas in english, but also to be able to master global knowledge, analyze, make judgments, and convince the public. therefore, the help of tools alone is not sufficient to master english debate. meanwhile, 36.7% of students agreed that the praat application could motivate them to indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 49 learn debate. this means that students feel more confident in arguing in english after knowing the right pressure and intonation through the praat application. for item 8, which is related to the statement "using praat application helps me to know the speakers' emotion in english debate" that as many as 50% of students agree that the praat application helps them to find out the emotions of speakers in the debate. this is because praat shows the stress and intonation patterns of the speaker in an interactive way. differences in intonation, stress, or tone of speech of a morpheme in the text shown by praat can bring about differences in meaning if it is spoken in different ways so that phonological utterance is strongly influenced by the context of speech, in this case the context of discourse (davletcharova et al., 2015; truesdale and pell, 2018). for item 9, which is related to the statement "using praat application helps me to know the sentence types in english debate", it is known that 66.7% of students agree that the praat application helps them differentiate the types of sentences spoken in english debates. this is because the results of praat's analysis clearly show that based on the study of intonation patterns there are several types of sentences, namely news sentences (declarative), interrogative sentences (interrogative), and command sentences (imperative). for the last item, which is related to the statement "overall, i find praat application useful in my learning" it is known that 73.3% agree, 16.7% doubt, and 10% strongly agree with the statement. this means that the majority agree that the praat application is useful for student learning. with advances in technology, especially the creation of computers today is very helpful at all in the process of progress in education (van et.al, 2001). moreover, there is the praat program that can change sound waves that previously could only be heard, now become visible to the human eye. in addition, the praat program is equipped with a device to see the tone movement, the amount of pause, the length of the utterance all of which are needed to determine the inaccuracy of an utterance or the error of the utterance. conclusion the results of this study showed that the use of intonation and stress can affect the meaning of speech, especially in debate. furthermore, students gave a positive response to the use of the praat application in understanding the correct intonation patterns and pressure in speaking english. the difference in the concept of intonation in english and indonesian triggers several difficulties faced by students in learning english as a foreign language. with the help of the praat application which displays different color graphics for intonation markers, it becomes easier for students to understand appropriate stressing and intonation of english. it is hoped that the results of this study can enrich the literature on suprasegmental elements of phonological studies which still have little attention in the context of indonesian efl. practically, this study provides information related to improving communication skills and expressing arguments especially for students. professionally, through the results of this research, it is hoped that teachers and lecturers can develop debate strategies that combine suprasegmental element analysis to support student success in mastering english as a foreign language. references abidin, y. z. 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(2009). drill, baby, drill: exploring a neurobiological basis for the teaching of segmentals in the esl/efl classroom. teachers articles: volume 39 article 2. kridalaksana, h. (2009). kamus linguistik edisi keempat. jakarta: pt gramedia pustaka utama. ladefoged, p. (2005). vowels and consonants: an introduction to the sounds of languages. second edition. malden, mass. & oxford: blackwell. magdin, m., sulka, t., tomanova, j., & vozar, m. (2019). voice analysis using praat software and classification of user emotional state. international journal of interactive multimedia and artificial intelligence, vol. 5, no. 6 marsono. (1999). fonetik. yogyakarta: gadjah mada university. mathew, i. (2005). errors in pronunciation by learners of english as foreign language whose first language are indonesia, gayo and acehnese. monash university linguistic paper 2005. vol.3 number 2. miles, m. b. & huberman, a. m. (1992). analisis data kualitatif. jakarta: universitas indonesia muslich, m. 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(2018). the sound of passion and indifference. speech communication, vol. 99, pp. 124-134. 2018, doi:10.1016/j.specom.2018.03.007 van, h., vincent, j., & judith, h. (2001). temporal distribution of interrogativity marker in dutch: a perceptual study” in gussenhoven, carlos, t. rietveld, and n. warner (eds.). (2001). papers in laboratory phonology viii. cambridge: cambridge university press. verhaar, j. w. m. (2010). asas-ssas linguistik umum. yogyakarta: gadjah mada university press. wulandari, i., rodliyah, i., & fatimah. (2016). using praat for analysing segmental features of speech produced by the students of english study program of universitas brawijaya. eltics journal, vol. 3, 2016. issn : 2407-0742 (page 1425) yusuf, s. (1998). fonetik dan fonologi. jakarta: gramedia pustaka utama. indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(2) july 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 136 miles’s character in looking for alaska: a psychologycal perspective yani heryani departement of english education, university of kuningan email: yaniheryani083@gmail.com apa citation: heryani, y. (2016). miles’s character in looking for alaska: a psychologycal perspective. indonesian efl journal, 2(2), 136-144 received: 19-05-2016 accepted: 22-06-2016 published: 01-07-2016 abstract: the aim of this research was to analyze the character of miles halter and the influences of the other characters towards miles’s character in looking for alaska novel. the primary data source was transcribed from looking for alaska novel directed by john green (2005). here, the researcher applied a descriptive qualitative research design based on theories of roberts and freud. to know how miles’s character presented in the novel, the researcher used several ways such as from what miles does and says and from what the other characters says about miles. as result, the reseracher found that miles’s characters were nice, independent, diligent, hard worker, naughty, curious, smart, and unique. besides, the reseracher also found the influences from the other characters such as habitual in reading, smoking, drinking, and pranking. keywords: young adult literarure, novel and character introduction novel is a part of literary work that belongs to fiction. novel is usually known as narrative fiction that is identic with the length of the story and a complex plot portrayed by a number of characters. novel describes what never happens or what usually happens.a novel is a book of long narrative in literary fiction. novel is belonging to modern literature. it consists of roman, popular novels, and short stories. novel presents the story which is portrayed by the characters. the characters and the events in the novel are imaginary. most of novel involves many characters and tells a complex story to attract reader’ interest. hoffman (1988) states that novel is a study of manners which is portrayed to the reader through the characters, the incidents, and the intrigue in the story. hoffman adds that novel can be from the imagination of the writer or from the actual history. it depends on the purpose or what the writer wants to show in the story. in with this, raymond (1988, p. 48) notes that “to create a fictional world that seems real to the reader, novelist uses five main elemenet such as plot, character, conflict, setting, and theme.”character, as a part of intrinsic elements, is one of important aspects in a novel. character presents and conveys the meaning and values from the writer to the reader. a role of character in a story is totally absollute since the story cannot be called as a story without any character in it. the presence of character is also important because it engages reader’s interest to the story so that they can enjoy and understand the story. roberts and jacob (1993) view the character as a verbal representation of human being. through action, speech description, and commentary, author potrays character that can make reader interest, laugh, love or even hate the character. so, character is the important aspect in a novel. based on the explanation above, this research analyzed the character of miles in looking for yani heryani miles’s character in looking for alaska: a psychologycal perspective 137 alaska and the influences of the other character towards miles’ character. this research was emphasized on the psychology of the main character in the novel. so, the researcher used the theory from barry (1824) about psychoanalysis. barry argues that psychoanalysis is a form of therapy which aims to cure mental disorder by investigating the interaction of conscious and unconscious elements in the minds. furthermore, barry (1824) divides the model of psyche into three parts; id, ego, and superego. the first is id. the id is the component of personality that consists of all the inherited (i.e. biological) components of personality, including the sex (life) instinct (which contains the libido), and the aggressive (death) instinct. the id is the unconscious part of our psyche which responds directly and immediately to the instincts. the second is ego. the ego deals with reality which tries to meet the desires of the id in a way that is socially acceptable in the world. this may mean that human’s desire is not always in the right way. the ego recognizes that other people have needs and wants too, and as a human being we shouldn’t selfish to get what we want or need. freud (1923) as cited in mcleod (2008) argues that ego is the part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world. the last is superego. the superego incorporates the values and morals of society which are learnt from one's parents and others. it develops around the age of 3–5 during the phallic stage of psychosexual development. freud (1923) as cited in mcleod (2008) argues that the superego's function is to control the id's impulses, especially those which society forbids, such as sex and aggression. it also has the function of persuading the ego to turn to moralistic goals rather than simply realistic ones and to strive for perfection. on the other hand, to knowhow character is disclosed in literature, the researcher used the theory from roberts (1983). roberts (1983) says that there are four specific ways in which the researcher gets information about the character. these are from what the characters say, what the characters do, what the other characters say, and from what the author says about the character. this research is inspired by the other researches that have been conducted by some researchers regarding the character analysis in a novel. the first is the research from ermalina (2015) whose purpose was to analyze the main characters in the lord of the ring-the return of the king novel and to know the characterization of main characters in the novel. the second research was done by riany (2007). this study analyzes the character of major female character in star shine down and the rage of angel novel. the last research is conducted by faisal (2010). this research was aimed at knowing the character and characterization of bruce nolan as main character by analyzing the evidence from the dialogues and his actions in the film. method this research applied a qualitative descriptive method since it investigated and described the characters of miles in looking for alaskanovel. in this research, the researcher analyzes and interprets all data through a set of certain processes of data collection and data analysis to describe the character of miles halter. the data in this research is not derived from questionnaire, from respondent or machines but it comes from novel by john green entitled looking for alaska. in data collection techniques, there were several steps done by the researcher. the first step was reading. according to fanani (2012), reading is a physic and mental activity to reveal the meaning of http://www.simplypsychology.org/unconscious-mind.html http://www.simplypsychology.org/psychosexual.html http://www.simplypsychology.org/psychosexual.html indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(2) july 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 138 the written texts in which there is a process of knowing letters in that activity. in this step, the researcher did not read the text just once, but the researcher read the text more than once in order to understand the whole story and the implied meanings contained in every dialogue. the second was identifying and highlighting. koff (2009) argues that identifying is the process to recognize and establish the particular person or things. this process aims to give a sign in the text and to differentiate whether it is required data or not. to differentiate the data, the researcher highlights the words, phrases or sentences in the text that support to the research. the third was collecting. collecting here means that after required data which support to the character were highlighted, the researcher collected that data and put it in table. the last was classifying. here, the researcher classified the data based on the certain character showed by every word, phrase, sentence, and dialogue in the novel based on the theory from robert (1983). further, in analyzing the data, the researcher firstly analyzes all of data that has been collected. analysis is the practice of looking closely at small parts to see how they affect the whole. this analysis focuses on how the main character is portrayed in this novel based on what the character says, what the character does, what the other characters say, and from what the author says. the next steps was determining. determining here means that the researcher concludes the characters of miles based on the theory and the description found in the novel. results and discussion as roberts (1983) stated that there are four specific ways in which the researcher gets information about the character. these are from what the character says, what the character does, what the other characters say, and from what the author says about the character. these four ways were used by the researcher to explain the exact character of miles as the major character in looking for alaska novel. from what the character says from what the character says, the researcher found seven character of miles. those are nice, independent, hard worker, naughty, curious, smart, and unique. first, miles was a nice character. ellerton (2014) argues that nice is pleasant or pleasing or agreeable in nature or appearance, socially or conventionally correct. from the converstaion in the novel, miles shows his cares to his parents. he promise that he would call them every sunday because he knew that it was the first time for them to stay far away from miles. this is shown in the following conversation. “god, we will miss you.” ” don’t worry, “ don’t do anything stupid.” “ok.” “ no drugs, no cigarette, no drinking. i love you . “ i love you too,” i’ ll call every sunday.”(3) besides, miles was also nice to his friends, martin and alaska. he often spent his money to buy cigarette for martin and alaska, although it was wrong but, as a friend, miles was a nice friend. second, we could know that miles was independent. according to suyadi (2013), independent is attitudes and behaviors that are not easy to pad a dependent of others in completing tasks. miles’s independent character can be seen in the following conversation. “i can unpack , mom” “let me at least make your bed.” “no, really. i can do it. it’s okay. because you simply cannot draw these things out forever.” (p. 3) yani heryani miles’s character in looking for alaska: a psychologycal perspective 139 in the conversation above, we could know that he tried to do anything by himself. miles refused the helps for his mom, started from prepared bed, unpacked his clothes to the drawer, until decorated the new room and he did it by himself. third, miles also has a hard worker character. suyadi (2013) says that hard worker is the behaviors that show serious efforts to overcome various barriers to learning and assignments, and complete the task with the best of it. miles showed his struggle from his effort to change his life. he said that he moved to culver creek was not because he did not have friends in the old school or was not because his dad. but the reason why he moved to culver creek was because he as inspired by the last word of francois rabelais, ‘‘ i go to seek a great perhaps.’ “is this why you want to leave, miles?” “ uh, no,”. ” well, why then?” “ because of me?” “ no, it wasn’t because of dad. hold on. so this guy, francois rabelais. he was the poet. and his last word were ‘ i go to seek a great perhaps.’ that ‘s why i’m going, so i don’t have to wait until i died to start seeking the great perhaps.” (p. 2) he told that he moved to culver creek to find the great perhaps in his life. he thought that he wouldn’t find the great perhaps in florida and he could not wait until he is died to see the great perhaps in his life. fourth, miles has a naughty character. according to psychologist adrian furnham (2016), naughty is disobey the convention, challenge the great and the good, frequently undermine. he did something although he knew that it was wrong. he forgot what his parents said. he drank and smoke regularly at school without thinking that he would get any problems because of his bad behave. "absolutely not," he answered. he walked over to his crumpled shorts lying on the floor and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. he lit two and handed one to me. i smoked the whole goddamned thing. (p. 40) fifth, miles also has curious character. hunt (1963) argues that curious derives the desire to acquire knowledge and skil. miles was corious because he always wanted to know about something. it could be seen from many situation. he always had question about everything, one of them was about his roommate (chip martin), alaska, jake (alaska’ s boyfriend), lara, dr. hyde and dr. starnes. "what is that? a bird?" (p. 7) "what happens…to us…when we die?"(p. 32) "did she say anything” (p. 73) "how drunk was she?"(p. 73) "nothing. i just want to know what happened to her."(p. 83) even after alaska dies, he didn’t believe that it was really happened. he didn’t believe that alaska was died. he wanted to know why she died, whether it was a suicide or an accident. miles tried to investigate to get the answer. this description was enough to conclude that he was a curious person. sixth, from what miles said, it could be known that he was a smart person. it was known when he answered the question from alaska and kevin who wanted to test miles relating to miles’s interest about people’s last word. alaska asked about miles’s interest about last word, instead confidently miles asked alaska to test him. then, alaska mentioned one person “jfk” and miles immadiatelly answered the last word "that's obvious.” it showed that miles was smart because he could remember indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(2) july 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 140 about people’s last word and not all people could memorize it. "so do you really memorize last words?” "yeah," i said. and then hesitantly, i added, "you want to quiz me?" "jfk," she said. "that's obvious," i answered. "oh, is it now?" she asked. "no. those were his last words. someone said, `mr. president, you can't say dallas doesn't love you,' and then he said, 'that's obvious,' and then he got shot." the last character presented by what miles said was unique. according to psychologyst adrian furnham (2016), unique is being the only existing one, unusual, or special in some way. miles was a unique person. he has an unsual hobby that was memorizing the last word of famous people. the last words mean that the words were said before someone was die. for instance the last word from francois rebelais “i go to seek the great perhaps” or simon bolivar “how will i ever get out of this labyrinth!". the conversation below was the quotes from miles. miles said that he knew a lot of people’s last word. for him, learning the last word was an indulgence. strangely, he never knew how he like it. it showed that he was a unique character which means that he was different or unusual. “urn, i know a lot of people’s last word. it was an indulgence, learning last word. other people had chocolate and i had dying declaration.” “example? “ “i like henrik ibsen’s. he was a playwright. i knew a lot about ibsen but i’d never read any of his playsa. i didn’t like reading plays. i liked reading biographies.” (p. 5) from what the character does from what miles did, the researcher found eight characters of miles including nice, care, independent, diligent, hard worker, naughty, curious, and smart. the first character showed was a nice character. it can be seen from how miles love his parents. miles hugged his parrents because he was sad knowing that he would leave his parents although he moved to culver creek because of his desire. i stood and hugged her. my dad walked over, too, and we formed a sort of huddle. (p. 3) i usually only called my parents on sunday afternoon, so when my mom heard my voice, she instantly overreacted. (p. 36) so during third period, i called my mom at work. i wanted her to say it was okay. (p. 36) second, he also cares about his parents although he was far away, he always called them every sunday. it made his parents happy because they always knew about miles’s condition. besides, miles always remembered what his parent said. he did what his parents suggested to him. third, miles was known as an independent character. miles was independent beacuse he could do anything by himself. he did not depend on other people. when he came to his new room in culver creek, he did everything by himself, started from placing the book in the bookshelves, unpacking the clothes and puting it into drawer, taping the map of the world to the wall until decorating the room. it was done by miles without any helps from his parents. besides, when he got problem at school, he could face it by himself. i managed to tape a map of the world to the wall and get most of my clothes into drawers before i noticed that the hot. (p. 11) they took me a roundabout way to the fake beach, and then i knew what would happen – a good, old-fashioned dunking in the lake – and i http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/existing http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/unusual http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/special yani heryani miles’s character in looking for alaska: a psychologycal perspective 141 calmed down. i could handle that. (p. 11) fourth, the researcher found diligent character from what miles did. according to krecjir (2003), diligent is practical obedience in action, which is the loving of our work so we are doing our best. practical obidience means conscientiousness in one’s work. miles has conscientiousness in reading book. i spent the night surfing the web (no porn, i swear) and reading the final days, a book about richard nixon and watergate. (p. 11) i spent most of the next day lying in bed, immersed in the miserably uninteresting fictional world of ethan frome, (25) i sat in the hall with my back against the wall and read my american history textbook. (p. 26) the data above showed that miles was a diligent person. he often spent his night to read a book, either material book or just the book for his additional knowledge. the final days, biographies, the history of american war and religion were several books that miles read. although he spent much time with his friend, but he still had time to read a book. on the other hand, he always came to the class 15 minutes before the class began and he always payed attention to the teacher during the class, especially for world religion subject that was teached by dr. hyde. the fifth character that could be identified was a hard worker character. miles was hard worker since he studied hard in every subject. many time he spent in his room, studying math and memorizing french vocab. he also focused on precalc and biology, two classes that might threatead his goal to get 3.4 gpa. he could sit for many hour in front of the computer to do the assigment or finish the paper and prepare for the examination until he was ready to face it. so, yeah, i spent a lot of my time at home studying math and memorizing french vocab. (p. 45). i'd just gotten my precalc test back, and i was awash with admiration for alaska, since her tutoring had paved my way to a b-plus. (p. 24) besides, he asked alaska to guide and tutor him in precalc subject because miles felt less in that subject and it might threatead his goal to get 3.4 gpa, so miles studied hard in that subject by asking alaska to help him. sixth, miles was also known as naughty student. miles showed his naughty when he was not obidient to what her parent said. miles often involved in several problems at school. when he moved to culver creek, his parents said that he is not allowed to smoke or drink. but, in reality, miles who had joined with martin and alaska did what his parents porbid. first, he tried to smoke. second, he drank. the last, he got problems because he and his friend did the prank at school. those bad behaviours showed that miles was a naughty student. the conversation below showed when he tried to smoke. besides, miles also drank at campus and he often involved in pranking at school. "want a smoke?" i had never smoked a cigarette, but when in rome… "is it safe here?" "not really," he said, then lit a cigarette and handed it to me. i inhaled. coughed. wheezed. gasped for breath.coughed again. considered vomiting. (p. 7) seventh, the curious character was also identified from what miles did. when alaska died, miles did not believe it because miles met alaska the night before even they were kissing at that indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(2) july 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 142 night. because miles did not believe about what had happen, he and martin went to police to reveal what really happened to alaska. the last character presented in the novel was smart. it could be known when kevin challanged miles relating to his interest in memorizing last word. but once more, miles could answer the last word from president who was mentioned by kevin. in addition, miles got b-plus for precalc subject. i'd just gotten my precalc test back, and i was awash with admiration for alaska, since her tutoring had paved my way to a b-plus. (p. 24) precalc was a difficult subject for miles, so he asked alaska to teach him about that subject. because miles was smart, he could understand and applied what alaska taught and finally he got bplus for that difficult subject. therefore, miles was smart because he could immadiatelly understand what alaska explained about that difficult subject. from what the other characters say about miles from what the other characters say about miles, the first character identified was nice. it was known from what mr. starnes said. when miles arrived in culver creek, he met mr. halter for the first time. mr. halter gave the schedule to miles. mr. starnes said that miles seemed like a nice young man. "welcome to culver creek, mr. halter. you're given a large measure of freedom here. if you abuse it, you'll regret it. you seem like a nice young man. i'd hate to have to bid you farewell." (p. 10) second, miles was categorized as an independent person. it could be known from what martin said about miles. in the beginning of the novel, miles brought his trunk to his new room. he tried to decorate the room by taping the world map on the wall and puting the clothes in the drawer. then, when martin come to the room, he said that “i see you have decorated this place. i like it.” third, from what martin said, miles was a diligent character. martin said that miles was a nerd. it mean that miles was categorized as a diligent student. martin clearly knew how often miles read a book, either material or just a biogarphies. so, he said that miles was a nerd. martin : “we need booze.” and we need to borrow eagle’s breathalyzer.” miles : “borrow it?” martin : “yeah, he is never made you take one?” miles : “urn, no. he think i’m a nerd. martin : “you are a nerd, pudge.”(p. 75) the fourth character from what the other character said was smart. it could be known from alaska’s perspective. alaska argued that miles was smart. it was because miles could mention the last word from people who is mentioned by alaska such as from jfk. miles mentioned their last word and it made alaska amazed. miles as unique person was also presented from what the other characters said. it was said by martin when he introduced miles to alaska. he immadiatelly tells to alaska that miles can memorize people’s last word. martin immadiatelly says that miles likes to memorize people’s last word and it indicates that miles has an unusual interest. if martin argued that it was normal, he would not tell it immadiatelly to alaska. the influences of the other characters toward miles’s character the second analysis was about what the influences of the other yani heryani miles’s character in looking for alaska: a psychologycal perspective 143 characters toward miles’s character. miles halter is the main character in looking for alaska novel. as the main character, miles gets the influences from the other characters. freud (1923), divides the model of psyche into three types in which one of them is ego. freud argues that ego is a part of id which has been modified by the dierct influence of the external world. the external world can be from reality, tragedy, accident, and influences from the other characters around them. here, the researcher only analyzed the influences of the other characters towards miles’s character. the other characters refer to people around miles. they are miles’s dad, chip martin, and alaska. first was the influence from miles’s dad. as a person who is always with miles during sixteen years, parents certainly had big influences for miles’s character. based on the novel, miles’s parents were nice and cares about miles. it automatically gave good influences to miles so that miles became a nice person who cares and loves his parents. besides, the habit of miles’s dad who like reading book make miles become a diligent student who also likes reading book. therefore, it is unsuprising if miles becomes a smart student. second was the influence from martin. chip martin was one of several important characters in the story since he provided stability for miles, and he was always around to help and come up with his ideas.when miles moved to the culver creek, most of his time was spent with chip martin. so, miles and martin always do the same thing. it was beacuse miles always listened to martin as if he had some sort of authority figure. martin is a smoker and he definitely drinks too much. certainly, it gives bad influences towards miles. martin had changed miles from a nice person to be naughty person. miles slowly unravels his innocence as he hangs out with martin. he began to smoke and drink regularly on campus. miles who was not a smoker and almost never drinks before became a smoker and drinker since he met martin. martin made miles become a naughty person, even he forgets about the messagges stated by his parents who forbid miles to smoke and drink. the last from alaska. alaska was also the character who was important in this story. the whole story revolved mostly around her and her mystery. her character also gave many influences to miles’s character since alaska was the person who made miles attracted. alaska had a big role in making miles into a naughty person since she had enchantment to make miles follow what alaska did. first, she was the first person who introduces miles to vodca and ambrosia. alaska made miles enjoyed drinking. when they were together, martin, alaska, takumi, and miles, they almost never passed without cigarette and drinks. alaska made drinks as a new habit for miles. second, alaska is a very flirtatious person, and she’s constantly flirting with miles, even though she has a boyfriend. she made miles thought that sex was interseting. last, alaska was a prank person. she often creates prank in culver creek. when miles joined with alaska and martin, they always involved miles in their mission, included prank. she successed creating the soul of the prank in miles’s character. even after alaska was died, miles and martin did the greatest prank in culver creek by presenting the striptease dancer in speaker’s day and they dedicated it for alaska. conclusion looking for alaska is a novel created by john green. it is categorized as young adult novel where the protagonists character is teens. this novel is very interesting since it tells about teenager who has ambition in finding the great indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(2) july 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 144 perhaps. miles halter is the main character in this novel. he decides to move to culver creek to find the great perhaps. in culver creek, he meets chip martin and alaska. after meeting martin and alaska, miles becomes a diferrent person. martin and alaska give the influences on miles’s character. to know how miles’s character is presented in this novel, the researcher used several ways such as from what miles’s character does and says, and from what the other characters say about miles. the result of this research showed that miles’s characters are nice, independent, diligent, hard worker, curious, intellectual, naughty, unique, unsociable, friendly, and smart. here, miles gets the influences from parents, martin, alaska, and dr. hyde. therefore, this analysis has answered both research questions about what are miles’s character presented in looking for alaska novel and what the influences of the other characters towards miles’s character. references barry, p. (1824). an introduction to literary and cultural theory. manchester: manchester unversity press. dian. (2014). karakter pintar, cerdas dan jenius. retrieved from http://dianeducationcenter.blogspot.co .id/2014/09/karakter-pintar-cerdasdan-jenius.html ellerton, k. (2014). nice vs. kind – what is the difference between niceness & kindness?. retrieved fromhttp://meditationmag.com/medit ation-psychology/nice-vs-kind/ ermalina. (2015). the main female character in “the star shine down and range of angels.” pasir pengaraian: university of pasir pengaraian. faisal. (2010). analysis of main character in bruce almighty movie. jakarta: state islamicuniversity. fanani, b. e. (2012). teknik baca cepat trik efektif membaca 2 detik 1 halaman. yogyakarta: araska. furnham, a. (2016). are naughty children and adults fun or problematic?. retrieved from https://www.psychologytoday.com/bl og/sideways-view/201602/thepsychology-naughtiness mcleod, s. a. (2008). id, ego and superego. retrieved from www.simplypsychology.org/psyche.ht ml freud, s. (1923). the ego and the id. se, 19, 166. green, j. (2005). looking for alaska. jakarta: pt gramedia pustaka utama. hoffman, h. ( 1999). latin fiction. chicago: a. c. mcclure & co. hunt, j. mcv. (1963). motivation inherent in information processing and action. in motivation and social interaction: cognitive determinants. new york: ronald. klarer, m. (1998). an introduction to literature studies. london: routledge. koff, h. r. (2009). a definition of identification : a review of the literature. proquest llc. krejir, r. j. (2003). into the word ministries. retrieved from http://www.intothyword.com/ raymond, b. r. g. ( 1988). introduction to the short story. rochelle park: hayden book co. roberts, e. v., & jacobs, e.h. (1993). literature: an introduction to reading and writing. new york: prentice hall, inc. robert, e. v. (1983). writing theme about literature. new york: prentice –hall, inc. suyadi. 2013. strategi pemebelajaran pendidikan karakter. bandung: remaja rosdakarya. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 31 producing global malaysian secondary students through foreign novels: challenges tan yuet zhou faculty of education, universiti kebangsaan malaysia, bangi, selangor, malaysia email: tanyuetzhou@gmail.com azlina abdul aziz faculty of education, universiti kebangsaan malaysia, bangi, selangor, malaysia email: azlina1@ukm.edu.my apa citation: tan, y. z, & aziz, a. a. (2019). producing global malaysian secondary students through foreign novels: challenges. indonesian efl journal, 5(2), 31-40. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v5i2.1798. received: 14-03-2019 accepted: 23-05-2019 published: 01-07-2019 abstract: the study of literature provides a civilizing effect on a society anywhere around the world. through these english kinds of literature, there are aspects of english culture encapsulated in it. this could potentially help students to develop as global citizens, which understand not only the feelings, settings, culture and even thoughts conveyed through the literature but being able to apply it to the real world, as a global citizen. if young students are not able to get such valuable exposure in schools, where are they supposed to receive such valuable input? through this study, it is aimed to provide an overview of how foreign literature english novels chosen by the ministry of education has expanded the students' perspective as a global citizen. this paper aimed to reveal the challenges faced by teachers in using these texts in completing the objectives of producing students as global citizens. thus, by applying louise rosenblatt transactional theory, it scaffolds this study to examine the challenges faced by english teachers in incorporating global citizenship values through the teaching of foreign novels in english. data was collected via classroom observations, document analysis and interviews on both teachers and students. the data collected from the interviews, observations and item analysis were analyzed and results were conveyed in different themes, on the challenges faced by the respondents. keywords: esl; global citizenship; literature learning; schools; transactional theory; challenges introduction according to the malaysian secondary school syllabus, the literature component is added to the curriculum for form 1 to form 5 students to learn english. this has allowed malaysian secondary school students to be engaged in the wider reading of the good literary novel, poetry, and plays for their self-enjoyment and development. through this syllabus, it is hoped that students will be able to develop an understanding of other studies, cultures, values and even traditions that will enhance their life-long learning emotionally and spiritually. such learning values, characteristics and input are aligned with the learning of producing global citizens. in contrast to the beliefs conveyed previously, malaysian secondary school students, especially second or foreign english language learners are often intimidated and scared of the idea of learning literature in the english classrooms. one of the biggest issues is that malaysian curriculum emphasis on learning language through literature rather than developing global citizens out of the students while learning different cultures and values from the literary works. collie and slater (2004) conveyed that literature should be utilized in the english language classroom to not only provide valuable authentic evidence and input from literary works read but also to https://ifolio.ukm.my/user/5539/melor-binti-md-yunus https://ifolio.ukm.my/user/5539/melor-binti-md-yunus tan yuet zhou & azlina abdul aziz producing global malaysian secondary students through foreign novels: challenges 32 encourage personal engagement of the students while enriching the cultural and linguistic apparatus of the reader. thus, to achieve this, malaysian teachers are required to make use of any relevant and interesting course material that they are provided or by finding resources, printed or online, to ensure the active participation of the learners by way of activities and a strong amalgamation of language and literature. this paper explores the challenges faced by english teachers in incorporating global citizenship values through the teaching of foreign novels in english. to scaffold this study, a research question was applied: what are the challenges faced by english teachers in incorporating global citizenship values through the teaching of foreign novels in english? according to rosenblatt (2005), a transaction process is determined by a reader's stance that allowed the reader to maintain their focus on their experience of reading the text. she claimed that this type of stance is required as it allows the readers to imagine and enter into a whole new world of the story from reading fiction and poetry and try to live through the moment of the world personally and experience the emotion incited. rosenblatt too stated that transactions between readers, texts and also the teachers are encouraged by the personal response, reflection, discussion, and elaboration. however, this is only made possible if teachers are committed to listen and view students' personal response as a crucial factor when students are engaged with the text. she conveyed that "the teacher needs to maintain the conviction that it is important to place the discussion of the text in this matrix of personal response" (1994, p. 68). thus, instead of asking students to memorise the needed information from the poems or novels for specific purposes like examinations, that are widely done in malaysian secondary schools, she stated that through the transactional theory, teachers must emphasis on allowing the readers to make sense of the texts, along with a discussion of the content of the texts in the classroom. as for today, with global engagement in every part of the world, people are forming, and being identified as, global citizens that create a sense of belonging to a world community. this was made possible due to the forces of modern information, communications and transportation technologies that are increasingly relevant in today’s society (de andreotti, 2014). by increasing world connectivity with the presence of these technologies such as the creation of the internet, it will enable people to connect to any part of the world. this has allowed the participation of global economy, worldwide environmental factors, the feeling of empathy due to pictures and videos of humanitarian disasters in other countries or even just by creating spaces for today's society to travel around the world (jewett, 2011; martin, smolen, oswald, & milam, 2012). to the people who viewed themselves as global citizens, they are not abandoning their own national or individual identities, ethnicities or political beliefs. these new beliefs and values can give new meaning to those who viewed themselves as global citizens, and they will continue to shape that they eventually turn out to be (smolen & martin, 2011). global citizenship education is a problematic term to be defined and is normally used without making sure of the difference. the research literature on the topic is divided as while some argued that global citizenship education is a moral endeavor, some other researchers view it as a set of skills, such as ict competence (purnell, 2002). according to oxfam (1997), a global citizen is someone who:“… knows how the world works, is outraged by injustice and who is both willing and enabled to take action to meet this global challenge” (oxfam, 1997, p.1) through the teaching of the set of skills in global education, researchers stated that the values and attitude will enable young people to critically engage with global issues and act indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 33 for change if needed. it is essential for the development of global citizenship as knowledge, skills and understandings to challenge social injustices and inequity, actively engage in peacebuilding and cooperation to resolve conflict, respect and value diversity, commit to sustainable development and concern for the environment, and acknowledge globalization and the interdependence of political, social, economic and cultural issues are some of the few factors that allow teenagers to grow as global citizen (meadows, 1991). every school plays a role in citizenship education, making it one of the most critical providers of global citizenship education. as schools have the potential to be aligned with transnational efforts that promote global civility (reimers, 2006), the role of teachers can hardly be overstated. however, as research conveys, teachers are mostly oblivious to the purposes, methods, and content of global citizenship education. for example, out of over 700 teachers in england who rated education for global citizenship as important, only a few were confident of their ability to teach it (falk, 1993). overall passive, and in many cases, skeptical, attitudes to global citizenship and related concepts eventually have resulted in the neglect of global citizenship education in many schools around the world. the growing amount of research, particularly comparative research, demonstrates that "the traditional notion of developing democratic understanding needs to be expanded to encompass attention to decision making, controversial issues, and civic action set in multicultural and global contexts" (hahn, 1998, p. 122). teachers may use novels to develop students' skills in spelling, handwriting, grammar, and punctuation. besides that, teachers can help students in gradually improving their skills in writing as well as organizing materials into paragraphs by providing essay type tests. the questions constructed in the tests are not only factbased questions that serve as a basis of evaluating comprehension but also to develop critical thinking skills through open ended-questions (dreyer, 2016; yusof, lazim & salehuddin, 2017). open-ended questions can be made to allow students to predict outcomes, making comparisons and drawing conclusions. class discussions of each novel event should comprise the main idea and supporting details, including who, what, when, where, and how. details of various social issues such as sexual harassment and abortion, which are often an integral part of the plot, can provoke interesting debate. according to the malaysian secondary school syllabus, the literature component is added to the curriculum for form 1 to form 5 students to learn english. this has allowed malaysian secondary school students to be engaged in the wider reading of good literary writing poetry and stories for their selfenjoyment and development. through this syllabus, it is hoped that students will be able to develop an understanding of other studies, cultures, values and even traditions that will enhance their life-long learning emotionally and spiritually (ganakumaran, 2003; ganakumaran, shahizah & lee, 2003). such learning values, characteristics and input are aligned with the learning of producing global citizens. a diverse range of texts has been offered and applied in all malaysian secondary school curriculums. this covers british, malaysians, australian, singaporean, south african and even most asian countries work (vethamani, 2004). through the application of texts from all these countries, learners are expected to be able to discover and adhere to a storyline or understanding the figurative and literal meanings of poems and sonnets. this is to allow students to have their responses to the text at hand. thus, the application of literature education in learning english in malaysian secondary schools is meant to nurture students into global citizens by inculcating the values learned and to broaden their outlook from their own skeptical and rigid outlook of malaysian cultures, values, and societies. tan yuet zhou & azlina abdul aziz producing global malaysian secondary students through foreign novels: challenges 34 one of the biggest barriers of malaysian classrooms in producing global citizens through the teaching of literature is that malaysian teachers tend to conduct examination-oriented lessons. it is common for teachers in malaysia to focus extensively on examination purposes in english lessons, be it grammar, writing, reading or even literature. one of the prominent reasons will be at the end of secondary studying life, parents, teachers, students, scholars, and even the ministry will tend to look at good grades. each student will compete for a better grade each year. lewey (1995) conveyed that the malaysian education system is too examination-oriented. though there may have been changes in attitude of teachers, school administration and the ministry’s attitude in viewing education as formative than summative in the recent years through the curriculum employed, teachers and students are still compelled by the examination and will teach and learn according to what will be tested in the upcoming public examinations such as spm or pt3 examinations. several studies have been carried out to relate the heavy influence of examination has on the mindset of malaysians as well as their curriculum development. according to pillay and north (1977), they have examined the role of the topics in an integrated approach and the way it is handled in the kbsm syllabus, textbooks, and examinations. through that research, they concluded that there was a dilemma by teachers on what to teach in the classrooms and to students due to a conflict between the official syllabus, the textbook syllabus, and the examination syllabus. in the official syllabus and the textbooks, it stresses on the topics or themes of the teacher’s scheme of work. however, in the public examination, they focus more on skills and grammar. method the design applied for the study will be a case study. according to bhattacherjee (2012), a case study is "a method of intensively studying a phenomenon over time within its natural setting in one or a few sites." it can derive richer, more authentic, more contextualized interpretation of the phenomenon. thus, a case study will be conducted to reveal the success of using foreign texts to mold students into global citizens. this research design will enable the study of the perception of the participants of the research to obtain detailed information on a small group of people or a specific context. this study will be divided into three phases. classroom observations (first phase), document analysis (second phase) and interview (third phase) will be a mean of triangulation. by triangulating the data obtained from all three instruments, the study will corroborate findings across data sets and reduce the impact of potential biases that may exist in this study. the sampling method used in this study was based on purposive sampling. the participants in this study were students from a suburban secondary school in langkawi. this school is identified as a high performing school in langkawi and has conducted lessons on the novel based on the requirements given by the ministry of education. 30 form 4 students, from upper intermediate to advanced level of proficiency, will be selected as participants for this research paper. the teacher is an english teacher from the english language department and has taught for 5 years on the novel used for this research. the novel used in this study will be the elephant man by tim vicary. a simple purposive sampling method will be used to select 10 respondents for the semi-structured interview. these participants were selected based on their language proficiency and ability to convey what has their learning from the reading of the past year from 3 novels and to recall the teaching methods of teachers in teaching foreign novels. therefore, the research would be able to get crucial data to analyze the findings received from the students and teachers. this is crucial as without being able to communicate proficiently, students may not be able to indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 35 convey what have they learned, or any data intended by the students. the first phases involved classroom observations of teachers re-teaching the given novels by the ministry and to observe the communication between the students and teachers while the lesson is on-going. the objective of the classroom observations is to establish a base for the students to respond to the novels and to observe the interpersonal factors while learning a foreign text novel. the response and interactive sessions by the students within the classroom will be observed and noted. the second phase was documented analysis of the students produced based on the study of the novel for the research. the study will draw upon multiple sources of evidence, namely the exercise worksheets of the students, presentation materials of the novel and the english teacher's record book in designing lessons and activities for the current form 3 students to be engaged in learning the novel. the last phase was a semi-structured interview to be conducted on several selected students on their views and perspective of learning the novel. by having an interview, the study will expect a more detailed explanation of the key factors through the observations and document analysis. this allows the participants to describe their attitudes and beliefs of learning a foreign novel and extracting the teacher's opinions on the challenges of teaching the novel to the students. burnard’s framework (1991) will be adapted to generate a systematic and organized record of the issues and methods of solving the barriers from the teachers' opinions. results and discussion challenges exam-oriented students are lacking the motivation to think critically based on the collection data done, some students were found lacking in the motivation to think critically. some of the students preferred to listen and read, rather than to think and speak. this is a challenge by the teacher, to encourage students to think critically and voicing it out during classroom presentations. though the values and messages were clearly stated by the members of the group after their reading of the novel, some students chose to avoid thinking critically about the values and messages when inquired by the teacher. the teacher mentioned how students will choose the word "no or don’t know, then spending a little time thinking critically and linking it to global events when asked." such behaviors have led to the teacher opting for the memorization of events, messages, values of the novel, and even examples of world events linking to the values taught through the foreign novel. through the classroom observations, some students would standstill while waiting for the more active members of the group to do the thinking and speaking during the role play and presentation of the required task. stimulus according to the teacher, the stimulus to enhance the understanding of the values and lessons incorporated while learning the foreign novel is the challenge that he has to face to get the students interested in the lesson. through classroom observations, the teacher has used pictures and videos related to the novel to capture the interest of the students. multiple pictures of the main character of the novel were used to activate the inner feelings of the students and to prepare them for the learning process of the novel. besides that, videos were downloaded and used by the teacher to further enhance the effectiveness of the stimuli. however, without subtitles and the lacking of good speakers in the class, the audio was made hard for the students to listen and to understand what was being explained in the video. with the constraint of basic instruments that enhance the stimuli for the incorporation of values in teaching the novel, the teacher resorted to a more teachercentered lesson, where the explanation of the stimuli was made orally by the teacher. tan yuet zhou & azlina abdul aziz producing global malaysian secondary students through foreign novels: challenges 36 time constraint another challenge faced by the teacher while trying to incorporate global citizenship values through the teaching of foreign novels is a time constraint. according to the timetable of the teacher, in a single week, the teacher was given 5 periods of classes, equivalent to 175mins. he conveyed that "with such limited time, trying to cramp all skills and lessons in a few periods of teaching and learning is impossible." the teacher too conveyed that because the lesson was cramped and hastened, some students were not able to catch up with the lesson, and later deem the lesson boring. this affected the motivation of the students to give up learning, as well as to think critically that could help promote global citizenship. besides that, the teacher stated that "the time to prepare for lessons, such as videos, printed materials, powerpoint slides required time." with other classes' teaching materials in need to be planned and ready, the time constraint is a huge obstacle. different learning style according to the classroom observation done, designing a literature lesson for 30 students was a challenge to the teacher. multiple types of learning strategies were implemented by the teacher to cope with the learning styles of the students and to provide a variety of lesson materials and styles during the teaching of the foreign novel. learning styles used by the teacher are group discussions, presentations, reading aloud, answering writing questions and teachercentered lectures. though multiple learning styles were used, the teacher stated that "not all lessons were able to satisfy the students. some were happy to talk in group discussion, but were yawning when i started talking in lectures about the novel." he conveyed that coping with students learning style is difficult, especially when the class was a mixture of advance to intermediate students. this could severely affect the motivation to learn what was being taught by the teacher, hence influencing the cultural values and messages to be learned from the novel that could eventually lead to global citizenship. lack of exposure according to the novel, the setting of the novel was in the 19th century, in london. due to the difference of time and country, the lack of exposure to the difference of norms and cultural practices were considered a challenge by the teacher to incorporate the global citizenship values that could be learned from the novel. the teacher stated that "though the values and lessons are universal, the ability for the students to imagine and practice the global citizenship values taught and shown from the novel could be an issue." students were able to understand the value of the lessons and messages taught in the novel. for example, during the presentations, students were able to express and explain the moral value of sympathy that one should give to the deform main character. however, when the teacher asked how could the value be practiced out of malaysia, most students kept silent and were unable to provide excellent examples of how those values were practiced out of malaysia. in the exercise books of the students, students were able to explain the value and how the values can be practiced by people. however, most examples were generally about malaysians, and rarely the examples given were events or organizations outside of malaysia. thus, the lack of exposure by the students to the outside world than malaysia is considered a challenge by the teacher in incorporating global citizenship values through the teaching of foreign novels in english lessons. one of the biggest challenges of such deeply-rooted perceptions is how literature learning is perceived. one may argue that learning literature components such as poetry, novels and dramas are widening the mind of students in terms of global values, humanity and moral values, but in the end, malaysian secondary school students and teachers may only learn literature for the sake of examination. the goals of the lessons designed by the teacher may have been pinpointed, but for students, they may only learn the novel for the sake of examination. when students indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 37 attend the novel learning classroom, their focus may entirely be on how that class may benefit them in school or public examinations. open-minded questions, critical thinking, global event relations maybe some of the extra agenda for the class lesson, but lessons with such motives may end up with basic language enhance activities. students are forced to memorize the memorable events of the novels; moral values, messages, and lessons are learned and memorized to avoid losing points when answering the novel literature questions in examinations. to sum up, for novels, students will have to read the novel, not to enjoy it, but to understand the novel vividly and to be able to cramp out as much information as possible for the literature review essay they are required to answer during the examination. thus, it is quite clear that the teaching and learning of english literature in malaysian secondary schools are basically for examination purposes and such perceptions are the main barrier for teachers to create activities that in incorporating global citizenship values through the teaching of foreign novels in english. one of the key motivations for english teachers in teaching students to enable their students to use the language effectively through personal, communal or professional contexts. for this study, teachers are looking into pedagogical methods of teaching into enabling students to use the language together with global values incorporated in the foreign novel. though lesson designs, english teachers should motivate their students to explore the diverse identities, culture, and norms gained from reading the novel. besides that, students will be able to think critically regarding their place in this world and build relationships within or outside of the classroom and country. this will foster a relationship to live positively and dynamically with the people around them. furthermore, learning the novel will allow the cultivation of global values such as empathy, respect for diversity and the power to imagine in recognizing their standards, levels and place locally, nationally and towards the global communities. this will expand the students' thinking and horizons in developing critical literacy and so on, to a higher level of attainments of the global values acquired from the novel. teaching approaches based on the activities designed by the teacher for the students in learning the novel, the study can conclude that the teacher may have used a few teaching approaches in teaching the foreign novel while trying to incorporate global values into the learning process. according to richards & rodgers (2014), it is more beneficial if teachers are aware of the approaches that may best serve the needs of esl students when learning the literature component. the language model this is the most common approach used by the teacher while teaching the class the novel. according to carter and long (1991), this approach can be referred to as the language-based approach. this is an approach that made the learners to study the text of the novel more systematically and methodically. this allows the students to exemplify certain specific linguistics features such as both literal and figurative languages or speech styles used in the novel. such an approach has allowed itself to the repertoire of strategies that the teacher has used. for example, prediction exercises during the presentation by the teacher in introducing the novel, summary writing of the chapters as well as a role-playing of the chapters by the students according to chapters of the novel. all activities designed and practiced in the classroom was to serve specific linguistics goals such as for examination purposes. unfortunately, these activities disconnected the students from the literary text of the novel, allowing little engagement by the students on the global values imprinted in the novel, as all focus are purely on the linguistic practices of the students for specific purposes such as examinations. the personal growth model the activities that the teacher designed to integrated the personal growth model. in tan yuet zhou & azlina abdul aziz producing global malaysian secondary students through foreign novels: challenges 38 this model, the activities designed and done were used to combine both the cultural model and language model, allowing the students to focus on both the language and context of the novel (carter & long, 1991). students, through this model, were able to express their opinions, feelings and they can make connections between their own cultural experiences to what was expressed in the text of the novel. such a model was able to bring out the global values that the teacher was trying to incorporate in the learning of the foreign text. students were able to link their experiences of the values and messages learned from the novel and expressed during presentations and novel literature review writing practices. besides, the activities that the teacher designed allowed most of the students to agree that the values that they have learned can be applied in and outside of the classroom, or linking themselves to a certain global group that practices certain global values. as cadorath and harris (1998:88) stated, the “text itself has no meaning. it only provides direction for the learner to construct the meaning from the learner’s own experience." therefore, the learning of the global values from the text takes its place when the learners were given the chance to imagine, interpret and construct the meaning and value of the text based on their own experience towards the text. conclusion the findings of this study were critically discussed and analyzed to justify how the activities designed for the learning of that foreign novel was heavily based on language enhancement rather than developing the global citizenship values been introduced and explained by the teacher and students. activities such as role-playing, reading aloud, writing literature reviews and even presentation should be able to convince and teach the students on the significance of the global citizenship values learned from the novel throughout the lessons. however, the activities were designed to enhance the students' language proficiency. though the teacher stated that he tried to teach and cultivate global citizenship values throughout the lessons, the materials, activities, and teaching in the classroom speaks otherwise. nonetheless, such actions are not entirely to be blamed on the teacher, as the motivation of the students, pressure by the ministry, school administrations and parents on the performance of their children in the examination are immensely high. to add on, the constraints such as time, materials designs and students' learning styles play roles in determining the path of the learning. in sum, the use of foreign novels was able to activate critical thinking and the understanding of global citizenship values incorporated in the novels, however, the learning, acquisition, and practice of the global citizenship values may be hindered by multiple factors. the cultivation of global citizenship values may be one of the objectives of the lessons, but it is subjective to all the constraints such as the pressure by external stakeholders and the motivation of the teachers and students in learning the foreign novel. references bhattacherjee, a. 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(1993). the making of global citizenship. in j. brecher, j. b. childs, & j. cutler (eds.), global visions: beyond the new world order (pp. 39–50). boston, ma: south end. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 39 ganakumaran, s. (2003). literature programs in malaysian schools: a historical overview. in s. ganakumaran, & m. edwin (eds), teaching of literature in esl/efl contexts (pp. 27-48). petaling jaya: sasbadi sdn. bhd. ganakumaran, s., ismail, s., & koo, y. l. (2003). the incorporation of the literature component. in s. ganakumaran, & m. edwin (eds), teaching of literature in esl/efl contexts (pp. 62-87). hahn, c. (1998). becoming political: comparative perspectives on citizenship education. new york: suny press. jewett, p. (2011). some people do things different from us: exploring personal and global cultures in a first-grade classroom. the journal of children’s literature, 37(1), 20-29. khatib, m., rezaei, s., & derakhshan, a. (2011). literature in efl/esl classroom. english language teaching, 4(1), 201-208. martin, l. a., smolen, l. a., oswald, r. a., & milam, j. l. (2012). preparing students for global citizenship in the twenty first century: integrating social justice through global literature. the social studies 103, 158-164. doi: 10.1080/00377996.2011.601358. meadows, d. h. (1991). the global citizen. washington: island press. oxfam, a. (1997). a curriculum for global citizenship. london: oxfam gb. pillay, h., & north, s. (1997). tied to the topic: integrating grammar and skills in kbsm. the english teacher, 26, 1-23. purnell, d. (2002). the changing role of teachers in embedding icts into the curriculum: a case study in a tasmanian school. unpublished dissertation. curtin university. reimers, f. (2006). citizenship, identity, and education: examining the public purposes of schools in an age of globalization. prospects, 36(3), 275-294. richards, j. c., & rodgers, t. s. (2014). approaches and methods in language teaching. cambridge: cambridge university press. rosenblatt, l. (1938). literature as exploration. new york: appleton-century. rosenblatt, l. (1978). the reader, the text, the poem: the transactional theory of the literary work. carbondale: southern illinois university press. rosenblatt, l. (1994). the reader, the text, the poem. carbondale: southern illinois university press. rosenblatt, l. (1995). literature as exploration (5th ed.). new york: modern language association. rosenblatt, l. (2005). meaning-making with texts. portsmouth, nh: heinemann. smolen, l. a., & martin, l. (2011). integrating global literature into the elementary social studies curriculum. the international journal of learning, 17(11), 183-192. van, t. t. m. (2009). the relevance of literary analysis to teaching literature in the efl classroom. english teaching forum, 47(3), 2. yusof, s. m., lazim, z. m., & salehuddin, k. (2017). teacher trainees’ perspectives of teaching graphic novels to esl primary schoolers. 3l: language, linguistics, literature®, 23(3), 136152. tan yuet zhou & azlina abdul aziz producing global malaysian secondary students through foreign novels: challenges 40 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 131 analysis of casual conversation in spontaneity, interactivity, interpersonally and coherence features nur ekaningsih english education, language and communication science faculty, sultan agung islamic university, indonesia e-mail: nurekaningsih@unissula.ac.id apa citation: ekaningsih, n. (2019). analysis of causal conversation in spontaneity, interactivity, interpersonally and coherence features. indonesian efl journal, 5(2), 131-140. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v5i2.1809. received: 17-03-2019 accepted: 22-05-2019 published: 01-07-2019 abstract: this study was carried out to respectively illustrate the casual conversation features in terms of spontaneity, interactivity, interpersonally, and coherence. the casual conversation analyzed was a conversation of two non-native english speakers who are an english teacher and a student at a convenient situation. the conversation lasted for eighteen minutes was transcribed. results showed that s1 dominantly used features of spontaneity on the field of repetition, incomplete utterances, and chunks. on the features of interactivity, s2 is more cooperative than s1. in addition, on the feature of interpersonally, both speakers seemed to appeal more agreement. thus, in terms of coherence, both speakers can run the conversation smoothly. the two speakers were still making conversation in line with the topic although they changed the topic three times. keywords: casual conversation; coherence; discourse features; interactivity; interpersonally; spontaneity. introduction discussing about spoken language, it is one of very famous method for communicating. spoken language is unique. the unique thing of spoken language is that it has so many features which are different from written language. spoken language is important in our daily life. as a human, we are as socialized individual who are living together and interact with other human beings. spoken is interaction. interaction is not only a process of mechanical system, but it is also taking turns at constructing sounds and words. as stated by duncan and fiske (1979), interacting is a semantic activity, a process of making meanings. when people interact to each other, they also deliver a very wide range of tasks. the tasks consist of meaningful utterances to express feeling, to negotiate meanings as well as to exchange meaning. while people negotiate, express and exchange meanings, they also do the pragmatic tasks, such as buying thing, selling goods, giving and accepting information, passing knowledge, applying for job, etc. human can talk to others in a type of conversation or chatting. both of them are called informal interactions. gathering with friends or officemates sometimes make them relaxed on making free talk which is familiar as “having a chat”. chatting here is a kind of casual conversation. as said by eggins and slade (1997), casual conversation is concerned with the joint construction of social reality. this is line with thornbury (2005) who notes that most day to day language use is spoken since our social interaction will be mostly occurred by spoken many various situations. by this reason, casual conversation is interesting to be analysed in the way of its unique features. those are on the evidence of spontaneity, interactivity, interpersonality, and coherence. the spontaneity features will involve the performance features, such as filled pauses, repetitions, false starts and backtracking, incomplete utterances, and chunks. in the features of interactivity, the use of taking turns, interrupting, signalling, and back channelling will be analysed in nur ekaningsih analysis of causal conversation in spontaneity, interactivity, interpersonally and coherence features 132 terms of its percentage of use. then, the features of interpersonality includes hedges, vague language, like to assertive, to opinionated, to appeal for agreement, and to exaggerate. last but not least, coherence in this casual conversation is also analysed. hence, this study elaborates the features in spoken discourse used by two non-native speakers. method the unit analysis of the study was discourse features on the aspects of spontaneity, interactivity, interpersonality and coherence (thornbury, 2005). the data was collected by recording the conversation between an english lecturer named mrs. nur (s1) who is 42 years old and an undergraduate student named ms. naf (s2) who is 24 years old and has graduated from english language department at sultan agung islamic university. both of them are from west java, indonesia. they had done a conversation in term of casual conversation which was done when s2 giving private course in the lecturer’s course. then, the free talk had been carried out in free topic, but it was related to condition in which s2 was absent to teach on the lecturer’s course. in this condition, the turns happened for 167 turns and ended in about 18 mi. 02 sec (18:02’). this study used some stages in analysing the data. firstly, the researcher transcribed the conversation. after transcribing the conversation, the researcher coded the features of casual conversation and then analysed the coding one by one. after analysing the coding of casual conversation features, the researcher analysed and counted the frequency of casual conversation features used in the conversation. the final step was describing the result of the analysis. results and discussion the results of the analysis are described following the categories of casual conversation features. the evidence of spontaneity spontaneous conversation is enhanced for human communication, but differs in some noteworthy ways from the types of speech for which human language technology is often advanced. according to thornburry (2005), the effect of spontaneity will produce one clause or one phrase construction or sometimes smaller “runs” which is each run representing a unit of meaning. the spontaneity features in this analysis consist of the speaker’s use of filled paused, repetition, false starts/back tracking, incomplete utterances, and chunks. the speaker’s filled pause occurred in conversation on this term, the filled pause is mostly uttered by s2 and is less spoken by s1. figure 1 shows the frequency of filled pause used by both speakers in the conversation. figure 1. the filled pause produced in the casual conversation the figure shows that s1 made only 20% filled pause in the conversation, while s2 made 80% filled pause. this means that s2 is frequently constructed the filled pause on the utterances. the filled pause on this conversation can be seen from the following sample turns on the transcribed below. table 1. conversation with filled paused turn speaker utterances 14 s2 i did many things actually, ah.==i helped my mom, helped my father== 30 s2 e…my mom have e … some kind like a minimarket. 70 s2 ==yeah. ==in the …last week…we just spent our time just in e… some kind like dinner together== 103 s1 ==oh…oke the facilities for the air conditioning ==hmmm 0 50 100 category 1 filled pause s1 s2 column1 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 133 yeah the facilities for the …yeah ==for the seat …for the seat in this sense, s1 as a lecturer created minimal filled pause because this is related to the way students learn a language by imitating pronunciation. pronunciation cannot be separated from the word fluency, but filled pause was commonly known as hesitancy. by this finding, s2 as a student needed more concepts of using filled pause in conversation. she (s2) produces the word ‘e…’ in the middle of her utterance frequently. besides, as it happened in turns 14, s2 spoke the word ‘ah…’ in the middle of her utterance which means s2 needed to think before she continued her utterance. hence, as a lecturer, s1 should become a good role model for the students in producing utterances with minimal filled pause on utterances. the speaker’s repetition occurred in conversation repetition is made by the speakers when they repeat words or phrases on the same turn. the repetition made by both speakers is presented in figure 2. figure 2. the repetition produced in the casual conversation s1 and s2 frequently repeated words or phrases on the conversation. s1 produced 54% of repetition and s2 produced 46%. each turn below involved the speaker’s repetition. table 2. conversation with repetition turn speaker utterances 22 s2 not teaching but for manage manage== the…ah 49 s1 ==(laugh) oke reunion…the reunion e…reunion…oke, when we talk about reunion yeah with your friends actually, and then e. did you meet a boy or a girl?== 69 s1 ==oke now we we are going to ..we are going to what is it by the way i just want to know when you went back to brebes and then e…you met your father, and your mother and also your brother oke. have you ever got what is it such kind of long day just together with him and then did you go somewhere together…== have you ever done this when you went ==back to your home? 80 s2 yeah and also my brother, my bother in the weekend sometimes yeah do games as it can be seen in table 2, on turn 22, s2 repeated the word ‘manage’ twice to tell that she was not teaching, but just managing. in this turn the speaker’s purpose is to explain clearly by repeating the word. this also happened on turn 80 in which ‘my brother’ phrase is repeated twice to clarify to that her brother was the only one who played games, while others were cooking. s1 also made the repetition by saying the word “reunion” three times. finally, both speakers almost made similar frequency of repeating words in the conversation. in this sense, both of them were trying to give stress on special words or phrases to make other understand her intention. the speaker’s false starts occurred in conversation false start happened in conversation because of the speaker’s thought. the false start is the speaker’s phenomena in casual conversation in which the speaker feel excited on something, feel intense on specific topic or begin to skip from one topic to another. in this conversation, s1 formed 23% of false start, while s2 created 77%. although both speakers made false start in different percentage, the conversation was still running pleasantly. 40 50 60 category 1 repetition s1 s2 column1 nur ekaningsih analysis of causal conversation in spontaneity, interactivity, interpersonally and coherence features 134 figure 3. the false starts occurred in conversation this happened in the conversation as shown in the table below. table 3. conversation with false start turn speaker utterances 54 s2 much about our chi cat== much about our chi cat most of our chi chat is about the flash back== our memory==, yeah because sometimes yeah. 58 s2 so, my friends sometimes, my friends remind me about something bad i forgot yeah and i forgot 120 s2 ==the best choice. right. but sometimes if i lost the time maybe like when the kali there is no schedule for kaligung for at that time so i choose kamandaka. if there is kamandaka i choose kamandaka. kamandaka maybe around from…kamandaka e…only arrived in tegal== not pass brebes.== but kaligung the last desination is brebes. but for kamandaka only for …brebes eh…only for tegal and also purwokerto==. figure 3 shows that s1 produced false start less than s2. on this part, false start happened because the speaker tries to answer the questions excitedly. while she wanted to start her explanation, she did not have enough preparation in what to say. consequently, she started to speak with some words had to be reconstructed again. as occurred on turn 54, the speaker reconstructs her phrase until three times. this was done to make sure that her statement was right. the speaker’s incomplete utterances occurred in conversation after analysing the transcript of the casual conversation, the data shows that the frequency of incomplete utterances between s1 and s2 were almost similar. as it can be seen in figure 4, s1 produced 44% of incomplete utterances, while s2 produced 56%. the proofs are then presented in table 4. figure 4. the incomplete utterances produced in casual conversation table 4. conversation with incomplete utterance turn speaker utterances 22 s2 not teaching but for manage manage== the…ah 39 s1 oke..besides that, besides you try to be. you tried to do something as a treasurer and then you helped your mother doing what is it such kind of activities ==at home, and then what else,e… you also help you mother try to do what is it, try to count the money to be a cashier so e… when you back, went back last week. did you go somewhere for example like tourism place maybe, you did you went to such kind of …== 61 s1 (laugh) something that you say what is it that you did a long time ago, something strange that you did a long time ago. it is …is it ...a kind of== as an english lecturer and an english student, both of them know that utterance is a spoken unit. when the utterance is one unit 0 10 20 30 category 1 false start s1 s2 column1 0 20 40 60 category 1 incomplete utterances s1 s2 column1 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 135 of talk, this means that spoken also includes subject and finite. when the finite does not follow the subject, this means that the utterance is incomplete. this occurred in the conversation on turn 22 in which s2 did not tell complete utterance, but she just said a part of it. “not teaching but for manage manage ==” in this utterance, s2 did not complete it because s1 interrupted her by saying ‘oke’. thus, in this case, s2 made incomplete utterance because of the listener’s interruption. yet, although both speakers made incomplete utterances, but the discussion run well without any interference. the chunks use by both non-native speakers in conversation the use of chunks in the casual conversation are given here to let readers know the function of chunks in the conversation. s1 produced 57% of chunks and s2 only produced 43%. chunks has an important function to contribute speakers’ fluency on english words or phrases. figure 5 shows the percentage of speakers’ production of chunks. figure 5. the chunks produced in casual conversation table 5 shows the chunks produced by bot speakers in the conversation. table 5. conversation with chunks turn speaker utterances 2 s2 hello, maam. 6 s2 fine, how’s life? 9 s1 ==never mind 17 s1 what sorts of foundation? oh oke? 48 s2 yeahh, ==some kind like reunion (laugh) ==nice actually mam the use of chunk in conversation is common because chunk has a specific meaning in utterance. although chunk is incomplete sentence, but it is a group of words or phrases which have meaning. on this part, chunks give positive effect on listener and others. chunks will help speaker in creating effective conversation. as made by s1 and s2 at the beginning of their conversation in which they ask “how’s life?’. using chunk in conversation will improve listener’s competence in memorizing and pronouncing it well. the evidence of interactivity interactivity is an activity done by humans in asking and answering questions. as stated by liddicoat (2007), the interaction had been analysed because it is an instance of social interaction in social phenomena. the analysis on this aspect is described below. taking turns taking turns can be divided into two categories, namely competitive and cooperative overlaps. competitive means one speaker’s domination or listener’s power back to interrupt in different ways. then, cooperative means a listener’s clarification on one point or listener will add further information from the speaker’s point. on this casual conversation, taking turns more happen in cooperative overlaps than in competitive overlaps. table 6 and 7 show some findings of cooperative and competitive overlaps occurred on the conversation. table 6. cooperative overlaps turn spea ker utterances taking turn 8 s2 ==yes. ==yeah. yeah, i went to my hometown actually, so sorry before that, i want to say sorry and == the conversation on turn 8 till 12 here shows taking turns between both speakers in cooperative overlaps 9 s1 ==never mind 10 s2 because of my mom told me to go went home, so yeah i go home== in last week. 0 50 100 category 1 chunks s1 s2 column1 nur ekaningsih analysis of causal conversation in spontaneity, interactivity, interpersonally and coherence features 136 11 s1 ==oke. so, what did you do in brebes== when you went back. 12 s2 ==yeah i do many things. table 7. competitive overlaps turn spea ker utterances taking turn 33 s1 mm of course you count money, i think. ==that’s very interesting ==because ==in institution you try to count money too and try to make a record (laugh)== here, both speakers are eager to dominate the conversation while they utter some utterances together at the same time and they want to show their power back on their different ways of interrupting. that’s why this taking turns on this conversation shows competitive overlaps. 34 s2 (laugh) == yeah ==in…in at home always, ==yeah i have much money but it is not mine (laugh) yeah 35 s1 (laugh ) your mom’s money== 36 s2 ==not all my mom’s money it’s e…many people’s money. yeah 37 s1 mm…oke it should be managed by your mom, oke?== the turns above describe the difference between cooperative and competitive overlaps in casual conversation. the cooperative overlap means the speaker wanted to show his/her enthusiastic support and agreement with another. in contrast, competitive overlap was disrupting the conversation. this means that speaker was able to dominate the conversation and handle it into his/her own topic. figure 6. the turn taking occurred in casual conversation the cooperative overlaps in this conversation mostly produced by s2. this means that s2 is more likely to have traits that can work well together. the incidence is different from what happens in competitive overlap. competitive overlap is more likely to be done by s1. it means that s1 is more likely to dominate the conversation. as shown on turn 33 that s1 did not give s2 chance to interrupt his speech. s2 was more likely to answer in turn 34 to give a laugh and say the word 'yeah' as a sign that he followed and agreed to what was said by s1. the same thing happened to s2 who preferred to be cooperative in conversation. in this case, it proves that the nature of s1 is more dominant and s2 is cooperative. interrupting there are three ways of interrupting someone in better ways. firstly, interrupting can be done when the other speakers are still pausing their breath. secondly, it can be occurred when the other speakers finished their phrase or sentence. thirdly, this can be happened when speakers have a good point to make that would contribute positively to the sharing but they must be sure to measure the timing carefully. thus, the interruptions do not appear rude. table 8 shows the examples of interrupting in the conversation. table 8. interrupting in the conversation turn speak er utterances 7 s1 you didn’t teach in my eh in my in my institution==. 8 s2 ==yeah, i went to my hometown actually, so sorry before that, i want to say sorry and == 0% 50% 100% speaker 1 speaker 2 turn taking cooperative competitive indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 137 145 s1 had lunch or brunch? breakfast and lunch together== 146 s2 ==you know. i cooked by myself. wow.. 66 s2 it’s …some kind like yeah monkey love yeah when we are still in junior high school… but it just also alright 67 s1 yeah …just fun (laugh) interrupting on the three categories above happened in the frequency shown in table 9. table 9. frequency of interrupting no dms purpose frequency 1 yeah to provide a response to what has just been said 17 2 you know to appeal to the shared knowledge of the other speaker’s as a new topic is introduced 1 3 sorry to ask for apologizing 1 4 yeah to provide a fairly non-committal response to what has been said 14 figure 7. interrupting occurred in casual conversation interrupting produced by the speakers in this conversation had been occurred by ssaying ’yeah, you know, sorry and yeah’. “yeah“. the first function of ‘yeah’ is to provide a response to what has just been said and the second ‘yeah’ functions to provide a fairly non-committal response to what has been said. s1 on turn 7 produced a proof of giving utterance in terms of interrupting. in contrast, s2 made an interruption when s1 tried to elaborate her utterance, but s2 continued to provide a response to interrupt s1. then, on the chart, the most commonly interrupting is on ‘yeah’ which provides a response to what has just been said and ‘yeah’ provides a fairly non-committal response to what has been said. this means that both speakers are trying to interrupt to make sure that the listener understood about what the speaker said on the conversation. signalling signalling allows the speakers to make a smooth transition from one speaker to the other, but the speakers must be aware of these signals. as stated by thornbury (2005), signalling is a way to show amusement in terms of grunts, laughs and chuckles. the use of grunts, laughs and chuckles on the conversation is presented in figure 8. figure 8. the signalling occurred in casual conversation the chuckle signals in this situation show that both speakers were glad in discussing the topic on the conversation. the chuckle used by both speakers in this conversation showed that each of them can show their amusement in understanding the speaker’s utterances. back-channelling back-channelling functions to register that the other speaker is following the other speaker’s drift. back-channelling often happens through interjections. backchannelling produced in the conversation is presented in figure 9. figure 9. back channelling occurred in casual conversation 0% 50% speaker 1 speaker 2 back channelling ==yeah mm hm yeah 0% 50% 100% speaker 1 speaker 2 signalling grunts laughs chuckels 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% speaker 1 speaker 2 interrupting yeah https://www.usingenglish.com/glossary/interjection.html nur ekaningsih analysis of causal conversation in spontaneity, interactivity, interpersonally and coherence features 138 table 10 shows the examples of backchannelling on the conversation. table 10. back channelling in the conversation 74 s2 we are cooking together with my mom==, and after that, my mom sometimes need me to help her==, my mom asked me to slice the onion== and some kind like that others== and my father told me that e... sometimes i have a message for me when we are together== in the…in the kitchen== 75 s1 ==mm.. ==mm ==yeah. ==yeah ==hm ==in the kitchen hm table 10 presents back channelling produced by both speakers on the conversation which showed agreement on what the speaker said. listener tried to pay attention by saying ”mm, hm, yeah and ==yeah”. as it can be seen on turn 75 that the speaker tried to elaborate her sentences and the other speaker just back-channelled to show that she was still interested in the speaker’s utterances. the evidence of interpersonality the conversation is not just a simple thing of giving information to others, but it also has interpersonal function. the interpersonality involves the negotiation meaning in conversation in terms of interpersonal meaning and logico-semantic meaning. both interpersonal meaning and logico-semantic meaning can be found table 11. moreover, the percentage of those features is presented in figure 10. table 11. the features of interpersonality in conversation no interpersonal aspects function s1 s2 1 laughter to maintain group solidarity 3 3 2 chuckles to save face 14 9 3 hedges to blunt the 4 8 force of disagreement 4 vague language not to sound too assertive and opinionated 6 4 5 markers to appeal for agreement 20 16 6 exaggeration to harmonize the joint construction of talk 2 1 7 swearing words to demonstrate ‘high involvement’ not to appear ‘cold’ or ‘hostile’ 3 1 figure 10. the interpersonal aspect occurred in casual conversation from the aspects shown on figure 10, interpersonal aspects can be categorized into two negotiation meanings, namely interpersonal meaning and logico-semantic meaning. from the analysis, it was found that there are 25 turns categorized as logicosemantic and 40 turns categorized as interpersonal. the examples of both negotiation meaning in the conversation are presented in table 12 and table 13. table 12. the sample of speaker’s turns in logico-semantic meaning turn speaker utterances 17 s1 what sorts of foundation? oh, oke? 18 s2 ==islamic foundation education foundation for kindergarten ==especially 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% interpersonal aspects speaker 1 speaker 2 column1 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 139 table 13. the sample of speaker’s turns in interpersonal meaning turn speaker utterances 137 s1 oke, nafisa thank you so much == for your for your ideas for your experience when you went back to brebes==. 138 s2 ==yes ==thank you. 137 s1 that’s very nice experience i think== 138 s2 ==anytime. from the features of interpersonality, the use of ‘chuckles’ mostly occurred in the conversation because of the speakers’ amusement. as the table shows that both speakers used laughter in the same frequency. s2 uttered more hedges than s1 because s2 just wanted to give empathy to s1 for what she said. then, on the utterance of appealing for agreement, s1 gave more agreement to s2. based on table 13, s1 and s2 created more interpersonality aspects. in addition, in term of negotiation meaning, the utterances were identified by interpersonal and logico-semantic. as identified on the transcript, the researcher counted the percentage of logico-semantic meaning and interpersonal meaning. the percentage of producing logico-semantic was 38% and 62% for interpersonal meaning. therefore, interpersonal negotiation meaning dominated the conversation and the conversation run quite smoothly. coherence coherence can be done in writing and spoken language. this means that the features of questions and answers on the conversations should make senses. thus, the conversation must be coherence and cooperative each other. the coherence on the spoken language must follow the maxim theory of grice in term of cooperative principles. grice (1975) mentioned the theory of maxim consists of maxim of quantity, maxim of quality, maxim of manner and maxim of relevance. the grice’s theory on the spoken language is used to identify the production of the language and its contribution on the conversation which should be relevant and orderly. besides, the casual conversation must be predictable two-way exchange and be organized on the top-down approach structures. the two way exchange here is commonly called as adjacency pair in conversation. table 14. non-native speakers in a matter of coherence turn speaker utterances 111 s1 what is the name of the train? 112 s2 kaligung, kamandaka, many trains.== tawangjaya 113 s1 ==oke. is this an executive train? kaligung, is the executive train?== 114 s2 ==no..no no..no kaligung is for the economic train but for 115 s1 o… the economic class train. hmmm 116 s2 kamandaka is the executive train, but i don’t know for tawangjaya. it is an executive class or not but e…i ever used tawangjaya but ee yeah only for the economic class 117 s1 but how much is the different cost between== executive and the economic? 118 s2 ==yeah for the kaligung is the cheapest train for fifty. but i comfortable more comfortable used this train because it’s the newest the newest train and also the cheapest and the newest train. sacks and schegloff (1978) divide the utterances into types of turn taking, named adjacency pairs. this always happens in terms of two utterances in which each pair was spoken by a different speaker. table 15. the adjacency pairs made in this casual conversation t s utterances adjacency pairs 11 s1 ==oke. so, what did you do in brebes== when you went back. question >< answer 12 s2 ==yeah i do many nur ekaningsih analysis of causal conversation in spontaneity, interactivity, interpersonally and coherence features 140 things. 139 s1 waiting for dinner maybe?== never mind i pay you== request >< refuse 140 s2 ==no i have eaten. ==i have eaten. the coherence aspects related to the questions which the lecturer and the student understood about the way or what should be answered. besides, coherence here can also be seen from the topic of conversation used by both speakers. if the topic is relevant and the responses from the questions are relevant too, subsequently the conversation was coherence. beside the relevance topic, the consistency features, such as lexical repetition, lexical chain, referring expression, substitution and linkers are also considered. in conclusion, the conversation was done by both non-native speakers on the conversation was coherence because of logically connecting ideas on the sentence. conclusion in accordance with the objectives of this study, it is revealed that various features relating to spontaneity, interactivity, interpersonality and coherence, are found in the conversation. on the feature of spontaneity, both speakers produced filled pause, repetition, false starts, incomplete utterances, and chunks. here, both speakers used all aspects in spontaneity with different frequency. s1 as a lecturer created filled pause less than s2. on the use of repetition and false starts, s2 made more than s1, but on the use of incomplete utterances s1 did more than s2. this happened because on the feature of interactivity, s2 produced more interruption to provide a fairly non-committal response to what has been said. by looking at interactivity features which consist of taking turns, interrupting, signalling and back-channelling, both speakers produced taking turns on terms of cooperative overlaps. this showed that the conversation between both speakers run well. by the cooperative overlaps, it can be concluded that the conversation also coherence because they can contribute each other in a positive point of discussion. in brief, both speakers had made good interaction although s1 should give more good model to s2 in using chunks and minimize the use of filled pause and false starts in making good conversation. s2 as a student should learn more about how to manage the occurrence of fill pause and false starts. in addition, the use of incomplete utterances which had been produced by s1 should be minimized. references duncan, s., & fiske, d. (1979). dynamic patterning in conversation. american scientist, 67. eggins, s., & slade, d. (1979). analyzing causal conversation. london: creative print and design wales. liddicoat, a. j. (2007). introduction to conversational analysis. london: continuum. sacks, h., & schegloff, j. (1978). a simplest systematic for the organization of turntaking. journal of language, 26. thornbury, s. (2005). beyond the sentence: introducing discourse analysis. oxford: oxford university press. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 59 cohesion and coherence in written texts of health medical laboratory students fiki setiawan akademi analis kesehatan an nasher, indonesia e-mail: pikipikipiki24@gmail.com taiman akademi analis kesehatan an nasher, indonesia e-mail: taimantea@gmail.com apa citation: setiawan, f & taiman (2021). cohesion and coherence in written texts of health medical laboratory students. indonesian efl journal, 7(1), 59-68. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i1.3991 received: 23-11-2020 accepted: 15-12-2020 published: 31-01-2021 introduction text writing skills play an important role for health analyst students in english courses. it is one of the subjects that students must take. in addition, it is a requirement to graduate from the university by submitting their final project report in writing english. not only important to fulfill university graduation requirements, ability writing well is very important and very important much needed for their further study. however, the writers know that writing or learning to write, especially in a foreign language, is not merely a matter of "writing things down." it is one of the four required skills that are very complex and difficult to master. the selection of topics in this study started from finding discrepancies or inconsistencies in students' essays. these can be seen from the inaccuracy of the cohesion or form of the paragraph and the coherence or meaning. based on the students' essays, which were obtained directly from the english language subject, they wrote that there were still many mistakes in the students' writing, especially in terms of cohesion, lexical and grammatical cohesion, and coherence. for the students in universities level, writing has a significant purpose as the primary tool for learning, and it is generally assumed to be the most essential for a successful study. university students expect to express their ideas in nonacademic and academic writing such as writing a text, an article, and a thesis as their final project. it is explained by artkinson and curtis (1998) as cited in paltridge and starfield (2007) that "academic writing in this progression degree students are not only writing their ideas down on paper but also they have to understand the writing patterned well." it can assume that while the students writing, they have to comprehend the pattern; there is a reciprocal connection between thinking and writing. it is a fundamental way of getting across their thoughts to develop their understanding. abstract: good writing, which is cohesive and coherent, must pay attention to the relationship between sentences. cohesive and coherence are essential textual components to create the organized and comprehensiveness of the texts. this research aims to identify the use of cohesion devices and coherence made by the students in their writing texts. this study applied a descriptive qualitative method. the study's object was eight explanation texts written by linguistic learning style students of health medical laboratory an nasher cirebon in the academic year of 2019/2020, who were taking english subjects. the data collected through documentation. the qualitative analysis was performed to explore the results. the result revealed that reiteration among all forms of grammatical and lexical cohesion, which occurs 207 times or 47.15 percent, is the most common form. the reference that appears 124 times or 28.25 percent follows. collocation is the third position, which happens 60 times or 13.67%. conjunction, meanwhile, occurs 44 times or 10.02 percent, replacement appears 3 times or 0, 68 percent and ellipsis appears 1 times. in terms of macro level coherenece, the results showed that additives were mostly used in student texts. followed by causal, temporal and last was adversative it concluded that the students to be competing well in producing cohesion and coherence in their writing texts. they use all kinds of coherence in their written text with only one ellipsis, and they apply all kinds of coherence in their written text. keywords: cohesion; coherence; discourse mailto:pikipikipiki24@gmail.com mailto:taimantea@gmail.com https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i1.3991 fiki setiawan & taiman cohesion and coherence in written texts of health medical laboratory students 60 writing comes from ideas initially, then people who have these ideas express and express them in the form of written language. however, writing is not merely a matter of expressing the ideas in suitable language, and using good grammar in writing will not be easy to implement if the relationships between the parts are not closely cohesive. therefore, the writing process is not just a matter of using the right language but also a matter of using the ability to create unity in a text. to create good writing, students have to combine their skill of using a well-patterned language and relate sentences and paragraphs to become a united text. writing a text as a kind of discourse should have good construction and need the cohesion and coherence to be unified. as halliday and hasan (1989) explain that "a text or a paragraph which uses cohesion and coherence it must be good writing." to build good writing, the writers have to use cohesion and coherence in their writing paragraphs or text. cohesion and coherence are essential properties in the writing text because they will complete the paragraph's sentences. according to them, cohesion is an internal property, while coherence is the paragraph's contextual properties. furthermore, halliday (1994) notes that "in writing a text, it is required to use a connection that involves the elements both within the clause and beyond it, which can make the text flow smoothly. the connections used within the text are cohesion and coherence. it can be meant that cohesion and coherence are the tools used in the writing text, and those function as the connection among the sentences to make the text stream smoothly. concerning that thing, tanskanen (2006) states that "cohesion and coherence are one of the ways to attain the unity of the text within its sentences and paragraph." this statement is exactly right because the cohesive devices in a text can only fit together through coherence devices that link them to unity. linguistics includes a wide variety of scientific areas, including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and discourse. of these several linguistic fields, discourse is the most complete and highest unit of language in the linguistic hierarchy. discourse consists of two types, namely oral discourse and written discourse. oral discourse is expressed in verbal communication, while written discourse is expressed in writing, containing interconnected sentences in forming a single piece of information. in written discourse, there is an aspect of paragraph coherence, which consists of cohesion and coherence. in such areas as text analysis and language teaching, the study of cohesion has attracted a lot of interest among scholars. he (2020) in the summary of his research in school of foreign studies, china, indicates that in their academic writing, l2 students have a lower cohesion density. their essays are distinguished by the lack of lexical continuity and demonstrative reference, the initial placement of conjunctions, and the intensive use of temporal conjunctions. while many of these studies have greatly contributed to our understanding of how learners use cohesion in their writing, it is important to note that most published studies have focused primarily on cohesion and its effects on the quality of writing, cohesion errors, and cohesive characteristics in the writing of students. shah (2020) in his study revealed that students' achievements in composition writing, mind mapping technique was more effective than traditional technique. there are some studies mostly include frequency counting and analyzing the realizations of such cohesive devices, with very few studies concentrating on the total cohesion density, and even less on the cohesion distance. sutopo (2020) conducted study about exploring the use of coherent devices in journal papers on english education written by graduate students of unnes. the aims of this research are to examine coherent devices in the article to clarify the usage of references in journal articles authored by graduate students. the findings of this study showed that graduate students used. six cohesive device types, namely replication, replacement, ellipsis, conjunction, reiteration, and collocation. references were more common than those of the other coherent instruments. on the other hand, to achieve their writing, the students of seldom used substitution and ellipsis. lestari (2020) confirms that the relationship of the devices in achieving text coherence was important. cohesive devices create a text that makes sense to read. therefore, in achieving text coherence, the partnership of cohesive devices was the direct participation of all cohesive devices in making text coherence. meanwhile crossley (2016) stated that the results of the study also indicate that cohesion indices are predictors of text organization human judgments and overall quality of the essay for l2 writing. however, there are few correlations between cohesion trends between longitudinal research and human quality decisions, suggesting a possible discrepancy indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 61 between cohesion development and proficiency assessments. cohesion is stated if there may be an interrelated interaction between one sentence structure and another sentence in a paragraph, whereas coherence is stated if there is a logical relationship of meaning between one sentence and another in the paragraph. every sentence with one another consists of cohesion and coherence, which is very necessary for the paragraph because by paying attention to the two elements above, the cohesiveness between paragraphs maintained so that the ideas, ideas, thoughts, and feelings can be conveyed appropriately and be well received by the reader. cohesion and coherence analysis arranged because considering cohesion aims to get the intensity of the meaning of language, clarity of information, and beauty of language. in certain conditions, the elements of cohesion become essential for the formation of coherent discourse. the analysis of the use of coherence aims to construct an arrangement and structure of discourse that is coherent and logical because a series of sentences that do not have a logical relationship between form and meaning cannot be said to be a discourse. halliday and hasan (1994) said that cohesion allows for the regularity of semantic relations between elements in discourse. it means that cohesion is also a semantic organization, which refers to the linguistic associations found in an expression that forms discourse. furthermore, halliday and hasan divide the cohesion of meaning into two parts, namely grammatically and lexically, which must have the cohesion contained in a single text. in line with halliday and hasan's opinion, richards argues that cohesion is a grammatical and lexical relationship between different elements in one text, which can be in the form of relationships between different or different sentences in one sentence. reasonable discourse must pay attention to the relationship between sentences so that it can maintain the linkages and coherence between sentences. the discourse is complete since there are complete concepts, thoughts, ideas, or ideas that can be interpreted without any doubt by the reader (written discourse) or the listener (oral discourse). discourse is the highest or the largest because of discourse formed from sentences or sentences that meet grammatical requirements and other discourse (cohesion and coherence). this cohesion and coherence analysis is structure because considering that cohesion aims to get the meaning of language, clarity of information, and beauty of language. in certain conditions, the elements of cohesion become essential for the formation of coherent discourse. the use of coherence attempts to establish a coherent and logical arrangement and structure of discourse. because a series of sentences that do not have a logical relationship between form and meaning cannot be said to be a discourse, for this reason, the researcher wants to examine the cohesion and coherence of the writing texts of students for this purpose. yvette coyle (2020) had conducted a study of cohesion. generally, this paper presents an empirical study in which we explore the role of reformulation as a written corrective feedback technique on the use of reference cohesion. then, the previous research that fitriati (2017) performed was about coherence. findings have shown that the students are weak enough to formulate coherent texts. while cohesive devices can create consistency in the entire text, it is difficult to bridge new ideas between sentences because there is a gap in connecting sentences to other sentences that in many instances results in the rough sentence. such a type of weakness can be caused by less optimization of different phrases of conjunction and passive form. in contrast, favart (2016) attested that children with sli were significantly impaired in managing written cohesion and used specific forms previously observed in narrative speech such as left dislocations. by contrast, and not expected, the management of written cohesion by adolescents with sli was close to their td peers. the communicative writing situation we set up, which engaged participants to consider the addressee, also made it possible for adolescents with sli to manage cohesion in writing. in terms of coherence, the study comes from coskun (2009), who investigated text coherence in the narrative texts of two groups of students from various nationalities concerning coherence. the results showed that both turkish and migrant students' success levels in terms of text coherence were inadequate and that there was no substantial difference between the two groups' successes. hellalet (2013) examined the second analysis. she explored the use of coherence at three stages of language learning by efl learners. the result showed the difference between the high and low levels of learners. of course, we can expect that high learners will get better proficiency in writing english essay. this result also proved that teaching english will get ease at a higher level, fiki setiawan & taiman cohesion and coherence in written texts of health medical laboratory students 62 especially for writing. the study showed an analysis of coherence in a casual conversation conducted by pambudi et al (2016). the study indicates that the schema and keywords significantly supported the conversation flow to make text coherent. although we cannot avoid grammatical mistakes and utterance, the two components do not affect the most significant error in the conversation text. so the text coherence keeps going on. method the methodology of research is an integral part of conducting research. descriptive qualitative research was used in the research because it involves data, analysis, and meaning interpretation. the writers used a descriptive qualitative design in order to address the research questions. fundamentally, qualitative analysis is interpretive. it implies that the researcher makes an understanding of the data he or she analyzes and explanations. creswell (2017) claimed that the qualitative approach is one in which the investigator frequently makes knowledge statements based primarily on constructivist viewpoints (the various socially and historically constructed individual experiences meaning the creation of a theory or pattern) or advocacy / participatory viewpoints (political, problemoriented, collaborative or change-oriented) or both. this design would explain how the use of cohesive devices in students' written work is intense and precise. the data was taken from the texts of the students. the research unit emphasized on sentences and clauses. the text cohesion and coherence of the texts were established in this analysis. it revealed the link between each sentence and showed the importance of the texts. only 8 of explanation texts written by linguistic learning style students based on the ranking of participants were taken by the researcher. in analyzing the cohesion devices, the researcher used theories from eggins (1994). in terms of micro-level and macro-level coherence of the texts, the researcher used thematic progression and logical relationship theories from thornbury (2005). results and discussion there were four forms of grammatical cohesion in this study, based on data analysis, and there were a reference, substitution, conjunction, and ellipsis. the results of grammatical cohesion research have shown cohesion in this discourse in the form of cohesion. the results of lexical cohesion research have shown cohesion in this discourse in the form of cohesion. the results below explain how the students' capacity to produce cohesion is represented in their written explanation texts. the researcher collected the information through the codes and measured each of the forms. besides, data on the number of occurrences and percentages of forms of grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion are shown in the following table. table 1. the number of occurrences and percentages of forms of grammatical cohesion and lexical cohesion text gramatical cohesion lexical cohesion reference subtitution ellipsis conjunction reiteration collocation 1 mt 5 0 0 9 16 8 2 yl 4 0 0 2 15 2 3 sr 5 2 0 6 33 8 4 yk 15 1 0 6 22 6 5 ui 3 0 0 6 14 8 6 rn 7 0 0 3 18 4 7 fn 68 0 1 7 50 14 8 an 17 0 0 5 39 10 total 124 3 1 44 207 60 % 28,25 0,68 0,23 10,02 47,15 13,67 the table indicates that there are 439 cohesive ties in 8 of students’ explanation texts. the lexical and grammatical cohesion appear. they include four subcategories of grammatical cohesion such as reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction, and two subcategories such as reiteration and collocation. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 63 reiteration is the most frequent types among all types of grammatical and lexical cohesion, which appears 207 times or 47.15%. the second stage is the reference which emerges 124 times or 28.25%. the third position is collocation which occurs 60 times or 13.67%. meanwhile, conjunction appears 44 times or 10.02%, substitution appears 3 times or 0, 68% and ellipsis appears 1 times or 0.23% in the explanation texts. grammatical cohesion is a type of cohesion that uses grammar to determine the semantic relation. it consists of reference, substitution, ellipsis, and conjunction. reference sits in the first position among all subcategories of grammatical cohesion. then it is followed by a conjunction, substitution, and ellipsis. reference cohesion occurs when one item in a text points to another element for interpreting the preceding or the following sentence. the interpretation can be found via sentence structure and inferred using anaphoric and cataphoric ways. in the explanation texts in this research, reference uses both anaphoric and cataphoric ways to show the semantic relation the anaphoric mostly explicit. example: (1) somehow, the student who are far from school, they can also go to school by ride a bike (text 4, sentence 16). in the example (1) the signalling word they refers to student and use explicit anaphoric way to refer back to its referential meanings. at the same time, a cataphoric way used by reference in the texts is implicit. the use of the cataphoric way in the explanation text is less frequent than the anaphoric way. example: (2) walk is activity that can make health and fresh body. it also can reduce the pollution (text 4, sentence 12). in the example (2) to know what it referred to, the reader should go forward to the next clause. the signalling word it refers to walk and use implicit cataphoric way to refer to its referential meanings. the two examples above show the way of referring used by writers to build the semantic relationships within and between sentences. the ways of referring are varied, namely explicit anaphoric way and implicit cataphoric way. these ways of referring are used together in the adjoining sentences to ease the comprehension for the readers. personal reference reference is divided into personal pronoun, demonstrative pronoun, and comparative pronoun. the personal reference uses personal pronouns to refer to the category of person. the personal pronoun employed in the explanation texts in this research mostly refer to things such as students, teacher, energy. the personal reference “it” refers to things such as bus school, weather, earth, home, fridge, and pollution. meanwhile, there are personal reference “its” in the explanation texts, and it represents the possessive pronoun of the animals and the things. example: (3) so the earth will change its weather. it then becomes our challenge to saving energy (text 6, sentence 28 & 29). from the example above, its and it refer to the earth and function as possessive pronoun and subject. from the analysis, it is known that reference mostly employs personal pronoun to establish semantic relationships within and between the sentences. it ranges from “she”, “her”, “it”, “its”, “they”, “their”, “them”, “themselves”, “we”, and “our”. the referential meanings can be derived from the sentence structure. demonstrative reference a demonstrative reference is essentially a form of verbal pointing. the speaker identified the referent by locating it on a scale of proximity. it uses words such as “this”, “that”, “these”, “those”, “here”, “there”, and “the”. demonstrative reference, somehow, is used to represent a scale of quantity as well. the demonstrative references “this” and “these” are used to point things which are near the speaker. “this” represents a single thing such as phenomenon, pattern, and stage. whereas the demonstrative reference “these” is used to represent things in the amount of more than one. example: (4) by walking and riding a bike we believe that these activities can me us more health and fresh. we can use it to doing sport and reduce the pollution (text 5, sentences 32) the comparative reference refers to a type of reference that is used as a means of similarity or identity. all the occurrences in the explanation texts indicate the general comparison of difference and identity, the comparison using adjective; the namely comparative and superlative degree of comparison, and thorough comparison in the numerative element. general comparison of difference is used when two or more things are, in fiki setiawan & taiman cohesion and coherence in written texts of health medical laboratory students 64 fact, the different thing. general comparison of identity is used when two or more things are, in fact, the same thing. meanwhile, both comparative and superlatives are used to compare things between sentences. and a particular comparison of the numerative element is used to compare in terms of quantity. example: (5) so different ways of saving energy will affect life expenses. (text 3, sentence 9 ) substitution substitution is a relation within the text. it is used when the writers wish to avoid repetition of the lexical item and use the grammatical resource of language to replace the item. substitution can be further classified as a nominal, verbal, and clausal substitution. in this research, there are 11 instances of substitution which are represented by nominal substitution, and one of them represented by verbal substitution. example: (6) it is one of solution to save the energy to the climate change (text 5, sentence 18). ellipsis ellipsis has involved a deletion of a word, phrase, or clause. it is the omission of parts of a sentence when they can be presumed from what has already taken place in the text. an ellipsis consists of nominal, verbal, and clausal ellipsis. there is only one instance of ellipsis in the students‟ explanation texts. example: (7) wherever you life must saving the energy for better life such as at your home, office, your company, and school (text 7, sentence 8). compared to other types of cohesion, the ellipsis is the less frequent type. the comment (must saving the energy for a better life such as at your home, office, your company, and school) has incorrect verb form. the word saving should be save. the comment uses ellipsis. the word ‘your’ in ‘your company’ is redundant. conjunction the conjunction is cohesive semantic relations with a specification of how what follows is systematically connected to what has gone before. it conjunctive elements are not in themselves cohesive, but they do express certain meanings which presuppose the presence of other components in the discourse. it helps to connect the idea within and between sentences. there are four categories of conjunction, namely additive, adversative, temporal and causal. the additive is represented by “and”, “our”, “in another word”, and “also”. adversative is represented by “but” and “however”. causal represented by “so”, “because of”, “therefore”, and “for”. the last of conjunction is temporal, which presented by “the first”, “the second”, “third”, “fourth”, “then”, “and then”, “finally”, “soon”, “in conclusion”, “the last”, “previously” and “before that”. example: (8) so, this place should be clean and the people surrounding should be responsible to keep the cleanliness of the canteen because it can be the place of the coming rubbish. (text 2, sentence 7). from the example above, and is used to connect activities that are done at the same time. because is used to show the causal relationship between a clause. from the findings above, it is known that the writers mostly used additive conjunction to connect the ideas in the explanation texts. it arranges semantic relation using familiar words even for neophyte readers. the additive is easy to understand because it adds presenting the idea with the new one instead of adversative or causal, which prosecutes more readers cognitive competence. lexical cohesion lexical cohesion is a type of cohesion that establishes semantic relation using vocabulary. lexical cohesion consists of reiteration and collocation. reiteration a reiteration is a form of lexical cohesion which involves the repetition of a lexical item. it uses the words that have the same or near the same meaning to establish the semantic relationships within and between sentences. reiteration contains repetition, synonym, superordinate, and general word. it determines the semantic links using the same words. repetition is the most straightforward relation for readers to understand the sentences in the texts. because they do not need to use the structure or the context to understand the meanings. in contrast, synonym or near-synonym has used the word that has to resemble or near resemble meanings. example: (9) nowadays, the energy saving program should have been one of the school indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 65 programs.why should it be one of the school program? school is the starting place for the students to learn many things. school is a place where all of the people must be responsible to carry out what become the school programs. regarding to the responsibility for the energy saving program and the effect of greenhouse it is very important for the school to realize and do this program (text 2, sentence1-5) from the example above, there is a marker in the form of lexical cohesion, repetition. lexical cohesion markers were found, characterized by the repetition of the word "the energy-saving program" in the f sentence which refers to "the energy-saving program" that has been previously mentioned in the first sentence, "the school programs" in the second sentence which refers to "the school programs" that has been previously mentioned in the first sentence, the word "school" in the fourth and fifth sentence which refers to "school" that has been previously mentioned in the third sentence. repetition of this type is called a nominal repetition (the repetition that occurs on nouns). by halliday and hasan (1976), this repetition is one of the writers' attempts to make sentences in cohesive discourse. she tried to link one sentence to another sentence by repeating one element in the sentence. therefore, it appears that the writer can connect ideas cohesively. collocation collocation uses the words that do not have the same meaning or are not classified in the same categories as the previous words. it uses the same context that the previous words appear. example: (10) the first tip is by looking for a good energy supplier such as solar energy or wind energy. as we know, indonesia is located on the equator that its rich of sunlight and also has many island that full of wind (text 8 sentence 8 & 9). the word solar and sunlight do not have correlation meaning with energy, but they appear in the same context that is something that happens when energy emerge. that is why it indicate collocation. coherence the micro-level coherence in terms of thematic progression and logical relationship is taken from eggins (2004), which has three main patterns: theme reiteration or constant pattern, zig-zag pattern, and multiple-rheme pattern. it can be seen as an example of the zig-zag pattern below. the capacity of a text to make sense is called coherence[16]. thornbury suggest that the issue of coherence is approached from two perspectives – micro and micro level. at the micro level coherence, the text is considered coherence when the readers’ expectation is met. it means that the meaning in sentences can easily be understood by the readers. there are two ways how to detect the micro level coherence: (a) by looking at its logical relationship, and (b) through the study of its theme-rheme. example: table 2. example of theme-rheme theme rheme 1 energy saving programin our school statement of topic 2 nowadays, the energy saving program should have been one of the school programs. 3 why should it be one of the school programs? the topic (energy saving program in ourschool), having been announced in the title, nowtakes theme position. the thesis statement that follows is the ‘news’ and takes the rheme slot. this sentence is related to the topic. however, because this is an explanation text, in this first paragraph the writer should start telling about the general explanation about the phenomenathat will be discussed. the topic (why) initiates some reasons of the rheme in (2) (should have been one of the school programs). the rest of text in fact answers the question. table 3. example of theme-rheme theme rheme 6 regarding to the energy saving program and the effect of green house it is very important for the school to realize and do this fiki setiawan & taiman cohesion and coherence in written texts of health medical laboratory students 66 program. 7 one of the energy saving programs is canteen.. 8 this is a place where people can buy food and drink. the topic (regarding to the energy saving program and the effect of green house) does not have any connection to any previous rhemes. in the previous sentences, the writer didn’t tell about what the energy saving program is and didn’t mention at all about the effect of green house, but suddenly in the last sentence of paragraph one, the writer directly mentions the effect of green house. so, it is totally incoherent. the clause is more likely suitable if it is placed at the end of the text as a recommendation placed at the end of the text as a recommendation. based on the findings, it can be identified that there are four kinds of micro level. they are additive, adversative, causal and temporal. the results showed that additives were mostly used in student texts. followed by causal, temporal and last was adversative. it means that most of the text contain additive relation; it showed the relation is the next sentence gives detail about or specifies the previous sentence. then followed by clausal relation, it means that the movement of the relation in this text is from general to specific. after that was temporal, it means that the relation in this text is the second sentence provides a reason for the situation or request mentioned in the first sentence. then the last relation is adversative; it showed that the relation implies the chronological order of events. it is assumed that the first sentence happened before the second. the second sentence claims the problem solving toward the problem stated in the first sentence. a passage can be cohesive as a text but lacks the ingredients of coherence as a discourse. what makes a coherence text is its ability of the reader to key into both familiar schema of ideational and interpersonal frame of reference. both frame of reference the reader keys into enables him to refer to people, things, objects, places, activities, events, states, qualities, circumstances and his feelings and attitude towards the passage and relate it to the purpose with the communicative conventions of any genre we are familiar with. therefore, no matter how far a text may be cohesive internally, the extent to which it is regarded as coherent depends on how it is related externally to contextual realities in these frames of reference the reader is familiar in a given sociocultural milieu. this study lent support to a systemic-functional perspective on cohesion. such an outlook views cohesion to be a system like many other systems of language. the cohesion mechanism will then be interpreted as a semantic network of lexicogrammatical choices classified and recognizable in lexical or grammatical guises in terms of their various kinds and occur in various conceptual leaps. as linguists and researchers have argued, this leap draws on the fact that texts are guided by the power of coherence associated with the flow of logical meaning anticipated in native speakers' minds. the text is to fall into the text category. there is a logical coherence between the building blocks of the conceptual meaning and the text's cognitive and applicable expression in the reader's actual text. the samples of the genres were analyzed using two devices of lexical cohesion (collocation and synonymy). the study of the english academic article genre's selected corpus reveals that most of the coherent chains in this genre belong to the coherent lexical form of synonym. in other words, synonymy, which is the modified form of repetition, is the most prominent cohesive device applied in this genre. the occurrence of collocational items was also prominent in this genre, but less than synonymy. the chain leaps are also strikingly present across both synonymous and collocational chains. the text analysis reveals that most of the cohesive chains in this genre include the collocational type of lexical cohesion, while the synonymous terms occur in a small number of chains. chain leaps are also existent across synonymous and collocation chains. another important finding is the role of coherent elements and chains in the creation of coherence in this genre. the cohesive items or chains direct prospectively forward, or retrospectively backward, in such a way that succeeding or preceding cohesive chain logically and coherently runs from or ripples downwards, toward each other, and it is discursively established. their retrospective or prospective counterparts unfold text in real-time and thereby establish coherence. conclusion the selection of topics in this study began with the discovery of inconsistencies or inconsistencies in student essays. these can be seen from the indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 67 inaccuracy of the cohesion or the form of the paragraph and the coherence or meaning. based on the students' essays, which were obtained directly from the english language subject, they wrote that there were still many errors in the students' writing, particularly in terms of cohesion, lexical and grammatical cohesion, and coherence. the result of this study shows that the author still has difficulties in composing a good text. it is found that the writer always makes mistakes in writing the words 'healing' and 'healing.' this shows that the writer is very careless. the students have the competence to produce cohesion in their writing texts. in the eight explanatory texts written by the students, 439 coherent links are used in their texts. grammatic and lexical cohesion is reflected in their explanatory texts. reiteration is the most frequent types among all the types of grammatical and lexical cohesion. it is meaning that the students have useful competence in producing coherence at their writing texts because they applied all the types of coherence in their writing texts. in terms of coherence showed that additives were mostly used in student texts. it means that most of the text contain additive relation. even though that the text is coherence, she seems to have insufficient knowledge on the use of cohesive devices, especially conjunctions. however she had tried to link the sentences in the text in number of ways like using lexical and grammatical cohesion. it is therefore, recommended that the writer should pay attention in spelling and using conjunctions. references coskun, e. 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(2016). the management of cohesion in written narratives in students with specific language impairment: differences between childhood and adolescence. research in developmental disabilities, 59, 318-327. fitriati, s. w., & yonata, f. (2017). examining text coherence in graduate students of english argumentative writing: case study. arab world english journal (awej), 8(3). halliday, m. a., & hasan, r. (1976). cohesion in english london: longman group. halliday, m. a. k., & hasan, r. (1989). language, context, and text: aspects of language in a socialsemiotic perspective. halliday, m. (1994). an introduction to functional grammar (2" d ed.) london: edward arnold. he, z. (2020). cohesion in academic writing: a comparison of essays in english written by l1 and l2 university students. theory and practice in language studies, 10(7), 761-770. hellalet, n. (2013). textual coherence in efl student writing. iosr journal of humanities and social science (iosr-jhss), vol. 15 issue. 3, pp 54-58. lestari, n., & sutopo, d. (2020). the the use of cohesive devices in the narrative texts of the 11th graders. english education journal, 10(1), 301-306. paltridge, b., & starfield, s. (2007). thesis and dissertation writing in a second language: a handbook for supervisors. routledge. pambudi, b. d.; ghasani, b. i.; & mawarni, b. (2016). an analysis of casual conversation. the 5 th eltlt international conference proceedings, pp 95-98. shah, n. h., & naqeeb, h. (2020). does mind mapping technique improve cohesion and coherence in composition writing? an experimental study. pakistan journal of education, 37(2), 3145. sutopo, d., & faridi, a. (2020). the use of cohesive devices in english education journal articles written by graduate students of unnes. english education journal, 10(2), 208-213. tanskanen, s. k. (2006). collaborating towards coherence: lexical cohesion in english discourse (vol. 146). john benjamins publishing. thornbury, s. (2005). beyond the sentence. oxford: macmillan education. fiki setiawan & taiman cohesion and coherence in written texts of health medical laboratory students 68 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 27 the use of teachers’ questioning strategies to stimulate students’ critical literacy: a case of two english lecturers in indonesia siti aimah english education department, universitas muhammadiyah semarang, indonesia e-mail: siti.aimah@unimus.ac.id bambang purwanto english language and literature department, universitas negeri semarang, indonesia e-mail: bambangpurwanto@mail.unnes.ac.id apa citation: aimah, s., & purwanto, b. (2018). the use of teachers’ questioning strategies to stimulate students’ critical literacy: a case of two english lecturers in indonesia. indonesian efl journal, 5(1), 27-36. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v5i1.1608. received: 15-09-2018 accepted: 21-11-2018 published: 01-01-2019 abstract: to create an effective teaching, teachers should consider the use of questioning strategies to not only elicit students’ attention, but also stimulate their critical literacy. this study aims to know the use of questioning strategies used by the english lecturers in the classrooms. an in-depth research was done to provide the information dealing with the reasons of using the questioning strategies and the questioning strategies used to stimulate students’ critical literacy. a case study was carried out by involving two english lecturers of universitas muhammadiyah semarang, indonesia. both of them taught the second semester students in reading class and language testing class in the academic year of 2017/2018. data were collected through videorecordings and interview with both lecturers. the findings showed that both lecturers used question-planning strategies and question-controlling strategies as proposed by xuerong (2012) and walsh (2011). to stimulate the students’ critical literacy, open-referential questions and follow-up questions were posed to encourage them to be more critical. wait-time given by the lecturers also helped the students answered the questions, and their questions were more accurate, elaborate, and reasonable. keywords: critical literacy; effective teaching; question-controlling strategies; question-planning strategies; teachers questioning strategies. introduction questioning has an important role to create an effective teaching (sun, 2012; yang, 2017). the questions function to not only elicit the students’ attention, but also stimulate students’ critical literacy (tofade, elsner, & haines, 2013; zhao, pandian, & singh, 2016). critical literacy which is closely related to critical thinking can be developed through formal instruction (yang, newby, & bill, 2005). in this case, what the teachers should do is by providing the questions to stimulate them to be critical. through questions, the teacher helps the students uncover what has been learnt, explore the subject matter, and enhance the discussion and interaction with the others (mccomas & rossier, n.d ; yang, 2017). therefore, it is very important for the teacher in posing questions to ascertain the level at which the students understand (or misunderstand) the certain concepts presented during lecture so that the students’ critical literacy could also be seen or measured. the teacher, in this case, can pose some questions which are also used to engage or encourage students’ active participation, draw the students’ attention, and motivate their interest in a classroom (fitriati, isfara, & trisanti, 2017; yang, 2017). by posing some questions, it can siti aimah & bambang purwanto the use of teachers’ questioning strategies to stimulate students’ critical literacy: a case of two english lecturers in indonesia 28 broaden the students’ thought to promote their critical literacy in the classroom. teachers’ questioning in the classroom; however, doesn’t always play its proper role. in daily teaching, for example, there still exist some problems, such as asking without response, and asking just for asking. the students are sometimes not familiar with the certain vocabulary used by the teacher. it makes the students difficult to grasp the meaning of the questions. consequently, the students become reluctant to respond the teacher’s question. they still keep silent even though the questions are nominated to them. therefore, the teacher must solve the problems existing in the process of english classroom questioning and put forward effective strategies for classroom teaching. according to xuerong (2012) and walsh (2011), questioning strategies are classified into two categories: question-planning strategies and question-controlling strategies. question-planning strategies function to elicit response and identify problems, better understand students’ knowledge, and invite for further discussions. while question-controlling strategies are procedures used by teachers to ask questions in the classrooms in order to distribute turn-taking and encourage participation (rido, 2017). xeurong (2012) mentions questionplanning strategies consist of asking openreferential, close-display, rhetorical, and follow-up questions, and asking for supporting data. meanwhile, questioncontrolling strategies comprise phrasing the question first and calling on the student, calling on specific students to answer questions, asking questions to entire class, encouraging students to consult their classmates before answering questions, encouraging students to initiate questions, moving closer to students when asking questions, repeating question when there is no response, and modifying question when it is not understood. some researchers have also conducted study focusing on teachers’ questioning strategies. first, rido (2017) focused his study on the use of questioning strategies of indonesian vocational english master teachers. the findings showed that the master teachers employed an interactive style of teaching. they used close-display, open-referential, and follow-up questions by nominating specific students to answer questions, asked questions to the entire class, and repeated questions when there was no response. the strategies made the teachers could control the lessons, guide the students towards a particular response, and promote interactions. second, fitriati, isfara, and trisanti (2017) investigated teachers’ questioning strategies to elicit students’ verbal responses in efl classes at a secondary school. the findings revealed that questioning skills have an impact on improving students’ verbal responses in the classroom interaction. teachers must apply comfortable and appropriate questioning strategies that were suitable for students and the class’ context of situation so that the purposes of questioning can be achieved, including developing students’ english proficiency, measuring their abilities, and motivating them to speak the language. meanwhile, yang (2017) analyzed the problems of classroom questioning. the problems were commonly about lack of waiting time, lack of proper feedback, and unequal distribution of questions. to solve the problems, a series of strategies for english classroom questioning was required, and it included preparation questions before questioning, controlling while questioning, and giving feedback after questioning. considering the importance of questioning strategies used by the teachers, none of them focuses on how to simulate students’ critical literacy. therefore, this study aims to provide an in-depth information of the teaching practices in universitas muhammadiyah semarang focusing on the use of questioning strategies used by two lecturers. further, it is also an attempt to know the types of questioning strategies used to stimulate the students’ critical literacy. based on the aims of the study, the research questions raised are as indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 29 follows: 1) what are the questioning strategies used by the lecturers in the classrooms and the reasons?, 2) what types of questioning strategies are used to stimulate the students’ critical literacy? method a case study was conducted in which lessons of two english lecturers were employed in this study. the selected participants were two english lecturers (one male and one female) in english education department of universitas muhammadiyah semarang, indonesia. the male lecturer (l1) aged 30 years old was a philosophy of doctor, while the female lecturer (l2) aged 35 years old was a master degree. both of them have been teaching english for about 8 years. two classes were investigated in this study. first, the investigated class was reading class for the second semester with the amount of 20 students. second was language testing class for the fourth semester consisting of 13 students. both classes comprised students from indonesia and thailand in which the average of their academic level was equal even though they were in different level of semester. the data for this study were the transcripts of two video-recordings english lessons and the interview with both lecturers. the two lessons taught by the two english lecturers were video-recorded and the whole class interactions were transcribed. the transcription data were then analyzed qualitatively based on walsh (2011) and xeurong (2012). while the result of interview with the two lecturers was analyzed qualitatively in which the function was to find out the lecturers’ reasons of using questioning strategies in their classroom. results and discussion the questioning strategies used by the lecturers and the reasons the results of video-recordings and interview showed that the two english lecturers used both question-planning and question-controlling strategies in their classrooms. question-planning strategies open-referential question referential-question deals with the question in which the answer is not already known by the teacher. it means that it requires interpretations and judgments from the interlocutor. the use of referential-question could be seen in extract 1 and 2. extract #1 l1 : first of all (,) i have one question for you from the title above (.) the title of the computer crime here (.) what do you think the passage about (?) before reading(.) (wait-time) s : well (,) the passage is about hacker (.) yes (,) hacker (.) l1 : okay (,) hacker (.) do you know what is hacker (?) s : yes (,) someone who hacks the sites on internet (.) from the extract 1, it shows that l1 asked the students by using wh-question commonly characterized by using what, why, who, etc. to provide the contextual information about situations, events, purposes, etc. (hamiloğlu, 2012; walsh, 2011). in delivering the students’ interpretation, the students were required to critically evaluate their reading. the lecturer said that through open-referential questions, the students were demanded to think critically based on their knowledge. they must be able to connect their understanding about the text with the certain context. it required deep thinking to evaluate about that. they also had to give their opinion about what they had learnt. it is in line with rido (2017) and zhao, pandian and singh (2016) who state that open-referential questions stimulate the students’ critical thinking. they needed to give longer responses toward the particular questions posed to them. similarly, walsh (2011) says that referential question is used to promote discussion and get longer responses. extract #2 l2 : in your opinion, what is the function (/) purpose of the public speaking (?) (wait-time) s : to share the public (.) siti aimah & bambang purwanto the use of teachers’ questioning strategies to stimulate students’ critical literacy: a case of two english lecturers in indonesia 30 l2 : what is to be shared (?) s : some topics (.) based on extract 2, l2 posed the referential-question demanded the student to give longer information about the purpose of the topic discussed. yet, the student only gave short answer to the question. based on the lecturer’s information, it was because the student was not confident enough to speak. she was afraid to make mistakes in speaking english. that is why it influenced her in expressing her ideas in front of the others. close-display question close-display questions, according to walsh (2011), are the questions asked to the students in which the teachers already know the answer. they require the students to display what they know. they have some functions: to elicit the students’ response, to check the students’ understanding, to guide the students towards a particular response, to promote the students’ involvement, and to check the students’ concept. close-display questions asked by l1 during teaching and learning process in the classroom could be seen in the following extract: extract #3 l1 : okay (,) finish (.) now let’s go on to the some word unfamiliar for you e.g. like bug (.) do you know bug here (?) s : error (.) l1 : bug bisa jadi kaya sampah yang tidak penting and then corrupt i think it’s very easy (.) corrupt is…. to cause error appear in file data or number reliable (.) different from construction e.g. dpr kaya gitu beda lagi (,) disini lebih ke eror datanya (/) tidak bisa dibuka and then next one some unfamiliar words for you e.g which one crook (.) what is crook (?) ss : penipu l1 : dishonest (/) penipu juga sama atau ……. dishonest tidak jujur and then is there any else (?) something unfamiliar word (?) ss : (silence) l1 : swindler (.) okay (,) what is swindler (?) ss : penipu extract 3 shows the display questions shown with the use of wh-questions and yes/no questions. dealing with the use of wh-question, the lecturer (l1) checked the students’ understanding about what they had learnt, i.e. their understanding about the term of bug. the use of this question made the lecturer easier in measuring what extent to which the students’ understanding about the text. then, to check the students’ concept about the similar topic, the lecturer also asked by using yes/no questions in which it actually aimed to promote the students’ involvement in the classroom. the similar condition above also happens in the extract 4 in which l2 used wh-question to guide students toward a particular response. the use of close-display questions could be seen in the following extract. extract #4 l2 : what time do you wake up today (?) s : delapan (,) mrs (.) l2 : at eight (?) s : no no no (,) at nine (.) l2 : at eight (?) no no at nine (?) jadi malah nambah jam 9 (.) okay (,) so if i am not mistaken (,) today we are gathering here to at least to do some practices about (.) what is your subject (?) public speaking and also you meet your new friends in public relation (.) do you think that both of the subjects has the correlation (?) and here we go the man who always come late after their friends (.) so please have a sit (.) do you think that public speaking and public relation have correlation (?) ss : yes (.) l2 : in what way (?) ss : speaking (.) from extract 4, it shows that l2 actually rebuked one of the students who came late to the classroom. to do that, l2 asked the students with wh-question by asking the time he woke up that made him late to come to the class. however, there was inconsistent answer from the student making l2 ascertained what he said. to ascertain the condition, then, l2 asked the students with yes/no-question to have the choral response. for having the choral response from all the students, the lecturer used close-display questions. she got easier in controlling the class by using the type of question which was not only for guiding the students’ response, but also for checking the students’ understanding about what they had learnt. it indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 31 concurs with xeurong (2012) that the use of questions stimulates the students to speak and improve the interaction in the classroom. the use of display-questions can also encourage language learners to get interested in and be active in the classroom. from the extracts above, they show that display-questions are commonly characterized with short responses from the students. it is in line with walsh (2011) who states that display-questions require short answers containing small pieces of information. it means that the responses given tend to be simple, restricted, and commonly contain one or two words. rhetorical question in the extract below, rhetorical questions were used by the lecturer (l2) during teaching and learning process in the classroom. extract #5 l2 : of course many areas which covered that public relation need to be accessed (,) (bahwa pekerjaan public relation itu tidak hanya dalam satu bidang saja)(,)bagaimana actually in public speaking or actually in broader areas (di dalam situasi yang lebih luas seseorang yang menyampaikan pesan) (,) it doesn’t talk only about how is our speaking (?) how is our pronunciation (?) how is our skill (,) but also your strategies (?) your tactics (?) your maping in finishing your job (?) (semua orang perlu maping) (.) even though in public speaking you should also define (anda juga harus menentukan apa yang anda mau sampaikan?) (,) which start (?) (saya mau memulai dari mana (?) what should be ended (?) (kapan saya memulai dan apa yang merupakan informasi yang harus saya berikan (?) in the end of the season misalnya (?) let’s see then to save the time because if i let you read this (,) maybe we will finish next month (.) so (,) what is public relation? if you are allowed to read please lastari first definition by harlow (.) from extract 5, a series of rhetorical questions were posed by the lecturer to the students. rhetorical questions are questions used not to find out information or elicit an answer. l2 as seen in extract 5 asked the students by using rhetorical questions, however, the questions posed did not really require the students’ answer even though they were possible to answer. during explaining, l2 depicted the condition in which she demanded the students to critically think what should be considered and/or prepared for facing the certain situations. l2 used the rhetorical questions as assertions of what she was talking about to emphasize the important points of the related topic. dealing with the use of rhetorical question which did not expect the answer, it can be categorized as redundant interrogatives. it is because rhetorical question is only seen as assertions of what is talking about. follow-up question the next strategy used by the lecturer is follow-up questions. those questions are characterized by using wh-questions posed to a specific student to respond. extract #6 l1 : okay (,) first of all (,) i will revise about how to pronounce this one arya (.) how to pronounce this word (?) increase (.) increase (,) agak panjang (.) increasing it is safer not to use computer (,) bacanya bukan komput tapi kompyuter (.) s : kompyuter (.) l1 : if you want to buy something in restaurant (,) menunya mana (?) ss : repeating and laughing (.) l1 : if we use it with the pronunciation menu (,) computer (.) what would your answer be in this condition (?) s : (silence) l1 : okay (,) nadya. do you agree with this sentence (?) s : sentence what sir (?) l1 : sentence not to use laptop (,) mobile phone (,) technological on the internet (.) s : no (.) l1 : why didn’t you agree with (?) (wait-time) s : because in our life we must know about the information and our situation here in globalization condition (.) extract 6 shows that l1 asked closedisplay question posed to a specific student to be more responsible to answer. after that, siti aimah & bambang purwanto the use of teachers’ questioning strategies to stimulate students’ critical literacy: a case of two english lecturers in indonesia 32 l1 continued his conversation by using further questions which are still related to the topic. l1 gave an analogy to the entire class to make the students easier in understanding what he was talking about. then, follow-up questions were posed by using wh-question to all students. however, no one of them gave a response. seeing that condition, l1 asked the other student to respond his follow-up question. unfortunately, she did not focus on the lesson which made her confused to get the point in which it demanded l1 to describe the condition. having got the response from the student, l1, then, continued to ask the question to the same student to develop her argument. in this case, l1 combined the strategies of question at the same time to stimulate and dig the student’s ability to think more critically. extract #7 l2 : okay then, saya mau tanya (.) do you think that public relation and public speaking is different (?) (wait-time) l2 : aini (?) s : yes different (.) l2 : in what way (?) s : the purpose (.) l2 : the purpose (?) good (.) what is the purpose of the public speaking and public relation(?) s : public speaking (.) l2 : in your opinion (,) what is the function/purpose of the public speaking (?) s : to share the public (.) l2 : what is to be shared (?) s : some topics (.) l2 : sesuatu (?) s : some topics (.) l2 : some topics (?) why do you think the topic should be delivered to public (?) s : i don’t know (.) from extract 7, l2 began her questions by using close-display question which was then continued with a series of follow-up questions. l2 posed those questions to a specific student in order to maximize her ability in communication and stimulate her to be more active in the classroom. rido (2017) mentions follow-up questions are aimed to stimulate the students’ involvement in the discussion of the classroom. the use of the questions can also stimulate the recall of prior knowledge, promote comprehension, and build critical-thinking skills (tofade, elsner, & haines, 2013). both lecturers added that follow-up questions stimulated the students to dig their knowledge deeply. they carefully answered the questions posed to them based on their critical thinking. question-controlling strategies question-controlling strategies refer to ways or procedures used by the teacher in the classroom (rido, 2017). the following is the findings found in the use of questioncontrolling strategies. phrasing the question and calling the student the following strategy is used by the lecturer in posing the questions to a specific student. extract #8 l1 : usually we find information from the computer or internet that’s good. is there any answer (?) (wait-time) l1 : okay (,) safira (?) s : as computer crime increasing (,) it is safer not to use the computer (.) what would your answer be (?) computer guard (.) extract 8 shows that l1 firstly posed his question to a specific student to respond. l1 preferred to use the strategy of phrasing the question and then calling the student to answer. it was done in order all students would have the same responsibility from the others to think first what the answer of the question is. having given wait-time to think in which the teacher waits after asking question before getting a response (walsh, 2011), then l1 nominated the specific student to answer. it was done to make the lecturer easier in controlling the class. the student, in this case, had also been ready and confident to give the response to the lecturer in front of the others. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 33 calling on specific students to answer questions the similar strategy above is shown in the following strategy in which the lecturer preferred to nominate a specific student to answer to mention the question. extract #9 l1 : ade said that computer crime is bad, it’s not good behaviour (.) indra (,) is there any else want to add additional information about computer crime (,) the opinion about computer (.) indra setiawati (?) s : yes sir (.) l1 : what do you think about computer crime (?) s : it’s not good (,) but they can merugikan people and then... extract #10 l2 : well, that’s very awesome answer (.) habib, can you tell me (,) can you tell us (?) do you think that public speaking and public relation have correlation (?) you can say no if you don’t want to answer (.) s : yes (.) based on extract 9 and extract 10, there is a similar condition in which both lecturers (l1 and l2) nominated the specific student to answer rather than firstly mentioned the question to the student. they preferred to do that to avoid any student who ignored the questions posed to them. when the student was in a situation in which he/she must give the response, he/she would have a responsible to think what the answer was. it concurs with walsh (2011) who states by nominating the specific student to answer, it can help to encourage his/her participation in the teaching and learning process. rido (2017) also adds that this strategy gives an opportunity to the students to respond the teacher’s questions. however, the strategy used by the teachers often made the students startled because they had not been ready to answer yet. consequently, the specific student pointed by the lecturer could not give the longer response to the teacher. he/she did not have any confidence to speak since she/he was not ready yet to answer (see extract 10). asking questions to entire class to elicit the students’ response and check their understanding about a certain topic, the lecturers commonly used this strategy in the classroom. to see more in detail, it could be seen in extract 11. extract #11 l1 : finish? now let’s go on to the some word unfamiliar for you e.g. like bug. do you know bug here? ss : error l1 : bug bisa jadi kaya sampah yang tidak penting and then corrupt i think it’s very easy. corrupt is…. to cause error appear in file data or number reliable. different from construction e.g. dpr kaya gitu beda lagi, disini lebih ke error datanya/ tidak bisa dibuka and then next one some unfamiliar words for you e.g. which one crook. what is crook? ss : penipu l1, in extract 11, checked the students’ knowledge about a certain topic that they had discussed. he posed the question to the entire class to get attention and elicit the response. the questions posed by the teacher to the students are keys in focusing the students’ attention. this strategy was also effective to stimulate the students’ participation in the classroom. even the use of this strategy could help shy students to get the others’ support to participate in the classroom (rido, 2017). repeating questions repeating questions were commonly used by the lecturers when there were no responses from the students. extract #12 l2 : okay (,) do you think that we just only need our vocabulary (,) and our pronounciation (?) do you think when we are doing speech and speaking we just need language components only (?) s : (silence) l2 : okay (,) do you think when we are doing speech and speaking we just need language components only (?) habib (?) s : no (.) when we are going to speak in audience (,) ..... define the meaning of our speaking and also we can do some of siti aimah & bambang purwanto the use of teachers’ questioning strategies to stimulate students’ critical literacy: a case of two english lecturers in indonesia 34 information that apa (?) for relation what are we talking about (.) from extract 12, l2 did repetition for her questions because there was no response from the students. repetition was done by l2 to ascertain that the students really understood her question. hopefully, when they got the point of the questions, they could give the teacher responses. it is in line with what fitriati, isfara, and trisanti (2017) said that repeating questions are basically used to stimulate the students’ more detailed responses. without repeating, for those who did not understand what the question was, they only would be silent and did not give a response. hence, in some contexts, repetition is very required to support the quality of teaching and learning in the classroom. the questioning strategies used to develop students’ critical literacy the findings show that open-referential and follow-up questions were the strategies used by the lecturers to develop students’ critical literacy. open-referential questions were posed to the students to seek the students’ interpretation about what they had learnt. even though both lecturers did not often use this type of questions, the lecturers admitted that through those questions, they would get many unpredictable answers from the students. students’ critical literacy basically can be influenced by the level of questions posed by the lecturer in the class. the quality of the questions posed also determines the level of students’ critical literacy. through questioning, the students built their understanding and developed their critical thinking by expressing their own opinions based on their critical review, conveying their arguments, etc. that is why the lecturers must think and prepare what type of questions used to stimulate the students to be more critical. based on the interview, the use of this question also helped the lecturers in achieving the information. the students attempted to think more deeply and critically to convey their arguments. it is in line with feng (2013) who says that referential questions are used to challenge students to think and respond at higher levels of cognition, to stimulate creativity and to involve students by asking for their opinions. the second strategy is follow-up questions. follow-up questions were actually the most common strategy used by the lecturers to stimulate the students’ critical literacy rather than open-referential questions. the lecturers said that the easiest thing to do in stimulating their high-order thinking was by nominating a specific student to answer the questions posed to them. they mentioned that even though the student usually only gave a short response when the lecturer tried to pursue to which his/her answer was by asking the other questions (see extract 6 & 7), it stimulated him/her to think more deeply. it proves that follow-up question also stimulated the students to be more critical through eliciting longer and complex responses. to stimulate the students’ critical literacy through the strategies above, it was also required to provide the wait-time as proposed by feng (2013). by providing wait-time, the students not only have the adequate time to reflect, but also formulate their responses (zhao, pandian & singh, 2016). as seen in the extracts above, the students needed wait-time to formulate their answer. when they were given an opportunity to prepare their responses, they answered the questions posed to them, and their answers become more accurate, elaborate, and reasonable rather than directly answered the question without having the wait-time to think. the lecturers said that not all students had the same level of knowledge. some of them could think quickly, and the rest needed the wait-time to think what the answers of the questions posed to them. to face the situation, the lecturers gave an opportunity to them to prepare their responses through the waittime given. consequently, they were responsible to answer the questions based on their level of understanding. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 35 conclusion the questioning strategies used by the teachers in the classroom are influenced by the quality of the teachers themselves. questioning proves for not only stimulating the students’ attention, but also determining students’ critical literacy (zhao, pandian & singh, 2016). to develop the students’ critical literacy, it was provided with the questioning strategies (question-planning strategies and question-controlling strategies) used by the lecturers. however, not all questioning strategies promote the students’ critical literacy. among the strategies used, open-referential question and follow-up question enabled the lecturers to stimulate the students’ high-order thinking. in pedagogical setting, the use of the questioning strategies helped the lecturers in managing and controlling the class, and stimulating the students’ response and critical literacy. therefore, the lecturers should be aware that the use of questioning strategies has a big impact on students’ learning. they should plan the use of questions that encourage the students to promote their involvement. it will also be better for the lecturers to pose the questions to the volunteer students so that the other students will have the opportunity to respond the questions. next, the students, in this case is english education students, should be taught with the questioning strategies that benefit to their future teaching career so that they can promote the students’ engagement in the classroom. references feng, z. (2013). using teacher questions to enhance efl students’ critical thinking ability. journal of curriculum and teaching, 2(2), 147-153. fitriati, s. w., isfara, g. a. v., & trisanti, n. (2017). teachers’ questioning strategies to elicit students’ verbal responses in efl classes at a secondary school. english review: journal of english education, 5(2), 217-226. hamiloğlu, k. (2012). the impact of teacher questions on student learning in efl. journal of educational and instructional studies in the world, 2(2), 1-8. mccomas, w. f., & rossier, l. a. (n.d.). asking more effective questions. retrieved from https://uwaterloo.ca/centre-for-teachingexcellence/sites/ca.centre-for-teachingexcellence/files/uploads/files/asking_better_quest ions.pdf. rido, a. (2017). what do you see here from this picture? questioning strategies of master teachers in indonesian vocational english classroom. teflin journal, 28(2), 193-211. sun, z. (2012). an emphirical study on new teacherstudent relationship and questioning strategies in esl classroom. english language teaching, 5(7), 175-183. tofade, t., elsner, j., & haines, s. t. (2013). best practice strategies for effective use of questions as a teaching tool. american journal of pharmaceutical education, 77(7), 1-9. yang, h. (2017). a research on the effective questioning strategies in class. science journal education, 5(4), 158-163. zhao, c., pandian, a., & singh, m. k. m. (2016). instructional strategies for developing critical thinking in efl classrooms. english language teaching, 9(10), 14-21. siti aimah & bambang purwanto the use of teachers’ questioning strategies to stimulate students’ critical literacy: a case of two english lecturers in indonesia 36 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 45 the students’ achievement in pronouncing english song using smule application himatul khoiriyah english education department, faculty of education, university of technology yogyakarta, indonesia e-mail: matul.hima@gmail.com ahmad mustamir waris tadris bahasa inggris, fakultas tarbiyah, iain manado, indonesia e-mail: ahmadmustamirwaris@gmail.com juhansar english education department, faculty of education, university of technology yogyakarta, indonesia e-mail: juhansar@uty.ac.id apa citation: khoiriyah, h., waris, a. m., & juhansar, j. (2018). the students‟ achievement in pronouncing english song using smule application. indonesian efl journal, 5(1), 45-58. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v5i1.1610. received: 19-09-2018 accepted: 21-11-2018 published: 01-01-2019 abstract: the development of science and technology forces academics to be more creative in the teachinglearning process to achieve a better quality of education. smule application as a part of science and technology development should be used effectively and creatively as a tool in that process especially in english education field. therefore, this research aims at describing the students‟ achievement in pronouncing english song using smule application and finding out the factors influencing students‟ achievement in pronouncing english song using smule application. this research used quantitative data with descriptive statistical approach. the data were collected through english pronunciation test and questionnaire. the english pronunciation test was used to collect the data related to students‟ english pronunciation achievement and the questionnaire was used to find out the factors influencing students‟ english pronunciation achievement. the results showed that the mean score of students‟ achievement in pronouncing english song using smule application was 3.81 or almost good. it was influenced by the low frequency in practicing pronunciation, the difficulty to balance singing karaoke and music instruments on fast song tempo, and the lack of using smule application to sing karaoke. keywords: achievement; english song; pronunciation; smule application; university students. introduction pronunciation is important in communication. yet, there are some students choose to speak nothing because they do not know what to say and do not have confidence to produce the correct english pronunciation unlike writing where students are expressing and developing idea in a written form not in spoken form (utami, pabbajah, & juhansar, 2018, p. 115). if these happen for a long time, they will never build a good communication in english. a communication will run well when someone can use language properly by combining and synthesizing facts and ideas (juhansar, et al., 2016, p. 88). as backley (2015) said, the listener sometimes makes quick judgment about the speaker‟s pronunciation. if the pronunciation is poor, so it can break the overall language level. it indicates that we cannot omit those pronunciation features to deliver a clear and a good communication. to understand english pronunciation well, students need to practice it more and more. to practice english pronunciation, students can use english song. song is sound mailto:matul.hima@gmail.com mailto:juhansar@uty.ac.id himatul khoiriyah, ahmad mustamir waris, & juhansar the students‟ achievement in pronouncing english song using smule application 46 art which combines music composition and text or lyric. according to encyclopedia of americana (1998) in farhati (2011), song refers to “the musical work which is set to phoetic text, with equal important given to the music and the words” (p.21). basically, the composer writes song not only to deliver the message or feeling but also to entertain the listener. in singing a song, between lyrics and the instrument of music should be balanced by following the rhythm or tempo. tempo refers to „time‟ or „musical time‟ (drum, n.d.). it becomes the most important ingredient in creating music. there are three main tempos in music, namely slow, medium, and fast tempo. each tempo has range of beats per minutes which popular with bpm (beat per minutes) that indicates the measurement of total beat that happens in a minute. to learn english pronunciation through song, it must be based on the proper song‟s selection. the selection of song for learning english pronunciation is different in each educational level. the slow song (40-76 bpm) might be used for elementary, medium song (80-106 bpm) is for junior high school, moderate pace (108-116 bpm) could be used in senior high school. for university level, it is better to use fast song (120-220 bpm) rather than slow or medium song. according to voldánová (2017), to concern the vocabulary and pronunciation from song, students are better to be challenged to sing the fast song, because it can force students to listen the song carefully. fast song is considered challenging especially for english education department students in exercising or learning pronunciation because they must keep up with the rhythm. song is usually found and listened when someone is watching tv, listening to radio, and streaming on the internet. yet, since internet has been providing many things, song can also be found easily there. nowadays, everyone has smartphone which connects to the internet, so songs can be searched through smartphone applications, such as sportify music, joox application, apple music, soundcloud, etc. by the time goes by, a music streaming application is getting upgrade for better quality and feature. for instance, joox application which is used by people as the music streaming application has been upgraded. it is not only to stream music, but also to sing karaoke where it provides many genres of song powered by smule application. smule is an application allowing the user to sing karaoke, play guitar and piano through smartphone (woo, 2016, p. 1). all ages of music‟s lovers whether students or not, younger or older can use it as a medium to sing karaoke easily. karaoke is originally coming from japanese which means singing without live orchestra (ruismäki, antti, & kimmo, 2013, p. 1222). karaoke by using smule application can be done solo, duet (pair), and group. the difference between joox application and smule application are on the features availability. according to apkmb (2018), there are several advantage features of smule application that one can use to sing a song. the first is self-recording option with video. smule application is not only audio recording but also video recording application. user can use video filter to make his/her face looks brighter when he/she is recording his/her video. second, sing like a star with audio effect. the users having bad voice do not need to worry when they would like to sing because smule application provides professional features to edit voice easily. users can edit their own voice by applying effects which is available as they need. third, share on the global platform. some persons have social media to inform their activity to their social media‟s friends. they may share or promote themselves, as they have ability to sing. they could record their voice and video when they are singing and then share it globally through social media, like facebook, twitter, instagram, and whatsapp messenger. fourth, duet with featured artists. it becomes prior feature of smule application to sing karaoke with many artists without meeting directly. it is a prior feature where other application does not. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 47 fifth, collaboration with the original singer. smule application presents different experience by providing collaboration singing with the original singer. it makes the singer fans can sing together with their favorite singer. yet, smule application also has disadvantages based on the information found in smule application. some of the disadvantages are; 1) users should pay about idr 24.000/month to be a vip member, 2) not all songs can be sung soloist, 3) users must cost the vip for it, not all artists or singers are using smule, so it limits the user to sing collaboration with original singers of the song, and 4) has many ads the annoying ads usually appear when the user open the application and or when user has done singing karaoke. to sing karaoke using smule application, the user should sing his/her lyrics part. if user sings as solo, the lyrics will not have different color. meanwhile, for the collaboration singing, the user will be directed to sing the blue lyrics part, the partner of duet will be directed to sing the grey lyrics part, and orange for singing the lyrics together. if the user sings the song properly, such as good in the intonation, stars show how excellent the intonation appear when singing. people are free to choose what song they want to sing whether it is local or international songs. there are many international songs. one of them is english song. while they are singing and enjoying the english songs, they also can acquire and/or learn foreign language. indeed, user can duet karaoke with artists, such as joining karaoke „say you won‟t let go with james arthur‟, „flash light with jessi j‟, „we don‟t talk anymore with charlie puth‟, „treat you better with shawn mendes‟ and many more. in relation to this research, there were some previous researches having similar topic which have been conducted before. first, research conducted by rengifo‟s (2009) showed that karaoke was a lot of fun in which the students‟ pronunciation advanced greatly. second, farhati (2011) focused on explaining the effectiveness of using english songs as a medium to enhance students‟ ability in pronouncing the english voiced plosive consonant (b, d, g) sounds. third, a research conducted by manik (2015) showed that the mean score of posttest is higher than pre-test score meaning that english song is an effective medium to improve students‟ mastery in pronunciation. basically, the english words will be easy to pronounce if students listen to correct english pronunciation and practice it frequently and repeatedly. pronouncing english words well is little bit difficult because students tend not to comprehend the pronunciation deeply. one way to make students listen and practice the pronunciation easily is by singing. therefore, this research aims at finding out the information about students‟ achievement in pronouncing english song using smule application and the factors influencing their achievement. indeed, pronunciation here is limited to segmental features (vowels and consonants) and suprasegmental features (intonation, word stress, and rhythm). to achieve those purposes, this research attempts to address the following research questions: 1) what is students‟ achievement in pronouncing english song using smule application? and 2) what factors are influencing students‟ achievement in pronouncing english song using smule application? method to achieve the aims of this research, the researchers used quantitative research data with descriptive statistical approach as the research design. it deals with the data about the students‟ achievement in pronouncing english song using smule application, and the factors influencing students‟ pronunciation achievement. according to ary, lucy, chris, & asghar (2010), “descriptive statistic procedure is basically a method of handling quantitative information; this procedure enables researchers to organize, summarize, and describe observation data” (p. 101). himatul khoiriyah, ahmad mustamir waris, & juhansar the students‟ achievement in pronouncing english song using smule application 48 furthermore, the participants of this research were fourth semester students of english education department, faculty of education, university of technology yogyakarta (uty) in the academic year 2017/2018. the participants consist of twelve (12) students; four (4) males and eight (8) females. they were from one class. indeed, the researchers selected all (12) students as participants in this research. in collecting data, the researchers used two instruments, namely english pronunciation test and questionnaire. english pronunciation test was used to find out data on students‟ achievement in pronouncing english song that was practiced through duet singing using smule application, while questionnaire was used to find out data on factors influencing students‟ english pronunciation achievement using smule application. in collecting the data, the pronunciation test was conducted to the students by practicing singing the chosen english song using smule application. the researchers contributed the lyric of the english song with phonetic transcription to the participants. participants were given time for a week to prepare well on singing, such as identifying and understanding the song and the lyric before singing and recording video in form of documentation. the pronunciation test data were given score based on five (5) pronunciation practice skill scoring classifications. related to the scoring process, the researchers gave score on the segmental features; vowels and consonants and suprasegmental features; intonation, word stress, and rhythm (ma, 2015, p. 34; gilakjani, 2012, pp.120-122). the pronunciation test which was collected in the form of video recording then analyzed using the following formula which is adopted from riduwan and sunarto (2013, p. 38): mean ( = where = the symbol of mean = the summation of each data = total students after conducting english pronunciation test, the students were asked to respond to the questionnaire by determining the factors influencing their achievement in pronouncing english song using smule application. the researchers used closeended questionnaire consisting of 20 items with four (4) options to choose. it was started by explaining what to do with the questionnaire before asking the students to respond it. based on the way to administrate the questionnaire, the researchers used mail questionnaire distribution to make it more effective and efficient. to administrate the questionnaire, the researchers contacted the participants one by one via whatsapp messenger application because they were in their semester‟s holiday where the researchers could not meet them up to contribute and to collect the data. the questionnaire data finding were calculated by using the following formula which is adapted from riduwan and sunarto (2013, p.23): x 100% where = the frequency of the answer = total number of respondent results and discussion the discussions on data finding are divided into two subsections following the research questions and the aims of the research. the first subsection is about students‟ achievement in english pronouncing and the second is about factors influencing students‟ achievement in pronouncing english song using smule application. the students’ achievement in pronouncing english song using smule application before conducting the pronunciation test, the researchers did several steps to ensure the work of the test. here, the participants were asked to record duet english singing song with the original native singer of english using smule application in the form of video. they sang in duet singing “treat you better” with shawn mendes, the native singer of english. it is fast song tempo with 220 bpm. the following picture is the indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 49 capture of student‟ video recording when she was duet singing with the original native singer of english: figure 1. duet singing “treat you better” song using smule application in this stage, the researchers present the data that have been collected to be analyzed and discussed. before that, the researchers determined the score of each feature. the researchers focus on segmental features, namely vowels (f1) and consonants (f2); and suprasegmental features, such as intonation (f3), word stress (f4), and rhythm (f5). the students‟ pronunciation would be said as excellent if the score is five (5), and poor if the score is one (1). to make it clear, the researchers present the frequency of students‟ achievement in each part using the english pronunciation test as follows. table 1. score of students‟ english pronunciation test no participants number score total mean f1 f2 f3 f4 f5 1 005 4 4 4 5 4 21 4.2 2 006 3 4 5 4 5 21 4.2 3 007 3 3 4 4 4 18 3.6 4 008 4 4 5 5 5 23 4.6 5 009 5 5 5 4 4 23 4.6 6 010 3 4 4 4 4 19 3.8 7 013 2 2 2 2 2 10 2 8 015 4 4 5 5 5 23 4.6 9 016 3 3 4 3 3 16 3.2 10 017 3 3 4 4 4 18 3.6 11 018 3 3 3 3 3 15 3 12 022 4 4 5 5 5 23 4.6 total 41 43 50 48 48 table 2. the work of table 1; students‟ english pronunciation test no achievement score f1 f2 f3 f4 f5 f1 f2 f3 f4 f5 classification (x) (x) (x) (x) (x) (x) 1 excellent 5 1 1 5 4 4 5 5 25 20 20 2 good 4 4 6 5 5 5 16 24 20 20 20 3 average 3 6 4 1 2 2 18 12 3 6 6 4 poor 2 1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 5 very poor 1 total 12 12 12 12 12 41 43 50 48 48 table 3. the mean score of students english pronunciation test no features x (score summation) (number of students) (mean) 1 vowels (f1) 41 12 3.41 2 consonants (f2) 43 12 3.58 3 intonation (f3) 50 12 4.10 4 word stress (f4) 48 12 4.00 5 rhythm (f5) 48 12 4.00 total 19.09 overall mean score 3.81 those are the result of mean score on work table. it shows that the mean score of vowels (f1) is 3.41 and the consonant (f2) is 3.58. it indicates that the mean score of segmental feature is 3.49 or average. meanwhile, the suprasegmental feature is himatul khoiriyah, ahmad mustamir waris, & juhansar the students‟ achievement in pronouncing english song using smule application 50 good. it is proven by the mean score of intonation (f3) is 4.10, word stress (f4) is 4.00, and the rhythm (f5) with mean score 4.00. the mean score for suprasegmental feature is 4.03. indeed, the researchers conclude that the achievement of twelve (12) students of fourth semester of english education department, faculty of education, university of technology yogyakarta in academic year 2017/2018 in pronouncing english song using smule application is 3.81 which includes on above average category. based on the results, the researchers are interested to see the factors influencing their achievement. the factors influencing students’ achievement in pronouncing english song using smule application based on the result of pronunciation test above, the researchers believe that there are some factors influencing the students‟ achievement in pronouncing the english song. those factors are explained based on the results of questionnaire that has been responded by the students. this is a closeended questionnaire which consists of 20 items, and it was analyzed individually. the analysis result is described below. table 4. students‟ opinion about their own pronunciation no classification frequency percentage 1 excellent 2 good 2 16.67% 3 average 8 66.66% 4 poor 2 16.67% total 12 100% table 4 shows that none of students who consider his pronunciation is excellent. there are 2 or 16.67% of 12 students think that they have good pronunciation; most of students or 8 (66.66%) students believe that their pronunciation is average; and 2 or 16.67% students claim having poor pronunciation. by those results, they seem happy with their ability as proven in the following table. table 5. students‟ feelings when they are listening to their english words pronunciation no classification frequency percentage 1 very happy 2 16.67% 2 happy 7 58.33% 3 unhappy 2 16.67% 4 don‟t care 1 8.33% total 12 100% table 5 shows the students‟ feeling when they are listening to their own pronunciation. there are 2 or 16.67% students feel very happy with it; 7 or 58.33% of 12 students state they are happy; 2 or 16.67% students feel unhappy; and only 1 or 8.33% student state don‟t care about his/her pronunciation. the following table tells about the students‟ frequency in listening to english song 1. table 6. students‟ frequency in listening english song 1 no classification frequency percentage 1 always 7 58.33% 2 sometimes 4 33.33% 3 seldom 1 8.33% 4 never total 12 100% indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 51 table 6 shows that from 12 students, there are 7 (58.33%) students who always listen to english song; 4 or 33.33% of 12 students only listen it sometimes; 1 (8.33%) student shows that the intensity of listening to english song is seldom; but none of students who never listen it. it is supported by table 7 which shows the time frequency of students in listening to english song 2 as follows. table 7. students‟ time frequency in listening to english song 2 no classification frequency percentage 1 every day 7 58.33% 2 twice a week 2 16.67% 3 once a week 1 8.33% 4 not at all 2 16.67% total 12 100% in line with table 6, table 7 proves that 7 or 58.33% students listen to english song every day. there are 2 (16.67%) students mention that they usually listen to english song twice a week. 1 or 8.33% student states that he/she listens to english song only once a week; and 2 or 16.67% students claim not at all which indicates that they listen to english song out of the available options or even they do not listen to. to know the time frequency of students in listening to english song in a day, the researchers present the following table. table 8. students‟ time frequency in listening to the english song in a day no classification frequency percentage 1 more than one hour 7 58.33% 2 one hour 1 8.33% 3 half an hour 3 25.00% 4 not at all 1 8.33% total 12 100% based on table 8, we can see that 58.33% or 7 from 12 students can spend more than one hour in a day to listen the english song. it seems that a song has been an additional part of their life accompanying their daily activities. meanwhile, 1 student or 8.33% do it for one hour; 3 of 12 (25.00%) students only spend half an hour to listen; and 1 (8.33%) said not at all. the following table shows how students‟ opinion related to the native singer of english pronunciation in singing the english song. table 9. students‟ opinion about the native singer of english pronunciation no classification frequency percentage 1 excellent 5 41.67% 2 good 6 50.00% 3 average 1 8.33% 4 poor total 12 100% as non-native speaker of english, indonesian students tend to point out the native english singer as their paragon in pronouncing the english words or sentences. we can see in table 9, among 12 students, there are 6 (50.00%) students think that the native singer of english has good pronunciation. the 5 or 41.67% students consider that it is excellent; 8.33% or 1 student state that it is average. none of students thinks the native singer of english have poor pronunciation. table 10 presents the students‟ reaction when they are listening to the native singer of english pronunciation. himatul khoiriyah, ahmad mustamir waris, & juhansar the students‟ achievement in pronouncing english song using smule application 52 table 10. students‟ feeling when native singer of english pronounces english words no classification frequency percentage 1 very happy 5 41.67% 2 happy 6 50.00% 3 unhappy 4 don‟t care 1 8.33% total 12 100% from table 10, we can see that 5 (41.67%) students state very happy, 50.00% or a half of 12 students feel happy, none of students who is unhappy to listen the native singer of english pronunciation, and 1 (8.33%) student states that he/she doesn‟t care about it. table 11 below presents the students‟ reaction in singing the english song. table 11. students‟ interest to sing the english song no classification frequency percentage 1 very interested 3 25.00% 2 interested 8 66.67% 3 less interested 1 8.33% 4 not interested total 12 100% as english education department students, their attraction to sing english song is high enough. it shows that there are 8 of 12 or 66.67% students who state that they feel interested to do it. there are 3 or 25.00% students are very interested; and only 1 or 8.33% student feels less interested. there is none of students who is not interested in it. next, the researchers present the pronunciation frequency of english education department as in the following table. table 12. students‟ frequency in practicing english pronunciation no classification frequency percentage 1 always 2 sometimes 2 16.67% 3 seldom 10 83.33% 4 never total 12 100% data in table 12 contrasts with data in table 11 where most of students are interested in singing english song. as it can be seen in table 12, there are only 2 (16.67%) students who state that they sometimes practice english words, and the others 10 (83.33%) students state seldom practice the english words pronunciation. then, none of students who states always and never. it indicates that students only like to listen to english song as shown in table 6, 7, and 8, rather than to practice the english words pronunciation. the following table presents the students‟ opinion about practicing pronunciation through english song. table 13. students‟ opinion about pronouncing english words through english song no classification frequency percentage 1 strongly agree 4 33.33% 2 agree 7 58.33% 3 disagree 1 8.33% 4 strongly disagree total 12 100% indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 53 table 13 shows that 4 of 12 or 33.33% students strongly agree that english song is a good medium to practice english pronunciation; 7 (58.33%) students mention agree; 1 or 8.33% student claim disagrees; and none of students strongly disagree with that statement. the following table presents the students‟ opinion related to song genre which is easy to sing. table 14. students‟ opinion about the tempo of song that is easy to sing no classification frequency percentage 1 slow 5 41.67% 2 medium 6 50.00% 3 fast 1 8.33% 4 not at all total 12 100% from table 14, it can be seen that there are 50.00% or 6 students consider that medium song tempo is easy to sing. the students who like slow song tempo to sing is 5 or 41.67% students. meanwhile, from 12 students, there is only 1 (8.33%) student who states that fast song is the easiest song tempo to sing than slow and medium. it indicates that all song tempos can be reached to sing by the students because none of students who mentions not at all as their opinion about it. next, table 15 presents students‟ recognition about smule application. table 15. students‟ recognition about smule application no classification frequency percentage 1 yes 10 83.33% 2 no 2 16.67% total 12 100% based on table 15, we can see that 10 out of 12 students state that they know smule application. it indicates that smule application has been familiar for them. there are two or 16.67% of students do not know about it. students‟ frequency in using smule application is shown in table 16. table 16. students frequency in using smule application to sing karaoke no classification frequency percentage 1 always 2 sometimes 2 16.67% 3 seldom 9 75.00% 4 never 1 8.33% total 12 100% table 15 is in contrast with table 16. table 15 shows that most of students know about smule application but if we look at table 16, there are only 2 students or 16.67% who state sometimes, 1 (8.33%) student states never, and most of students are seldom using smule application to sing karaoke. it is proven by the 9 or 75.00% of students who state seldom and no student said always. based on the research, it can be concluded that even though students know smule application, it does not mean that they will use it to sing karaoke or to practice pronouncing the english song. table 17 presents the students‟ experience in using smule application. himatul khoiriyah, ahmad mustamir waris, & juhansar the students‟ achievement in pronouncing english song using smule application 54 table 17. students‟ opinions about smule application as medium to practice pronunciation no classification frequency percentage 1 strongly agree 1 8.33% 2 agree 10 83.33% 3 disagree 1 8.33% 4 strongly disagree total 12 100% based on students‟ experience in using smule application, there are 10 of 12 students who agree with the statement that smule application is a good application to practice english pronunciation. it is proven by the result on table 17 that 10 students or 83.33% agree about it. the others strongly agree and disagree with each percentage is 8.33% or 1 student and no students strongly disagree. the following table presents the students‟ motivation to use smule application. table 18. students‟ motivation to use smule application in practicing pronunciation no classification frequency percentage 1 strongly agree 2 agree 7 58.33% 3 disagree 5 41.67% 4 strongly disagree total 12 100% we can see from table 18, there are about 58.33% or 7 students agree; and 5 (41.67%) students disagree. none of students who strongly agrees and strongly disagrees about smule application as a medium to increase their motivation in pronouncing english words or sentences through english song. to know students‟ reaction about pronouncing english song by using smule application, the researchers present the result of questionnaires‟ item in the following table. table 19. students‟ reaction in pronouncing english song using smule application no classification frequency percentage 1 strongly agree 1 8.33% 2 agree 10 83.33% 3 disagree 1 8.33% 4 strongly disagree total 12 100% table 19 shows that most of students agree that pronouncing english song using smule application is not boring. it is shown by the 10 students or 83.33% who agree about it. the other students mention that they strongly agree and disagree with similar percentage 8.33% or 1 student; and none of students strongly disagree about it. next, the students‟ view about smule application is shown in the following table. table 20. students‟ opinions on duet singing using smule application helps to imitate good pronunciation no classification frequency percentage 1 strongly agree 3 25.00% 2 agree 8 66.67% 3 disagree 1 8.33% 4 strongly disagree total 12 100% indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 1, january 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 55 according to students‟ opinion as in table 20, duet singing with an english native singer helps students to imitate good pronunciation. it is proven by 8 of 12 or 66.67% students who agree with that statement. 3 or 25.00% students strongly agree; 1 (8.33%) student disagrees; and none of students strongly disagree about it. next, the researchers present the data about imitating native singer of english which is shown in the following table. table 21. imitate the native singer of english pronunciation makes students be better in pronouncing english words no classification frequency percentage 1 strongly agree 2 agree 8 66.67% 3 disagree 3 25.00% 4 strongly disagree 1 8.33% total 12 100% as it can be seen in table 21, most of students agree that imitating native singer of english help them to have a good and correct english pronunciation. it is supported by 66.67% or 8 students who agree to the statement. students who disagree with the statement are 3 or 25.00%; and who strongly disagrees about it is 8.33% or 1 student. none of students states strongly agree that imitating native singer of english help his/her english pronunciation be better. the following table presents the students‟ experience in using smule application to sing karaoke. table 22. students‟ experience in using smule application to sing karaoke no classification frequency percentage 1 very interested 1 8.33% 2 interested 7 58.33% 3 less interested 1 8.33% 4 not interested 3 25.00% total 12 100% regarding to students‟ experiences in using smule application shown in table 22, there are 7 of 12 or 41.67% students who interested in using smule application. it happens because smule supports the singing activity with its features. meanwhile, 1 or 8.33% student states very interested and 1 (8.33%) student mentions less interested. even though table 20 shows that most of students do not feel bored when using smule application, it does not work in this case. there are 3 (25.00%) students who are not interested in using smule application. the following table shows students‟ opinion about smule application to pronounce english song. table 23. students‟ opinions about smule application to pronunciation (helpful or not) no classification frequency percentage 1 strongly agree 2 agree 7 58.33% 3 disagree 5 41.67% 4 strongly disagree total 12 100% table 23 shows that most of students agree that smule application helps them in achieving better english pronunciation. it is proven by 7 or 41.67% students who agree; 5 (41.67%) students disagree; and none of students states strongly agree and strongly disagree about it. himatul khoiriyah, ahmad mustamir waris, & juhansar the students‟ achievement in pronouncing english song using smule application 56 based on the questionnaire data analysis, the researchers explore some factors which are influencing the students‟ achievement in pronouncing english song using smule application. there are 3 factors influencing the achievement of fourth semester students of english education department, faculty of education, university of technology yogyakarta, academic year 2017/2018 in pronouncing english song. first, table 12 (item 9) shows that 10 of 12 or 83.33% students mention seldom to pronounce english song using smule application. it indicates that the students‟ frequency in pronouncing english words or sentences is lack. they only like to listen rather than to pronounce it. hence, to have good pronunciation, students need to not only listen to the english song, but also practice it. second, based on the selection of song tempo, learning pronunciation through song for university students should use fast song tempo. yet, table 14 (item 11) shows that 6 or 50.00% students choose medium as the easiest songs tempo to sing. it means that students cannot follow or balance with the determined song tempo. third, most of students on item 17 (table 20) agree that imitating a native singer of english pronunciation helps their english pronunciation be better. yet, table 16 (item 13) proves that 9 or 75.00% students seldom use smule application to sing karaoke. they should use smule application more frequently because only in smule application they can sing and imitate the pronunciation through singing duet with the native singer of english. conclusion based on the data analysis of students‟ mean score and questionnaire that have been presented and discussed, it is found that the mean of segmental features‟ score; vowels (f1) is 3.41 and consonants (f2) is 3.48. both are included into the average category. meanwhile, for the mean of suprasegmental features‟ score is good. it is proven by intonation (f3) is 4.10, word stress (f4) is 4.00, and the rhythm (f5) is 4.00. based on the segmental and suprasegmental features mean score, the overall mean score for students‟ pronunciation is 3.81. thus, it can be concluded that the achievement of fourth semester students of english education department, faculty of education, university of technology yogyakarta, academic year 2017/2018 in pronouncing english song was almost good or equal to 3.81. furthermore, the researchers found 3 (three) factors influencing the achievement of fourth semester students of english education department, faculty of education, university of technology yogyakarta, academic year 2017/2018 in pronouncing english song using smule application. first, students have low frequency in practicing english pronunciation. second, students feel it is difficult to balance singing karaoke and music instruments on fast song tempo. third, students lack of using smule application to sing karaoke. refferences apkmb. sing! karaoke by smule v5.3.3 vip unlocked [new fixes] apk [latest]. retrieved march 2, 2018, from https://apkmb.com/singkaraoke-by-smule-apk/. ary, d., lucy, c. j, chris, s., & asghar, r. 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(2017). the use of songs in the classroom with a focus on grammatical mistakes. unpublished bachelor thesis. department of english language and literature, masaryk university, brno. woo, y. (2016). smule connecting the world through music. san fransisco: apteligen. retrieved april 5, 2018 from https://www.apteligent.com/wpcontent/uploads/2016/03/apteligent-casestudy-smule-0316.pdf. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324720219_the_implementation_of_higher_order_thinking_skills_at_universitas_teknologi_yogyakarta_in_indonesia_opportunities_and_challenges https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324720219_the_implementation_of_higher_order_thinking_skills_at_universitas_teknologi_yogyakarta_in_indonesia_opportunities_and_challenges https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324720219_the_implementation_of_higher_order_thinking_skills_at_universitas_teknologi_yogyakarta_in_indonesia_opportunities_and_challenges https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324720219_the_implementation_of_higher_order_thinking_skills_at_universitas_teknologi_yogyakarta_in_indonesia_opportunities_and_challenges https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324720219_the_implementation_of_higher_order_thinking_skills_at_universitas_teknologi_yogyakarta_in_indonesia_opportunities_and_challenges https://revistas.unal.edu.co/index.php/profile/article/view/10547/36785 https://revistas.unal.edu.co/index.php/profile/article/view/10547/36785 https://www.apteligent.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/apteligent-case-study-smule-0316.pdf https://www.apteligent.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/apteligent-case-study-smule-0316.pdf https://www.apteligent.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/apteligent-case-study-smule-0316.pdf himatul khoiriyah, ahmad mustamir waris, & juhansar the students‟ achievement in pronouncing english song using smule application 58 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 93 using orai application in teaching pronunciation lilis suryani english department, faculty of language education, institut keguruan dan ilmu pendidikan (ikip) siliwangi, indonesia e-mail: lis-suryani@ikipsliwangi.ac.id trisnendri syahrizal english department, faculty of language education, institut keguruan dan ilmu pendidikan (ikip) siliwangi, indonesia e-mail: trisnendri@ikipsiliwangi.ac.id ula nisa el fauziah english department, faculty of language education, institut keguruan dan ilmu pendidikan (ikip) siliwangi, indonesia e-mail: ulanisa@ikipsiliwangi.ac.id apa citation: suryani, l., syahrizal, t., & fauziah, u. n. e. (2019). using orai application in teaching pronunciation. indonesian efl journal, 5(2), 93-102. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v5i2.1835. received: 21-03-2019 accepted: 25-05-2019 published: 01-07-2019 abstract: teaching in 4.0 era cannot be separated with information and communication technology (ict). there are many applications that can be used in learning and teaching process. orai application is chosen to be used as teaching tool in learning pronunciation. the main objective of this research is to discover the pro and cons from students as the main user in using orai application in learning pronunciation. this research implemented qualitative as research method and the participants of the research was 35 students of third semester of english students in ikip siliwangi. the data were collected by observation and interview. the result of the research showed that most of the participants agree that orai brings more benefits in learning pronunciation practice class. their agreement can be classified into four categories: accessibility, comfortability, technicality, and integrated learning. the students were motivated and they could learn effectively. while, some of the students indicated that they did not want to use this application, they just delivered that this application has weaknesses in their process of practicing english pronunciation. their cons on the use of orai are classified into two categories; topic difficulties and technicalities. overall, the implementation of orai has positive effect for students in pronouncing correctly and they have good feedback to trigger them for practicing a lot. on the other hand, pronouncing english well will make a big contribution to their communication skills. keywords: accessibility; comfortability; technicality; integrated learning; information and communication technology (ict); orai application; pronunciation. introduction the rise of the industrial revolution towards various aspects, the challenges faced also increased. as we know that the industrial revolution began with industry 1.0 that together with the invention of paper, changed the way people educate their children from oral to written tradition, whereas industry 2.0 brought with it mass production and mass education. in the meantime industry 3.0, triggered by the invention of internet and ict (information and communication and technology) development led to online and borderless teacher students’ interactions and industry 4.0 enhances the attainment by such synergetic linking technology as cloud computing, internet of things, with further enhanced artificial intelligence, and virtual and augmented realities (hocheng, 2018) as cited in (suherdi, 2018). thus the involvement of many aspects of industry 4.0 is undeniable. mailto:suryani@ikipsliwangi.ac.id lilis suryani, trisnendri syahrizal, & ula nisa el fauziah using orai application in teaching pronunciation 94 information and communication technology (ict) which has developed recently has become an umbrella for all aspects including the education area. teaching era in 4.0 cannot be separated with information and communication technology (ict). ict has to be involved in learning and teaching process in order to encourage selfregulated learning, and strong and positive character (suherdi, 2018). it is confirmed by tinio (2002) as cited in rahamat (2019), any technologies related to ict has been announced as potentially powerful enabling tools for educational change and reform. so, ict can be used as teaching aid for learning and teaching process and it can be trigger for students to learn well. because of the enormous role of ict in education, in the ministry of national education strategic plan 2005 2009 was stated that the strategic role of ict for the first pillar, namely the expansion and equitable access to education, was prioritized as a medium of distance learning. as for the second pillar, improving quality, relevance and competitiveness, the role of ict is prioritized for implementation in education or learning processes. finally, for strengthening governance, accountability and public image, the role of ict is prioritized for integrated management information systems. the students of indonesia are familiar with using the aid of ict in their daily life, for example personal computer and mobile device or gadget. the activities performed by most of mobile device owners are emailing, text messaging, searching information on the internet, logging to social networking as well as watching videos or movies (exact target as cited in lee in & sulaiman, 2019). while the students feel happy about ict in their computer or mobile devices, the teacher can use technology in teaching them in order to make the learning process effectively. ict gives more benefits in teaching and it has already discussed by some experts. the notion of ict was posited by djiwandono (2019), ict has been an attractive source that provides learning resources, fosters communication and collaboration, and spices up teaching learning activities. it is supported by rodliyah (2018), ict can facilitate students’ learning and teaching process. in other word, ict can be one of support systems in teaching in order to make learning process effectively. there are many kinds of ict that can be implemented in learning and teaching process. this research implemented orai application. orai is an application that is developed by danish dhamani and it is one of most famous android mobile application. orai application helps people to encourage their confident, to sharp their skill to talk in front of people (bodana, 2017) as cited in (halimah, helmie, & susilawati, 2018; halimah, lustyantie, & ibrahim, 2018). orai application is easily used, for instance, it has an accurate result analysis. there are three critical factors about analyzes users’ speech. first, it looks for the overuse of filler words; second, there is pacing – how fast you’re talking; third, there is energy which has to do with vocal variation, also the changes in pitch or volume that make speeches sound interesting. then, the app presents users with feedback and tips to improve (macthar, 2017) as cited in (halimah, helmie, & susilawati, 2018). thus, orai application is suitable to use on teaching learning. based on the explanation above, orai can help people in learning, especially speaking and it can encourage students’ motivation. brown (2001) as cited in suryani (2015) defines that speaking as an interactive process of constructing meaning that involves producing, receiving, and processing speech of sounds as main instruments. in other word, teaching speaking involves some steps until students can produce the words. pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary are the important elements in speaking. it means that speaking is not an easy skill and it becomes the most stressful for the students. so, teachers need to seek an appropriate method of teaching to solve the problem indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 95 (maeng, 2008) as cited in (suryani & argawati, 2018). in fact, it can be challenging for the teacher to select teaching media or method. this is line with norahmi (2018) as cited in retnomurti, hendrawaty, and tiwiyanti (2019) who said that teachers are required to be competent, professional, up-to-date, and well informed, and they are able to operate any technology based media due to increasing students’ ability to get information. thus, teachers’ knowledge and skill to access and use the technology are needed to facilitate the learning and teaching process. user friendly can be one of the reasons in choosing orai application in teaching. the students can download from play store on android system or apple store on ios system. so, it will be easier for students to practice it, they do not only practice in the classroom but also at home. there are some of the researches that investigated the implementation of orai application in teaching speaking, but this research focuses on pronunciation. in short, pronunciation is one of important parts in speaking cycle (schmitt, 2002). according to pennington (1994), pronunciation is viewed as a component of linguistics rather than conversational fluency. in addition, harmer (2007) says that pronunciation teaching does not only make students aware of different sounds and sound feature (and what this mean), but it can also improve their speaking immeasurably. pronunciation is one of the subjects that have to be learned by students of english education study program of ikip siliwangi, bandung. there are two kinds of pronunciation subjects, they are pronunciation practice i and pronunciation practice ii. this research focuses on pronunciation practice i and it is compulsory subject for third semester. this research would like to know the students’ perception about orai application in teaching pronunciation practice. in teaching pronunciation should go beyond just teaching the phonemes. it must also consider other areas such as accent and intelligibility and prosodic features of pronunciation (stress, intonation, and rhythm) i.e. the supra-segmental. additionally, teachers need to identify learners’ problematic areas and address the issues accordingly (shah, othman, & senom, 2017). thus, the students are able to pronounce correctly, or be able to pronounce the words like native speakers. intelligible pronunciation is crucial in communicating and to be understood as without “adequate pronunciation skills, a person’s communicative skills maybe severely hampered, and this in turn may give rise to speech that lacks intelligibility, leading to glitches in conversation and to strain on the part of the listener” (rajadurai, 2006) as cited in (shah, othman, & senom, 2017). given the importance of pronunciation skills, one would assume that classroom practices would reflect what is mandated in the curriculum. so, improving the ability to speak english with a good pronunciation is important thing for indonesian students, because the ability to speak english well will make a big contribution to their communication skills. method this research used qualitative descriptive method. according to moleong (2002), qualitative research is aimed at understanding the phenomena of what is experienced by the subject of research such as behavior, perception, motivation, holistic actions qualitatively using words and language in natural special contexts by using various scientific methods. in this research, the students’ perception as the subject of research was investigated to know their experiences in using orai application in learning. this was similar with creswell (2012) who says that qualitative is used to understand a phenomenon by focusing on the total picture rather than breaking it into variable. qualitative research method was interpreted as a research that produces a qualitative data in the form of written or spoken words of the people, and it was to lilis suryani, trisnendri syahrizal, & ula nisa el fauziah using orai application in teaching pronunciation 96 describe the participants of the research more complete and comprehensive (fraenkel & wallen, 1993; moleong, 2002) as cited in (anshori, 2017). in addition, it described people experience in-depth (goodyear, et.al, 2014). this was in line with azwar (1997), in a descriptive method, the researchers analyze and present the fact systematically, and therefore it could be understood and concluded easily. the main objective of this research was to discover the pro and cons from students as the main user in using orai application. this technology based application was mainly used to trigger students in producing proper english sounds and also give wider opportunity for students to practice their pronunciation inside and outside classroom. with this specific objectives, the teacher as facilitator and observer combined a pronunciation practice class with orai application. after the use of it, the researchers found the students’ perception, in order to find whether most of the students were in pro or cons in the use of this application and the reason behind those decisions. the subject of this research was third semester students of private education institute in cimahi majoring english education. they took pronunciation practice class as one of their required subject in the third semester. there were 35 students with same english ability namely intermediateenglish level and all of the participants were also native speaker of indonesian. classroom observation was used to invent a natural situation on using orai application during the process of teaching and learning in pronunciation practice class. it was conducted into five meetings. the result of observation was used to answer the research question of this research. the interview then was conducted to validate the finding during the observation process. during the observation, the research used log book to create more holistic finding. during the interview the research used question that adopted from several resources that related to the students’ perception in using assisted based learning. in short, this research used two simultaneous steps to collect the data. data were analyzed and it was an interpretative process. researchers reflect on their personal viewpoints and how they shape their interpretations of the data (clark & creswell, 2015). all gained data from observation’s log book then transcribed into excel order to manage the students’ perception in more readable result. all the data then synchronized with the result of the interview. all the answer of the participants then also transcribed into excel and matched with the previous result obtained from the observation process. the result of this study cannot be generalized to other social situation (sugiyono, 2013). in other word, the findings of this research could not be referred as the result as general in implementing orai in teaching pronunciation. results and discussion this research was conducted into five meetings. observation was done when learning and teaching process while the lecturer was implementing orai application in teaching pronunciation. here was the detail information of the implementation of orai in teaching. the first meeting was conducted in september 17th, 2018 and the material was producing vocal (mono short and long vowel sound). at the beginning of the class, orai application was introduced by the lecturer as the application that was used in learning. the students were not familiar with this application, so the lecturer needed more time to explain how to use this application. although, orai application was used at the first time, the students were really excited to use it. they were motivated to use it. it could be seen from their enthusiasm to use and discuss it with their friends in the classroom. then, the second meeting was done in september 24th, 2018 and the students used orai for the second time in the classroom. this meeting, the students were familiar how to use it and the material that was explained by the students was producing trip thongs indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 97 sound. the third meeting material was producing consonant sounds and it was conducted in october 1st, 2018. next meeting was conducted in october 8th, 2018 and the material was producing consonant and sound. the last meeting was conducted in october 15th, 2018 and the material was suprasegmental element (intonation, phase, pause, stress, and prominence). after the last meeting, the interview was done and asked nine students about the implementation of orai application, strengths and weakness of this application. the interview of students was recorded and then transcribed. the result of students’ interview was categorized based on pros and cons of the implementation of orai in teaching pronunciation. over the observations, the writers discovered new cycle of learning and practicing students’ pronunciation, this cycle began with recording, and receive, revising, and reproduce (4rs cycle). reproducing process was the ending of the cycle but its return to the first process of the cycle. the end of the process occured when the students could produce most standard english sounds. the cycle of this process can be seen the figure 1. figure 1. learning cycle using orai application the first stage was recording, in this stage students recorded their word, utterance and speech. orai application provided a text to read, a topic to expand, and question to answer. by this, the students do not need to confuse themselves to find a topic to talk about yet the students still need to manage their idea related to the provided materials from orai. students also had more autonomous situation, they could record whenever their ready and also could ask teacher for the standard pronunciation before they record their sounds. the second stage was receiving, in this stage the students listen to their recorded sound and do self-assessment. besides, the recorded sounds, orai also provides a transcript of the students’ talk. it also provided the sore that projected in the percentage of achievements. this percentage indicated how suitable the students talk with the standard talk. the higher the percentage was better student’s speech means. during this process orai also provided visual report projected by graph. this graph helped the students and the teacher to see the progress made by the students. the third stage was revising, orai provided several option in the process of revising. first, if the speech of students was out of the topic or not read the exact similar text, orai would automatically ask students to revise it and reproduce it. second, if the number of the percentage was low, orai would give the options for students to rerecord the sound based on comments that given by orai or leave the score. third, even if the percentage of the students’ talk is high, orai still gave an option to the students whether they wished to reproduce their talk and make a better score or stay with the score. in this revising process teacher also gave comment how to create a better sound. orai did not give the detail information related to the students’ weaknesses, but it gave a general example of standard pronunciation. orai did not give each word miss pronunciation. by these situations, teacher provided more detail correction toward students’ pronunciation errors. the next stage was reproducing. after finished with revising the talk, the students reproduced their talk by re-recording it through orai. students had their own freedom to reproduce their speech to get their lilis suryani, trisnendri syahrizal, & ula nisa el fauziah using orai application in teaching pronunciation 98 whished score and after that collect it to the teacher. this condition initiated better confidence of the students. in the observed class, students were laughing and chatting with their friends about the audio they record after doing revision, this process really helpful to build students confidence and ability to produce a standard sound of english. other result from the observation was the students look very happy during their process of learning. students looked very enjoy recording their own sounds then listening it, they looked enjoy because they had their own freedom to talk without direct assessment given by the teacher that may rise the nerve of the students. moreover, students also had an opportunity to give a peer feedback to their friend, this peer feedback also gave benefit to the students’ comfort, by peer feedback student be more relax and away from personal nerve that come by teacher assessment. from 35 or 86% participants or 30 participants agree that orai really helps them in improving their pronunciation skill then help them to be more confident in doing english speaking with proper sounds. while in the other hand, 5 students or 14% participants think that it was very difficult to do pronunciation practice with orai. figure 2 showed you the pros and cons toward the use of orai in pronunciation practice class. pros on orai figure 2. pro and cons on orai cobuild advanced english dictionary (2018) defines about ‘pros and cons’ of something are its advantages and disadvantages, which you consider carefully so that you can make a sensible decision. from the figure 2 can be seen that most of the participants agree that orai bring more benefits to the teaching and learning process in pronunciation practice class. their agreement could be classified into 4 categories: accessibility, comfortability, technicality, and integrated learning. these categories appeared from the various reasons that found during the observation and interview session. this is in line with chapelle (2003) as cited in rahamat (2019), the technology-based learning activities would offer more advantages and opportunities for natural learning. so, the students’ achievement had already increased and it gave a good impact for the students’ ability in learning. here was the detail explanation about the students’ perception toward the use of orai application in teaching pronunciation based on observation and interview that were analysed based on four categories. accessibility on problems, many students had limited time to practice their pronunciation due to several reasons, such as limited time in one term of learning that mostly spent 100 minutes per session and huge number of students in class. by the use of orai, students had more access to their individual practice related to the speaking specifically on their pronunciation development. during observation session every student had an equal opportunity to practice themselves in producing their speech and practicing their english pronunciation. students with their own mobile device conducted the 4rs cycle as much as they wanted without being afraid of taking turn with their friends which create harder access. as well as in the interview session most of the students believed that by using orai, they should not wait for their time to practice they could practice it at any time they ready to start recording their speech. moreover, by using orai they had more opportunity to get more feedbacks. usually feedbacks only given by the teacher after students did practice in the front of the indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 99 teacher. by the use of orai feedback also could be given by their friend. by using orai, students could share the topic of the talk, the question or the text that they read in orai. this kind of feedback helped to build their confident and braveness to talk in public and to practice their pronunciation, even students could get over it. this result also supported by the interview result, students feel very comfortable with the feedback that given not only from the teacher but also from their friend and orai. additionally, students did not need to be afraid of losing their time to practice their pronunciation, because they could do practice in class room and outside the classroom, this situation gave wider and longer chance for the students to practice their pronunciation. students did not need to practice in classroom they could practice it in their home, garden, and others. they also could practice their pronunciation at any time and keep getting feedback from orai. therefore, they were still able to improve their pronunciation. comfortability based on the observation, students seemed to be more comfortable practicing their pronunciation. formerly, students practiced their pronunciation in front of the class and teacher gives direct correction, this process made students more nervous and gave less comfort to the students. orai did different way. orai was able to reduce students’ nerves in practicing their pronunciation. students became more comfortable to practice their speaking without being afraid or making mistake. as supported by the result of the interview, most of the participants believed that they no longer afraid to talk and practice their speaking and pronunciation. beside, orai also gave individual feedback to the user in this case the students. another case that could be found in the use of orai was that if the students felt shy or uncomfortable with their result they could simply save it for themselves and nobody would notice it so that students felt lees frightening, more comfortable, and more confidence in practicing their pronunciations. moreover, one of the problems that students faced in practicing their speaking and pronunciation was they being shy. some students felt shy because they did not pronounce the word as good as other friends did. this application helped students in solving this problem. they got more confidence to practice their pronunciation because they had individual access without being compared with other students. by this condition, students felt more comfortable in practicing pronunciation using orai. this application is an excellent app to be used as a supporting media for speaking class (halimah, helmie, & susilawati, 2018; halimah, lustyantie, & ibrahim, 2018). it provoked the students to learn actively and happily in the classroom. students got feedback and revised it. so, they could be independent learners and the teacher as the facilitator in learning and teaching process. technicality orai was an application that can be used by anyone who wished to improve they language skill especially their listening and speaking. the sub-element of speaking like pronunciation was one thing that was focused. in the beginning, all of the students were not familiar with this application. therefore, the first thing that the researchers did is introducing orai to all students. students did not feel too hard to access it because orai could be found in the apple store of iphone user, google play for the android user and web for students who wish to use it in pc or laptop. by these three possible ways, most participates agree that orai was very accessible for anyone and it gave an ease in operating it. moreover, orai was a free application. by asking students to download it, we did not give them a burden to spend some amount of money. another benefit of the use of orai based on the interview was that orai did not require high ability level of technology. in other words, orai was very user friendly with easy transition and instruction. based on lilis suryani, trisnendri syahrizal, & ula nisa el fauziah using orai application in teaching pronunciation 100 this explanation that orai gave an ease not only for the students but also for the teacher, both teacher and students could have an easy access to orai and used it during the instructional process. integrated learning as we know that speaking and listening were two skills that highly connected. listening was one of the receptive skills that could help to improve the speaking skill as a productive skill. by listening english sounds, students got various references to pronounce an english words and giving english speech. by using orai, students can also practice their listening. in the second level of orai students would hear two different sounds with different characteristics of sound such as different accent, speed, pauses and others. by listening to this recording, students had a reference to imitate the sound. as the result, students could pronounce the english words properly. besides, these two skills, reading was also a skill that could be improved by using orai. as mentioned earlier, orai provided a text to read by the students, although orai did not provide question to measure the reading comprehension of the students, it still helped the students to practice their reading skill. on the interview, students felt happy because they could practice not only their speaking but also their listening and reading. cons on orai as previously stated, five of thirty-five participants gave their negative perception toward the uses of orai application. they disbarment did not indicate that they did want to use this application, they just delivered that they had problems in implementing orai. their cons on the use of orai were classified into two categories; topic difficulties and technicalities. here is the detail explanation. topic difficulties some students thought that limited topic, limited question, and provided text to be read and gave them less freedom to choose. as result, students felt less comfortable to talk. as example they should read a text that they did not understand what did the text means and it made them feeling hard to read it and of course would make them to record it over and over again which made them uncomfortable. moreover, they also some time found a difficult vocabulary to pronounce, and again it made them have to record their sound more than one time. students also thought that the topic provided in orai also not suitable with the context of the study, sometimes the topic went too wide. on interview, students felt more comfortable to talk and practice their pronunciation with the topic that they chose by them and also answered the question that the teacher gave compared to the question ant given by orai. they argued that the question from the teacher was more contextual. moreover, recording the students’ speaking more than one time on the other hand could downgrade their confident in producing their speaking. it happened because not everybody should do the task several times some often could do it just in one time, and the former situation did not change at all. some students would still good and some other will not. this condition was getting worse by the situation that the students who did it only one times and it gave negative effect toward the learning process. these difficult topics gave a narrow opportunity to the students who actually having average ability in english. since, that the topic was too difficult, they could not pronounce the words as they wish. on the other hand, teacher also could not give a major help to this problem since the idea of the students could not simply added by comment from the teacher. besides a difficult topic, some questions that were provided by orai was also quiet difficult for some students, for example in the level 1 of orai asked about what project that students had been doing what their goal, what have achieved and what had not. the students who felt disagree of the use of orai thought that this kind of question was too hard for them. they felt better to practice their pronunciation by only answering their indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 101 common question because the word that be pronounced would be very applicable to their daily live. during the interview the students said that indeed orai gave a lot of benefit the learning process, but they prefered do all the pronunciation activity with classroom practice that provide by the teacher instead by using orai. they believed that teacher would more aware about the students’ psychology so than when the students got wrong, the teacher would not only give correction but also encouragement for the students. from this interview response we could say that this technology really helped the students yet could replace the existence of the teacher and the major function of the teacher in the classroom. technicality as the opposite opinion, some students discovered some difficulty in accessing orai. as internet based application the speed of the interned become one of the most fundamental elements in using orai. in some cases, students have limited access to the internet would automatically have limited access to the use of orai. other cases that occurred are, after they recorded it the connection went wrong and they have to record it again. moreover, they also thought that outside classroom activity also gave more burdens to the students. they believed that orai could not truly use anywhere due to connectivity problems. others technicality issue that faced by the students was guarding system that have by orai. even though orai did not require payment on the usage, this application regularly asked the students or the user to upgrade the application, this process of upgrading became the obstacle for the students. the case that found during the observation was that 3 students had a different progress with other students because they have to wait their application to be upgraded. orai application did not give an option to postpone the upgrade, if they asked to be upgraded the use should upgrade unless that could not use it. this issue which strengthen by the statement from the interview. since they had lower progress their losing their spirit to continue their learning activity and at the end they could not practice their pronunciation as much as they did. other technicality problems that faced by the students was in the sense of distraction. during the process of learning teacher could not give a maximum control toward the use of students’ mobile devices. this condition that used by some of the students to use their mobile device for different purposes such as playing other games, opening their social media, and others. this condition would clearly affect the affectivity of instructional process. conclusion based on the findings and discussions, there are two kinds of the answer, the first is pros and the second is cons the implementation of orai in learning pronunciation based on the students perception. the result of the research showed that most of the participants agree that orai brings more benefits to the teaching and learning process in pronunciation practice class. from 35 or 86% participants or 30 participants agree that orai really helps them in improving their pronunciation skill and help them to be more confident in doing english speaking with proper sounds. on the other hand, 5 or 14% participants think that it is very difficult to do pronunciation practice with orai. their agreement can be classified into 4 categories, they are accessibility, comfortability, technicality, and integrated learning. while, some of the students did not indicate that they did not want to use this application, they just delivered that this application has weaknesses. their cons on the use of orai are classified into two categories; topic difficulties and technicalities. on the other hand, the teacher should think a lot especially about the topic for the student. the topic has to be suitable with the students’ ability and level. besides, the internet connection can be challenging for the implementation of this application. lilis suryani, trisnendri syahrizal, & ula nisa el fauziah using orai application in teaching pronunciation 102 so, a good connection can help the students learn effectively. references anshori, d. s. 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(2002). an introduction to applied linguistics. london: oxford university press. suherdi, d. (2019). teaching english in the industry 4.0 and disruption era: early lessons from the implementation of smelt i 4.0 de in a senior high lab school class. indonesian journal of applied linguistics, 9, 67-75. doi: 10.17509/ijal.v9i1.16418. suryani, l. (2015). the effectiveness of role play in teaching speaking. eltin journal, journal of english language teaching in indonesia, 3(2). suryani, l., & argawati, o. a. (2019). risk-taking and students’ speaking ability: do they correlate? eltin journal: journal of english language teaching in indonesia, 6(1). indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 45 the teaching of writing recount texts by utilizing padlet asep saepuloh english education study program, universitas suryakancana, indonesia e-mail: asepsaepulah@unsur.ac.id vina aini salsabila english education study program, universitas suryakancana, indonesia e-mail: vnsabila91@gmail.com apa citation: saepuloh, a., & salsabila, v. a. (2020). the teaching of writing recount texts by utilizing padlet. indonesian efl journal, 6(1), 45-54. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v6i1.2637. received: 12-07-2019 accepted: 23-09-2019 published: 01-01-2020 abstract: writing has always been beneficial for those who master it. albeit its virtues, it is subject to investigation due to issues concerning its derisory tasks, its complexity, and its arid learning activities. based upon the issues, this study is aimed at portraying how english teachers teach students writing recount texts by integrating padlet into their classroom. involving one english teacher and a class of 25 students, this study obtained the data through observation of four class meetings. the data were then analyzed qualitatively to depict thoroughly the teaching practice of the teacher as padlet was deployed in the classroom. the analysis resulted in findings vis-à-vis the integration of padlet and the teacher’s ways of integrating padlet, that the integration of technology is categorized into some levels. the findings to some extent conform to previous studies that the integration of technology has been prevalent among english teaching in general. it is therefore suggested that teachers maintain the integration of technology while keep on fostering the accompanying capability of integrating it. keywords: writing; recount texts; padlet; technology integration; digital teaching media. introduction writing constitutes one of the most essential skills for educational success (tillema, 2012), alongside its association with literacy which draws the government’s attention to increase the literacy level in indonesia. it is reported that indonesia’s literacy ranked 60 out of 61 countries (sulistiyono, 2016). this indicates that literacy in this country is in crisis even though writing has been demanded in the era of the industrial revolution 4.0. in this regard, many complain that writing practice and assignments for students in indonesia are inadequate (lowenberg, 2000). this phenomenon denotes the necessity to keep on improving students’ writing skills. notwithstanding its importance, writing is a complex skill to master (tillema, 2012). in addition, based on years of experience from the writer in teaching the writing skills, the learning activities of writing recount texts tend to be uninteresting and monotonous due to lack of students’ interaction. this issue causes students to be less enthusiastic and often results in their poor writing, accordingly. henceforth, this study is intended to depict the teaching of writing recount texts by utilizing a digital tool called padlet. recount text, among other texts embodied in core competency and basic competency, is supposed to be mastered by students. this type of text is defined as a text retelling an event or occurrence in the past in chronological order (anderson, cited in pertiwi, 2013). it functions to give readers or audience information about the event (gerot & wignell, 1995; derewianka & jones, 2013; coogan, cited in siswita & al hafizh, 2014). besides, derewianka and jones (2013) argue that the organization structure of recount texts include orientation that provides background information; record of events which tells chronological steps; and comment which expresses response from the writer. in addition, types of recount texts vary as holandyah (cited in permatasari, 2016) affirms that recount texts can be personal, factual and imaginative. as written language is different from spoken language, strategies to teach and assess writing are also proposed (derewianka & jones, 2013, pp. 132-134). it can begin with assigning students to orally recount what they have just done or observed. the next strategy is to provide a jumbled text to be reassembled. furthermore, a part of a text can be provided to let students create cohesive chains. this activity can be followed up by modelling and identifying asep saepuloh & vina aini salsabila the teaching of writing recount texts by utilizing padlet 46 features written language compared to spoken language. as for assessing strategies, a set of criteria or rubric is required, conforming to the features of the particular genre and the mode being used, the field and the tenor. the integration of technology in the classroom is inevitable as the technology development allows teachers to employ many digital tools that can best facilitate students’ learning. the technology integration is explained by the samr model proposed by puentedura (2006, 2010) cited in ashcroft and imrie (2014). the model classifies four stages in integrating the technology by the teachers, comprising substitution, augmentation, modification, and redefinition. in addition to this, apple classroom of tomorrow’s (hereafter, acot) project generated a framework, which encompasses entry, adoption, adaptation, appropriation, and invention stages, to describe how teachers make effective use of technology aiding the teaching and learning process (acot, 1996). regarding the samr model, substitution is defined as the replacement of traditional ways of learning with the technology which shares something in common (puentedura, 2006; 2010). usually, substitution leads to efficiency of learning compared to the former old-fashioned way. for instance, instead of writing the materials on the board, teachers can make use of technology, such as lcd projector which saves time and energy efficiently. augmentation is characterized by some improvement on the function which cannot be done through traditional media (puentedura, 2006; 2010). this to some extent requires teachers to provide the materials or tasks which are not only available in the classroom, but also accessible regardless of the time and space. writing the materials on the webs or blogs offers a different function where the materials can be accessed wherever or whenever students want to. in addition, modification is concerned with significantly redesigning tasks. according to ashcroft and imrie (2014), it encompasses importing data for creating the study set or task, using the test mode and sharing a set through the website. the last stage in the model is redefinition which deals with a new creation of tasks by utilizing technology (puentedura, 2006; 2010). it, as ashcroft and imrie (2014) assert, focuses on student collaboration where they can study together or share resources. in addition to the samr model, the acot’s framework proposes five stages. in the entry stage teachers concerns that students’ use of technology may be burdensome for them as technology is deemed to be unmanageable by them (rein, 2000). therefore, it denotes teachers that are still having problems with technology and that are coping with how to use the technology (acot, 1996; muir-herzig, 2004; brooks-young, 2007). the adoption stage constitutes a state of willingness to use technology in the classroom (muir-herzig, 2004). the adaptation stage denotes efficiency of learning in terms of the rate and engagement of learning in various contexts (acot, 1996; muirherzig, 2004). at the appropriation stage, not only do teachers use technology in the classroom, but also give prominence to students’ collaboration and project-based learning (acot, 1996; brooks-young, 2007). finally, the invention stage lies as teachers combine a number of technologies to generate numerous functions in the classroom (acot, 1996; brooks-young, 2007). of the five stages of teachers’ technology integration, it is found that teachers’ ability to integrate the technology is limited to adaptation stage (kurniawati, maolida, & anjaniputra, 2018). concerning this, most educators are considered unready to effectively deploy the technology in such stages (rein, 2000). albeit teachers’ disinclination and unreadiness, integrating the technology in the classroom can generate a myriad of advantages for students in the learning process. some of the advantages are stated that these entail enjoyable learning, learning autonomy, learner persistence, and learner engagement (anjaniputra & salsabila, 2018). therefore, the use of padlet is supposed to facilitate not only students’ interest to develop their writing skills, but also to allow for sharing ideas with others. padlet is an ideal place to collect ideas, share ideas, and modify them in the future (jaganathan, 2016). it encourages students’ creativity to create and gather ideas, photos, citations, and others stuffs in one room. it also becomes a virtual note or a plan notebook to gather ideas, photos, and even clip videos. the use of padlet to teach writing skills has been conducted in several studies. among others are studies that focus on students’ engagement in the classroom (fusch, 2014), to assess students’ perception (akmar, rafidah, & huda, 2017), and to find out the effectiveness on students’ writing indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 47 skills (algraini, 2014; haris, yunus, & badusah, 2017; lestari, 2017). however, the process of how teachers teach writing skills to students and how they learn was not discussed in the previous studies. henceforth, this study attempts to investigate how the teacher uses padlet to teach writing recount texts to students. this problem addresses specifically two main issues of how the integration of padlet into the classroom activities in teaching students writing recount texts is and of how the teacher employs padlet seen from the teacher’s digital literacy. method the method deployed in this study was descriptive qualitative research as this study aims to gain in-depth understanding of how padlet is employed to teach writing recount texts. convenience sampling was used in a way that the sample was selected due to its availability and willingness to be the subject of this study, which is a lecturer and a class of 25 students in a private university in west java. the data were collected through observation and field-notes as well as the lesson plans created by the teacher to implement padlet in the classroom. the observation was administered four times since the teacher taught writing recount texts in four meetings. during the observation, activities in the classroom were video-recorded so as to help analyze and interpret the findings in this study. to analyze the data, what happened in the classroom was synchronized with the data from the lesson plans and field-notes. the synchronized data were then displayed in relation to the purposes of this study to find out stages of technology integration in which padlet is employed in the classroom and portray the process of how it is used. after that, the data were reduced to general themes in order to focus on what is sought in this study. by doing data reduction, the data which share common information were categorized into broader themes based upon the samr model (puentedura, 2006; 2010) in which its classification includes substitution, augmentation, modification, and redefinition and in relation to the acot’s framework (1996) consisting of entry, adoption, adaptation, appropriation, and invention level. finally, the data were organized properly to go through data interpretation where the results were interpreted to become findings and the findings were associated to previous theories or studies. by doing so, it is expected that this study results in comprehensive, thorough findings and discussion. results and discussion meeting 1 the lecturer greeted, welcomed, and thanked the students for joining the class. the lecturer also initiated the lesson through the ice breaking activities to get the attention and focus of all students. the lecturer then checked the presence of students, there were several students who were absent that day. the lecturer asked some students in random about their past activities like where they went yesterday, what tourism attractions or interesting places they had already visited before. the students actively responded the questions and they shared their past experiences. further, the lecturer asked the students whether or not they had already made padlet’s account. the lecturer then asked them to create an account of padlet by downloading it from the appstore or opening it in website. later, students were given a link code or barcode to open through the padlet application and the lecturer wrote some questions on the padlet wall that were shared with students, such as what did you do on the weekend? what did you visit on your last holiday? what was your favorite activity in high school? what was the memorable moment that happened when you were a child? and how could indonesia get its independence? afterward, students were asked to comment on each available theme. each student had to respond at least three questions available in the padlet wall and put the name at the bottom of his/her posts. the lecturer discussed some students’ comments and gives appreciation and feedback. the lecturer then informed the students that the material that they would learn was recount text. in the main activities, the lecturer brainstormed the idea about recount text by asking the students about what they knew about recount text. the students were asked to express their opinions on padlet wall which had been provided by clicking the shared link or by scanning the given barcode. regarding samr model (puentedura, 2006; 2010), asking the students to express their ideas or opinion on padlet wall instead of paper was included in substitution, since padlet as a product of technology only replaces the traditional ways, asep saepuloh & vina aini salsabila the teaching of writing recount texts by utilizing padlet 48 meanwhile the functionality is not distinctive and no improvement in terms of functions is made. meanwhile, in relation to the acot’s framework (1996), the above stage was categorized into adoption stage as the teacher was willing to and did not hesitate to use technology in the classroom. in line with the adoption stage, inan and lowther in howard and mozejko (2015) state that teachers who are more confident using technology are more likely to integrate technology in the classroom. thus, being confident is the first thing that the teacher should do to be able to integrate the technology in the classroom. some students responded the activities enthusiastically, they tried to define recount text based on their experiences ranging from definition, generic structure, and language features of recount text. the teacher intended to build students’ framework about recount text, so that they would be able to create it. since recount text is one of text types that is enough complicated, so it is necessary for teacher to build students’ prior knowledge. because writing is not only the activity of producing symbols of language in written form, but also a mean to deliver ideas. when people start writing, they do not only write all their ideas. they need to convey and organize their ideas into a readable text that has some meanings (harris & ansyar, 2014). in line with this, writing recount text is not only a matter of delivering ideas, but also organizing ideas in the correct order or sequence. therefore, students’ writings must follow the rules and must be suitable with the text social function, generic stuctures, and language features. after that, students were asked to read some texts from other various types of recount text on padlet. then, students were asked to determine what types of texts were given. the students answered easily when they were showed a text example of personal recount. however, they could not answer as the teacher displayed other types of recount text, such as biographical, autobiographical, historical, and literary recount text. this phenomenon happened as they were only exposed to one type of recount text when they were in junior or senior high school. thus, when they were given another type of recount text, they got confused since what they found was different with what had been explained by their previous teachers. according to anderson and anderson (1998), even though recount text had been studied since junior high school, sometimes the students had problems in writing it. it is because in writing recount text, the students should be aware in using the schematic structure of recount text including orientation, record of events, and reorientation (anderson & anderson, 1998). besides, the students should apply the linguistic features of recount in their text, including specific participants, circumstance of time and place, first person, additive conjunction, material process, and past tense (gerot & wignell, 1995, p. 194; nafisah & kurniawan, 2007). the teacher then gave a number of questions to students regarding the text they read. for example: what activities are told? when did it happen? what places are told in the text? who made the text? what is the author’s opinion about the activity? the teachers proposed those questions to show the students the way of developing paragraph of orientation, series of events, and reorientation. the questions were seemingly intended to make the students understand the steps for developing each schematic structure of recount text. meliyanti, sutapa and husin (2012) suggest that by giving guided questions with what, who, when and where related with the topic, the students could easily arrange the orientation aspect by using the answers that they have had. the guided questions also can help the students in determining the events that they want to develop. by answering the question, such as what happened next, the students can develop their writing ideas in sequence related to the topic. after that, the teacher concluded that recount text had specific functions and it was different from other types of text. the teacher also explained the schematic structure of the text that had been given and explained it in detail. to measure students’ understanding of recount text, students were instructed to mention the function, schematic structure, and language features of the text. that technique was applied to any other examples of recount text with different themes and types from the first text, and the teacher did that process on and on until the students really understood the material delivered by the teacher. in the closing activity, the teacher reviewed the learning material, appreciated those who answered the questions and reinforced their answers. the teacher also asked several students to explain the recount text material correctly and thoroughly. before going home, the teacher assigned the students to visit the padlet wall that would be used in the next meeting and reminded indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 49 them to download padlet. eventually, the teacher ended the class and reminded the students to relearn the material. meeting 2 in the second meeting, as usual the teacher greeted, called the roll, and reviewed the previous material. the teacher then informed the students that they would learn the generic structure and language features of recount text. the teacher divided the students into four groups and told them that they would learn recount text through game. the teacher tried to apply different technique that day since he found some students who seemed less enthusiastic and unmotivated in the first meeting. this was a classical problem usually encountered by teachers as students still perceived writing as a difficult thing to learn. as the depiction above, ferguson and mickerson (in indariati, 2012) state that writing is one of english skills that should be taught in an integrated way because it is regarded as the most difficult language skill to learn. it is often perceived as the most difficult language skill as it requires a higher level of productive language control than the other skills. as the objective reality found, so the teacher tried to solve the problem through playing a game to make the students enthusiastic and interested in learning writing. as stated by indariati (2012), by applying game techniques, the teacher could encourage the students to participate in the classroom activities. the teacher should also be able to encourage the students to express their ideas into good writing. the teacher gave opportunities to the students to write their ideas without being afraid of making mistake. the game was whisper game about determining the generic structure of recount text. further, the teacher arranged the chairs in four lines facing forward and instructed each group to sit on each line. the teacher explained the rules of whisper game. the teacher gave each group a worksheet consisting of 10 paragraphs and told the students that he would whisper a clue about the explanation of one of the generic structures of recount text to the student sitting in the back and the student had to whisper it to his or her friend in the front lines. then, the student who sat on the first front chair had to fill out the worksheet by writing one of the recount text generic structures (orientation, record of event, or re-orientation) in one paragraph within 30 seconds. the first front student had to move to the back and the other students behind had to move to the front chairs and so on, then the teacher also explained that he would whisper the second, third, fourth clue and so forth. the game would be finished once one of the groups could fill all worksheets. afterwards, the teacher asked the students whether or not they were ready to start the game. the teacher then started the game and put the worksheet in front of the class so that the student who filled the worksheet would not be intervened by his or her group friends. all students were engaged in playing the game and they really enjoyed the game since it was interesting and fun. the students played the game cheerfully and occasionally interspersed with jokes and laughter when they found something funny. the teacher had to wait until all groups finished filling out the worksheet because there was no group that could guess the answers correctly. after all group finished, the teacher and students discussed the answers. the teacher also explained about linguistic features (participant, past simple tense, description of time and place, and sequence of events) from each paragraph in the worksheet so that the students could understand. furthermore, the teacher divided the students into 9 groups. each group was asked to make an orientation, series of events and reorientation. the first three groups had to make an orientation, the second three groups had to make a series of events and the rest had to make a reorientation of at least 100 words. before instructing the students to start writing, the teacher previously provided some examples of how to write orientation, series of events and reorientation by accommodating students’ ideas. the teacher wrote it on padlet so that all students could see the process. then, the students were given 15 minutes to make one of the recount text structures. students had to write it directly on the padlet wall like the example given by the teacher. the teacher also asked all groups to give numbers for each of their posts. subsequently, the teacher instructed each group to analyze the grammatical errors found in the text of other groups. after that, each group corrected the other group’s text in the comments column. the teacher kept reminding all groups to write their group numbers when giving comments. after finishing the section, the teacher and the students directly corrected the text of each group based on suggestions or comments from other groups. this was intended asep saepuloh & vina aini salsabila the teaching of writing recount texts by utilizing padlet 50 to make students know how they should correct to fit the linguistic features of the recount text. based on the samr model (puentedura, 2006; 2010), the above activities concerning the use of padlet, were included into redefinition since it dealt with a new creation of tasks, especially as students were identifying the grammatical errors of the other group’s text on padlet. padlet also facilitates collaborative learning where each student can have access to it as long as he has the link or the barcode of the tasks. therefore, students can work together and cooperate to do the same tasks without having them gather in the same place at the same time. in the meantime, regarding the acot’s framework (1996), those activities were included into appropiation because the teacher not only used padlet as a technological tool in the classroom, but also used it as a medium of students’ collaborative learning where students worked together and interacted each other for accomplishing the same target. according to webb (in laal & ghodsi, 2011), collaborative learning builds more positive heterogeneous relationships and develops higher-order thinking skills. therefore, it is essential for teachers to use digital technology as a collaborative learning media to develop students’ higher-order thinking skills. at last, the teacher reviewed the material that had been learnt, such as asking about the generic structure and language features of recount text. besides, the teacher also appreciated and reinforced students’ answers as well as asked them to post the results of their group’s written corrections. eventually, the teacher ended the class by reminding students to relearn the material. meeting 3 same as the previous meeting, the teacher greeted, checked students’ attendance, reviewed the previous material, gave appreciation, feedback, and reinforcement on students’ answers. the teacher then informed the students that the material they would learn was writing recount text in group from one part of the text made at the previous meeting. the teacher also motivated the students to keep their passion in writing by telling them that writing was not an instant process and it needed stages. as stated by harmer (in utami, 2012), the stages on writing process are planning, drafting, revising, and final drafting. writing process as a classroom activity that incorporates those four basic writing stages is seen as a recursive process (see figure 1). this means that it has a cycle which integrates among stages. it can be seen as a process wheel in which it clearly shows the directions that the writers may take during their process in writing. meanwhile, tooley (2009) stated that writing is a complex subject; there is no “one right way” to teach it. he also added that the teaching of writing is a multifaceted subject that does not come with a manual. as writing was considered as a complex and multifaceted subject, so it certainly involves a number of theories, strategies, and approaches to enhance the quality of writing. due to the complexity of writing, teacher should make students aware that learning writing is not an instant process. writing is not only a matter of grammar and vocabulary. there are many factors that should be considered both in learning and teaching writing. in line with the statement above, perl and wilson (in monaghan, 2007) concluded that, just as there are any number of ways in which to write, there are any number of ways in which to teach writing. the strategies and curriculum a teacher chooses are dependent on who he is, what’s important to him, the background he brings into the classroom, and the students he finds there. in this case, teacher plays an important role in encouraging and motivating the students to keep them excited in writing since this skill can be the key to success. as what tooley (2009) stated, despite the barriers, teaching writing well is a worthwhile endeavor. it is an essential skill for success both in school and workplace. figure 1. the wheel process of writing taken from harmer (2004, p. 4). first of all, the teacher divided the students into 9 groups. the teacher said that each student should sit with his or her group. the teacher then asked the students to open padlet at the last meeting where each group had made one part of recount text. the teacher gave each part of the text that each group had written at the previous indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 51 meeting to the other group. after that, the teacher gave students a recount plan that they had to fill in to develop the recount text. each group wrote their own recount texts. they were expected to be able to complete all informations in accordance with the recount plan. for example, if they got an orientation, so they had to make sure that their orientation complied with the concept of 5w+1h. if not, they should complete it before they continued telling series of events. the series of events should consist of 6 events, so they had to develop 6 events with different conflicts. the teacher approached and guided each group to consult on problems that students experienced while they were writing. after finished, the teacher asked the students to post the results of their writing on padlet which the teacher had prepared. afterwards, the teacher asked each group to give comments on the other groups’ writing through the comment column available on padlet. the comments given should be based on the revision rubric that the teacher gave and each group of students should revise the recount text from each comments or suggestions that the other group gave and immediately edited their own writing on padlet. referring to the samr model (puentedura, 2006; 2010), the activities in the third meeting were categorized into modification and redefinition level. in modification level, it was portrayed when the teacher asked the students to open padlet through the shared links or barcode since padlet as a technological tool used for creating the study set and sharing a set. in redefinition level, it was depicted when the teacher used padlet as a medium for collaborative learning. meanwhile, in line with acot’s framework (1996), the above stage was in adaptation level since it denotes the efficiency of learning in terms of the rate and engagement of learning in various contexts. lastly, the teacher asked the students about what they had learnt, appreciated, reinforced the students’ answers, and asked them to post the results of their group’s written corrections as well. finally, the teacher asked the students to pray after reminding them to relearn the material. meeting 4 the teacher welcomed and thanked the students for joining the class. before starting the class, he reviewed the previous material, gave appreciation and feedback as well as reinforcement on students’ answers. the last, he informed that the material that would be learnt that day was writing recount text individually. the teacher instructed the students to write a recount text. further, the teacher divided the students into six groups complying with the number of the themes of recount text types. each group was asked to choose one of the themes displayed on padlet wall. after getting the themes, the students were given 45 minutes to write a complete recount text individually. students were also asked to write the text they made in the previous padlet wall by logging in first so that their names appeared. besides, he reminded the students that their writing had to be based on the recount plan and consisted of at least 300 words. as depicted above, it was the same as the first meeting, the activities concerning padlet were included in substitution (puentedura, 2006; 2010) since padlet was only used to replace the traditional ways, in this case, padlet was used as an alternative to replace paper, however, as the teacher asked the students to log in through shared links and barcode scanning, like and dislike, give numerical score, etc. they indicate the technology integration process at modification level (puentedura, 2006; 2010) and regarding the acot’s framework (1996), the above stage was in invention stage as the teacher was able to combine a number of technologies to generate numerous functions in the classroom (acot, 1996; brooks-young, 2007). during the students wrote their recount texts, the teacher approached each student to provide suggestion and guidance in writing, such as reminding students to give a title for their writing, asking whether his or her orientation based on the concept of 5w+1h, asking whether the student had decided his or her record of events to be developed, etc. then, the teacher asked the students to give comments on their friends’ writing. however, there were some problems found in running this activity, some of students seemed confused to find errors in their friends’ writings and they left the comment column blank. the teacher then asked some students to know why they did so. they said that they did not know what to write, they could not analyze the errors for they were not good at grammar or sentence structure. they were not consistent in using past tense, even they still confused to differentiate between past and present tense. thus, it is important for teachers asep saepuloh & vina aini salsabila the teaching of writing recount texts by utilizing padlet 52 to emphasize and highlight the use of language features in students’ writings. as suggested by anderson (in nurohmah, 2013), the students should apply the language features of recount in their text, including specific participants, circumstance of time and place, first person, additive conjunction, material process, and past tense (gerot & wignell, 1995, p. 194; nafisah & kurniawan, 2007, p. 71). during writing recount text, the teacher also suggested the students to utilize the features of padlet, such as like and dislike, giving rates, and scores. to check students’ works, the teacher kept walking around the class and occasionally approached some students who found problems and needed some suggestions and guidance in writing. after getting comments from their friends, each student was asked to revise his or her own writing based on the comments and suggestions given. the teacher ensured that all students had revised the results of their writing because the final results of the writing would be assessed. the teacher gave extra time for students to revise their writings at home in case some of them had no sufficient time to revise them in class. again, the teacher reminded the students to revise their writings at home before it was too late. the teacher reminded the students to relearn the material at home before praying to end the class. conclusion the use of padlet as a technological tool greatly depends on the user itself, how far the user can explore and optimize its function and utility, padlet can only reach the substitution level or higher levels. padlet can be a model of how a technology is integrated into classroom. padlet can fulfil the four stages of samr model (puentedura, 2006, 2010), namely substitution, augmentation, modification, and redefinition. in fact, padlet can be used as a media for collaborative learning that allows students anywhere and anytime interact each other in one platform. students know types of recount text, such as personal recount, biographical recount, autobiographical recount, historical recount, and literary recount. they can also differentiate the generic structure of each text. it was different with the first time the teacher brainstormed the students about recount text, they could only mention the generic structure of personal recount. references anderson, m., & anderson, k. 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(2012). improving students' writing skills on recount texts through collaborative writing technique. retrieved from https://eprints.uny.ac.id/38716/1/amrih%20bek ti%20utami_07202244062.pdf. https://eprints.uny.ac.id/38716/1/amrih%20bekti%20utami_07202244062.pdf https://eprints.uny.ac.id/38716/1/amrih%20bekti%20utami_07202244062.pdf asep saepuloh & vina aini salsabila the teaching of writing recount texts by utilizing padlet 54 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 63 issues in translation of balinese cultural terms into english kadek putri yamayanti linguistic program in translation studies, faculty of arts, udayana university, indonesia email: pyamayanti@gmail.com apa citation: yamayanti, k. p. (2020). issues in translation of balinese cultural terms into english. indonesian efl journal, 6(1), 63-72. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v6i1.2639. received: 18-07-2019 accepted: 13-09-2019 published: 01-01-2020 abstract: this descriptive qualitative study investigates translation equivalent of balinese cultural terms into english. it is based on the understanding that cultural terms belong to salient part in dealing with translation due to the cultural gap between source and target languages. therefore, this study is conducted in order to find out the degree of equivalence between balinese cultural terms and their translations into english in the book entitled memahami roh bali ‘desa adat sebagai ikon tri hita karana’ and its translation in discovering the spirit of bali ‘customary village as icon of tri hita karana’. in finding the degree of equivalence, componential analysis especially the binary features was applied in terms of confirming the semantic features. the result showed that all translated cultural terms have no exact synonymy into source language. some semantic features do not occur in target language as a result of lack terms in target language. the translator tends to replace cultural terms in source language into appropriate terms in target language based on his knowledge and experiences even in some cases, it shows the loss and gain information. however, overall, those translated cultural terms still can share some basic semantic features of the source language. keywords: cultural term; semantic features; equivalence. introduction translation is an art of transferring meaning of one language to other languages. it becomes an art since there is a process of creativity and imagination involved while translating. the translator needs to “picture” the meanings of source language and then “paints” those meanings in different “picture” which is acceptable in target language. the process of figuring out the meaning can be stated as the process of making imagination in interpreting the meaning. eventually, it continues to the process of creativity in making form in target language which carries the appropriate meaning as in source language. in depth, as stated by larson (1998, p. 3), “translation consists of transferring the meaning of the source language into the receptor language. only the form changes.” in translating a text, the focus of the translator, certainly is not to the form of source language (sl) and target language (tl), but to the meaning. as the meaning carries out all the gist of the text, in translating the meaning of sl, it should be replaced as equivalent as in the tl. the issue on how to deal with the equivalence in translation is quite salient in translation field. referring to the theory of objectivity claimed by rand (1966), it settles with the translation possibility. it argues that translation becomes possible since there is a concept which conveys the same reality that is named as a referent. moreover, cohen (1985) agrees with conceptual equivalent makes translatability possible. when the conceptual meaning finds its equivalent in the tl, it means the function of translation is fulfilled. however, cohen’s statement arises bias in the referent of abstract object or even real referent which does not exist in other languages, for instance the words which refer to culture. the referent of a word that has no real object in one language can be easily found in the book which contains a lot of cultural terms. the instance can be found in the book entitled memahami roh bali ‘desa adat sebagai ikon tri hita karana’ and its translation in discovering the spirit of bali ‘customary village as icon of tri hita karana’. some cultural terms are found in this book since the book theme is to reveal the cultural of bali. the translator faces difficulty in order to pick up the closest term presenting the meaning of sl into tl. yet, finding out the semantic meaning of sl and tl through componential analysis becomes one of intermediary to figure out the equivalence of the translation and it can solve the difficulty found by translator. componential analysis especially in term of semantic meaning analysis is the “most accurate translation procedure…which highlights mailto:pyamayanti@gmail.com kadek putri yamayanti issues in translation of balinese cultural terms into english 64 the message” (newmark, 1988, p. 114). componential analysis refers to the description of the meaning of words through structured sets of semantic features, which are given as “present (+)”, “absent (-)” or “indifferent with reference to feature (±)”. by applying componential analysis, we can evaluate explicitly the semantic features both sl and tl. the comparing of those semantic features is clearly enough in order to show the similarities and differences carried by sl and tl as well. one-to-one correspondence guides us in order to figure out to what degree of equivalence in sl and tl obtained. there are several studies conducted in this field. hapsari and setyaningsih (2013), for instance, had conducted research on analysing types of cultural words in the english version of twilight novel. another relevant study focused on the translation of cultural terms in english version of laskar pelangi novel. this study investigated the translation quality of those cultural terms as well (kuncara, 2015). yet, this study has slightly different from the present study since the present study showed up the translation equivalence by componential analysis. further, another study tried to analyze the cultural term and procedure of translation in translating cultural terms that found in bali travel news (wirayanti, erfiani & agustia, 2018). the difference of this study and the present study is that the present study focused merely on balinese cultural terms. in addition, saraswati (2014) analyzed translation strategies in translating balinese cultural terms into english. however, she did not concern on the translation equivalence especially in term of semantic aspect. those studies provided the translation of cultural terms. yet, some of them took different scope of data. the present study presented the analysis of translation of balinese cultural terms which emphasized the analysis of translation equivalence. the translation equivalence was conducted by providing semantic features analysis through componential analysis of source and target languages. therefore, it can be stated that the present study focused on classifying balinese cultural terms into some categories and finding out the degree of equivalence of balinese cultural terms and their translations into english through componential analysis. method the descriptive qualitative method was applied in order to conduct full description of the data analyses. the data were gained through intensive reading the sl book “memahami roh bali ‘desa adat sebagai ikon tri hita karana’” and its translation “discovering the spirit of bali ‘customary village as icon of tri hita karana’”. note taking technique was applied in finding the balinese cultural terms in sl and their translations. meanwhile, comparative technique is applied in comparing the data through its semantic features by componential analysis proposed by newark (1988). the analysis was conducted in some steps. first, the selected data, balinese cultural terms, were classified into cultural category proposed by newmark (1988). then, cultural terms in sl and tl were compared descriptively in concert to look for the equivalence of sl and tl through its semantic features in componential analysis. results and discussion the balinese cultural terms found in the book memahami roh bali ‘desa adat sebagai ikon tri hita karana’ and its translation in discovering the spirit of bali ‘customary village as icon of tri hita karana’ belong to some categorization based on newmark’s theory. those balinese cultural terms are (1) ecology, (2) material culture, (3) organization, customs, activities, procedures and concepts, and (4) social culture. the analysed data are presented in the form of phrase and table. ecology the term of balinese culture found related into ecology is bungkak or klungah. as stated in oxford advanced learner’s dictionary that ecology is the relation of plants and living creature to each other and to their environment. this definition is in line with the theory proposed by newmark (1988) which stated that cultural categories especially ecology includes flora, fauna and weather. bungkak or klungah is the name of young coconut in bali. actually, there is a bit difference between bungkak and klungah. in bali, we have different name for each stage of coconut fruit. first, there is bungsil which refers to the very early stage of coconut fruit. then, when the fruit grows a bit, it is called as klungah. the inside shell of klungah can be eaten as part of lawar, balinese traditional food. continuously, klungah grows up into bungkak. bungkak has its own position in balinese hinduism. in this stage, this coconut fruit has many functions related into religious offering. balinese hinduisms believe that the water (juice) of this coconut can purify our mind and soul by drinking it after offered to indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 65 the god or after it is sparkle into our body especially on the head. the next stage is called kuud which refers to late young coconut. it is usually used for making ice in indonesia. last, it is nyuh. this is the common coconut fruit we find in supermarket. it can be stated as the old coconut fruit. sl: … dan abunya dimasukkan ke dalam bungkak atau klungah dan … (p.46) tl: … and their ashes put into young yellowish coconut fruit and… (p.106) as the data shows, the word bungkak or klungah is translated into one term young yellowish coconut fruit. the translator tends to translated it by using phrase. young yellowish coconut fruit may have the appropriate equivalent into sl. as the english has no different name of each stage in coconut fruit, this phrase is enough in order to present the gist of sl into tl. the comparing of semantic features can be seen on the table 1. table 1. bungkak atau klungah and young yellowish coconut fruit semantic features sl tl bungkak atau klungah young yellowish coconut fruit inanimate/thing + + coconut fruit + + yellowish colour +/+ it has balinese hinduism religion function + the table shows that bungkak or klungah has some colours, such as yellowish and greenish. this semantic feature belongs to one miss in tl. in tl, the translator directly declares that the colour of bungkak or klungah is yellowish. meanwhile, in fact, it has another colour, greenish. however, this may occur as the translator has knowledge that the yellowish one is common used in religious activity rather than the greenish. material culture: food, housing and city the terms of material culture refer to the custom materials used in a society. it is according to the newmark’s (1988) categorization on culture which implies material culture as food and beverage, clothes, housing and transportation and the others. in this occasion, the balinese cultural terms found are lawar, sate and pura. the following explanation presents semantic features of those culture terms and their translations. the first data is material culture related to food. that is lawar and its translation chopped meat. sl: dagingnya selanjutnya digunakan untuk membuat makanan sesajen seperti misalnya lawar dan sate. (p.43) tl: the meat is then used to make sesaji foods such as chopped meat and satay. (p.104) the word lawar belongs to cultural terms related to material culture especially food. lawar is one of balinese cultural foods which is served not only for meal but also, for balinese hinduism, it is one of offering to the god. there are many kinds of lawar which depend on the main protein ingredient, such as lawar with chicken called lawar ayam, lawar mixed with pork called pork lawar and lawar mixed with fresh or raw blood called lawar barak as the colour is red. however, sometimes the type of lawar is different from one regency to others, for instance in gianyar regency. in this regency, lawar is made by mixing the shell of young coconut, klungah and long bean as the vegetables with meat and others common (balinese) ingredients. the word lawar is translated into chopped meat in english. the phrase chopped meat cannot be stated as equivalent as the meaning of lawar in sl. chopped meat refers to the meat which is cut into pieces by sharp knife. the semantic features can be shown as follow: table 2. lawar and chopped meat semantic features sl tl lawar chopped meat inanimate/thing + + type of food + + ingredients: meat + + vegetables mainly jackfruit and + kadek putri yamayanti issues in translation of balinese cultural terms into english 66 fresh grated coconut fresh or raw blood + a lot of spices + from the table, it can be seen that tl has represented some basic features of sl. those are as one kind of food made by main ingredient, meat. if it is seen from newmark’s (1988) definition in translation “the basic process of componential analysis is to compare a sl word with a tl which has a similar meaning, but is not an obvious one-to-one equivalent, by demonstrating first their common and then their differing sense components”, the translator has demonstrated prior to the common component of sl into tl. however, there are some features which do not occur in the tl. it can be pointed out that chopped meat has no semantic features of ingredients especially in representing the jackfruit and/or fresh grated coconut as the vegetable mixed with the meat. the existence of fresh or raw blood in lawar as well as made it quite different with chopped meat. lawar is commonly mixed with fresh or raw blood to increase its taste. whereas, chopped meat merely refers to pale meat without any combination of ingredients. therefore, the translation of lawar into chopped meat can be stated not as equivalent as the gist of sl. the translator needs to add more explication of certain chopped meat to conduct clear understating of what lawar is in english. the next cultural term related into material culture especially food is sate. sate which is translated into satay basically has obtained equivalent in translation. it is because the term only has slightly differences between sl and tl. the data is stated below: sl: dagingnya selanjutnya digunakan untuk membuat makanan sesajen seperti misalnya lawar dan sate. (p.43) tl: the meat is then used to make sesaji foods such as chopped meat and satay. (p.104) the translation of a single term sate into a single term satay as well can be justified. the word satay has reference to a meat cooked on stick and served with a sauce made with peanuts based on oxford advanced learner’s dictionary. even the term in sl and tl share the basic semantic feature as a meat cooked on stick, there are some miss features such as on the ingredients. the binary features is shown below: table 3. sate and satay semantic features sl tl sate satay inanimate/thing + + type of food + + ingredients: meat + + grated coconut + palm sugar + peanuts sauce + the way it is served: wrapped around the bamboo + as it can be seen on the table, the main ingredients of sate, besides meat, are grated coconut and palm sugar. balinese usually make their sate by adding palm sugar as the flavouring and grated coconut. in addition, sate in balinese has no peanuts sauce. the prominent difference of sate and satay is the way it served. common satay is served by sticking the meat on skewer. conversely, sate is served by wrapping the chopped meat mixed some ingredients around the bamboo. yet, the translation reaches its equivalent and it can be justified. moreover, the material culture discussed is related into housing and city. the example of the use of the data is as follow: sl: pengecualian dibuat dalam hal lahan (lahan kering atau lahan basah) yang dimiliki oleh pura. (p.18) tl: an exception was made in the case of land (dry and wet land) owned by the temple (p.82) from the data, it can be analysed that the word pura can be categorized into cultural term related into material cultural since it refers to the place or object made by human in specific complex shrines which has their specific function and authority. the word pura which is translated into temple is a common case. it is because indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 67 almost all people know that temple is a place of hinduism to doing worship to god. however, there is certain feature gained in tl, temple. the word temple represents as the building which is not only for hinduism, but also for other religions such as buddhist to pray. although it has additional information in tl which can lead the readers into misunderstanding, the translator have considered it since the context of the text is in bali where mostly balinese hinduism live. this is in line with newmark’s (1988) definition in translation which stated that there is no one-toone equivalent translation but first by demonstrating the common sense of sl and it is followed by differencing sense component. therefore, the translation of pura into temple can reach translation equivalent. table 4. pura and temple semantic features sl tl pura temple inanimate/thing + + a place for praying + + for the balinese hinduism people + +/ it consists of shrine that have their own function + it has deposit to maintain its need + according to the semantic features represented above, there is also one feature which makes the difference between pura and temple. that is the authority of pura. in bali, pura is organized specifically by its society. therefore, in some conditions, pura can have its own deposit to maintain its needs. the deposit is usually in the form of land. the land will be rented and the money is used for supporting every temple’s need, such as renovation, etc. in english culture, there is rarely or no kind of authority had by the temple. organization, customs, activities, procedures and concepts there are many cultural terms related to organization, customs, activities, procedures and concepts found in the data. the first one will be discussed is related to religious thing. the data below belongs to religious cultural terms. tirta panglukatan is translated into holy water for cleansing. the data is represented in sentence below: sl: yang kedua, sugihan bali dirayakan dengan melaksanakan ritual dan memohon tirta panglukatan, … (p.42) tl: second, sugihan bali is celebrated by holding a ritual and asking for holy water for cleansing … (p.103) from the data, it can be analyzed that the word tirta can be categorized into cultural term related with religion based on newmark (1988) because the word tirta is a term which refers to holly water in balinese hinduism. however, in this case, the word tirta occurs with additional phrase, panglukatan. tirta is water which has been given mantra. then, it is believed to give blessing to us. in some cases, tirta has different functions. there are many kinds of tirta in bali. those are tirta prayascita, tirta durmanggala, tirta pengentas, tirta penembak, etc. those tirta have their function and so does tirta panglukatan. tirta panglukatan is holy water which is the combination between water and many kinds of flowers given mantra. as one kinds of holy water, tirta panglukatan has function to purify our mind and soul. it is not like common water which cleaning our body from dust or dirt, but balinese hinduisms believe that it also cleans or purifies our mind after we drink it or after it is sprinkle to our body especially into head. table 5. tirta panglukatan and holy water for cleansing semantic features sl tl tirta panglukatan holy water for cleansing inanimate/thing + + made from water and flower which is given mantra + it has hinduism religion function + used for cleaning mind and soul + tirta panglukatan is translated into holy water for cleansing. the phrase in tl reaches the closet equivalent to sl. as it can be seen on the table, some semantic features depicted in sl are kadek putri yamayanti issues in translation of balinese cultural terms into english 68 not represented in tl. however, even there are miss semantic features in translation which leading to loss information in tl, the meaning can be clearly understood by the readers in tl by considering the context. the cultural information may lose in this translation, but the main essence as the holy water for cleansing still can be obtained. it can be drawn that translator has similar understanding with newmark’s (1988) notion on translation where the basic process of componential analysis is not obviously one-to-one translation. the next data discussed is still in religious term specifically in the activity or event. the data presented is one of the events related into religious cultural of balinese. piodalan is ceremony done in every temple in bali. this ceremony takes every six or twelve months according to the balinese calendar. offering things always come in this ceremony as well such as fruits and some offerings made by coconut leaves arranged with flowers. if it is compared ‘roughly’ to english, piodalan is like anniversary of the temple. it shows the time of the temple inauguration counting in balinese calendar. in this event, there will be a balinese priest who leads the ceremony. sl: penduduk desa secara kolektif atau bersama-sama bertanggung jawab atas penyelenggaraaan semua jenis upacara, seperti piodalan. (p.19) tl: the villagers are collectively responsible for the organization of all kinds of upacara, such as the yearly temple festival. (p.83) in this occasion, the translator translates the word piodalan into noun phrase yearly temple festival. the occurrence of the word yearly conducts perspective to the readers that the event is done once a year, like christmas. in fact, this event is done every six or twelve months according to balinese calendar. balinese calendar has different amount of day in one month. one month in balinese calendar consists of 35 days in common calendar’s day. therefore, the time takes in tl miss in term of the amount of the days. table 6. piodalan and yearly temple festival semantic features sl tl piodalan yearly temple festival event + + done by balinese hinduism people + done with typically balinese hinduism offerings + it consists of hinduism symbolization + done according on the balinese calendar + from the table, it can be seen that there is only one common sense of sl and tl which shares the same semantic feature. yet, in this case, it still can be considered as the translator has determined first common sense of semantic features which is in line with newmark’s (1988) notion. then, there are some cultural concepts found in the data. the first one is related to colour. those colours are brumbun and putih siyungan. the concept of colour can diverge into one language to others. brumbun is concept of colour which refers to the composite of main colours in balinese hinduisms belief. those colours are red, black, yellow and white. the appearance of the data is as follow: sl: ... menggunakan lima ekor ayam dengan warna bulu yang berbeda, yaitu hitam, putih, merah jambu, brumbun, dan putih siyungan. (p.45) tl: … employs five chickens of different colours, namely black, white, crimson, multicolours and whitish black. (p.109) table 7. brumbun and multicolours semantic features sl tl brumbun multicolours abstract concept + + all colours + it has sacred sense/ nuance + the word multicolours becomes the translation of the word brumbun. based on the oxford advanced learner’s dictionary, the word multicolours refers to the consisting of or decorated with many colors, especially bright ones. thus, the english translation seen in the table captures the basic meaning of the composite of many colors, but the kinds of colors (red, indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 69 black, yellow and white) are not associated in tl. it is needed to make clear that the composite of the color in brumbun does not mean the color becomes one. brumbun, in this case the color of chicken’s fur means the chicken has four colors (red, black, yellow and white) in its fur. the other gist carries by brumbun is also the sacred sense. meanwhile, multicolours only represents the difference among the colors, the difference color of brumbun brings the essential of the harmony in word. the next concept of balinese cultural colour is putih siyungan. putih is equal into white in english. yet, when the word putih is added by siyungan, the meaning depicts a slightly different reference. putih siyungan refers to the animal especially chicken whose fur is white, but the feet’s colour is yellowish. the translator tends to translate putih siyungan into whitish black which still carry the basic meaning of the colour white. the translation only partially captures the meaning in sl. it is in line with the definition cited by bell from dictionary of language and linguistics (hartmann & stork, 1972) which stated that “text in different languages can be equivalent in different degrees (fully or partially equivalent) in respect of different levels of presentation (equivalent in respect of context of semantic, of grammar, of lexis, etc.) and at different ranks (word-for-word, phrase-forphrase, sentence-for-sentence).” sl: ... menggunakan lima ekor ayam dengan warna bulu yang berbeda, yaitu hitam, putih, merah jambu, brumbun, dan putih siyungan. (p.45) tl: … employs five chickens of different colours, namely black, white, crimson, multicolours and whitish black. (p.109) table 8. putih siyungan and whitish black semantic features sl tl putih siyungan whitish black abstract concept + + white colour + + it refers to the colour of another’s body part + the second cultural concept is related into the name of day. as a religious society, balinese hinduisms have many specific names of day depending on the specific story lied up with it. in this study, one of those is analysed as follow: sl: biasanya mereka memilih hari yang khusus untuk melakukan meditasi seperti misalnya kajeng kliwon, purnama, tilem atau pada hari sakral nyepi. (p.58) tl: usually they choose a special day for medication such as magic day, full moon, new moon or sacred day of nyepi. (p.116) kajeng kliwon is one of the day in which balinese hinduism will come to temple in order to pray. in this day, balinese hinduisms believe that one of the three main deva, shiva does meditation. this day comes every 15 days based on common calendar. on the other hand, in society, there is another superstition of this day. kajeng kliwon day becomes scared day since it is believed that in this day, people who have spirit (black magic) will ‘send’ their black magic to target. as a result, some parents do not allow their children to go out at dusk because they believe of those surrounded black magic in the environment at that day. in addition, in the past, kajeng kliwon day was believed as a day to neutralize some illnesses, such as goitre and rush caused by black magic. table 9. kajeng kliwon and magic day semantic features sl tl kajeng kliwon magic day abstract concept + + it refers to specific day in religious concept + it comes every 15 days + sacred day + the noun phrase kajeng kliwon is translated into magic day in tl. western culture in the past might familiar with the occurrence of magic term. in sophisticated era, western culture seems unfamiliar with the term magic. they refuses the existence of magic because there is no scientific evidence of magic. magic literally means the secret power of appearing to make impossible things happen by saying special words or doing special things. related into this context, magic kadek putri yamayanti issues in translation of balinese cultural terms into english 70 day may refer to the day when people who have spirit expel their spirit to make others get trouble. by looking at this definition, the translation of kajeng kliwon into magic day has reached the equivalence in term of its sense. however, even there is a word magic in tl, the readers especially western may not have the same ‘sense’ in their culture. it is as a result of the incredulity of magic in western culture. they may not receive or experience the same scared nuance. this case implies there is no obviously one to one equivalent in translating culture (newmark, 1988). next data, the ultimate concepts of cultures are sekala and niskala worlds. those two words belong to the balinese hinduisms belief as the world where we live and ‘others’, unseen creatures live as well. sekala world points to the real world in common where we live, whereas niskala refers to the world where ‘devil’ and other unseen creatures live. sl: binatang seperti misalnya ayam, itik, babi, sapi dan kerbau mempunyai arti khusus, baik di dunia sekala atau di dunia niskala. (p. 49) tl: animals like chickens, ducks, pigs, cows and buffalos have a specific meaning, either in visible world or invisible world. (p.108) table 10. sekala and visible world semantic features sl tl sekala visible world inanimate + + it is where we live in + + in the data, the word sekala is translated into visible world. if it is analysed through the semantic features as stated above, it can be concluded that there is no gap between the sl and tl. it looks similar in meaning of sl and tl, but when the target readers, especially western people, read it, there will be a slightly strange sense in the word visible. the word world is clearly enough to refer to the world where we live in. it seems like an ambiguity in the phrase visible world. hence, it can be said that in this case, the translator tends to denote the different world between the ‘seen’ and ‘unseen’ one. that is by seeing the context of situation in which the comparing is needed in order to convey clear understanding of the text. in concert to compare the componential analysis of the previous data, the data below is presented: sl: binatang seperti misalnya ayam, itik, babi, sapi dan kerbau mempunyai arti khusus, baik di dunia sekala atau di dunia niskala. (p. 49) tl: animals like chickens, ducks, pigs, cows and buffalos have a specific meaning, either in visible world or invisible world. (p.108) table 11. niskala and invisible world semantic features sl tl niskala invisible world inanimate + + it is where ‘unseen creatures’ including manifestation of god and devil live in + +/ as referring to the explanation of previous data (data in table 10), niskala is a concept of world where unseen creatures including the manifestation of god and devil live in. it does not merely refer to the world that cannot be seen by normal eyes, but it refers to world where there is life which is as similar as with humans’ life. in balinese belief, in the niskala world, there are many kinds of unseen creatures (familiarly with ghost in common people). they live in niskala world like having daily life in our world. the word niskala translated into invisible world has same degree of equivalence as in sl. this abstract concept may not or rarely occur in tl. thus, the translation of niskala into invisible world is clearly enough to be understood in tl. this example makes the evidence of statement “there is no exactly one-for-one correspondence from one language to another language.” the last cultural term is related into organization. the word banjar belongs to cultural term related into organization since banjar is one of the assemblies of members in one village. it means that banjar is a part of a village which has its authority to manage its society specifically in term of religious activity. actually, banjar has two references. those are a reference of balinese hinduism assemblies member and a place in indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 71 which the meeting the assemblies member takes place. in this context, the word banjar refers to the assemblies’ member of balinese hinduism. it can be seen as follow: sl: seperti pada hampir semua aspek kehidupan orang bali, desa adat dan juga banjarnya diatur oleh adat… (p.15) tl: as in almost all other spheres of balinese life, the traditional village and also its neighbourhoods are regulated by adat… (p.80) the translation of banjar as neighbourhoods seems slightly different in meaning in tl. as stated on the oxford advanced learner’s dictionary, the word neighbourhood refers to a district or an area of a town where the people live there. however, in this context, the sl requires the main gist of banjar as a group or balinese hinduism assemblies’ member. table 12. banjar and neighbourhoods semantic features sl tl banjar neighbourhoods inanimate/thing + +/ abstract object + +/ organization/ group of people + it has rules in managing the life of community + social culture the term of social culture occurs as a part of the occupation or job in the data in accordance with newmark’s (1988) categorization on the culture. the sl is balian which is translated into shaman. the data is as follows: sl: pada zaman dahulu, aktivitas tersebut dilakukan oleh sulinggih/pedanda, pemangku, balian dan mereka yang diinspirasi oleh literature. (p.57) tl: in ancient times, this activity was indulged in by high priest, village priest, shaman and those who were inspired by literature. (p.116) balian depicts the meaning of a person who can cure the patients with magic illness in their body. balinese hinduisms are known as its belief to the spirit that cannot be seen. one spirit believed is a spirit to make others in dangerous condition especially in health aspect. in order to heal the illness caused by this invisible spirit, the occurrence of balian becomes the solution. the ability had by balian can be got by studying some ancient balinese manuscripts. however, in some cases, this ability is given to selected people. those who are believed by god are given this ability without any learning process. it usually happens in one generation to the next. in this condition, she/he must use her/ his ability to help others. if she/he refuses to do this, she/he will get some troubles, such as getting sick without any medical reasons or passed away suddenly. moreover, balinese hinduism priest sometimes can be a balian. table 13. balian and shaman semantic features sl tl balian shaman type of work + + she/ he has the ability to cure illness through invisible magic spirit + + only done by selected people +/+ she/ he is a part of hinduism priest +/ by looking at the translation of balian above, shaman has partially conveyed the meaning of balian. shaman is a person in some religions and societies who is believed to be able to contact good and evil spirits and cure people of illnesses based on oxford advanced learner’s dictionary. the gap of balian and shaman merely is seen on the semantic feature as a part of priest or not. in western culture, shaman has no any relation as a priest of one religion. despite missing one semantic feature, the backbone of a person who cure illness people from magic condition has been fulfilled. conclusion in accordance with the aforementioned discussion, it can be concluded that there are some of balinese cultural terms found which belong to ecology; material culture; organization, customs, activities, procedures and concepts; and social culture. in discussing the degree of translation equivalent of balinese cultural terms into english, the applying of kadek putri yamayanti issues in translation of balinese cultural terms into english 72 componential analysis has been showed some semantic features which leads to the information of loss and gain features available in target language. the attempt of translating culture terms may face difficulty to the translator. however, in this occasion, the translator has gained the appropriate term into tl in which it can be stated that the degree of equivalence match in some level depending on the cultural terms. this study may inspire translator to add more explication when facing the cultural terms in translation as result clear notion of sl can be provided. in addition, further research needs to be attempted in concert to enrich the explanation on the translation of balinese culture. references cohen, m. f. (1985). reality, language, translation: what makes translation possible. paper presented in the american translators association conference, miami. hapsari, n. d., & setyaningsih, r. w. (2013). cultural words and the translation in twilight. anglicist, 2(2), 75-81. retrieved from http://journal.unair.ac.id/download-fullpapersanglicistd056474059full.pdf. hartmann, r., & stork, f. (1972). dictionary of language and linguistics. amsterdam: applied science. kuncara, s. (2015). cultural terms translation in hirata’s laskar pelangi and the impact on the translation quality. journal of culture, arts, literature, and linguistics (calls), 1(1), 1-17. doi: 10.30872/calls.v1i1.705. larson, m. l. (1998). meaning-based translation: a guide to cross-language equivalence (2nd ed.). new york-oxford: university press of america. newmark, p. (1988). a textbook of translation. new york: prentice hall. rand, a. (1966). introduction to objectivist epistemology. the objectivist inc. saraswati, r. (2014). the translation strategies in translating balinese cultural words into english. journal of english language and culture, 4(2), 110-119. retrieved from https://journal.ubm.ac.id/index.php/englishlanguage-culture/article/view/323. wirayanti, n. k. r., erfiani, n. m. d., & agustia, k. t. s. (2018). the procedure of translation in translating cultural term on bali travel news. jurnal litera bahasa dan sastra, 2(2), 1-12. retrieved from https://jurnal.undhirabali.ac.id/index.php/lentera/ article/view/591. http://journal.unair.ac.id/download-fullpapers-anglicistd056474059full.pdf http://journal.unair.ac.id/download-fullpapers-anglicistd056474059full.pdf https://journal.ubm.ac.id/index.php/english-language-culture/article/view/323 https://journal.ubm.ac.id/index.php/english-language-culture/article/view/323 https://jurnal.undhirabali.ac.id/index.php/lentera/article/view/591 https://jurnal.undhirabali.ac.id/index.php/lentera/article/view/591 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 73 picture word inductive model for better descriptive text writing mira ermita department of language education, universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail: miraermita_lt15s3@mahasiswa.unj.ac.id emzir department of language education, universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail: emzir.unj@unj.ac.id ninuk lustyantie department of language education, universitas negeri jakarta, indonesia e-mail: ninuk.lustyantie@unj.ac.id apa citation: ermita, m., emzir, e., & lustyantie, n. (2019). picture word inductive model for better descriptive text writing. indonesian efl journal, 5(2), 73-84. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v5i2.1736. received: 19-03-2019 accepted: 12-05-2019 published: 01-07-2019 abstract: this study is done to find out the effect of using the picture word inductive model for teachinglearning descriptive text with second-semester students in the english education study program at the university of jambi in indonesia to improve the students’ writing skills. this study used an action research method. three cycles were done in this study. data were gathered from observations and tests. in the preliminary study, the mean score of the student’s speaking was 50. the percentage of students who passed the minimum criterion of 70 was 6% with only 1 out of 17 students passing the minimum score. the mean score from cycle 1 was 72 and only 11 students or 65% passed the minimum score. the mean score from cycle 2 was 67 and 41%, i.e. only 7 students passed the minimum score. meanwhile, from cycle 3, the mean score was 80 and all of the students (100%) passed the minimum score. hence, the results showed that the use of picture word inductive model was a success. the students enjoyed their lessons more and were more motivated, interested and confident during the teaching-learning sessions. keywords: action research; descriptive text; picture word inductive model; writing skill. introduction in this global area, learning and mastering english as one of the global communication tools is extremely important in order to build a good relationship globally (fadhly, hasanah, & agustiana, 2017; rohmat & sadikin, 2019; syarifah & emiliasari, 2019). as a means of communication, english can be done in written and spoken form (budiharto, 2019). chanyoo (2018) argues that writing skills is one way of communicating that cannot be separated from human life. writing usually reinforces learning, thinking, and reflecting language as a mode of communication. having automatic writing skills will have the potential to write. writing is a form of communication that allows students to put their feelings and ideas on paper, to organize their knowledge and beliefs into convincing arguments, and to convey meaning through well-constructed text. in its most advanced form, written expression can be as vivid as a work of art. writing is considered as one of the important components of applied linguistics (abbas & tawfeeq, 2018) and one of four important language skills and must be studied by efl students (ratminingsih, marhaeni, & vigayanti, 2018). writing activities are an integral part of the entire learning process (nurdianingsih, 2018). writing can be the main criterion towards a better academic position and greater educational success (kamariah, husain, atmowardoyo, & salija, 2018). writing is important parts of everyday life, and it is mailto:miraermita_lt15s3@mahasiswa.unj.ac.id mailto:emzir.unj@unj.ac.id mailto:ninuk.lustyantie@unj.ac.id mira ermita, emzir, & ninuk lustyantie picture word inductive model for better descriptive text writing 74 involved in many situations where a series of symbols convey meaning with multiple purposes. niño and páez (2018) stated that writing is a process related to how learners develop their language skills because it is possible to make the progress of language learning truly proven when writing production increases. meanwhile, urrutia and gutierrez (2011) argued that writing is more than the production of graphic symbols but must consider formal aspects, so that it is coherent. writing is important for sharing ideas and feelings, and convincing others. writing is a complex activity both from the point of view of teaching and learning. writing does not merely compile or compose words, phrases and sentences but writing must follow certain language rules in order to produce writings that are understood and accepted by the community (jam & shahin, 2012). spelling, vocabulary, grammar, and organization come together and grow together to help the student demonstrate more advanced writing skills each year (soviyah & etikaningsih, 2018). the written form can be done using written text such as sending message, email, or text. aljatila (2015) states that what is meant in writing skills is the skill of using spelling, punctuation, word formation, use of sentences, selection of sentences, selection of effective sentences, expressing thoughts carefully, precisely, logically, and consistently. an effective writing is the writing had been well and carefully compiled, so that the reader could understand the message, news, and message conveyed in the article. achieving effectiveness in the writing, a writer must pay close attention to language problems, spelling, and choice of words. there are many kinds of genre text. one of them is descriptive text. descriptive text is one of the basic functions of each language system and one of the first skills that arise and can be controlled by language users. this is also one of the most widely used genres in all fields of learning. descriptions allow the categorization or classification of almost unlimited experiences, observations, and interactions into a system and allow us to find out whether objectively or subjectively, depending on the learning area or the intent of the author. descriptions are also used widely in many types of texts, namely: (1) information reports, (2) literary descriptions, (3) descriptive recounts, and (4) classifying and/or describes a process (knapp and watkins, 2005) descriptive writing is a type of writing with the aim of providing information. the context of this type of writing is a description of certain things, such as animals, people, or other people, such as our pets or someone we know well. the social function of descriptive writing is to describe certain people, places, or things. according to finoza (2013) the description is collected from description english which of course relates to the verb to describe (describing with language). description essays are essays that purpose is to provide details or details about objects so that they can influence emotions and create the reader's imagination like seeing, hearing, or feeling directly what the writer is saying (aji, 2013). dadi (2015) states descriptive writing is a type of writing that describes or shows something rather than telling it. descriptive writing can describe people, feelings, sounds, places, processes, qualities, or procedures in detail. writing this text needs knowledge and skill. the students need to understand the generic structure, linguistic features, and social function of descriptive text to write it. according to miy (2012) good descriptive paragraphs have the following characteristics: (1) provide clear information about the place, object, or person that is described; (2) provide detailed explanations in the body of the paragraph; (3) complete the paragraph with recommendations or comments about the object described (table 1); (4) using the present tense or past tense; and (5) the use of clear words and adjectives. aljatila (2015) states generally the characteristics of descriptive writing according to experts are (1) describing or describing objects; (2) containing details of indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 75 objects; (3) making readers or listeners feel themselves or experiencing themselves; and (4) results absorption of the five senses. knapp and watkins (2005) also explained that in a descriptive writing, paragraphs must have grammar features of describing such as: (1) using present tense when describing things about technical or point of view; (2) although the present tense can be used in literal descriptions, past tense can also be used; (3) relational verbs are used when classifying and describing the appearance, quality and part or function of a thing; (4) action verbs are used when describing behavior or being used; (5) mental verbs are used when describing feelings; (6) adjectives can be used as part of a noun; (7) adverbs are used to add information to verbs to add detailed descriptions; (8) adverb groups are used in descriptions to add information about ways, places or times; and (9) sentences and paragraphs are thematically related to the topic of the description. table 1. schematic structure of descriptive text (miy, 2012) schematic structure function introducing first paragraph contains the name of the place and location and the reasons for choosing the theme. body the second paragraph we usually write about is what the theme or idea is like. the third paragraph describes the theme in detail and includes things that can be seen, felt, heard, smell. in the main body there are complementary sentences that function as supporting sentences. sources in conveying information to readers are also needed, because with the source of the reader more confident in the information submitted. conclusion the conclusion is a summary of the important things discussed in the body of text. however, the students of second semester of english education study program of university of jambi faced some problems in writing. they looked bored in writing the text. they were not interested and motivated in the writing activities. they also lack of vocabulary. moreover, they have confusion in the use of grammar. furthermore, they were unable to write sentences and paragraphs in english. picture word inductive model (pwim) was chosen as a model to solve the problem. it helps students to improve writing skills because it can increase vocabulary acquisition (mcdonald, 2010; swartzendruber, 2007). pwim helps ells practice spelling, phonics and grammar (shaman, 2014). pwim improved students english vocabulary and students able to compose meaningful english paragraph. as well as students motivation toward learning english (feng, 2011). pwim is used by english teachers to get better scores and as an alternative technique for teaching writing skills (suraya, 2017). pwim can improve students’ descriptive text writing (muttaqin, 2015; nurani & rosyada, 2017). pwim has a significant effect on students' descriptive text writing skills (sepyanda, 2013). the previous research applied pwim in specific elements of writing such as mechanism or just limited on grammatical feature. yet, in this research pwim was applied on the three elements of writing; text structure, language features, and diction. overall, there are some advantages to using pwim. yuniyarsih and saun (2014) mentioned five benefit of using pwim in writing class; (1) pwim provides concrete visuals to learn new words, phrases, and sentences. this model also provides interesting visuals to make it easier for students to learn new words, expressions, and also make sentences. because students use images that relate to topics or materials and label together images, they will feel that they are part of the class community and the confidence to participate in class activities. students as part of the community can have confidence and will be happy to participate in mira ermita, emzir, & ninuk lustyantie picture word inductive model for better descriptive text writing 76 the class. (2) pwim teaches students how to ask the structure of words and sentences based on labeled images. so, students can classify words into various groups of words. (3) students are helped to see the pattern and relationship of english, which allows them to apply this learning to find new words. using pwim can help students make sentences using new words in the picture and also try to create an understanding of the connection of reading or writing. (4) using pwim students can benefit from teacher modeling of keywords and concepts. with practice, they can learn to make sentences and paragraphs related to the subject. (5) pwim can help the teacher to provide curricular and instructional balance better by focusing the lesson to arrange and understand the subject. pwim has 10 main activities in the learning process of writing paragraphs, namely: (1) select an image, for the selection of images, it must be noted that the selected image is a familiar picture with students. (2) identify parts of the image. in this stage, the students tried to identify some words related with the pictures given by the teacher. (3) label (word) the part of the image that has been identified. (4) reading and reviewing. (5) students read the word. (6) read and review again. (7) add words. (8) give the picture title. (9) make sentences and paragraphs. (10) read and review sentences or paragraphs (joyce, weil, & calhoun, 2009). therefore, this study was conducted to discover the students’ writing improvement especially in descriptive text through the implementation of pwim. method this research was an action research which was emphasized in improving students’ writing skill. it was a descriptive qualitative research. the nature of this action research was collaborative which involved the english teacher as the collaborator and the researcher herself. based on these considerations, in this study, the researcher used collaborative action research in which she co-operated with one of the english lecturers from the english education study program at the university of jambi. the lecturer acted as the researcher and also as an observer on the implementation of pwim in writing class while the collaborator acted as an independent observer who observed both the researcher and the participants. the lecturer was an active participant who not only functioned as an observer but also participated in taking actions by making the lesson plans and by giving assessments. then, she collected and analyzed the data together with the collaborator. researcher used a design developed by riel in mertler (2009) implemented in three cycles each of which involved four steps in this modeling method of research namely: consisted of four main strategy, study and planning are needed. problems were determined based on the empirical experience found every day. after the problem was identified, then appropriate actions are planned to overcome the problem and be able to be carried out by the researcher. action support devices (media and semester learning plans) are prepared at the planning stage. the next stage was implementing the action, then collecting data / information and analyzing. the evaluation results were then analyzed, evaluated and responded to. activities are carried out until problems can be overcome. the subjects of the research were 17 students second semester of english education study program at university of jambi, indonesia. it was chosen because the students in the class had problem in writing skill. based on the interview conducted with the writing lecturer it was found that there were five problems encountered by the students of english education study program at university of jambi. the researcher interviewed the head of the english education study program at university of jambi related with writing ability; namely (1) the previous school had not provided learning of english writing specifically which referred to the improvement of english writing skills; (2) the lack of student vocabulary knowledge, so students still have difficulty in determining the appropriate indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 77 vocabulary; (3) students experience difficulties in using grammar when given the task of making a sentence and forming a paragraph; (4) students have not been able to write sentences and paragraphs in english comprehensively; and (5) students are still very dependent on the internet in completing assignments given by lecturers. pre-test and post-test were used as the instruments to collect the quantitative data. after the data were collected, the researcher assessed the result of the tests using the scoring rubric adopted from weigle (2002), anderson and anderson (1997), derewianka (2000), emilia (2010), and knapp and watkins (2005) provided in table 2. table 2. the scoring rubric for descriptive writing text the text structure score a. general opening statement is in the first paragraph. this statement tells the reader what the text contains, including a brief description of the subject, and includes the definition of the subject. b. each paragraph starts with a topic sentence. the topic sentence at the beginning of each paragraph provides information contained in the paragraph. the sentence after this preview provides further details. each paragraph must provide information about the subject. these paragraphs build a description of the subject. this paragraph can include technical language related to the subject. c. the closing paragraph signifies the end of the text and this paragraph can summarize in its entirety. 4 a. this statement tells the reader what the text contains, including a brief description of the subject, and includes the definition of the subject. b. each paragraph must provide information about the subject. these paragraphs build a description of the subject. this paragraph can include technical language related to the subject. c. a very concise conclusion in a paragraph. 3 a. includes a brief description of the subject, and includes the definition of the subject. b. these paragraphs build a description of the subject. this paragraph can include technical language related to the subject. c. a simple closing paragraph. 2 a. covers the definition of the subject. b. only includes technical language related to the subject. c. a simple closing sentence. 1 language feature a. posts in the present tense or past tense. b. using action verbs, process verbs, adjectives, factual and appropriate languages. c. language to define, classify, compare and construct, formal and objective writing styles. 4 a. posts in the present tense or past tense. b. using action verbs and adjectives, factual and precise languages, c. language to define, classify, compare and construct, formal and objective writing styles. 3 a. posts in the present tense or past tense. b. use verb actions and adjectives. c. language defines and compares formal and objective writing styles. 2 a. posts in the present tense or past tense. b. not using action verbs and adjectives. c. language does not define and compare. 1 diction a. choose the right and harmonious words to express ideas in paragraphs. b. providing targets for effective communication to readers. 4 a. the word chosen is quite aligned to express ideas in paragraphs. b. enough words can provide the target of effective communication to the reader. 3 a. choose words that are less precise and do not express ideas in paragraphs. b. cannot provide effective communication targets to readers. 2 a. the chosen word is incorrect and not aligned to express ideas in paragraphs. b. diction cannot provide the target of effective communication to the reader. 1 mira ermita, emzir, & ninuk lustyantie picture word inductive model for better descriptive text writing 78 to find the students’ score the following formula was used: score = number of students′score maximal score x 100 thus, the results shown in table 3. meanwhile, to find out the students’ score based on the category, the range score presented in table 4 is used. table 3. the convert score students’ point maximum score score 1 12 8 2 12 17 3 12 25 4 12 33 5 12 42 6 12 50 7 12 58 8 12 67 9 12 75 10 12 83 11 12 92 12 12 100 table 4. score category category of final score category 85 – 100 vey good 70 – 84 good 60 – 69 fair 50 – 59 poor 0 – 49 extremely poor results and discussion result from observation in doing this research, the researcher acted as a teacher and delivered the teaching and learning process. the english teacher acted as the collaborator and observed the teaching and learning process. there were two cycles in this research. each cycle consisted of three meetings. at the end of each cycle, the researcher did the reflection. each cycle consisted of three meetings. before implementing the actions, the researcher conducted a pre-test to measure the students’ writing ability. the problems encountered by the students in writing were the structure of the text, grammar/language use and diction. some steps were also conducted to determine the problem. the result of the research showed that there were some students’ improvements in writing descriptive texts using pictures. the students could use the appropriate vocabulary in their writing. they could write a text with more detailed information based on the picture and used correct capitalization, spelling, and punctuations; they produced longer paragraph with sufficient supporting details. the students could get the ideas and inspirations to write a descriptive text after they had seen the picture and knew the steps. several things related to the implementation of the pwim were found from the observation notes. there are always strengths and weaknesses. each of them was discussed comprehensively by the researcher with her collaborator so that it could become input for future improvements. so that in the end, all the short comings were overcome. as an example, at the beginning of the actions the teacher still had difficulties with several things such as time management and class control but then soon after that she corrected her mistakes so that they did not happen again in the next phase. from the students’ side, at first they looked confused, puzzled and afraid when they were asked to write. they still had difficulties in expressing their ideas, their opinions and their thoughts, and they still found it hard to combine the new vocabularies into a sentence and they were indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 79 also less motivated to follow the teachinglearning processes. those problems were discussed and analyzed until the pwim became the solution to those problems so they could be resolved. therefore, the researcher can say that the pwim gave a positive impact for the teaching learning processes in her speaking class. there were ten stages did by the students throughout the three cycles. firstly, they had to observe the pictures chosen by the teacher. the students were really enthusiastic in describing pictures. pictures did not only bring images of reality, but also has function as a fun element in the class. through the pictures students can see and imagine what things are inside. moreover, through pictures would ease them to recall vocabulary to compose a paragraph. secondly, the students identify the pictures such as the objects, the events, the situation, as well as the actions happen in the picture. third, students were asked to label the picture. in this activity, the students named the pictures and uttered the word loudly. this was done in order to drill the student on vocabulary mastery and got feedback from the other students. fourth, the student had to read and review the words they had written in stage four. the sixth, students repeated the activity in stage five. in this stage, the students uttered some words being written and reviewed their words related to the picture. with their friends in their group they corrected their mistakes with guidance from their teacher. finally, they had to re-record what they said after it had been corrected and ensure that their corrected speech was written in their notebooks for future learning and review outside of class. through these activities the teacher-centered class time was reduced and the studentcentered class time was increased. seventh stage was the time for students to add some information about the picture. in this stage, through the guidance of the teacher, the students add some words to expand the information about the picture. the teacher also guided the students to write the tittle of their writings. the next stage was students constructed the words they have been listed into a sentence and a paragraph. finally, the teacher read and reviewed the students’ writing. when the observations of the learning processes were being done during the first cycle, the students were really busy with their activities. most of the students were motivated to participate more in the teachinglearning processes for writing descriptive text since the pwim reduce their boredom during the teaching-learning processes. they became more motivated at constructing the paragraph in english and were more active in the teaching-learning processes because the pwim gave them more guidance in a clear stage to practice writing during the class activities. they felt more comfortable to compose a paragraph in front of their lecturer as well as in front of their classmates. they were more interested in learning writing for they could compose paragraph and comprehend the material given by the teacher. they could assess their own work through the reading and reviewing activities and then they could improve their writing ability as they corrected their problems. using the pwim had enabled them to develop social skills in the teaching-learning processes, which gave them self-esteem to show their ability in using english. it also helped them to solve their problems in learning writing descriptive text because they could share with their friends as one of a pair or a group and hence they got feedback from their friends. result from test in each cycle the students’ tests were scored by using the scoring rubric listed in table 2. the maximum score for each aspect was 4 and the minimum score was 1. at the end of each cycle, the researcher did the reflections. the result of the research showed that there were some students’ improvements in writing descriptive texts using pwim. based on the results from their writings, it was found that the writing skills of the students improved further within each cycle. the scores from each student in all four tests are set out in figure 1. mira ermita, emzir, & ninuk lustyantie picture word inductive model for better descriptive text writing 80 figure 1. students’ score from all four writing tests to compare the test results between the pretest and between each test, the mean scores from each test, the percentage of the class achieving the passing score, and the improvement in the mean score from one test to the next were calculated and are set out in table 5. table 5. students’ score viewed from average, category, and passing grade test average score category passing score pre-cycle 59 poor 6% cycle 1 72 good 65% cycle 2 67 fair 41% cycle 3 80 excellent 100% based on the result of the tests in each cycle sets in table 5, it can be narrated that the results of the test were fluctuate. in the pre-cycle the students writing ability was low. the average score was only 59 and it belongs to “poor” category. moreover, the passing grade was only 6%. in cycle 1 the average score was 72. it means that the score was in the “good” category. nevertheless, the passing score had not been reached. it just reached 65%. in cycle 2, the result of the test was even getting worse. the average score was under the 70 or only 67. this score was categorized into “fair”, and the passing grade also decreased became 41%. yet, the students’ score was increased in cycle 3. the average score was 80. it was in “excellent” category. the passing score was 100%. it was meant that all the students passed the passing grade. figure 2 shows the improvements in the mean scores of students in each test. besides, the students’ average score in the three aspects of writing also increased. it was set in figure 3. figure 2. students' mean scores of each cycle pre-cycle cycle 1 cycle 2 cycle 3 59 72 67 80 avf dt u gn ca yl aj ff sa al ar rrl psa cas mf nb sp wl d pre-cycle 50 67 50 67 50 67 58 75 42 58 67 58 58 67 58 67 50 cycle 1 67 75 67 75 67 75 75 83 58 67 75 75 75 75 75 75 67 cycle 2 58 67 58 75 67 67 75 75 50 75 75 67 75 75 67 67 50 cycle 3 83 83 75 83 75 83 75 92 75 75 83 75 83 83 83 75 83 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 81 figure 3. students' mean scores of each aspect of writing the mean score of structure improved from 2 in pre-cycle to 3 in cycle 1 and cycle 2, and increased again became 4 in cycle 3. the mean score of language feature improved from 2 in pre-cycle test to 3 in cycle 1, 3 in cycle 2, and 3 in cycle 3. the students’ skill in diction also improved from 2 in pre-cycle to 3 in cycle 1, yet it decreased to 2 in cycle 2 and increased again to 3 in cycle 3. the students’ skill in exploring the ideas improved. the students were more fluent in expressing the ideas and their writing was logical. they were able to organize the generic structure of the texts. to wrap up the result is supported by kurniawan and lubis (2015) stating that pwim increased students creativity during teaching and learning process. the students felt comfortable while make a paragraph in a good organization and paragraphing according to the generic structure of a descriptive text. the students’ skill in grammar also improved. the students were able to differentiate between present tense and past tense. they began to be able to choose appropriate tenses for their writing. it can be said that by the end of the action, the students could use the appropriate vocabulary in their writing. pwim consists of images that are familiar with students. educators use pwim in class with small groups, and individuals to lead them to ask questions about words, add words for them to read and write vocabulary (indra & sudartini, 2015; kartika, sofian & suhartono, 2012). this is to make students able to identify easily. in addition kartika, sofian, and suhartono (2012) also said that pwim is an inquiry into the art-oriented model of language that uses images containing foreign objects and actions to obtain words from listening to children and talking. the students’ skill in language use also improved. the students made better sentences and used simple present tense, noun phrase, conjunction, and adverb in a better way. the students’ skill in mechanics also improved. the students’ skill in writing was better organized in paragraphing and also much better in spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. besides, the students could apply the appropriate tense in their writing. they had enough opportunity to write; the teaching-learning focused more on writing skill. through this action, the students had more practices in writing descriptive texts using pictures. they could create a better writing than before including in constructing the present sentences by using simple present tense. this finding was supported by the research conducted by the opinions above are supported by shaman (2014), pwim helps students learn to read and write, by activating the student scheme, it also helps develop vocabulary knowledge, and spelling for learning english (soviyah & etikaningsih, 2018). they could write a text with more detailed information based on the picture and used correct capitalization, spelling, and punctuations; they produced longer paragraph with sufficient supporting details. the students could get the ideas and inspirations to write a descriptive text after they had seen the picture and knew the steps. the pictures gave them a stimulus so that 0 1 2 3 4 pre-cycle cycle 1 cycle 2 cycle 3 structure 2 3 3 4 language feature 2 3 3 3 diction 2 3 2 3 mira ermita, emzir, & ninuk lustyantie picture word inductive model for better descriptive text writing 82 they could have something to write in their paper. the results of the test also support the positive improvements. moreover, their attitude towards writing had changed to be better. it was not hard to ask them to write a descriptive text. they were also interested and motivated to join and to get involved in teaching and learning process. they became more active in teaching and learning process. they showed positive attitudes towards writing lesson. the students became more active and enthusiastic both in responding to the researcher and finishing the exercises given. they asked questions to the teacher and also answered the teacher’s question. the use of picture in the teaching learning process of writing skill could make the students motivated and confident when they were asked to write in groups and individually by seeing the picture first. they did their writing without being asked many times and did not complain anymore. by seeing the pictures, the students could spend shorter time when they were asked to write and most of the students could finish their writing on time. it is because the pictures could help them by presenting certain topic which can be written down. some students discussed actively about the topic in the pictures in their own group after they saw the pictures. their motivation could be seen from their activity during the action. they paid close attention when the researcher showed the pictures. they felt comfortable and did not look bored. it was easier for students to write the story based on the picture because they still remembered what they saw. this finding is supported by muttaqin (2015) nurleni (2018), riyadi (2017), sepyanda mukhaiyar, & kusni (2013), and suraya (2017) that pwim can improve students’ writing skills. hence the results showed that the use of the pwim was a success. the students enjoyed their lessons more, and were more motivated, interested and confident during the teaching learning sessions. conclusion based on the results of the research, it could be concluded that the use of pwim the students’ skill in writing descriptive text in three aspects. the aspects were: the structure, language feature, and diction. the most significant improvement was in the aspect of structure. the use of picture that applied in writing made the students interested to the media. they had high motivation to join the teaching and learning process and they had good spirit to learn english while the pwim is applied in writing class. the students paid attention more when the researcher used and showed the pictures. they felt comfortable and they did not look bored. it was easier for the students to write the descriptions on the paper because they still remembered what they saw while the teacher showed the pictures. it proved that the use of picture as the media in the teaching and learning process improved the students’ writing skill. acknowledgement in this part, the researchers need to express many thanks to the persons who helped in the research. first, the researchers would like to say thanks to educational fund management institution of republic of indonesia (lpdp) who gave financial support. second, the researchers would like to say thanks to team of university of jambi, indonesia who provided good service for the researchers during the research. references abbas, a. m., & tawfeeq, h. m. 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(2011). adolescents’ awareness of environmental care: mira ermita, emzir, & ninuk lustyantie picture word inductive model for better descriptive text writing 84 experiences when writing short descriptive texts in english. profile, 13(1), 11–30. weigle, s. c. (2002). assesing writing. uk: cambridge university press, 144. yuniyarsih, p., & saun, s. (2014). using picture word inductive model to teach students in writing a descriptive text. jelt, 2(2), 192–199. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 81 introducing local wisdom through narrative: teaching english in higher education titis sulistyowati faculty of teacher training and education, muria kudus university, indonesia email: titis.sulistyowati@umk.ac.id sri surachmi w faculty of teacher training and education, muria kudus university, indonesia email: sri.surachmi@umk.ac.id apa citation: sulistyowati, t., & surachmi, w. s. (2020). introducing local wisdom through narrative: teaching english in higher education. indonesian efl journal, 6(1), 81-88. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v6i1.2641. received: 16-07-2019 accepted: 23-09-2019 published: 01-01-2020 abstract: it is very important to introduce and continue the local narrative and their values to the next generation. this paper is part of a larger research on narrative writing for higher education level students organized in a genre writing class. in this paper, the writers focus on exploring the students’ understanding of moral values in the local narratives constructed during genre writing activities. this paper also describes the teacher’s feedback on the students’ writing quality. this study involved 20 students from the english education department of muria kudus university. guided questions were used in the interview session to explore the students’ understanding of the local narratives and moral values. the review of students’ papers was used to analyze the teacher’s feedback to explore the students’ quality of writing. keywords: local wisdom; narrative; character building; writing. introduction the function of indonesian national education is to develop human capabilities and to form the national character and national civilization in every citizen’s thought and behavior. it intends to educate and to improve the nation's life and aiming at developing potential students so that they become great believers and worshipers of their god (kurniawan, 2014). the development of the students’ characters is very important so that the generations will not be defeated by global competition. character building must be adapted for the noble values of our culture. the character of a nation is a combination of all the characteristics of a nation. it includes the physical, intellectual, and moral characteristics of all the citizens and individuals. building the characters of the nation does not mean building intellectual capability or physic, or by only explaining about moral issues in the classroom. we need the whole aspects to be integrated into the learning process. this character building is a combination of intellectual power and human life skill. indonesia consists of many local ethics and tradition; therefore, it is very important to hold on to the development of the local cultural values from the community. the values can be introduced to students through the teaching and learning process at schools to preserve the tradition and to instill the national identity of our nation. according to damayanti (2013), local wisdom can be interpreted as good cultural values that exist within a society. this means that every society has a noble order or values that have been taught generation after generation. to know local wisdom in a region, we must be able to understand the noble cultural values that exist within the region. kudus is a small city in central java with diversity found in its community. starting from religion, work, to culture. in kudus, there are also two figures from walisongo who spread islam in java in ancient times. the two guardians were sunan muria or raden umar said and sunan kudus or sheikh ja'far shodiq. it is not surprising if the city of kudus is also known as the city of santri, because there are many islamic boarding schools spread in the holy city, kudus (kompasiana, 2016; indrahti, 2012) the philosophy of sunan kudus is described by the acronym gosjigang which means gus or ‘good’, ji means ‘recite’, and gang means ‘trade’. through that philosophy, sunan kudus guided his followers and the holy community to become people with good personalities, diligent in reciting, and willing to try or trade. thus, this philosophy becomes the guidance of life for the titis sulistyowati & sri surachmi w introducing local wisdom through narrative: teaching english in higher education 82 kudus community (widi & burhanuudin, 2011; maharromiyati & suyatmo, 2016). in learning english, folklore is usually taught in the sub-theme ‘narrative’. narrative text is a type of text that tells a story or event that has been inherited from time to time. texts which include narrative are legends, folklore, myths, etc. what is interesting about the narrative is that each story usually holds a moral message that is full of noble characters. for students, narrative writing is not simple. many of them think that writing is the language skill in which even a native speaker still has problems to acquire it. it means that writing is not simply language written on paper. it is more complicated and it needs more practice to improve it. therefore, a writer needs some knowledge about writing and writing technique and must practice it regularly (norrish in sulistyo, 2013). to be able to write, a writer needs to acknowledge the crucial aspect of language and genre. derewianka in tuan (2011) says that genre can be defined as specific text-type which results from using language (written or spoken) with predictable and recurring patterns to accomplish something in everyday, academic and literary text within a particular culture. therefore, genres are associated with the particular purpose, stages and language features. the communicative purpose represents the purpose of using the language, for example, if people want to explain the step of doing something, they use procedures. on the other hand, if they want to entertain the reader/hearer by using stories, they use narratives. this definition is also supported by paltridge (2001) and knapp and watkins (1994) in melissourgou and frantzi (2017). they connect the term genre to language processes, such as describing, explaining, and arguing and consider the term text type as products of language usage or things, such as reports, expositions, and stories or narrative. masoni states that narrative text usually presented an imaginary story derived from the author’s imagination or can be based on a real event adopted by the author or can be a combination. folk refers to stories without a precise author, and it is told by many people in the society, which range from fictional genres, such as fairy tales to jokes, legends or personal experience tales (masoni, 2018) recently, in indonesia, the teaching and learning writing is shifted to text-based writing. the focus of writing is no longer on grammatical orientation, but it enhances the more complex way of writing qualification, such as genre focus, and it includes the cohesion and coherence aspects. narrative as one of text types has been introduced from school level and university level, but writing difficulties seem to be the problems of many teachers. sulistyo (2013) finds out that writing problem which might be faced by students usually due to understanding the generic structure of written narratives. they miss the concept of applying the generic structure of written narratives. it might be because they are incapable of differentiating the orientation, evaluation, complication, resolution, and re-orientation, therefore, they make some errors in identifying the sentence patterns used in every generic structure. in line with the problem above, wibowo (2013) states some writing problems which occur in writing process, such as students have difficulties expressing their idea into written form. especially in writing narrative text, students have to express their ideas to make a story that entertains the reader. lirola (2015), in her research, focuses on the use of genre-based theory to teach writing. she reveals that using the theory of genre as a framework to teach academic writing helped students to improve their writing skills. the results show that providing students to good models of different text types, and directing them to write texts based on these models, improves students’ writing from the grammatical level to the whole textual point of view. luthfiyati, latief, & suharmanto (2015) research students’ mistakes in writing narrative at the level of senior high school in lamongan. they claim that students made mistakes in expressing moral value, in expressing content, and in using organization, grammar and vocabulary. khunzunuddin (2017) examines the oral stories in the form of folk (myths, legends, and myths) of the kudus society. he found the folk story of “dewi nawangsih and bagus rinangku”, the legend of “karangbener”, and the myth of “kyai telingsing” have the same narrative structure in the function of the knights’ story of leaving home. likewise, the prose story of the people “dewi nawangsih and bagus rinangku”, the legend of “karangbener”, and the myth of “kyai telingsing” have similar values in aspects; a) environment, b) responsibility, c) religion, and d) social (khunzunuddin, 2017). this current research focuses on analyzing the students’ understanding of local values in kudus implied in the stories. the writers also present the teachers’ writing feedback. this indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 83 research is conducted at a university-level education in a genre writing class. the students are asked to write narrative texts based on the local folklores in their home town. the students are also asked to analyze the moral values which are implicitly carried out in each story and mention them as the coda. to illustrate the quality of the students’ narrative writing, the writers also analyze the teachers’ feedback. briefly, this paper has two purposes. first, the writers focus on exploring the students’ understanding of moral values which are stated in the students’ narratives texts as coda and describing the teacher/lecturer’s feedback on the students’ writing quality as the works are being reviewed by the teacher. method the research conducted at the english education department, muria kudus university in kudus regency involves 20 students. to explore the students’ understanding of the moral values, the students are assigned to compose narratives text based on the local folklores in kudus. classroom discussions were conducted to let students share their stories and tell the moral values they find out after understanding the stories. during this process, the students are given some questions related to the moral values and the kinds of folklores they already know. at the end of this session, students are assigned to write narrative texts. when the writer observes the students while they are writing the narratives, it was found that the students encounter many problems. therefore, this research also explores the teachers’ feedback to overview the quality of the students’ writing. here, fgds were used to organize the students in exploring their understanding of their local narratives and values. this discussion facilitates the students to share their understanding and to enrich their knowledge on kudus local narratives. interviews were equipped with guided questions to explore the students’ understanding of the local narratives and moral values. documentation was also used during the review of students’ papers. this aims to analyze the teacher’s feedback to illustrate the students’ quality of writing. results and discussion the students understanding on local values the influence of hindu culture is caused by the existence of hindu kingdoms which was spread out across java island in ancient times. islam is introduced by sunan kudus through several approaches. he spreads islamic teachings very smoothly by preserving the previous tradition established by hindu beliefs (pradisa, 2017). these following values are some moral values identified by the students after understanding some local narratives. value refers to something or concept of high value that is believed or respected and used as individuals’ way of life. therefore, values are used as social rules of a person or group of people in their daily life as ways of thinking, speaking and acting. the eed students regard the values as the rules to socialize with others, in the narrative story of the people in kudus, they found various values, such as cultural, social, religious, environmental, and responsibility values. table 1 presents the list of moral values summarized from the stories written by the students. table 1. list of moral values mentioned by the students moral value interpretation honesty honesty is a moral value that attributes to integrity, truthfulness, straightforwardness, including straightforwardness of conduct. honesty also involves being trustworthy, loyal, fair, and sincere. this value is well reflected in the story of majapahit gates as kebo anabrang tries to complete the task from sunan muria to bring the majapahit gate to kudus. value on others creating values of others means respecting and appreciating the existence of other people by maintaining a good manner. this value often contributes to other values, such as respecting others. this value is found in the story of ki ageng kedu who does not value the existence and power of sunan kudus, he finally receives his punishment. maintain religious value religious values are principles found in any religious traditions, thoughts, and beliefs. religious-based values are based on scriptures and a religion’s established norms. kudus was ruled by hindu kingdoms long before islam was introduced. the religious value is carried out at most of the folklores. this story is told in the religious folk syeh ja’far and kyai the ling sing as the former of islamic religious teaching. entrepre neurship value entrepreneurship value relates to the spirits of the people who believe in trade to maintain their economic life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/value_(ethics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/scripture titis sulistyowati & sri surachmi w introducing local wisdom through narrative: teaching english in higher education 84 this value lies behind the history of asal-usul kota kretek, in which the trade of tobacco leaves was introduced by ki agen kedu. respect older people it means treating elder people with respect and being polite and showing a good manner as it is used and believed in society. this value is taught in most of the folks which represent the story of religious figures in kudus showing the relation between students and teachers or children and parents. serving parents showing honor to mother and father by taking good care of them. young children honor their parents through their obedience. this value is implied in the story that tells the relationship between children and parents, for example, the story of dewi nawangsih the daughter of sunan muria and the story of kebo anabrang. being tolerance to other religion the ability or willingness to tolerate something, in particular, the existence of opinions or behavior that one does not necessarily agree with, in this case in other beliefs or religions. this value is presented in the tradition of kudus people who are forbidden to kill cow because the animal is considered to be sacred by hindu people. loyalty loyalty is a dedication and faithfulness to a nation, country, group, or person. many characters in the story show the feeling of faithfulness to parents and teachers. patience the ability to overcome difficulties such as tolerance of provocation without responding in annoyance/anger; or forbearance when under pressure, especially when faced with longer-term difficulties. many local folks written by the students are related to figures who have been the establisher of islamic culture. one of the famous ones is the folk of bulusan. this story related to sunan muria. bulusan (also called bulusan tradition) is one of the traditional celebrations in the islamic community in kudus, central java, indonesia, which held seven days after eid. this tradition comes from folklore related to sunan muria. he cursed the villagers who still work in the fields at night during ramadan on the eve of revelation of the qur’an so that residents turn out to be turtles (bulus). sunan muria stuck his stick into the ground, out 48 springs or sources. the springs are then becoming the name of the village, namely dukuh sumber. once these places inhabited, kyai dudo then asks every 7th shawwal to create a ritual to pray for two of his students who were condemned for being turtles. ritual prayer followed by the rest of society is then referred to as a tradition bulusan. it became an interesting spectacle for kudus society today. bulusan tradition today not only presents a ritual prayer in petilasan kyai dudo, but also a variety of other activities, including a parade of music and other stage entertainment (suciati & erzad, 2018). one of the folks also told about a tragic love story between dewi nawangsih and raden bagus rinangku. raden ayu dewi nawangsih is the daughter of sunan muria who was proposed by raden bagus rinangku. however, sunan muria disagrees because of bagus rinangkul’s personality that is considered challenging. spontaneously, sunan muria launched an arrow accurately to bagus rinangku and it passed through his back chest. seeing her lover died, dewi nawangsih bumped into him, so the arrow also injured dewi nawangsih which then resulted in her death. the bodies of the two lovers cannot be separated, they were then buried together. the students find that this story included some moral values that parents and children should build a good relationship by developing a good communication. another story is about the legend of jember village. this story was written by the students in their writing task. this story is about the son of sunan kudus who was assigned by his father to spread the teaching of islam in kedu, salatiga. sunan kudus’s son approached them by following the cockfight game. the chicken of sunan kudus’s son won the game. ki ageng kedu then challenged the son of sunan kudus by betting the clothing they wear, finally, sunan kudus’s son lost the game. then the son of sunan kudus came back home and report to his father. to re-challenge ki ageng kedu, to take back his clothes, finally, the son of sunan kudus managed to win the game. realizing his loss, ki ageng kedu realized that who defeated him surely was the son of a wali (orang jaduk) great person. because of the defeats, ki ageng kedu got more curious and wanted to try the miracle of sunan kudus, then he visited the city of kudus by riding a bamboo plait to show off his power to sunan kudus. suddenly, sunan kudus, in front of him said: “hai ki ageng kedu, i'm in here”. the tampah he drove suddenly shuffled here and there, uncontrolled, his light body suddenly turned heavy and was immediately sucked by the gravity of the earth, it was like being knocked down by invisible forces. ki ageng kedu body https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/fixation_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/faithfulness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/person https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/anger indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 85 was thrown into the muddy ground of the sewer area. in javanese language called “ngecember” until now, the place name is called jember village. students learn many moral values from this story. when they analyze ki ageng kedu’s attitude, it reflects high arrogance. he thinks that he is a great man who cannot be defeated by others. sunan kudus with the gifted power, drawn the arrogance. from the story, students learn that they should not be arrogant for what they possess because someone out there might be more capable than us. not being arrogant also means appreciating other people. javanese wisdom teaches us to appreciate others. therefore, in javanese culture, we know three levels of language and the different registers in using the language. the appreciation of others is reflected in the use of the different levels of the language. the human appreciations include appreciating elder people, teachers, saints, parents, and people from a higher level of society. another story of the local narrative in kudus is the story of majapahit gate. this is the story of a young man named kebo anabrang or commonly called as kebo nabrang. one day, kebo anabrang met kanjeng sunan in his school (padepokan). kebo nabrang went to padepokan kanjeng sunan to confess that he was the son of kanjeng sunan muria. since his childhood, kebo nabrang had never seen his father. his mother told him that his father was sunan muria. however, he was strongly rejected by sunan muria. he said that he never had a child named kebo nabrang. because kebo nabrang constantly urged, sunan muria finally said that he was willing to admit that kebo nabrang was his son, with a condition; kebo nabrang must be able to move one of the gates of majapahit kingdom to mount muria in one night. kebo nabrang could indeed carry one of the gates himself to be taken from majapahit to the mountain of muria. yet, unlucky for kebonabrang, at the same time in juana, east of pati, there was also a young man who was heading to majapahit to follow the contest to move the gate of majapahit. the contest was to win a beautiful princess named roro pujiwati, the daughter of kyai ageng ngerang (sunan ngerang) juana. kebo nabrang who had successfully brought the gate was stopped by raden ronggo and there was a fight between them. the fight between the two young men was known by sunan muria. he went to the place where the two young men fought. the place is now called towelo village (from cetho welo-welo). it seemed that raden ronggo is not strong enough to lift it. by sunan muria, raden ronggo was only given a bar, which was then taken to juana, handed over to kyai ageng ngerang. yet, kyai ageng ngerang refused to accept the contest because the requirement was not a doorstop, but the gate. because of anger, the wooden bar was swung to roro pujiwati, but a miracle happened, the wooden bar was not falling on roro pujiwati, because there was a voice from the dark and at that time the night was dark, on the night of 15 sha'ban (ruwah) and vanish roro pujiwati without a trace, somewhere. meanwhile, kebo nabrang was welcomed to bring the gate of majapahit to mount muria. yet, when it was just lifted, there was the sound of crowing chickens, a sign of morning. then kebo nabrang finally failed to meet the requirements demanded by sunan muria. kebo nabrang was then ordered to guard the gate of majapahit until his death. the moral value of this story is a child should have a responsibility to gain a huge trust and he should be confident and remain humble in an attempt to prove the love for parents through a difficult task. if we want to get something, we should try to get it in any way even though by risking our life. kudus is considered the center of islamic culture in its district and widely known as islamic religious society. it is because the spread of islam is influenced by two saints, namely sunan kudus and sunan muria. now, the influence of the figures can still be seen in several buildings that keep the histories and the folks of the islamic development in kudus. besides, the old buildings are now considered as the local heritage. some traditions are preserved for generations, such as buka luwur, dukderan, bulusan and others which are celebrated due to the historical and religious values. the teacher’’ feedback teacher’s feedback has an essential role in students’ writing process. it helps students to identify their strengths and weaknesses in developing their writing project, this will make students know what to do to make improvements on their writing and at the same time learning to organize their ideas based on the local folklore. teacher’s feedback, if it is addressed effectively, can also contribute to students’ second language acquisition. in this research, titis sulistyowati & sri surachmi w introducing local wisdom through narrative: teaching english in higher education 86 there are several aspects of teachers’ feedback that will be highlighted. some specific comments from the teachers are: 1. the generic structure of the narrative text is not well applied. 2. the teacher does not understand some of the underlined phrases. “can you rewrite this sentence?” students need to rewrite the phrase. 3. students need to provide specific details to tell the story clearly and engagingly. there are more confusing plot and text structures. 4. the writing has already presented a well simple structure, but it needs improvement in the choices of words and phrases. 5. the text implies the local folklore in kudus, but it needs improvement on variety of linguistics features. 6. this gives excellent example moves on narrative and you need to add your argument on local values. 7. students need to build up a transition clarifying the connection between the sentences. 8. there is a lack of connection between ideas in the paragraphs. 9. the organization of the ideas and the sentence structures are much influenced by the form of l1. there are inappropriate english expressions that may be caused by direct translation. in general, all students have good control of the obligatory constituent structure of narratives proposed by joyce and feez (2000) that includes orientation (introducing the story), complication (problem arise), and resolution (the resolution of the problem). moreover, one of the narrative structures which is sequence of events as proposed by anderson and anderson (2003) is also found in the students’ writing. students well address the sequence of events, though missing links between the events are still emerging in some of the works. how the characters react to the complication in chronological order sometimes is not clearly stated. coda as the optional structure of narratives that should be found in the last text sometimes is not mentioned by the students. coda consists of comments about the future lives of the character such as; they lived happily ever after. coda also contains some information about moral values implied in the story. it is presented at the end of the stories to emphasize that the story is told to give moral values. in terms of linguistic features, the students still need more practice in writing a narrative text especially in the specific language features, such as tenses and word choices. in some texts, there are some inappropriate linguistic features of narrative exist, for example the use of specific participants and the use of linking verb to indicate the time sequences. moreover, in a few of the students’ text, past tenses as one characteristic of narratives do not appear. some students still face a lot of difficulties in writing narratives. there are more errors in the linguistic features of narratives. more than once, the students make a lot of grammatical errors. however, some achievements are found in the students’ writing. the language features of narratives can be found, namely; 1) the use of past tense, 2) the use of action verbs, 3) the use of temporal conjunction, 4) the verbal and quotation existence, 5) the use of personal pronouns, and 6) the description of time and place. past tenses are used to indicate that the story is happened in the past. minor and major grammatical errors are found in some of the students’ works. therefore, students still need to make some revisions due to different use of past tenses and present tenses. although in narrative writing, it is dominated by the use of past tenses, minor present tenses are sometimes used to indicate a verbal quotation. furthermore, in terms of narrative’s language features, different students from different levels of achievement have different abilities in applying the features in the story. in conclusion, some students still have lacks knowledge of linguistics features of narratives. the findings of this study indicate that some students from all levels of achievement have been aware of generic structure of narrative text that includes orientation, complication, and resolution; although in some of the writing we still cannot find clear distinction of each step of the structures. for example, at the beginning of a narrative, the writer usually introduces the story by indicating the time, place and main character. some writers start their narrative with limited orientation and sometimes it was seen like they directly jump to the complication. based on the findings, teachers need to find some approaches and techniques in teaching writing to improve students’ abilities, particularly in narratives. they need to gain more information about each students’ characteristics especially low achievers since they need more guidance in writing narratives. students and teachers also need to explore more on the local narrative to understand their identity as members of society. local folktale should be told over generations to preserve local wisdom and to introduce them in writing classes could help the students to become agents in preserving tradition as their local indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 1, january 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 87 heritage. in writing classes, the importance of feedback is considered as part of the teacher’s pedagogical practices. students should be able to comprehend the teachers’ feedback they find in their writing. developing well-structured writing should be the responsibility of the learners and teachers. the importance of the teachers’ written feedback has largely been documented by previous research in the areas of esl and efl writing. in both english language teaching contexts, especially in classrooms where the teaching of writing is process-oriented, teachers and students have acknowledged the crucial value of the teacher’s written feedback which is not only facilitating students’ revisions, but also assisting them during the step to step learning-to-write process (harmer, 2004; peterson, 2010). in this research, there are some points can be concluded as the basis of teachers’ writing feedback. 1. grammar point/linguistics features the students’ writing has already presented well structure, but it needs improvement in the choices of words and phrases. the texts imply the local folklore in kudus, but it needs improvement on variety of linguistics features. the narrative linguistics features use past tense to indicate the past event and also present some present tense to indicate quotation or verbal language. some students still use many simple present tenses to indicate past events. 2. punctuation point students need to build up a transition clarifying the connection between sentences. in this case, students need to think of the appropriate way to connect the sentences or clauses by using correct conjunctions or punctuation. there is a lack of connection between ideas in the paragraphs. 3. vocabulary point the organization of the ideas and the sentence structures are much influenced by the form of l1. there are inappropriate english expressions that may be caused by direct translation. 4. generic structure some writings have given excellent example moves on narrative, although students need to add argument on local values as coda. the generic structure of the narrative text is not well applied. the teacher does not understand some of the underlined phrases; therefore, students need to rewrite the phrase. students need to provide specific details to tell the story. there are more confusing plots and generic structures found in the students’ writing. conclusion kudus is also well known as ‘kota santri’ or the city of islamic students. in this regency, there were two sunan; sunan kudus and sunan muria. both of them are also called walisanga. many local narratives are told and they bring local values related to the former of kudus. many folks are related to figures who have been the establisher of islamic culture. the texts imply the local folklore in kudus, but they need improvement on variety of linguistics features. the narrative linguistics features use past tense to indicate the past event and also present some present tense to indicate quotation or verbal language. some students still use many simple present tenses to indicate past events. students need to build up a transition that helps to clarify the connection between sentences. in this case, students need to think of the appropriate way to connect the sentences or clauses by using correct conjunctions or punctuation. naturally, students concern more about their grading result then improving their skill and they have less interest in revising their work as feedback is provided on their work. students need more encouragement to actively involve in the learning-to-write process and do what their teachers suggest them to improve their writing. teachers should clearly explain the assessment criteria as well as the meaning of different codes they use in their error-feedback. the students should be allowed to participate in the decision of the assessment criteria to provide them with information about what should they do to develop good written narrative texts. learning narrative is not only learning the language features or the generic structure. it is also part of learning moral values. teachers should use narratives as the media of teaching writing and also instilling moral value. moral values are also part of national identities. to make the students aware of the moral values, teachers can design the class by making group discussion, the writing class may not only concern on writing instruction but also discussion on the local values. to get the students’ improvement in writing, teachers also need to give some positive feedback for further revision. responding to student writing is a crucial component of the teaching-towrite process. furthermore, students’ access to the teacher’s feedback and their effective use of it contribute to important aspects in the way their learning-to-write process. titis sulistyowati & sri surachmi w introducing local wisdom through narrative: teaching english in higher education 88 acknowledgment we would like to show our greatest gratitude to the research department of muria kudus university and other parties who contribute to this research. references alyousef, s, h., & alyahya, m, a. 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(2011). gusjigang: sunan kudus melintas zaman. retrieved from http://nasional.kompas.com/read/2011/08/02/122 21026/. http://www.membumikanpendidikan.com/2014/05/menanamkan-pendidikan-karakter-dengan.html http://www.membumikanpendidikan.com/2014/05/menanamkan-pendidikan-karakter-dengan.html indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 187 instagram-mediated project-based learning in teaching speaking skill agung ahmad syahida master of english education, faculty of teacher training and education, univesitas terbuka, banten, indonesia email: agungahmadsyahida@gmail.com andang saehu english literature study program, faculty of adab and humanities, uin sunan gunung djati, cibiru, bandung, indonesia email: andangsaehu@uinsgd.ac.id hanna sundari english education department, postgraduate program, universitas indraprasta pgri, jakarta, indonesia email: hanna.sundari@gmail.com apa citation: syahida, a. a., saehu, a., & sundari, h (2022). instagram-mediated project-based learning in teaching speaking skill. indonesian efl journal, 8(2), 187-196. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v8i1.6642. received: 07-03-2022 accepted: 12-05-2022 published: 31-07-2022 introduction the increasing use of english as a part of daily life is unavoidable. english as a global language has been recognized by many people. this is based on the number of people who speak english. crystal (2003) estimated that in 2002 english users had reached a third of the world's population or close to 1500 million users, either as a mother tongue or a second language. likewise, the existence of english as a second language in indonesia has entered various sectors including education. considering the existence of english in indonesia, english is one of the subjects taught in high school (pratiwi, 2016). to grow speaking skills in education, it is necessary to learn actively from students according to the mandate of the 2013 curriculum. students are required to be active both in physical and mental activities. speaking is one of several skills that efl students must master. fulcher (2014) stated that speaking is the use of verbal language in communicating with one another. meanwhile, kuning (2019) stated that speaking is one of the important lessons in teaching a second language. in abstract: this study was grounded in a mixed-method design that aimed to analyze the differences between learning speaking taught using instagram-mediated project-based learning and those taught using conventional techniques. in addition, this study was also conducted to investigate the challenges faced and explore the strategies given by students in solving problems in the application of instagram-mediated project-based learning techniques. this study involved 12th-grade students who were randomly selected to be the control and experimental groups. the research instruments used were pre-speaking tests and post-speaking tests to measure the level of students' speaking skills and a questionnaire to investigate the challenges faced and explore the strategies provided by students in instagram-mediated project-based learning conducted by the experimental group. the significance score was 0.000 smaller than 0.05. this confirmed that the instagram-mediated projectbased learning technique proved to have a significant difference. in qualitative stage of analysis, it was revealed that the challenges the students faced were categorized into language barriers, video making, and external factors. from the results of this study, it can be concluded that the instagram-mediated project-based learning technique was proven to be effective in improving students' speaking skills. therefore, school policymakers can provide a wider internet network to support this learning technique. however, the results of this study recommended similar research on speaking skills in other materials in more depth with a wider scope. keywords: instagram; project-based learning; mall; speaking; mixed-method. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i2.4564 agung ahmad syahida, andang saehu, & hanna sundari instagram-mediated project-based learning in teaching speaking skill 188 addition, brown (2004) said that speaking is an interactive process of meaning formation and the production, reception, and processing of information involved. the interaction between one person and another in communicating must make meaning in the context of the information that occurs. according to richards and renandya (2002), speaking is one of the central things in communication. however, the education first english proficiency index 2020 stated that indonesians' english proficiency was 74 out of 100 countries. speaking english is considered a difficult activity for students (pratiwi, 2016). there are problems with difficulty in lack of vocabulary, pronunciation, self-confidence are other reasons. based on initial observations made in a high school with 28 students in grade x and also informal interviews with english teachers, it was stated that the ability to speak english still needs to struggle. various studies with various approaches have been carried out in this regard. one approach that involves students working freely in learning to speak english and turning it into a real product is the project-based learning approach (pjbl). furthermore, the pjbl approach can be integrated with technological advances as stated by gonulal (2019) stated that digital technology is not only increasing in people's lives but also in the language learning process. language learning activities combined with mobile devices as a digital technology are known as mobile-assisted language learning (mall). mall refers to language learning activities anytime and anywhere that are carried out via mobile devices without limitations of physical location and time (kukulska-hulme, 2009). furthermore, mobile phones have helped teachers in many teaching activities, especially in foreign language teaching opportunities (yudhiantara & saehu, 2017). several studies related to the use of technology such as facebook (alm, 2015; ibrahim, orcid, directorate, anbar, & orcid, 2021) and twitter (solmaz, 2018; taskiran, 2020) succeeded in revealing that most students really enjoyed these activities and contributed to their language learning process. however, the fact that instagram is one of the most popular social media today has also succeeded in becoming a platform that supports the language learning process. there are several studies related to the use of instagram as an effective tool in improving student learning such as erarslan (2019) who found that instagram has a major impact on students' language learning. as shown in the research conducted by soviyah and etikaningsih (2018) which investigated the effectiveness of using instagram in learning to write a descriptive text. the results obtained indicate that there are significant differences between students who are taught to use instagram and those who are not. meanwhile, devi, virginia, and auli (2020) found that students' speaking skills improved significantly through the integration of instagram into the language learning process. however, these studies were conducted in face-toface classes. in addition, the use of instagram is only used as a tool in the final stages of completing the pjbl implementation project. in line with this information, research using pjbl as a learning medium from the first to the last stage of the six series of pjbl procedures in online classes has never been carried out. research like this needs to be done because it can provide information about how students' learning to speak that is integrated with technology in online classes is carried out. in addition, the findings obtained can be the basis for the development of research conducted on learning to speak english. specifically, this study investigates the following 3 research questions: (1) does instagram-mediated project-based learning give different impact to the learners’ speaking proficiency? (2) what challenges do students face in using instagram-mediated project-based learning technique in the speaking learning process? (3) what strategies do students apply to solve the problems encountered in using the instagram-mediated project-based learning technique in the speaking learning process? method to answer the first research question “does instagram-mediated project-based learning give a different impact on the learners’ speaking proficiency?”. we carried out 3 steps in this quantitative approach such as planning, conducting, and evaluating as proposed by creswell (2002). furthermore, arikunto (2019) divided the steps into; pre-treatment, treatment, and post-treatment. pre-treatment was an activity carried out before the teaching technique implemented to both experimental and control group. they were given a indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 189 pre-speaking prompt test to measure the level of speaking in both groups. furthermore, there were differences in teaching techniques in the treatment step between both groups. the control group used conventional speaking teaching techniques, while the experimental group implemented instagrammediated project-based learning. in this treatment process, the speaking strategies applied 4 of 6 project-based learning systematic procedures that were proposed by the george lucas educational foundation (2005), while the other 2 strategies were applied at the post-treatment stage. those systematic procedures were start with the essential question, design a plan of project, create a schedule, monitor students and project progress, assess outcome, and evaluate the experience. in the post-treatment step, since the teaching techniques was taught to both groups, the teacher continued the last 2 systematic procedures of project-based learning as mentioned before namely asses the outcome, and evaluate the experience. the teacher gave post-speaking tests to research subjects both experimental and control groups with the aim of measuring the learner's improvement in speaking skills. for the second and third research questions related to challenges faced and strategies proposed by students in applying instagram mediated projectbased learning, we provided 15 closed-ended questions about the application of instagrammediated project-based learning in learning speaking, and 3 open-ended questions about the challenges faced and the strategies proposed by students in applying instagram-mediated projectbased learning techniques. the questions were an attempt to freely investigate respondents' responses and provide detailed information. the mixed-methods research design was chosen to answer those research questions. this was based on the fact that research problems are not adequately answered by one type of research (qualitative or quantitative) and a lot of data was needed to expand, elaborate, or explain the previous data. the first research question could be answered with the results of statistical tests while answering the second and third research questions required data expansion to describe the first question in order to obtain more detailed results. in line with this, creswell (2012) stated that in mixed methods studies when following up on quantitative research by conducting qualitative research to obtain more detailed and specific information that is not obtained from the results of statistical tests. this study took 1 class out of 9 classes consisting of 291 twelfth grade high school students in cianjur regency as research subjects. the subjects of this research were taken by using a cluster random sampling technique in collecting quantitative data. the sample should contain specific types of people that the researchers want to make sure. however, there are occasions when it is impossible to choose a representative sample of a population (fraenkel & wallen, 2009). the cluster random sampling technique was chosen because the researcher had limitations related to the sample frame, namely the list of instagram usernames that were the discussion of this study even though the class data was complete and had homogeneous characteristics. in line with priyono (2008) who explained that the cluster random sampling technique is used if the researcher has limitations due to the absence of a sample frame but the researcher has complete data about the group. from 1 class of research subjects were divided into 2 groups a and b which were designated as the experimental group and the control group with a simple random sampling technique. taking 2 groups in one class with a consider that face-to-face learning was limited to 50% by the circular letter of the west java provincial education office regarding learning in semester 2 of the 2021-2022 academic year. meanwhile, in collecting qualitative data, a purposive sampling technique was used for the experimental group by considering that research questions related to the application of instagrammediated project-based learning were only conducted on the experimental group. as a result, the participants were chosen through the use of purposive sampling, which included people with particular qualifications who were representative based on earlier data, in order to provide accurate information about the contribution of instagrammediated project-based learning (fraenkel & wallen, 2009). the use of instagram in this study was not only for the completion of pjbl implementation projects but also as a learning medium from the first to the last stage in a series of pjbl procedures. therefore, the pjbl systematic procedure framework from george lucas educational (2005) was used as a procedure for combining learning with the use of agung ahmad syahida, andang saehu, & hanna sundari instagram-mediated project-based learning in teaching speaking skill 190 technology. the framework of the systematic procedure was shown in the following figure: figure 1. the framework of project-based learning systematic procedures of the george lucas educational. source: captured from figure 2 in educational technology division (2006) through direct message (dm) of instagram, the pjbl procedures carried out in this study began with the stage of giving essential questions to students which became the theme of the project they were working on such as “what will you do after graduating from school? through video shows, give interesting tips about what you will do to achieve it!” next, students designed a project plan in response to the previous questions. students prepared tools and materials or others that was used in the project. the schedule was made by the teacher and students collaboratively in this third stage to see the progress of the project. the fourth stage was the monitoring of students in the progress of the project. in the next stage, students uploaded videos in their instagram and the teacher gave a project assessment of all aspects including the achievement of students' speaking skills in this project-based learning. the last stage was the teacher and students reflecting on the project activities and the results that have been implemented. the teacher evaluated the activities by providing opportunities for students to explore their experiences of the challenges encountered and the strategies proposed in instagram-mediated project-based learning in english speaking skills. for the quantitative data, pre-treatment was an activity carried out before the teaching technique implemented to research subjects. they were given a pre-speaking test prompt to measure the level of speaking in both the experimental group and the control group. pre-treatment was carried out on february 8, 2022, on research subjects (even and odd number groups at 12 mipa 2). the prespeaking test prompt was given using a different method, namely the experimental class (even number group) through the instagram direct message application, while the control class (odd number group) was conducted face-to-face. the research subjects were given treatment by implementing instagram-mediated project-based learning in teaching speaking skills. the treatment in this study was from 10 17 february 2022. in this treatment process, the speaking strategies applied 4 of 6 project-based learning systematic procedures that proposed by the george lucas educational foundation (2005), while the other strategies were applied at the post-treatment stage. meanwhile, the control group used learning speaking with conventional face-to-face techniques in class. post-speaking tests was given on 17 february 2022 to research subjects both experimental and control groups with the aim of measuring the learner's improvement in speaking skills in the posttreatment. the control group was given a postspeaking test orally in front of class. meanwhile, the experimental group continued the last 2 systematic procedures of project-based learning as follows as proposed by the george lucas educational foundation (2005); assessment outcome and evaluate the experience. furthermore, for qualitative data needs in answering the second and third research questions, questionnaires were given on the same day as the post-speaking test to the experimental group regarding learning experiences, challenges, and strategies for applying instagram-mediated projectbased learning in teaching speaking skills. this was conducted after all steps of instagram mediated project-based learning were applied. analysis of quantitative data was taken from data collected from pretest and posttest from both experimental and control groups processed then calculated and computerized to get normality and homogeneity in descriptive statistic result. hypotheses testing in answering the first research question used computer program on statistical analysis such as spss 25. the data were processed to get means and standard deviations of each group. the results were used to analyze the differences in speaking skills taught using instagram-mediated project-based learning technique and those of taught using a conventional technique in the classroom. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 191 furthermore, in the qualitative data analysis, the researchers analyzed the answers to the openedended questionnaire. observing people, and recording what they do; in-depth interviews with people about their ideas, opinions, and experiences; analyzing documents; are conducted by qualitative researchers. these three methods are the main ones they employ to gather and analyze their data (fraenkel & wallen, 2009). in this study, the researcher analyzed the data using content analysis techniques. participants' responses in this learning application experience were asked. in addition, the challenges faced and the strategies proposed by the participants became the main part of the qualitative analysis as the aim of this study. results and discussion based on the proposed research questions within this study, the findings discuss students’ improvement and it then moves to challenges faced and strategies proposed by students regarding to the application of the learning process. students’ speaking improvements to answer the first question regarding students’ improvements after conducting the learning process. the experimental group’s improvement was declared by comparing the result of their prespeaking test score and post-speaking test score. it was intended to measure any improvement gained by this group who had treated to the implementation of instagram-mediated project-based learning. the analysis result was described in the following table. table 1. the analysis result of the experimental groups’ preand post-speaking score the table showed that the experimental group obtained a mean score of 54,40 at the pre-test while at the post-test it was 85,33. it meant that the mean score obtained in the post-test was higher than in the pre-test. furthermore, the significance score (2tailed) was at 0,000 which indicated that the score was < 0,05. if the significance score was < 0,05 it indicated that there were significant differences found between preand post-speaking achievement obtained by the experimental group. in other words, in the end of experiment, the experimental group’s post-speaking achievement was more improved than the pre-speaking achievement. as a result, it created the difference between the both prespeaking scores and post-speaking scores of the experimental group. it also proved that the treatment conducted by applying instagrammediated project-based learning technique in the learning speaking process was improved effectively. students’ challenges faced to answer the second research question regarding challenges faced by students in learning using instagram project-based learning, most students did not find the challenges too difficult in their involvement in the application of this learning technique. making videos that are loved by all circles from children, teenagers, to adults was not a big problem. even the use of instagram in everyday life did not seem to have a negative impact on students. meanwhile, the ability of students to speak english was still low so at the beginning of the application of this learning technique, most students felt that the challenges lay in linguistic barriers. this was in line with bygate (2005) who stated that linguistic barrier was one of five factors of difficulty in speaking english. barriers in a language such as grammatical errors, poor structure, and mispronunciation. however, the application of this learning technique made them eager to speak english better. furthermore, since the involvement of students in the application of this fun learning technique, they felt challenged by conditions that arose from external factors. according to brown (2007), there are numerous factors that affect students' ability to speak, including non-social factors such as homes, schools, equipment, and atmosphere. however, like the two previous challenges, challenges from agung ahmad syahida, andang saehu, & hanna sundari instagram-mediated project-based learning in teaching speaking skill 192 external factors were not difficult challenges to overcome. various responses from students' participants of the experimental group (called q2.spe1 q2.spe15) regarding those 3 main challenges were mentioned by several participants as follow: the challenge was to find a video concept (q2.spe10). it's a challenge when it came to video editing, but i also enjoyed it because i could learn more about using technology (q2.spe12). the delivery of vocabulary was afraid of being wrong (q2.spe3). how to pronounce words (q2.spe14). the challenge was insufficient storage space (q2.spe1). we made the video must be in a quiet atmosphere because noisy sounds could enter the video recording (q2.spe6). it's just that there were 3 main challenges that they mentioned from outside the implementation of this instagram-mediated project-based learning; video, linguistic barriers, and external factors. based on the results of the second questions about the challenges faced in instagram-mediated projectbased learning, several challenges were found that were easy to overcome. this learning technique could be effectively applied to students. the following pictures showed how instagram-mediated pjbl conducted and showed the process and the progress. figure 2. instagram-mediated pjbl process and progress students’ strategies proposed as mentioned in the second research question about the challenges faced by students in instagrammediated project-based learning, this third question relates to the strategies given by students to face these challenges. like the challenges faced, the strategies were given by students also consist of 3 main strategies to overcome these challenges regarding video, linguistic barriers, and external factors. students who mentioned the challenges related to the video provided strategies to overcome them. the use of features on instagram such as making and posting a video was not a difficult thing for students to do. this has become a habit in the use of social media. in line with subburaj (2016) said that teenagers spend most of their time for pleasure and focusing on their studies which become a regular habit on this site. looking for information about the project to be worked on (q3.spe10). by looking for references or help from various sources such as friends or the internet (q3.spe12). meanwhile, the low speaking ability of students before the application of this learning technique was resolved. most students felt motivated to speak better in overcoming the challenges of linguistic barriers. as ur (1996) proposed about speaking success that students have high motivation and want to speak when a given topic is interesting and clear indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 193 so that they are eager to speak. the proposed strategies were; learn vocabulary through google translate (q3.spe3). learn more about each vocabulary, be more careful in pronouncing words, and memorize more words (q3.spe14). besides, some students got difficulties that arose from external factors in implementing instagrammediated project-based learning in speaking english. there were many factors that influence students in implementing this learning including unsupportive equipment. as brown (2007) stated that the factors that influence student learning include non-social factors such as home, school, equipment, and atmosphere. but they could easily overcome these difficulties with the strategies they provided. my strategy was to remove some rarely used apps and free up some storage space (q3.spe1). waiting for a quiet atmosphere, and looking for the right place to make a video (q3.spe6). meanwhile, the students who mentioned internet quota which became a challenge that emerged from external factors also provided an interesting strategy. a school environment that provides a variety of interesting facilities is something that can influence students in learning. this was also expressed by brown (2007) regarding external factors that possibly affect students' learning including the supporting equipment used and the school environment. therefore, students propose several strategies so that they could participate in project-based learning using instagram media properly and smoothly as follows; friends or schools provided free wi-fi (q3.spe2). getting facilities from the school (q3.spe7). based on these opened-ended questionnaire results, the strategies were given by students regarding the challenges faced in instagrammediated project-based learning could be implemented properly and smoothly. so that this learning technique could be applied effectively. discussion there are many experts who define speaking. according to harmer (2007), speaking is an ability to speak fluently not only knowledge of the features of the language, but also the ability to process information and language. participants can express words, ideas, feelings and process information well in speaking and socializing in everyday life. based on the findings of this study, speaking improvement occurred significantly in participants who were taught through the application of instagrammediated project-based learning. the improvement could be seen from the scores of the pre-test and post-test results conducted by the experimental group. it could be seen in table 1 which shows that the experimental group's mean score in the prespeaking test was 54.40 and that the experimental group's mean score in the post-speaking test was 85.33. it was proven that the experimental group's mean score in the post-speaking test was greater than the experimental group's mean score in the prespeaking test. in addition, an increase in level also occurred in participants from the initial condition of understanding and using english only around common vocabulary and simple sentences to a level that could interact even though the interaction was limited. participants could communicate in english, but the discussion only covers certain things that have been mastered. meanwhile, improvements also occurred in speaking aspects such as pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, fluency, and comprehension. students could make themselves understand in using their current abilities to the fullest. furthermore, they could speak the right words in the right order and proper pronunciation. besides, the results of the opened questionnaire strengthen various assumptions about the effectiveness of instagram-mediated project-based learning in learning english. all students from the experimental group responded that learning using instagram-mediated project-based learning was fun and made them much more active. several reasons expressed by students in implementing the fun of instagram-mediated project-based learning were that it could increase self-confidence, creativity, and increase knowledge. in addition, although there were several challenges such as linguistic barriers, video, and external factors faced by students, they believed that these challenges were easy to overcome. they also provided strategies for overcoming these challenges. the ease of the challenges faced by students indicated that instagram-mediated project-based learning was agung ahmad syahida, andang saehu, & hanna sundari instagram-mediated project-based learning in teaching speaking skill 194 very effectively applied to students in learning speaking skills. in summary, the effectiveness of pjbl in improving students' speaking skills was related to the 7 components of pjbl as proposed by barrows (2001). (1) learners-centered environment; pjbl provided opportunities for students to actively speak english in applying this learning technique. (2) collaboration; pjbl has provided opportunities for students to collaborate by discussing well with friends and teachers in making speaking assignments related to tips through instagram videos. (3) curriculum content; pjbl was chosen for language learning by integrating appropriate materials and technology. (4) authentic tasks; pjbl connected students with the real world with the task of providing tips on what to do after graduating from high school that are relevant to students' lives. (5) multiple presentation modes; this pjbl has integrated the use of technology in improving students' speaking skills such as video maker applications, and the instagram platform. (6) time management; pjbl also effectively provided time management in completing project progress. students could set the time which this project was expected to be completed properly. (7) innovative assessment; the assessment in this activity, of course, involved the teacher himself and also the assessment between friends as the products posted on social media were everyone's attention. people could like and comment on the videos they upload. in addition, the existence of instagram as a social media could also provide effectiveness in learning speaking. this was due to mobile learning that offered to learn that could be done anywhere and anytime rather than in the classroom, especially during the covid-19 pandemic as it is currently ongoing. it helped students in developing their language skills, especially speaking skills through instagram either formally or informally with a wider time, place, and also the opportunity to learn. this finding proved what was stated by several experts such as erarslan (2019) who stated that instagram as the social media most frequently used by students was the preferred platform for language education and learning purposes. it had the potential to foster a cooperative, collaborative, and sharing environment, as well as assist formal classroom settings and materials sharing. furthermore, since instagram was included in mall, kukulskahulme (2009) said that mall refers to language learning activities anytime and anywhere that are carried out through mobile devices without a physical location or time restrictions. this made it useful as an alternative language learning tool for anyone who wants to learn a language without limitations of location and time. devi, virginia, and auli (2020) also claimed that including instagram in the efl learning process increased students' speaking skills greatly which were also proven in this study. in line with yudhiantara and saehu (2017) who confirmed that the most widely used social media platforms were effective instruments for facilitating the teaching and learning of english. moreover, the utilization of instagram as a language learning tool that gradually integrated into projectbased learning became an alternative medium to provide innovative and creative teaching speaking skills (qisthi & arifani, 2020). in summary, instagram-mediated project-based learning teaching techniques were not only beneficial in improving the quality of students' writing skills successfully (listiani, 2016), had a tremendous effect on improving students' language skills (handayani, 2015) but also developed students' speaking skills effectively as evidenced in this recent study. in general, the students' responses revealed that they were fun and found it enjoyable to use innovative teaching methods that included mobile technology in language learning, such as the instagram-mediated project-based learning teaching style. furthermore, as mentioned in the research question regarding challenges and strategies, the challenges faced by students in learning speaking through instagram-mediated project-based learning were challenges that could be overcome by the students themselves, such as language barriers, video making, and external factors. likewise, the strategies related to the challenges they found in this lesson could easily propose, such as deepening the aspects of speaking english independently, looking for references to various sources about making videos, and even proposing strategies for solving storage space difficulties. it supported the study's previous findings, which showed that using the teaching approach increased the students' speaking abilities. moreover, students’ creativity, knowledge, and self-confidence increased, and they were able to more freely express themselves while actively speaking english. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 195 conclusion the experimental groups' speaking skills were shown to be significantly enhanced in the current study. its t-test result showed that the difference between the preand post-speaking scores of the control and experimental groups was in favor of the experimental group. this conclusion demonstrated that the treatment was effective in improving students speaking skills by integrating instagrammediated project-based learning teaching techniques into their speaking learning process. the results of the second investigation in this study found the challenges faced by students in using instagram-mediated project-based learning techniques in teaching speaking skill activities. the majority of students did not find the challenges in applying this learning strategy to be overly challenging. it was not difficult to create videos that appealed to a wide range of audiences, including children, teens, and adults. even students' usage of instagram in their daily lives did not appear to have a negative impact. it's only that outside of the execution of this instagram-mediated project-based learning, they noted three primary challenges: linguistic barriers, video, and external factors. several challenges were discovered that were easy to solve based on the findings of the second question concerning the challenges faced in instagram-mediated project-based learning. in order for this learning strategy to be used to students effectively. the third result of the study was to explore the strategies proposed by students to solve the problems encountered in using instagram-mediated project-based learning techniques in teaching speaking skills activities. like the challenges faced, the strategies were given by students also consist of 3 main strategies to overcome these challenges regarding linguistic barriers, video, and external factors. they proposed some strategies such as to learn vocabulary through google translate, finding various video sources such as friends or the internet, and removing some rarely used apps and free up some storage space. based on these results, the strategies were given by students regarding the challenges faced in instagram-mediated projectbased learning could be implemented properly and smoothly. so that this learning technique could be applied effectively. the results of this study were reinforced by student responses which revealed that this learning technique was fun with innovative teaching methods that include mobile technology in language learning which applied instagram-mediated projectbased learning. acknowledgement we would like to express our gratitude to the reviewers and supervisors for their comments and suggestions that helped our research paper improve. we would also like to thank the headmaster and related parties of sma pasundan cikalongkulon cianjur who helped the implementation of the teaching-learning process in this study. references alm, a. 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(2018). instagram use to enhance ability in writing descriptive texts. indonesian efl journal, 4(2), 32–38. subburaj, s., ul ferdus, z., hawhidul kabir, t., amin, z., mansoor, a., rabeet, s., and, h., & hashmat, f. (2016). impact of social media of student’s academic performance. international journal of business and management invention, 5, 22–29. taskiran, a. (2020). telecollaboration: fostering foreign language learning at a distance. european journal of open, distance and e-learning, 22(2), 87–97. https://doi.org/10.2478/eurodl-2019-0012 the george lucas educational foundation. (2005). instructional module project based learning. https://www.edutopia.org/ ur, p. (1996). a course in language learning: practice and theory. cambridge: cambridge university. yudhiantara, r. a., & saehu, a. (2017). mobile-assisted language learning (mall) in indonesian islamic higher education. ijeltal (indonesian journal of english language teaching and applied linguistics), 2(1), 21–31. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 175 nonverbal communication performed by foreign english teacher jihan ananda department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas kuningan, indonesia email: jihanananda91197@gmail.com dadang solihat department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas kuningan, indonesia email: dadangsolihat@uniku.ac.id yayan suryana department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas kuningan, indonesia email: yayansuryana@uniku.ac.id apa citation: ananda, j., solihat, d., & suryana, y. (2020). nonverbal communication performed by foreign english teacher. indonesian efl journal, 6(2), 175-188. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v6i2.3424. received: 02-04-2019 accepted: 01-06-2019 published: 01-07-2020 abstract: this paper specifically aims at knowing the types of nonverbal communications performed by the foreign english teacher based on schmitz’s (2012) theory and finding out the students’ responses toward the foreign english teacher’s nonverbal communication. qualitative research design was applied in this research. the participants of this research were the foreign english teacher and the students of class vii a mtsn 2 kuningan. the data were collected through observation, interview, and questionnaire. the data were analyzed both qualitative and quantitative. the results of the research revealed that the foreign english teacher performed 3 types of nonverbal communication: 1) kinesics (includes gesture: emblems and illustrators, head movements and posture, eye contact, and facial expression); 2) vocalics; and 3) proxemics. however, the foreign english teacher did not perform adaptors and haptics in the classroom. he confessed that he did not really do certain gestures while feeling nervous, and for the american teacher, haptics (communication by touch) is a sensitive thing, and a difficult area. regarding the students’ responses, they felt motivated learning english with the foreign english teacher because it made them happy, excited, proud, enthusiastic, and have willingness to learn more. it was showed that 89,6% of the students responded positively toward nonverbal communication performed by the foreign english teacher in teaching learning process, and being responded negatively by 10,4%. furthermore, it emphasizes that teachers should be aware in applying nonverbal communication to create educative interesting atmosphere for the students and make the teaching learning process effective as well as motivating them. keywords: nonverbal communication; foreign teacher; student’s response. introduction “globalization is a fact, because of technology, because of an integrated global supply chain, because of changes in transportation. and we are not going to be able to build a wall around that,” a quote from barack obama, the 44th president of united states of america. it is clear that globalization is unavoidable in the human life. globalization has an effect on the elements of the world, such as economic, political, cultural, environmental, and many more. people connect to each other easily no matter what side of the world they live in. globalization impacts the way of communication. language plays important role in transmitting and receiving the message in communication (lamichhane, 2016). this means communication deals with the message exchange between sender and receiver using language as the method of human communication, instead of spoken or written. communication has very important roles in life. without the existence of communication, this world would be a silent ball which is full of nothing. communication cannot be separated with human life (panjaitan, suryani, & chairunisak, 2017). wherever humans exist, there is always communication intertwined because communication is the human’s need to share and fulfill their information, emotion, knowledge, idea, and everything. especially in this globalization era, communication skill is needed to improve productivity, including in the field of education. one of productivities conducted by nations in this globalization era is international volunteer program in education field. generally, it aims at mailto:jihanananda91197@gmail.com jihan ananda, dadang solihat & yayan suryana nonverbal communication performed by foreign english teacher 176 educating young generation to have better knowledge, including culture across nations. that kind of productive program is usually be held in developing countries. peace corps is one of the volunteer programs run by the united states of america. taken from its website, peacecorps.gov, their work at the front line has changed the world to be a better place in the field of education. surely, that shared triumphs are achieved by nations in the world. in addition, the program formed 58 years ago is taking advantage of the global connection by connecting educators and the volunteers of peace corps to the next generation all over the world (peacecorps, n.d.). clearly, they send the volunteers to other countries that still need the improvement of their education quality. when the volunteers come to other countries that have different languages and cultures with them, undoubtedly they have to communicate with the local inhabitant. as a teacher, the teacher volunteer should give the appropriate materials to the students by communicating with them. unfortunately, many people have trouble in the area of communication. some just do not possess the professional needed of communication in this globalization era (prabavathi & nagasubramani, 2018). communication can be presented with verbal and nonverbal. nur (2014), says that verbal communication is delivered by meaningful words symbols. the message is exchanged and it creates the idea of oral or verbal communication. added by schmitz (2012), the oral or verbal communication is relied by one channel only. the channel that he meant is through sound on the air and then picked up by humans’ ears. different with the oral communication or verbal communication, nonverbal communication can be taken by the humans’ five senses. the ‘teacher volunteers’ also use nonverbal communication to make sure the interlocutors understand what they are talking about. nonverbal communication following schmitz’s logic (2012) is a process of producing meaning using behaviour, not words. both verbal and nonverbal communications are absolutely used in the teaching learning process as the way to interact to one another. nonverbal communication seems more interesting to be studied because experts of communication science have estimated 70% of the communication is nonverbally involved (raymond, 2016). we cannot deny that every culture has its own characteristics. people in all cultures unavoidably use nonverbal communication which can be inferred differently. devito (2002) gives us some examples, the first is in the united states, they say “hello” by waving whole hand moving side to side, but in the most part of europe that kind of gesture means “no,” and in greece signal is considered as an insult. the second example, the v for victory is a very common normal gesture in the world. but the v gesture in the united kingdom, with the palm facing the face means insulting as the raised middle finger is in the united states of america. another nonverbal communication in the united states and much of asia is hugs. hugs are common among acquaintances, but among latins and southern europeans, hugging has deeper meaning. it is a common greeting gesture, and if someone refuses to hug, he or she may be considered as unfriendly. in addition, american people tend to use index finger to point when giving nonverbal direction, regardless to young and old people (hidayatullah, 2019). different with the indonesian culture, for instance sundanese culture which tends to use thumb to point when giving nonverbal direction especially to older people to show politeness and respect. basically, nonverbal communication helps the communication run smoothly and effectively. imagine if we apply certain nonverbal communication to the classroom. it is believed that the learning process potentially will be more effectively. this is supported by huang (2011) that more understandings is appeared if nonverbal communication is able in getting along with the language. teacher should be aware with the use of nonverbal communication in the classroom. if the teacher’s nonverbal communication is clear and easy to understand, it will be helpful for the students to get the meaning and memorize it. besides, in creating effective learning athmosphere in the classroom, what teachers have to do is maintaining effective communication. not only maintaining, the communication intertwined in the classroom has to be developed (sutiyatno, 2018). imagine a foreign english teacher volunteer teaches indonesian students. the classroom consists of two different cultures from different countries. would the teacher be aware of the nonverbal communication? what kind of the nonverbal communication that probably conducted by the teacher? would the students get the meaning of what the teacher says? how would they response the teacher’s nonverbal communication? would the students become indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 177 motivated in learning english with the foreign english teacher? because amin, sumitro and lukiani (2017) claim that motivation has an important role in giving encouragement to do something. motivation is such a crucial and effective factor that should be possessed by the students in learning language (mahadi & jafari, 2012). haliq and masta (2016) already conducted a research to find out the influence of nonverbal communication toward students’ motivation to learn. from test that they conducted, it was proved that nonverbal communication performed by teacher has significant influence toward students’ interest in learning. kirby (2020) mentions factors that determine someone’s motivation such as pride, recognition, monetary rewards, pressure from any parties, and fear. therefore, the results of nowdays research proved that there was a correlation between the teacher’s nonverbal communication skills and students’ motivation (bambaeeroo & shokrpour, 2017). in addition, sercu (2006) states that the main focus of foreign teachers from countries around the world is how to acquire communicative competence. it is very useful in the foreign language learning as well as teaching culture. therefore, the students’ familiarity and knowledge of new culture are increased as well as their motivation, passion, and excitement to learn the foreign language. method this research was a descriptive qualitative utilizing schmitz’s (2012) theory. sugiyono (2016) concludes that qualitative method is a natural setting as the direct source of data and researcher is the key instrument. the foreign english teacher from united states of america and students class vii a of mts negeri 2 kuningan were the research subjects. the first research question regarding the nonverbal communications performed by foreign english teacher was revealed using observation and interview, meanwhile the second research question regarding students’ responses toward nonverbal communication performed by foreign english teacher was revealed using interview and questionnaire. creswell (2012) mentioned that in a qualitative research, field notes is useful in recording data of observation which is the form of words. fraenkel and wallen (2012) suggest to utilize interview to make sure the accuracy by verifying or refuting the data taken from the observation. the one-on-one interview type in conducting the interview was used. creswell (2012) states that in collecting the data, one-onone interview is effective enough to get deeper information from one participant at a time. 16 out of 31 students who were interviewed voluntarily (herdiansyah, 2013). meanwhile, questionnaire is the types of written interview that is conducted to get information from the interviewer. it can be carried out face to face, by telephone, computer, or post (mcleod, 2018). to answer the research questions, the researcher analyzed the data qualitatively supported by the quantitative data. the qualitative data collected from observation and interview. meanwhile, the data from questionnaire were analyzed quantitatively. in analyzing the data, the researcher conducted these steps: reduction, data display, and conclusion (miles & huberman, 1984). results and discussion nonverbal communication performed by foreign english teacher after conducting class observation and interview, the researcher found the results which help and support evidence to answer the first research question. the vii a class was chosen for the classroom observation to observe the teaching process regarding nonverbal communication performed by foreign english teacher. the result indicated that the foreign english teacher commonly performed different nonverbal communications. the observation result is showed by the table 4.1 related to the nonverbal communication conducted by foreign english teacher. table 1. the observation field notes result observation field notes setting : mtsn 2 kuningan observer : jihan ananda name of participant : mr. miguel (teacher) no. indicator subindicators yes no note 1 kinesics a. gestures adaptors  jihan ananda, dadang solihat & yayan suryana nonverbal communication performed by foreign english teacher 178 emblems  shushing illustrators  two, listen, i, everyone. b. head movement and posture head nodding standing  sitting  squatting  lying down  c. eye contact  quite often d. facial expression happiness  smile sadness  fear  anger  disgust  2 haptics touch handshake  pat on the arm  pat on the shoulder  3 vocalics a. pitch  asking b. volume  speaking louder in front of the class c. rate  speaking slowly with clear articulation d. verbal fillers  fluent 4 proxemics proxemics distances  comes closer to the student he intends to talk with based on the result from classroom observation, the table 1 the observation field notes result indicates that the foreign english teacher performed these nonverbal communications; 1) kinesics (includes gesture: emblems and illustrators, head movement and posture: standing, eye contact, and facial expression: happiness); 2) vocalics; and 3) proxemics. it is also concluded that the foreign english teacher did not perform haptics or communication by touch. kinesics kinesics outlines the use of gestures (adaptors, emblems, and illustrators); head movements and posture; eye contact; and facial expression. however, the researcher only found out emblems and illustrators in gestures; head movements and posture; eye contact; and happiness in facial expression. there are three main types of gestures: adaptors, emblems, and illustrator. emblems and illustrator are the gestures that the foreign english teacher performed in the classroom. emblems are the gestures that have a specific agreed-on meaning. emblems have nothing to do with the sign language. here are the emblems that the foreign english teacher performed. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 179 figure 1. emblem with “sshh” sign his index finger on his lips does not indicate any sexual desire. the gesture means he asks his students to be quiet. when the class situation is hectic, this gesture is perfect to be used. it is a “shushing gesture” that is quite common in indonesia. illustrators are type of gesture used to illustrate the verbal message. unlike emblems, illustrators do not typically have meaning on their own. besides, illustrators are used more subconsciously than emblems. figure 2. illustrating“two” holding up the index and middle fingers in a “v” shape like the picture above does not mean “peace” in the united states or “up yours” in britain. it basically illustrates “two.” he always combines the gesture with his voice of saying “two” as a result his students understand the pronunciation of “two” in english and the difference between “two” and “to” is clearly spoken. figure 3. illustrating “listen” pointing index finger to ear means “listen.” in this case, the foreign english teacher gives instruction to the students to listen to him carefully. he does this quite often in the classroom when his students mishear his instructions. jihan ananda, dadang solihat & yayan suryana nonverbal communication performed by foreign english teacher 180 figure 4. illustrating “i” his hands on his chest illustrates “i” as he says “i” not “eye.” this gesture is very useful to differentiate the homophones. this “i” illustration gesture can be categorized as a natural gesture flow. figure 5. illustrating “everyone” to describe “everyone” in the classroom, the foreign teacher draws a circle in air with both hands. as saying “everyone” and doing eye contact to every student, this gesture is understood by the most of students. the gesture dominantly performed by teacher of english as a foreign language illustrators, it is a gesture of hand and body which naturally flowing with the speech (rahmat, 2018). figure 6. head nodding head nodding as a form of nonverbal communication is categorized as kinesics. in the picture, head nodding performed by the foreign english teacher is an agreement or saying “yes” to the student’s answer. from his head nodding, the clarity of the answer is showed vividly. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 181 figure 7. posture standing is one of four general human postures. by standing, the communication occurs perfectly between the foreign english teacher and his students. he stands with the hands folded holding marker. with that position, the teacher looks professional and ready for action. figure 8. eye contact conveying information to the students, the foreign english teacher looks focus during communication. interpersonal connections with the students were indicated by his eye contact. in the picture, the foreign english teacher makes eye contact to the students while giving material to make sure all students give their attention to him. not only to all students, the foreign english teacher also makes eye contact to every student he talks to. using a picture as media, he stands in front of the student and does eye contact to get student’s response. the foreign english does eye contact all the time in the classroom. figure 9. facial expression smile on the foreign teacher’s face is part of facial expressions. his smile is an expression of happiness and friendliness to the students. smile is also shown by the foreign teacher when he sees jihan ananda, dadang solihat & yayan suryana nonverbal communication performed by foreign english teacher 182 the student’s funny behavior in front of the class. his smile warms up the classroom athmosphere. vocalics vocalics is the study of paralanguage. there are four vocalics that the foreign english teacher performed in the classroom: pitch, volume, rate, and verbal fillers. the first vocalics performed is pitch. every question asked by the foreign english teacher is with a higher pitched ending. for example, “what is in the picture?” “janitor, bahasa indonesia?” the pitch he performs is recognized by the students. as a result, the question is answered by the students and the communication runs well. the next vocalics performed by the foreign english teacher is volume. this american teacher knows when to speak louder. for example, when he delivers material in front of the class, he speaks louder to make sure the students listen to him. he adjusts his volume based on the setting and distance. supported by karim and sotoudehnama (2017), tone of voice is one of the nonverbal communication used from the most frequently used to the least used respectively. not only aware of volume, the foreign english teacher is also aware of speaking rate. he tends to speak slowly to the students with very clear articulation. this is because the most language used in the classroom is english. however when he speaks in bahasa indonesia, the rate is also slow, clear, and understandable. in addition, both languages are mixed to be more interested. for instance, “you / bahasa inggris / i / bahasa indonesia //” for the verbal fillers, he always knows what to say next because he speaks english very well. besides, he knows when to pause for a moment to think the words and to emphasize the words during the communication. in a situation he says “okay, everyone. today, we are going to learn about adjective. kata sifat. tau?” proxemics figure 10. proxemics proxemics is the study of how space and distance influence communication. in the picture, we see the distance comparison performed by the foreign english teacher to the students. he gives space to the students to answer the question on the whiteboard. after the question is answered, the teacher comes closer to the students to explain the answer. he realizes how important the space is in this situation. to get deeper information and avoid confusion about nonverbal communication performed by foreign english teacher taken from the observation, the researcher conducted an interview with the foreign teacher. the interview was also helpful in matching the data taken from the observation. therefore, the findings would be valid. the main topic of interview was about the nonverbal communication he performed. it was revealed that the teacher was aware that nonverbal communication had important role in teaching. other way of communication was needed to create more understanding in communication. nonverbal communication was the perfect way to accompany the verbal language. especially in teaching the indonesian young learners, who mostly do not speak english very well, the foreign teacher must be creative in giving them great input. the situation that mostly “forced” the foreign teacher to perform nonverbal communication was obviously in the classroom setting, when the students look confused with what the teacher explains. to be a professional teacher, the foreign teacher worked hard to serve the best for the students. communication is the indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 183 basic way, so it is important to make an effective understanding communication accompanied by the nonverbal communication. the first nonverbal communication performed by the foreign teacher was kinesics. as a human, being nervous while teaching and communicating with the students is normal, especially if the teacher is not experienced enough. this american teacher had two years of teaching english experience, one year in the united states, and one year in indonesia. he used to feel nervous at the beginning, but he was quite good at controlling his feeling. he did not really do anything while feeling nervous, probably just face expression that was shown. it is confirmed that the adaptors or touching behaviors and movements that indicate typically related to nervous or anxiety were not performed by the foreign english teacher. then, he looked professional in teaching and learned new things every single day. while teaching, it is important to look at the students in the eyes. get them by staring at their eyes. it shows the intention to communicate with them, and also to get their attention. not only the eye contact, the teacher’s expression was also a good contributing factor of the successful of teaching. by giving them nice expressions, the class atmosphere would be animatic, alive and not boring. vocalics which is also the part of nonverbal communication have important role in teaching. the foreign english teacher knew very well how to make the students understand what he was saying. in “playing” with vocal, the foreign teacher spoke in the slow and clear style. the point is to make sure the students know every word spoken by him. young learners are the fast learners. they learn the language quickly. to get to know the students better, it is important for the teacher to speak directly with them. communicating with the students is the key of teaching. selle (2015) proved that teacher’s moves around the classroom while teaching is the way to create effective interaction. the foreign english teacher felt happy communicating directly with the students because he wanted to communicate better with them and make a good vibe of communication. it is clear that the foreign english teacher also performed vocalics and proxemics. for the american teacher, haptics (communication by touch) is a sensitive thing, and a difficult area. anyone might feel uncomfortable with the haptics. we never know the kind of risks, and you never know whether students feel uncomfortable with this as well or their parents. if the teacher wanted to communicate with a student, he would rather call the name or just say “hi” than touching the student’s back. for him, nonverbal communication flows naturally in human beings. what we have to consider is culture differences. know who you are and who you talk to. in using nonverbal communication, people from different cultures as well as different languages contribute to the consciousness and awareness of intercultural communication (wahyuni, 2017). nonverbal communication holds crusial role in teaching learning process to improve teaching quality and efficiency in the foreign language classroom (pan, 2014). from the result of the observation and interview, it is obvious that the foreign english teacher performed three types of nonverbal communication, they are kinesics, vocalis, and proxemics. meanwhile, haptics were not performed by the foreign english teacher. in addition, adaptors, one of kinesics parts, were not also performed by the foreign english teacher. students’ responses toward nonverbal communication performed by foreign english teacher to answer the second research question, questionnaire and interview were utilized. the researcher collected the responses of students from questionnaire and interview. 31 students of class vii a filled out the questionnaire. meanwhile there were 16 students who were willing to be interviewed. the analysis of the students’ responses toward the foreign english teacher’s nonverbal communication is shown as follow. kinesics based on the result of the interview, most of the students felt motivated when the foreign english teacher was using gestures in the classroom. the combination of gestures and verbal communication is the good way of learning some pronunciation of words in english. the students were helped by the foreign english teacher’s gesture in understanding the material. it just felt unique for them to have a foreign teacher who spoke different language. the gestures of the foreign language teacher made the students even focus on what he was saying. however, the teacher always helped the communication between the foreign teacher and the students so the teaching learning process ran smoothly. the students confirmed that head movements and posture of the foreign english teacher jihan ananda, dadang solihat & yayan suryana nonverbal communication performed by foreign english teacher 184 affected their motivation in learning english. when the foreign teacher nodded his head indicating that the students’ answer is correct, they felt happy and had more passion to learn more. besides, they also felt that their ability in learning was good. proud and enjoyment were created in learning english with the foreign teacher. the foreign teacher’s eye contact had special effect toward their learning motivation. they felt like they got attention when the teacher was looking them in the eyes. besides, the students’ also felt focused. the communication seemed to be active by making eye contact. the other opinion, making eye contact with the foreign english teacher was kind of something that they wanted to avoid. in some occasions, eye contact was being avoided by them because they did not want to answer the teacher’s question. sometimes they felt embarrassed when the teacher was looking at their eyes. facial expression performed by the foreign english teacher was smile. the students confessed that the foreign english teacher’s smile somehow had effect toward their learning motivation. friendliness and happiness were shown from a smile. this kind of atmosphere affected students’ feeling. they did not feel afraid, nervous, or even awkward. teacher’s smile spreaded happiness to the students. that is why, they liked talking with the foreign english teacher. lisa (2006) stated that students’ motivation for learning english is likely enhanced when the teacher utilizes the following behaviors: smile, gesture, has a relaxed body position, and uses a monotone voice while teaching. vocalics from the interview, the students admitted that foreign english teacher’s vocal affected their motivation in studying english. lisa (2006) adds that variety of vocal expression also increases students’ motivation. when the foreign english teacher was talking loudly, the students were happy because they could hear it clearly. even though they did not understand english very well, if the teacher’s voice was clear and fluent, the students’ motivation appeared. besides, the seatmates little discussion was often conducted by the students to discuss the foreign teacher’s verbal words. proxemics taken from the interview the students confessed that they felt motivated when the foreign english teacher was next to them. beside the teacher’s clear voice, the students were also excited because a teacher from another country was talking with them directly. supported by the teacher’s good attitude, the students felt comfortable and learned so many things from the foreign english teacher. they became more understand the material given. that kind of feeling motivated them to be willing to learn english more. the students enjoyed learning english with the foreign english teacher. the friendliness is shown by the teacher. he adapted the indonesian culture very well. it is shown by the excitement and enthusiasm from the students toward the foreign english teacher. collaborating with the school english teacher, the foreign english teacher contributed ideas to live the class up. for example is by applying games in teaching vocabulary. studying english with the american teacher gave something valuable to the students and motivated them well. they knew new words in english, the correct pronunciation words in english, and they got new knowledge and experience with the foreign english teacher. the other reason why the students liked studying with the foreign english teacher was because his character who was nice, friendly, and easy-going. it makes the students happy, excited, enthusiastic, proud, and have more passion to learn more. nonverbal communication such as facial expression, body movement, proxemics, eye contact, and paralanguage also take parts in affecting students’ motivation (indrawan, nitiasih, & piscayanti, 2017). the non-verbal communication can be an important source of motivation and concentration for students’ learning as well as a tool for taking and maintaining attention (zeki, 2009). students’ responses were also taken from the questionnaire. it revealed students’ response toward foreign english teacher’s nonverbal communication. in addition, students’ responses toward learning process were gathered through the questionnaire as well. it consists of 22 questions that are filled out by 31 students. the following is the student’s questionnaire result. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 185 table 1. the student’s questionnaire result no. statement answer yes no 1 i always feel excited learning english when the teacher is coming to the class. 30 1 2 i feel interested to learn english. 28 3 3 learning english with mr. miguel is fun. 31 0 4 i like learning english with mr. miguel 31 0 5 i actively involved in learning english with mr. miguel 29 2 6 i understand when mr. miguel puts his index finger on his lips while making “sshh” sound is to keep students quiet and i feel motivated to be silent. 30 1 7 i understand when mr. miguel pointing up his index and middle fingers while saying “two” is because number two. i feel more understood and motivated. 31 0 8 when mr. miguel touches his ear while saying “listen”, he asks students to listen. i feel motivated to listen. 31 0 9 i understand the movements such as making a circle in the air with both hands while saying “everyone” means “everyone.” i feel motivated to listen more. 26 5 10 i feel motivated when mr. miguel nods his head when my answer is correct. 30 1 11 when mr. miguel stands up straight while explaining the material, i feel motivated and more ready to study. 31 0 12 i feel motivated and interaction is active when mr. miguel makes eyes contact with me. 25 6 13 i feel embarrassed when mr. miguel makes eyes contact with me. 15 16 14 i feel motivated because communication signals become strong when mr. miguel smiles at me. 27 4 15 i feel motivated listening to mr. miguel’s voice that is clear (such as the pitch, volume, rate, and verbal fillers). 25 6 16 english words pronounced by mr. miguel are poorly understood. 12 19 17 communication runs smoothly when mr. miguel is next to me. 26 5 18 i feel motivated and love to communicate directly with mr. miguel. 27 4 19 i often feel sleepy when studying english with mr. miguel. 2 29 20 i often daydream when studying english with mr. miguel. 3 28 21 i often concentrate when studying english with mr. miguel. 30 1 22 studying english with mr. miguel increases my motivation to learn. 31 0 total 540 142 682 positive 611 89,6% negative 71 10,4% adapted from schmitz (2012) the responses from the student’s questionnaire were analyzed its positive and negative responses. based on the students’ responses above, there were 31 students who filled out 22 numbers of questionnaires. this means, 682 answers were gathered. 611 of them responded positively, and 71 students responded negatively. take a look at the formulation of the positive and negative responses analysis below. positive response p = fo/n x 100% = 611/682 x 100% = 89,6% negative response p = fo/n x 100% = 71/682 x 100% = 10,4% from the student’s response questionnaire, it shows that 89,6% of the students respond positively toward nonverbal communication jihan ananda, dadang solihat & yayan suryana nonverbal communication performed by foreign english teacher 186 performed by the foreign english teacher. in addition, the foreign english teacher’s nonverbal communication is being responded negatively by 10,4% of the students. conclusion from the research conducted it can be concluded that the foreign english teacher performed three types of nonverbal communication namely kinesics, vocalics and proxemics. however, the nonverbal communications that the foreign english teacher did not perform were adaptor and haptics. the adaptors or “touching behaviors” were not performed because the teacher did not feel nervous or anxiety in the classroom while teaching. in addition, he did not perform haptics because touch is a sensitive thing, and a difficult area. in addition, learning english with the foreign english teacher motivated the students because it made them happy, excited, proud, enthusiastic, and have willingness to learn more. it shows that 89,6% of the students respond positively toward nonverbal communication performed by the foreign english teacher. in addition, the foreign english teacher’s nonverbal communication is being responded negatively by 10,4% of the students. references bambaeeroo, f., & shokrpour, n. 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(2015). nonverbal codes in english classroom interaction: ethnographic study at state islamic college (stain) parepare. alishlah, 13(1), 75-87. sercu, l. (2006). the foreign language and intercultural competence teacher: the acquisition of a new professional identity. intercultural education, 17(1), 55-72. sugiyono. (2016). metode penelitian kuantitatif, kualitatif, dan r&d. bandung: alfabeta. sutiyatno, s. (2018). the effect of teacher's verbal and nonverbal communication on students' english achievement. journal of language teaching and research, 9(2), 430-437. wahyuni, a. (2017). the power of verbal and nonverbal communication in learning. 1st international conference on intellectuals' global responsibility (icigr 2017) (hal. 8083). sidoarjo: atlantis press. zeki, c. p. (2009). the importance of non-verbal communication in classroom management. procedia social and behavioral sciences, 1(1), 1443–1449. jihan ananda, dadang solihat & yayan suryana nonverbal communication performed by foreign english teacher 188 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 127 designation of gender on electronic efl textbook for senior high school imam santosa department of english education, sekolah tinggi keguruan dan ilmu pendidikan (stkip) media nusantara citra, indonesia e-mail: imam_santosa@stkipmnc.ac.id apa citation: santosa (2020). designation of gender on electronic efl textbook for senior high school. indonesian efl journal, 6(2), 127-138. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v6i2.3381. received: 07-03-2020 accepted: 02-04-2020 published: 01-07-2020 abstract: this study aims to examine gender representation in the electronic efl textbook for senior high school. content analysis will be utilized to examine gender representation in the electronic efl textbook for senior high school entitles “bahasa inggris x” published by puskurbuk. the study probes gender representation focusing on the designation of the character proposed by unesco. the designation of the gender representation in the textbook comprises 5 designations; first name, family relationship, other relationship, occupational status (agriculture, education, trade, small business, health, art and culture, and office) other status. the study later will reveal how the designation of the gender representation in the textbook. the comparison is 40% and 31%. unsurprisingly, the number considered as ungendered character is slightly lower in 29. the designation of the character in textbook is dominated by first name with 98 appearance for male and 82 for female character. then, the category followed by occupation status, (68:60 character), other relationship (52:34), and family relationship category (34:20). the result concluded that male character dominated in all designation category strengthen the position of the male as dominant character. additionally, the result of the study will give the insight on how gender representation exists as the basis to evaluate the construction of the textbook. keywords: gender; gender bias; gender representation; textbook. introduction during these decades, the issue of gender bias has been frantically conferred in english language learning. the concern of gender bias highlights how men and women are portrayed in learning, especially in learning english. portrayals of gender bias can be discovered in the use of language in the classroom as well as in teaching materials used during the learning process. the disproportion of roles and representations between men and women depicted in teaching materials may not be in accordance with real life. thus, learning english that occurs is expected to increase awareness of gender equality between men and women in the representation of teaching materials. the issue of gender bias addresses the imbalance proportion on the daily basis. this issue, certainly, alter student perception toward gender equality. it could also create intolerable because of unjustified and unfair situation based on gender bias (mille, 1992). moreover, mustapha discovered that gender bias shaped children development, as basically, gender bias is systemic injustice depiction that makes one gender, especially women marginalized (mustapha, 2013). in addition, johansson and malmsjö explained that gender bias refers to a situation where one gender is treated unfairly compared to the other gender (2009). by looking at the explanation above, gender bias is an imbalance and injustice that occurs in men and women in the education system where one gender is marginalized compared to other genders because of the limited opportunities to get an equal education and portrayal. in 2005, 2006, and 2007, united nation through unesco emphasised the importance of gender equality on catering education for both boys and girl. later, it synthesized the framework to determine gender equality on the textbook (brugeilles & cramer, 2009). the framework also determined the essential role of the textbook to promote gender equality. however, recent study on gender bias on the textbook. zhao identified the inequality gender on the text embedding on the text (2019). furthermore, ali uncovered gender-bias on the iranian efl textbook focusing on its illustration (dabbagh, 2016). on the top of that, vahdatinejad examined linguistic sexism on the textbook. later, the result revealed lack, unfair, and unbalance women exposure in the textbook (vahdatinejad, 2017). later, fahrian, alek and wekke (2019) investigated gender representation in the efl textbook used by islamic school. the outcome exposed the imam santosa designation of gender on electronic efl textbook for senior high school 128 unbalance and inequal proposition inside the textbook. the previous researches validate gender bias on the textbook. the studies of gender variously conducted on over the world. in 2003, ansary and babii (2003) depicted the role of particular gender in the daily activity. the study focus on the sexist attitude and gender value in the textbook. however, the study focus only the visibility of sexism in the textbook without concerning the role of each gender in the text. furthermore, other study conducted by sulistyo (2013) conducted the study on focusing the visibility of gender bias in the textbook. the study hugely showed gender inequality in the textbook. based on the two previous study on the gender, the fixation is on the visibility of the gender bias in the textbook. in this study, the issues are not only focus on how gender bias portrayed in the textbook, but also how gender equality exists in the textbook. the study also uses the unesco guideline on promoting gender equality in the textbook. textbook, understandably, has major impact on delivering issues. textbook bears important role on transmits a society‟s cultural capital to its youngest citizens at a particular moment (brugeilles & cramer, 2009). textbook, furthermore, prevailed as an agent of change. hutchinson and torres (1994) assumed that a good textbook, properly used, can administer an exquisite agent for effective and long-lasting change. crawford (2019) urged that textbook, as powerful tool, manufactured to meet a particular cultural, economic or social goals. in addition, smith and apple justified agger critical theory of text on how social science textbook performed a political role as a consignment tool to reflects the interest of capitalism and patriarchy (apple & christian-smith, 2018). as the undeniably important role of the textbook, it is relevant to reinvestigate the designation of gender on the textbook. the teachers need to recognize if the textbook considered as gender biased and to equip themselves to modify the application of textbook to ensure the student obtain equal opportunity for learning. in case of unawareness of the teacher on gender bias in the textbook, especially in the dialogue, will, may unconsciously hinder the speaking practice contingency for the underrepresented gender. recently the study of gender in the textbook variously conducted in several aspect of analysis. ariyanto (2018) examined the portrayal of gender inequality in the textbook. it revealed that gender stereotype presented in the visual and verbal text. furthermore, emilia (2017) analysed the reading text in the textbook using transitivity system of functional grammar. the study showed that that males were perpetually constructed as „adventurous‟, „risk taker‟, „active‟, „independent‟, and „capable‟. meanwhile, the processes also indicate that the females were shaped as more „passive', ‟expressive‟, „nurturing‟, and „unassertive‟. ahmad and shah (2019) analysed the representation gender bias in the textbook utilizing fairclough‟s threedimensional model. the result of the study showed that the textbook is designed to maintain male dominance in implicit as well as explicit ways. meanwhile, yang (2016) investigate visual representation in the textbook carrying gender. the result showed that binary notions of gender often remained intact in their normative forms there were also other forms of representation which challenged them. the latest development of the gender equality concluded that, still, far from ideal. furthermore, unesco have created the project to promoting gender equality in every aspect of life. the project manifested in the 20142021 action plan of gender equality. it shows the guideline to ensure gender equality perspective is reflected in all policies. in related with the issue of promoting gender equality, unesco in sync with international network for research into gendered representations in textbooks (réseau international de recherche sur les representations sexuées dans les manuels scolaires – rirrs), undertook the project of gender equality by utilizing textbook (brugeilles & cramer, 2009). the project originated the framework to examine gender in-equality in the textbook. the framework incorporates characteristic of gender bias in the textbook. those are category, sex and age of the character, designations, activities, attributes, interaction, and the location of the lesson. this study determined how those policies or action plan concluded in the reality. the study revealed how gender equality existed in the textbook. the revelation in this study would provide insight to the educator the gender issue in the textbook. it would lead the educator wisely use the textbook to promote gender equality. gender bias gender defined as a social and psychological dimension of sex (huyck, 1999). hyuck also determined the gender role as social ordinance or stereotypes associated with each sex; it may also be used to construe the extent to which a indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 129 particular individual adhere with the social notion. moreover, scott (1986) explains the gender term used to discuss social organization about relationships between men and women. furthermore, scott in (meyerowitz, 2008) conveyed that the word gender shift in meaning. men or masculinity is depicted as scott predicted, to the multiplicity strength, protection, independence, camaraderie, discipline, rivalry. in other hand, women or femininity represented weakness, fragility, helplessness, emotionality, passivity, domestication, nurturance, attractiveness, partnership, excess, and temptation. what is more, stoller in (geller & sved, 1997) referred gender as a particular balance of masculinity and femininity encountered in each person. the definition carried psychological or cultural rather than biological connotations. on the top of that, unesco defined gender as is pertinent to culture and the social division into “masculine” and “feminine”. gender therefore associated to the qualities, tastes, aptitudes, roles and responsibilities associated with men and women in a society. definitions of masculine and feminine differ enormously exhibit their social origin considering every society establish its classification on the basis of its own criteria and principles. the notion of masculinity and femininity are not refined independently of each other but are commonly reliant. accordingly, the word gender is not associated with the definition of sex carried by biological connotation but rather social, cultural and psychological connotation. unfair portrayals that tend to be biased between men and women in education still exist even though it is very hidden. gender bias as explained by raina (2017) is the difference in opportunities that men and women have in the education system which ultimately affects men and women in undergoing and completing education. in line with the previous explanation, zittleman and sadker (2002) explained that men and women receive different education even though they sit in the same class, read the same book, listen to the same teacher. gender bias, in fact, prevail in the several aspects of daily basis. rovino and rorong (2019) examined tinder application as semiotic analysis on its gender performance. the result revealed that although generally tinder user remained to conform to the traditional gender ideology that is masculine-centric and feminine-centric, the subversive gender performances that went against the traditionalist view on gender were also noticeably. on the other hand, fay (1993) conducted an experiment on how women unfairly discriminated on requesting loan. the result widely held perception that women can encounter gender discrimination when requesting loan. such discriminatory behaviour by loan officers may not be, and probably is not, intentional. rather, the pervasiveness of the social construction of differential gender roles in western culture is such that it is more likely that discrimination is unconscious, and consequently more difficult to change. furthermore, mustapa (2013) explained that gender bias can affect the quality of education because it can affect the development of children because basically gender bias is a systematic injustice of representation that makes one gender, especially women marginalized. in addition, johansson and malmsjö (2009) explained that gender bias refers to a situation where one gender is treated unfairly compared to the other gender. moreover, macnell, driscoll and hunt (2015) administered the experiment on how student perceive the rate of teacher based on gender in online classroom. the result delivered that student tends to rate male teacher higher than female teacher. the students rated the male identity significantly higher than the female identity, regardless of the instructor‟s actual gender, demonstrating gender bias. given the vital role that student ratings play in academic career trajectories, this finding warrants considerable attention. the findings and the result inline the result by olafsdottir (2018). olafsdottir discovered that the discrepancy between student evaluation of teaching for male and female faculty, using random-effects ordered logit regressions. i find that female faculty receive lower evaluations than male faculty in a simple model. in a model linking each of the covariates with gender i find an even greater gender bias for full-time faculty, while female part-time instructors receive higher student evaluation of teaching than their male counterparts. gender bias in efl classroom can be obstacle to develop student ability in learning. hassaskhah & zamir (2013) examine studentteacher interaction and student-student interaction focusing on gender theory. the result uncovered that there were significant differences in the quantity and quality of the interaction for females and males in almost all categories of interaction. the study also revealed that the presence of any negative barrier such as gender bias is likely to hinder development. minasyan (2017) conducted imam santosa designation of gender on electronic efl textbook for senior high school 130 an investigation how teachers and students position themselves within different discourses in efl classroom interaction. the result emphasises 4 point on gender issue. those are (a) teachers are biased in favour of boys, especially with respect to giving them more attention; (b) male students demand more teacher attention and more instructions from the teacher than their female peers; (c) female students are more likely to receive praise and positive comments, whereas male students are reprimanded by the teacher; (d) male students are more active in class participation, by taking more turns, volunteering and calling out. so, by looking at the explanation above, gender bias is an imbalance and injustice that occurs in men and women in the education system where one gender is marginalized compared to other genders because of the limited opportunities to get an equal education and portrayal. in the term of professionalism in the education, gender bias unbelievably existed. jan sauermann, mengel and zolits (2019) revealed that particular gender would obtain lower score than other in the teaching evaluation. moreover, the study also uncovered the slow progress of particular gender in the career path. in the other hand, the study conducted by helmer, schottdorf, neef, & battaglia, (2017) showed that women are underrepresented in the peer-review process, that editors of both genders operate with substantial same-gender preference (homophily), and that the mechanisms of this homophily are genderdependent. gender bias in the textbook gender bias manifested in efl material especially textbook. amini (2012) investigated gender bias in iranian textbook. the focus of the study was the visibility (frequency and nature) of the two genders across five sections containing omission, firstness, masculine generic constructions, occupations and activities in two of the iranian efl textbooks currently practiced at the high school level. those categories were examined in both text and illustration. the result conclude that every category examined was reveal gender bias. the result showed over posed male characters both text and illustration in frequency and order of occurrence, occupation, stereotypical activities, and the linguistic manifestation of masculine generic referents. parham (2013) the present study explored the representation of gender in conversations, illustrations and graphic design of the cover in nine packages designed to teach english to young children for evidence of bias. the study investigated the gender bias on three different point. the first was conversation. the conversation was divided into 3 main variables to be analysed of gender representation; number of participants, and lastly, the number of turns that males and females take in a conversation. next, second point was how gender was represented in illustrations. two variables were inspected; the appearance of each gender and the prominence of the character. the last point was the representation of gender in the cover design of the books apart to the number of male and female characters present. the findings of this study exposed that conversations in efl books for children have moved toward a more egalitarian representation of females and males, and surprisingly females have achieved equitable visibility in conversations. the results, yet, further exhibit the under-representation of female characters in illustrations of the textbooks studied. in the other hand, johansson & malmsjo (2009) differently investigated gender representation focusing on the dialogue in the textbook. the focus of the studied rely on 4 different typologies of the dialogue within the textbook; initiating a dialogue turns taken, number of characters and number of words used. the result, again, conform the over-presentation on one particular gender. in the initiating the dialogue, female turned to be dominant appearance in the dialogue. next, as in the turn taken typology., the overall appearance of each gender indicated that, again, women gained more presentation than man. then, in the typology of number of character representation in the textbook, male emerged as over-representation character. and the last was word used. in this typology, male outnumbered female. the result, again, indicates that gender bias, still, lie on the textbook though the domination of the gender in this study was female. broadly speaking, three previous study concluded that gender bias, unfortunately, still, exist in the textbook. the portrayal gender bias emerged in both text and illustration. the role of textbook according to unesco, textbook: define as the core learning medium composed of text and/or images created to deliver about a particular educational outcome; traditionally a printed and bound book including illustrations and instructions for aiding chain of learning activities. (unesco, 2005). textbook greatly contribute in learning as the tools of delivering knowledge. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 131 besides, textbook enact as an important aspect in children nurturing and educating by disseminate the epitome of social behaviour, norms and values of society (brugeilles & cramer, 2009). hutchinson and torres (1994) assumed that a good textbook, properly used, can administer an exquisite agent for effective and long-lasting change. crawford (2019) urged that textbook, as powerful tool, manufactured to meet a particular cultural, economic or social goals. in addition, smith and apple justified agger critical theory of text on how social science textbook performed a political role as a consignment tool to reflects the interest of capitalism and patriarchy (apple & christian-smith, 2018). moreover, lau et al (2018) justified the importance of textbook in the learning process. the textbook delivered the flexibility in the teaching and learning on digital situation. the argument believe that the role is textbook, not only, as mere transmitting knowledge, but also as a tool to deliver the idea, culture and particular view. edge (1993) in tabassum (2018) pointed out the benefit of textbook as attractive, reliable and user friendly. later, unesco further note that textbook as the vehicle of values and models of social behaviour through the representations that textbook contained (brugeilles & cramer, 2009). textbook evaluation textbook carries both positive and negative aspect on it based on the way we used it and how it delivered. cunningsworth (1995) argued the importance of textbook evaluation as a basis to get the best of the textbook and get rid of the weakness. furthermore, ahmadi and ali (2016) determined that textbook evaluation would create an opportunity to the teacher to reflect their perception of the strength and the weakness of the textbook. lopez (2016) believe that textbook evaluation would create adjustment of the textbook in the future. bogoleva (2016) concluded that textbook evaluation could be one of instrument to identify both pedagogical and linguistic need for the student and the teacher. gender equality framework by unesco promoting gender equality, unesco formulated a methodological guidance for textbook. the method utilized the framework instrument to evaluate the material contained gender bias in the textbook (brugeilles & cramer, 2009). unesco believed that people should get equal opportunity in the society, regardless the gender. the guidance has two fundamental objectives. the intentions here is therefore to consider the textbook‟s comprehensive environment and all the parties entangled and to explore the possibilities of the textbook as a vehicle for gender equality. in this context, textbooks are compelling leverage of social change in inseminator universal values (brugeilles & cramer, 2009). the first objective is to display the existence of gender equality in the textbook. next aim is to give the party involved in the creating textbook a suggestion to scrutinize the textbook or the suggestion to use the textbook critically. the studies (johansson & malmsjo, 2009; parham, 2013; amini, 2011; brugeiles and cramer, 2009) indicated that gender bias can be detected by two may feature; text and illustration. the text may contain text, dialogue, instruction, task and activity in the textbook and the illustration may contain the image inside the textbook. furthermore, based on international network for research into gendered representations in textbooks (réseau international de recherche sur les représentations sexuées dans les manuels scolaires – rirrs), gender bias in the textbook occurred in the six particular category (brugeilles & cramer, 2009). the first category is category, sex and age of the character. this category concerns the representation of the character based on its biological connotation of gender such as man, boys, woman, or girls. next category is designation. designation is the situation that being given to the character in the text. the designation category narrowed into first name/surname or title family relationship (mother, uncle, etc.) other relationship (friend, neighbour, etc.) occupational status (occupation, political or religious office). this category of designation can be decided into 7 group. agriculture: farmer, farm manager related job, education: primary-school teacher, secondaryschool teacher; trade: shopkeeper, salesman/saleswoman, bookseller; health: doctor, pharmacist; art, culture, science, media: artist, engineer, journalist; and office work: office worker, secretary, librarian. then beside previous category is other status (customer, traveller, etc.), another category is activities. the activities is the action that being situated by the character such as school activity, occupational activity, formal or non-formal, domestic activity, buying activity, • care or caring activity, leisure, recreational or sports activity, social activity, routine personal activity (washing, eating), negative activity (making a mistake, imam santosa designation of gender on electronic efl textbook for senior high school 132 breaking something, doing something inappropriate, causing problems), and successful activity. next category is attribute. attribute is defined as the attribute attached on the character such as school materials, occupational equipment or item, domestic item, money, food, leisure, recreational or sports equipment or item, physical characteristic, and psychological characteristic. next category is interaction. interaction is the situation involving character in the textbook such as, occupational interaction, school interaction, cooperative interaction (acting together, helping each other), affective interaction (expressing affection, cuddling), social interaction (talking, celebrating, inviting, sharing), and violent interaction (quarrelling). and the last category is the position in the lesson whether the in the lesson or exercise. based on the discussion above, the reinvestigation concerning gender bias in efl textbook for senior high school is needed. senior high school student needs to be aware with the issue of gender equality. thus, this study aims to examine gender representation in the electronic efl textbook for senior high school. method the purpose of the study is to examine gender representation in the electronic efl textbook for senior high school. content analysis was utilized to examine gender representation in the electronic efl textbook for senior high school. content analysis is described as the method to illustrate and calculate phenomena (shelley & krippendorff, 1984) . it is also recognized as a method of analysing documents. content analysis allows the researcher to assess theoretical issues to embellish understanding of the data. through content analysis, it is possible to clarify words into fewer content related categories. it is inferred that when classified into the same categories, words, phrases and the like share the same meaning (cavanagh, 1997). the aim is to attain a condensed and broad description of the phenomenon, and the outcome of the analysis is concepts or categories describing the phenomenon. efl textbook senior high school entitled “bahasa inggris x” was analysed to examine gender representation. in the grade ten, or the first grade of senior high school, the student faces different view of the classroom situation. the awareness of gender equality, showed in the gender representation, may lead how student react. as proposed in the guidance of the gender equality (brugeilles & cramer, 2009), two main part of the textbook carry gender representation; text and illustration, as the limit of this study is focusing on the text not illustration. in order to analyse the data, this study tracked the procedure by unesco to analyse the gender representation in the text book (brugeilles & cramer, 2009). the procedure started by selecting characteristics and compiling lists of details. the characteristics can be divided by several categories – sex, age, designation, actions, attributes, relations with other characters, position in chapter. in this study, the limitation is in 2 first categories; categories – sex, age and designation. the designation consists of name/surname or title family relationship (mother, uncle, etc.) other relationship (friend, neighbour, etc.) occupational status (occupation, political or religious office). thenceforth, the category be recorded in the grids inventory character designed by unesco. the grid focused on the text. figure 1 showed the grid on text. later the grids were connected with the grid analysis focusing on designation. and the last procedure was the summary table was analysed and an assessment made of parity and gendered representations. as cramer and brugeilles mention, the purpose of the assessment has 2 different angles, as in designing textbook and evaluating textbook. this study took the second angle. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 133 results and discussion based on the analysis of the book, the result of the analysis is presented below. 0% 100% breakdown chracter in the text by sex and age ungendered female, age unspesific male, age unspesific girls women figure 1. breakdown character in the text by sex and age the chart in the figure 1 suggested that, the characters designation by age and sex was in tight number differences. in total male outnumbered other categories with 40%. the expansion of male character from the entire textbook, chapter 1-15, is greatly significant, only in the first chapter, entitled “let me introduce myself”, the number of male characters was lower than female character. the rest chapter was dominated by male character. and the female character appearance concluded in 31 %. surprisingly, ungendered character lied in 29%. adult male character substantially overrepresented, 27 % comparing with women in the number only 10 %. besides, girls outnumbered women, 13%. based on data calculation, the male character overrepresented than other character. the domination of the male character conveyed that there is no gender equality in the textbook. the result is in line with previous study that indicate one of particular gender dominated in the textbook (brugeilles & cramer, 2009; fahriany et al., 2019; johansson & malmsjö bachelder, 2009; parham, 2013). besides, the figure, also, concluded that the female role model as an adult are rare only 10 % from the total appearance which lead girl‟s pupil got less for identification and projection. this result is in line with the research of the international network for research into gendered representations in textbooks in (brugeilles & cramer, 2009). however, the significant number of ungendered representations demonstrated the intention promoting gender equality. imam santosa designation of gender on electronic efl textbook for senior high school 134 0 20 40 60 80 100 designation of the character male female figure 2. designation of the character the bar chart illustrates the number appearance of male and female character in the english textbook for senior high school. it can be seen that, overall, male characters get more proportion than female character. the number both male and female character relatively high in the category of first name. the number reach 98 appearance on male and 82. however, still, the male character outnumbers female character. in the family category, the number of character portrayal is, somewhat, the lowest among other. the number of male characters is 32 and 24 for female character. in the other relationship category, unusually, the number of female character overrepresented than male character with 52 to 24 appearance. however, the last category strengthens the domination of male character in the textbook. in the status category, male character exceeds female character on 68 appearances to 60. based on the result, 4 out of 5 forms of designation male character exceeds the female characters. women dominated in the other relationship which portrays the relationship of friend, neighbour. this result comes from the first chapter that put the female character as main characters in the dialogue between friend on the school situation and the naming character in the exercise as presented in figure 3. figure 3. examples of the use of name the use of name saidah, alia and hannah dominated the appearance of female character in this chapter. besides the female character representation in the family relation ship status occurs mostly as a mother and sister. the result aligns as the research by unesco (brugeilles & cramer, 2009). the next chart displays the status attaching the character in the textbook. as presented in the figure 4, the status of the character based its job indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 135 can be divided into agriculture, trade, small business, education, art, culture science and media, office worker and other status. the chart indicates that three occupational status dominate; education, art, culture science and media and office worker. the distribution is varying according to the character‟s gender. in the education which includes teacher, student, headmasters and other related educational job, female relatively dominates the manifestation of education job with 33 appearance comparing to male with only 10 appearances. 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 male female designation of status on character agriculture education trade health small business art, culture, science, media2 office worker other status figure 4. designation of status on character the domination of female character in this category comes from the status of student that lies on the female character in the dialogue and text presented in the first chapter. it can be inferred that the importance of women to get education is being portrayed in the textbook. the result is different by unesco research on gendered representation on math book that showed the representation of female character in the education category was low and represented the unimportant of education for female. however, even though the display of male character in this category is low, the status is significant. the male characters described as significant character like a student, teacher or headmasters. this outcome is related with the research by unesco that male character tend to have significant role in society representation (brugeilles & cramer, 2009). other dominated category in occupational status is other status. other status defined as the job that not include in the previous category. the uncategorized jobs appear in the textbook are army related job, government related job, and crime related job. as presented in figure 5, the male character extremely outnumbers female character. unfortunately, the description of this job like thief, police, army, robber is associated with male character. those jobs, often, associated with strength, brute force and masculinity. it is inline with the argument of scott in (emilia et al., 2017; meyerowitz, 2008) that male represent multiplicity strength, protection, independence, camaraderie, discipline, rivalry. however, the representation of strength also comes from the female character.; cut nyak dien. and the third dominated status is art, media, science and culture. in this category, the male immensely exceeds female character. the comparison is 19 and 5 appearances. the quote of the famous imam santosa designation of gender on electronic efl textbook for senior high school 136 person in the end of each chapter mostly comes from male character. figure 5. examples of famous person quote the female character emerges once which shows quote from oprah winfrey. this number indicates that male tend to be positioned as an idol and important figure. the result is in line with the study by (johansson & malmsjö bachelder, 2009). this result is also similar in the office category. the appearance of the male character and female character existed in the next representation, office work, is similar with the previous category. the male extendedly appears in this category. the male character is not only dominant in the appearance but also in the position of the job. the position of the male character in the textbook is portrayed higher than female character. the male character described as the manager or the leader but the female character is described as a staff as seen in figure 6. figure 6. examples of conversation in office the one who being promoted and become director is male character, meanwhile the staff or the colleague is female. this result align with the research by (ariyanto, 2018; johansson & malmsjö bachelder, 2009; yang, 2016). conclusion based on the findings and discussion, it can be concluded that the presence of male character is outnumbered female character. the comparison is 40% and 31%. the domination of the male character conveyed that there is no gender equality in the textbook. furthermore, unsurprisingly, the number considered as ungendered character is slightly lower in 29%. the ungendered character proves that there is intention to promote gender equality. besides, the designation of the character in textbook is dominated by first name with 98 appearances for male and 82 for female character. then the category followed by occupation status, (68:60 character), other relationship (52:34), and family relationship category (34:20). the result concluded that male character dominated in all designation category strengthen the position of the male as dominant character. as the last finding; the occupational status; that three occupational status dominate; education, art, culture science and media and office worker. the distribution is varying according to the character‟s gender. the highest representation is in the education female manifest higher than male in this category, but it is dominated by the status of student. however, the importance of education for female is showed in this representation. then, other status is dominated by men that represent the job such as army, thief, robber, police. the kinds of job are associated with masculinity carried by male character. in the office work status, male, also, outnumbers female category. even though, there are slight numbers of female in this category. the position of male, still, is indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 137 higher. in overall, male dominated gender representation in the efl textbook for senior high school. references ahmad, m., & shah, s. k. 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(2002). gender bias in teacher education texts: new (and old) lessons. journal of teacher education, 53(2), 168-180. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487102053002008. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 109 what do people do to sustain a conversation: analysis of the features and the speech function of a casual conversation latifa ika sari department of port and shipping, politeknik ilmu pelayaran semarang, indonesia email: latifa.ika@gmail.com ria hermina sari department of port and shipping, politeknik ilmu pelayaran semarang, indonesia e-mail: ria.hermina.sari@gmail.com apa citation: sari, l. i., & sari, r. h. (2020). what do people do to sustain a conversation: analysis of the features and the speech function of a casual conversation. indonesian efl journal, 6(2), 109120. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v6i2.3379. received: 11-03-2020 accepted: 24-04-2020 published: 01-07-2020 abstract: conversation analysis (ca) has a great implication in the second or foreign language teaching and learning. this study was aimed to analyse a casual conversation, to identify what people do to sustain a conversation. the conversation, which lasted for 20 minutes and involved three speakers, was transcribed verbatim. several features of the spoken text are analysed: spontaneity, interactivity, interpersonal features, coherence features, negotiation of meaning, and speech function. the result of the analysis showed that there are several strategies used by the speakers: time-gaining strategies (filled pauses; frequent use of conjunctions: and, but, so); using chunks and producing one clause or phrase in small ‗runs‘; self-monitoring strategies (repetition, backtracking), and interactional strategies (backchanneling, showing amusement by laughing or chuckling, using certain discourse markers, hedges, vague language, showing empathy by completing and repeating each other‘s utterances). the speakers also negotiate interpersonally and logicosemantically to keep the conversation going on. the equal number of rejoinders that each speaker produces indicates that they are willing to support each other to sustain the conversation. this study implies that when teaching speaking, english teachers should include communication strategies to achieve the goals of communication. keywords: casual conversation; negotiation of meaning; speech function; strategies. introduction language is considered as an important tool for communication. communication itself is seen as a transactional process of creating meaning which requires interaction of at least 2 or more individuals (kpogo & abrefa, 2017). the communication can be realized using spoken or written text. spoken text – even though messy – is more than just a collection of random utterances. all utterances are meaningful and have certain purposes. as social creatures, humans spend much of their time to talk and to interact with others. the talking activity and the interaction have meaningful purposes: to find out information, to transfer knowledge, to make appointments, to offer something, to buy and sell goods or services, etc (eggins & slade, 1997). further, cornish (2006) describes that spoken language or speech typically involves ―face-toface interaction between two or more participants who share a spatio-temporal environment‖. spoken language has different characteristics from written language in many aspects. there are actually no clear-cut dividing points, instead the differences are shown in the mode of a continuum. written language is considered as language as representation, while spoken language is considered as language accompanying action (verhoeven, 1994). since spoken language is the language accompanying action, it has special characteristics (thornburry, 2005). first, it is dynamic in structure which is shown by the presence of interactive staging and open-ended conversations. second, different from written language, spoken language is often unplanned and unpredictable (dahal, 2010).anything can happen during the conversation, and that makes spoken language spontaneous. false starts, hesitations, and repetitions are some of the evidences of spontaneity. third, spoken language is context-dependent. it means that someone cannot understand well a spoken text without knowing the context. it is mailto:latifa.ika@gmail.com latifa ika sari & ria hermina sari what do people do to sustain a conversation: analysis of the features and the speech function of a casual conversation 110 shown by the use of deictic expressions which can only be understood by referring to the speaker‘s intention. the last one, while written language employs monological organization, spoken language has turn-taking organization (halliday, 1989). speakers take turn in order to sustain the conversation together. during a conversation, individuals have interactions through talk. describing, analyzing, and understanding talk as a basic and constitutive feature of human social life is called as conversation analysis (sert & seedhouse, 2011). in conversation analysis (ca) talk is seen as a vehicle for action. participants engage in a talk not only simply to transfer information, but they also concern with the actions getting done through talk (e.g., asking, requesting, complaining, noticing, and so on), and the reallife consequences of those actions (hoey & kendrick, 2018). conversation analysis (ca) is a method of ―gathering data involving naturalistic conversational interaction, analyzing it systematically, and reporting on features of its structural organization‖ (albert, 2017). ca involves ―identification and description of interactional phenomena through naturalistic observation‖ (kendrick, 2017). ca has a great implication in second or foreign language teaching and learning because it reflects the ‗social organization of natural language-in-use‘. since social interaction becomes the core of human activities, analysing a conversation can be a great source for learning a second or foreign language (barraja-rohan, 2011). research on conversation analysis has developed greatly in many fields. in recent years, the significance of ca has grown significantly that it is used in other fields than linguistics. fasulo and sterponi (2016) used ca to analyse children‘s mental health conditions in their interactional environment. buchholz and kächele (2017) found ca was beneficial for psychotherapeutic talk during psychotherapy. ca is able to describe moment-by-moment evolution of talk that is organized as sequences of actions (peräkylä, 2019) and therefore can be a powerful tool for psychoanalytic practice and psychotherapy research (buchholz & kächele, 2013). in education setting, ca can be used to investigate classroom interaction between teachers and students to identify pedagogical teacher problems (akmaliyah, 2014; koole, 2013). by using ca, teachers or researchers can address issues in classroom interactions and environment by studying teacher-student interaction and student-student interaction. as takeda (2013) found that conducting ca will be beneficial for english language teachers to understand their students and interactional issues in the classroom. his finding was supported by hale et al. (2018) who found that ca can provide teachers with a powerful analytic lens to view language use in their classrooms—both their own language use, and that of their students—in order to make pedagogical changes that can enhance learning. hidayat (2019) analyzed the use of ca in casual conversation and how it can serve as a potential means in language teaching. his findings showed that turn taking system, adjacency pairs, overlaps, response tokens and repairs were evident in the conversation. casual conversation is guided by interpersonal objectives in which people aim to expand or maintain interpersonal relations by having a casual talk with other people. casual conversation covers many ranges of topics which may include daily activities or experiences. unlike transactional conversation, casual conversation is more unpredictable. therefore, it can be more difficult for language learners to handle. chan (2019) investigated the language and communication needs of business professionals in hongkong and found that the informants face difficulties when handling nontechnical genres such as replying emails and socializing because they are harder to predict and therefore harder to prepare. it is different from technical genres which tend to make use of a finite set of technical terms and technical concepts. when having casual conversation, it becomes a challenge for individuals to sustain the conversation to reach the goals of communication. besides technical knowledge, people also need skills to maintain good interpersonal relations and deal with interpersonal tensions in handling workplace genres. however, vo et al. (2016) found that the classroom materials which supported relational talk at university were not available. this paper aims to analyse a casual conversation to explore what people do to sustain a conversation. there are several features of the casual conversation that will be analysed including spontaneity, interactivity, interpersonal features, coherence features, negotiation of meaning, and speech function. there are several pedagogical implications which make this study indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 111 is important to be conducted. firstly, understanding the features of casual conversation will enable english language teachers to teach speaking better. in speaking, beside knowledge about vocabulary, grammar, or pronunciation, students also need knowledge and skills to sustain conversation. secondly, by learning the features of casual conversation, speakers can be more aware with their utterances and thus have more control towards their utterances. for example, how to show disagreement, how to establish solidarity during a conversation, or how to make the conversation becomes more lively and friendly. thirdly, by understanding the feature of casual conversation, speakers can also learn several communication strategies to reach their communication goals. method participants there were three speakers involved in the conversation (henceforth s1, s2, and s3). they are english lecturers working in one of polytechnic in semarang. s1 is the head of the language unit. she is 38 years old. s2 is the staff of the language unit. she is 33 years old. s3 is a non-permanent lecturer, and she is 27 years old. data collection the conversation was 20 minutes long and was recorded in a taxi when the speakers had their journey to the airport. they had attended a workshop in jakarta and wanted to go back to semarang. the conversation was conducted as naturally as possible. at some points of the recording, there were sounds of ambulance and horn of cars that interfered with the conversation. data analysis there are several stages conducted by the researcher in analysing data in this study. first, the researcher transcribed the conversation verbatim. verbatim means that the transcription is made word for word, exactly as said by the participants (trippas et al., 2017). the transcription of the conversation follows the framework from eggins and slade (1997). the symbols used in the transcriptions are summarized as follow: 1. turn numbers are shown in arabic numerals: 1, 2, 3. 2. clause numbers are shown in lower case roman numerals: i, ii, iii. 3. move numbers are shown in lower case letters: a, b, c. 4. nv indicates non-verbal moves. 5. other symbols: a. == indicates overlap of utterance b. … indicates short hesitation within a turn (less than 3 seconds) c. [pause – 4 secs] indicates pause length d. dash – then talk indicates false start / restart e. [words in square bracket] indicates nonverbal information. after finishing the transcription, the researcher read the conversation several times and identified the features of the spoken text which include spontaneity, interactivity, interpersonal features, coherence features, negotiation of meaning, and speech function. tables and diagrams are used to display the data to allow the readers to understand the findings easier. results and discussion turns, moves and clauses each speaker produces different number of turns, moves and clauses. s1 produces 117 turns, 143 moves and 198 clauses. s2 produces 81 turns, 91 moves and 83 clauses. while s3 produces 94 turns, 103 moves and 157 clauses. the turns, moves and clauses are summarized in table 1. table 1. the number of turns, moves and clauses of each speakers speaker turns moves clauses s1 117 (40%) 143 (42%) 198 (45%) s2 81 (28%) 91 (27%) 83 (19%) s3 94 (32%) 103 (31%) 157 (36%) total 292 337 438 evidence of spontaneity spontaneity is one of the characteristics of spoken language. it is indicated by filled pauses, repetitions, incomplete utterances, false start and backtracking, frequent use of conjunctions ‗and, but, so‘, and chunks (thornburry, 2005). in spoken language, speakers produce one clause or one phrase at a time as small ‗runs‘. different from written text, the clauses or phrases in the spoken text are not embedded in large unit. table 2 describes the examples of evidence of spontaneity found in the conversation. latifa ika sari & ria hermina sari what do people do to sustain a conversation: analysis of the features and the speech function of a casual conversation 112 from the shreds of evidence presented in table 2, we can see that the conversation has the feature of spontaneity. spoken language is messy because people do not have much time to think and re-think their utterances. especially in a casual conversation, there is no topic preparation at all. people just say what is on their minds and give responses in a very short time. people can hardly anticipate what will happen in the conversation. everything just happens spontaneously. the pauses and the repetitions are actually part of strategic competence that are used by people when they communicate (celcemurcia, 2007). the pauses give the speakers time to think about what they are going to say. the repetitions also function the same way. they belong to stalling or time-gaining strategies. the strategies enable the speakers to engage in the conversation and give responses appropriately. false start and backtracking prove that the speakers use self-monitoring strategies. in turn 71, speaker 3 says ―i see -i saw that a lot of people also focus on the screen and yaa they will take a lot of time for doing so‖. at the beginning, she said ―i see‖, but after she realized that she should use past tense instead, she corrected her utterance. if the speakers are given time and opportunity to correct their utterances before saying them, they will surely do that. however, it is not possible since conversation happens in a spontaneous way. therefore, people use chunks to help them talk fluently. chunks are ―multiword units that behave as if they were single words and typically consist of formulaic routines that are stored and retrieved in their entirety‖ (thornbury, 2005, p. 65). ―one kind of the text, a lot of things, afraid of something‖, are some of chunks found in the conversation. the use of chunks will ease the speakers‘ burden to memorize grammar rules and can enhance the speakers‘ fluency which is part of formulaic competence (celce-murcia, 2007). in a conversation, people also tend to use one clause or one phrase at a time. unlike in writing that uses complex sentences, in spoken text, people use clauses or phrases to make them easier to convey their meaning. in turn 139, speaker 3 says ―her family… something like that inside of ambulance, the sounds, while you are worrying about your family…she just…you know…close her ears…‖. what she wanted to say was ―she has a friend who is afraid of the ambulance sirens and always close her ears every time she hears the sound because she has a bad experience of her family that was ever carried by using ambulance‖. cutting off long utterances into short ones is also part of strategic competence to make people understand more about the topic that is being discussed. table 2. evidence of spontaneity no. evidence of spontaneity turn speaker utterance 1. filled pauses 1/b s1 (ii) i‘m i‘m ... i‘m actually making eee what it‘s called… aaa a confession (iii) that i do impulsive buying on saturday…(iv) buy a larger speaker 2. repetition 46 s1 (i) actually i... i didn‘t re regret of buying that thing (ii) but i... i regret that my phone is brokens (iii) that‘s why i cannot afford eee to buy new laptop 3. false start and backtracking 71/a s3 (i) i see -i saw that a lot of people also focus on the screen (ii) and yaa they will take a lot of time for doing (iii) so , so, so, it just .... 99 s3 (i) one of the mmm class -one of the my class -my student notice me (ii) when i was so worry… 4. incomplete utterance 111 s1 (i) maybe these students are .....what it‘s called… eee having.... 5. frequent use of conjunctions: and, but, so 178 s1 (i) and the problem is if we are tend not to update our…what it‘s called …knowledge… well (ii) we will be teaching the same thing for years, and last might be eee… a bit… what it‘s called… 180/b s1 (ii) so, we might not deliver it correctly according to the...what it‘s called… the updated knowledge that the students should have. (iii) so, we tend to ignore eee several important things, ...... (iv) eee yeah, we will be the bad teacher, i think. (v) if we never learn more and more. (vi) indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 113 so, learning is important, even for the teachers. 6. chunks 169 s3 (i) i mean like no one kind of the text, one text. (ii) so we have to prepare a lot of thing like the talks, about the questions, (iii) and that‘s only one, (iv) and… then we jump to another text, (v) so we are...== 7. one clause or one phrase at a time produces small ‗runs‘ 139 s3 (i) her family… something like that inside of ambulance, the sounds, while (ii) you are worrying about your family…(iii) she just…you know…close her ears… evidence of interactivity conversation is interactive. it means that it involves speakers‘ interaction. to make the conversation run smoothly, all speakers should interact cooperatively. interactivity can be seen from the following aspects: turn-taking, interruptions or overlapping utterances, signals of amusement (grunts, laughs and chuckles), backchanneling, and the use of discourse markers such as well, yeah, but, you know, etc (thornburry, 2005). turn-taking and interruptions are clearly seen in the transcript of the conversation. the examples can be seen in table 3. table 3. examples of turn-taking and interruptions turn speaker utterance 1/a s1 (i) and you know what? 1/b s1 (ii) i‘m i‘m ... i‘m actually making eee what it‘s called… aaa a confession (iii) that i do impulsive buying on saturday…(iv) buy a larger speakers 1/c s1 (v) that we can use for… the test.. [laugh] 2/a s2 (i) larger speakers? 2/b s2 (ii) how about the small one? 3 s1 (i) because eee the small speakers… eee you know, (ii) it get less power than the bigger one… and (iii) this bigger speakers -it has eee a more… what it‘s called… a more clear ... 4 s3 (i) ==sound? 5/a s1 (i) sound 5/b s1 (ii) ya so i choose the larger one, (ii) so that we can eee use it for the…the toeic, marlins test..and things like that, so…== 6 s3 (i) == you said that your computer can not connect to the speakers? 7 s1 (i) ==yes…yeah 8 s3 (i) another speakers ... (ii) suck the red one.. 9 s1 [laugh] 10 s2 (i) actually, i wanted to to buy the same like yours 11 s1 (i) mmm, mhm 12 s2 (i) the orange one the transcript shows that s1, s2 and s3 interact by taking turns to speak. turn taking in conversation is an important feature of human interaction. when having a conversation in everyday situations, interlocutors efficiently align their turns-of-talk (barthel et al., 2017). the distribution of opportunities for talk is very essentials to maintain the conversation (de jaegher et al., 2016). however, there are times that a speaker interrupts another speaker. for example, in turn 5 and turn 6 when s1 says ―sound, ya so i choose the larger one, so that we can eee use it for the…the toeic, marlins test..and things like that, so…‖. before she manages to finish her sentence, s3 interrupts by saying ―you said that your computer can not connect to the speakers?‖. the interruptions and overlapping turns are shown by the sign ==. laughs as the signal of amusement are found many times in the conversation. from the total 337 moves, there are 22 moves that involve laughing. in a casual conversation in which people have a close interpersonal relationship, the conversation will run more interactively. the speakers feel more freedom to express their feeling by laughing, chuckling, etc. this is also an indication that the power and status (tenor) of each participant are considered as ―balanced‖ during the conversation. backchanneling is also another interactive device in which the listeners do in order to latifa ika sari & ria hermina sari what do people do to sustain a conversation: analysis of the features and the speech function of a casual conversation 114 register that they are following the speaker‘s drift (thornburry, 2005). an expression such as ―mmm, mhm‖ is used as a sign that the listener pays attention to the speaker. the examples of backchanneling are presented in table 4. in the conversation, s1 shows her attention towards s2 by uttering ―mmm, mhm‖ when s2 says that she wants to buy the same sound speaker. backchanneling is important in conversation because it gives a speaker motivation to continue his/her utterance. it is like another way of saying ―go on with your utterance, i am listening‖. in this conversation, there are 29 moves which use backchanneling. the use of discourse markers such as well, yeah, but, you know, etc. are also important to make the conversation more interactive. table 4. examples of backchanneling turn speaker utterance 10 s2 (i) actually, i wanted to to buy the same like yours 11 s1 (i) mmm, mhm 12 s2 (i) the orange one 13 s1 (i) mmm, mhm table 5. example of discourse markers turn speaker utterance 43 s2 (i) ==but... but i think if it is useful for your class, (ii) then... it‘s worth the price== 44 s1 (i) ==yaaa…== 45 s2 (i) ==isn‘t it? 46 s1 (i) actually i... i didn‘t re regret of buying that thing (ii) but i... i regret that my phone is brokens (iii) that‘s why i cannot afford eee to buy new laptop 47 s3 (i) because of your phone, (ii) not because of the speakers== 48/a s1 (i) ==[laugh] yeah, 48/b s1 (ii) because of my phone, (iii) i hate that‘s 49 s3 (i) yeah... another evidence of interactivity is the use of discourse markers that can be seen in table 5. discourse marker ―but‖ shows that s2 responds to s1‘s story that she has just bought a new sound speaker. since s1 seems to feel guilty because of spending rp. 2,3 million just to buy a new sound speaker, s2 then signals her contrast opinion by saying ―but‖. in turn 49, s1 says ―yeah‖ as an agreement response to what has just been said by s3. discourse markers in a conversation have several functions. they can be the signposts of shifts and turns in an on-going conversation. they also have a connecting function which connect utterances within speakers and across them (thornburry, 2005). using discourse markers is said as ―an interactive process that requires speakers to draw upon several different types of communicative knowledge – cognitive, expressive, social, and textual‖ (schiffrin, 2001). those evidences show that the conversation has the feature of interactivity which belongs to the interactional competence (celce-murcia, 2007). people use strategies such as turn-taking, backchanneling, showing their amusement by laughing or chuckling, and using certain discourse markers to keep the conversation ―alive‖ and interactive. interpersonal features ―conversation is not simply the exchange of information but has a strong interpersonal function‖ (thornbury, 2005, p. 66). people give support to each other when having a conversation and maintain group solidarity. even if they disagree over something, they will use certain expressions to blunt the force of a disagreement. people use hedges, vague language, showing empathy by completing and repeating each other‘s utterances, and use certain markers such as ―you know‖, ―don‘t you‖, etc. the examples of people completing and repeating each other‘s utterance are presented in table 6. table 6 shows several examples of completing and repeating each other‘s utterances as evidence of interpersonal features. in turn 34, s3 completes s1‘s utterance when she finds difficulty in saying her words. s1 then replies by repeating the word ―conversation‖ that has been mentioned by s3. in turn 60, all speakers repeat the word ―happiness‖ which has been mentioned indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 115 by s1. completing and repeating each other‘s utterances demonstrate empathy between speakers and can function to establish and maintain group solidarity between them. hedges, laughs, and the use of question tags or special markers are also part of interpersonal features. table 7 shows the examples of hedges, laughs, the use of question tags or special markers, and exaggerative language in the conversation. in a conversation, people use hedges and laughs to blunt their language so that they will not sound too opinionated. ―negative responses which reject or decline the initiating action also tend to be delayed in time and may occur with turn-initial particles like ―uh‖ or ―well‖, and include accounts for the negative response (e.g., uh no, i‘m a bit tired actually)‖ (bögels et al., 2015). table 6. example of completing and repeating other’s utterance no. interpersonal features turn speaker utterance 1. completing other‘s utterance 31/b s1 (vi) you know... 31/c s1 (vii) in a class when you‘re have the eee small discussion and (vii) then i want to play like music to distract their attention or to … what it‘s called… 32 s2 (i) ==mmm, mhm 33 s1 (i) ==cut their…== 34 s3 (i) ==conversation? 35/a s1 (i) conversation, yes, 2. repeating other‘s utterance 59 s2 (i) it just -(ii) i think it just postpone your… eee, (iii) what is your... 60 s1 (i) happiness 61 s1, s2, s3 (i) happiness [laugh] s3 in turn 126/b says ―i don‘t know‖ in order to blunt her disagreement towards s1‘s utterance. in turn 119, speaker 1 tells s3 not to do something again. she then laughs after saying her utterance. s3 also laughs after hearing s1 and says ―yeah. that‘s funny..‖. questions tags are also often used in a conversation. special markers such as ―you know‖, ―don‘t you…‖ are also widely used. s2 in turn 24 says ―don‘t you think?‖ as a clarification and agreement seeking. she asks s1‘s agreement that the sound speaker that she wants to buy is portable and useful. in a conversation, speakers sometimes also exaggerate their language to make the conversation lively. in turn 271, s1 says that the reading session kills you. this is a kind of exaggerating utterance because the reading session cannot literally kill a human. however, s1 says that to ―light up‖ the conversation to make the topic more interesting. that is also one of strategy to make the conversation keep going. table 7. examples of hedges, laughs, the use of question tags or special markers, and the use of exaggerative language no. interpersonal features turn speaker utterance 1. hedges and laughs 119 s1 (i) don‘t do that again! [laugh] 120 s3 (i) [laugh] yeah. that‘s funny.. 121 s1, s2, s3 [laugh] 122/a s1 (i) yes, always funny, 122/b s1 (ii) the students are funny…(iii) and at the same time, they are annoying. 123 s3 [laugh] 124 s2 (i) yeah, funny and annoying 125/a s1 [laugh] (i) annoying... 125/b s1 (ii) but you cannot angry... with them [laugh again] 126/a s3 (i) that‘s the thing, yes... 126/b s3 (ii) i don’t know… 127 s1 [laugh] 2. question tag or 21 s3 (i) it is portable? latifa ika sari & ria hermina sari what do people do to sustain a conversation: analysis of the features and the speech function of a casual conversation 116 special markers 22/a s2 (i) yeah, portable 22/b s2 (ii) and ...... very mmm… useful 23 s1 (i) mmm mmm 24 s2 (i) ==don’t you think? 25/a s1 (i) yes yes, it‘s very practical. 3. exaggeration 265/a s2 (i) yeah.. 265/b s2 (ii) the level of difficulty…== 266 s1 (i) ==yes 267 s2 (i) i think it‘s higher 268 s1 (i) yes... higher 269 s2 (i) than... the previous one 270 s3 (i) hmm hmm... correctly 271 s1 (i) yes... the reading... session is... kills you [laugh] 272 s2 [laugh] coherence features coherence refers to how the text makes sense. different from the written language which depends solely on the writer, coherence in spoken language depends on the cooperation of the speakers who involve in the conversation. speakers co-operate so that what they say is relevant to what has been said before and to the overall purpose of the talk (thornburry, 2005). coherence will sustain a conversation and prevent communication breakdown. the example of coherence features found in the conversation can be seen in table 8. as we can see in the excerpt of the conversation, in turn 158 s1 asks about s2 and s3‘s opinion about the workshop. s2 and s3 give relevant responses by answering ―great‖ and ―it makes me think a lot‖. their responses are relevant and help the conversation keep going on. s1 then replies by saying ―a lots and lots of thinking‖. s3 then replies again by mentioning about preparation. their responses are relevant to the previous turn. the conversation unfolds because the speakers cooperate to keep it going on to prevent the communication breakdown. table 8. example of coherence features turn speaker utterance 158 s1 (i) so, about the workshop.... (ii) what do you think about the workshop? 159 s2, s3 (i) mmmmmmmm 160 s2 (i) great 161 s3 (i) it makes me think a lot 162 s2 (i) hmm hmm 163 s1, s2, s3 [laugh] 164 s1 (i) a lots and lots of thinking, 165 s2 (i) yeah 166 s1 (i) and trying to figure out whether it’s applicable in our institution or not, (ii) will the students be able to keep up with that or not. (iii) so many questions about== 167 s3 (i) ==the thing is that one more thing as…(ii) the biggest thought is about preparation 168 s1 (i) yes 169 s3 (i) i mean like no one kind of the text, one text. (ii) so we have to prepare a lot of thing like the talks, about the questions, (iii) and that‘s only one, (iv) and… then we jump to another text, (v) so we are...== 170 s2 (i) ==we need a preparation… 171 s3 (i) but i believe, by time, eemm going, by experience, (ii) we as a teacher will be easy to do so. (iii) we don‘t need to prepare a lot (iv) but at first, of course it is..== negotiations of meaning ―negotiation is concerned with interaction as an exchange between speakers: how speakers adopt and assign roles to each other in dialogue and how moves are organized in relation to one another‖ (martin & rose, 2007, p.221). there are indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 117 two kinds of negotiation: interpersonal negotiation which negotiates feelings and attitude and logico-semantic negotiation which negotiates message or news in the conversation. in this conversation, there are 160 moves which use interpersonal negotiation, 126 moves which use logico-semantic negotiation, and 51 moves which have no negotiation of meaning (only consist of backchanneling and laughing). the negotiation of meaning is summarized in table 9. table 9. negotiation of meaning negotiation of meaning occurrence interpersonal negotiation 160 (48%) logico-semantic negotiation 126 (37%) no negotiation (backchanneling and laughing) 51 (15%) from table 9, it can be seen that the speakers negotiate meaning both interpersonally and logico-semantically. it means that they negotiate message or news as well as negotiate feelings or attitude. however, the interpersonal negotiation happens more often than logico-semantic negotiation which indicates that this is a casual conversation in which the speakers have a close interpersonal relationship. the logico-semantic negotiation that happens in this conversation is highly influenced by the context and setting of the conversation as well as the educational background of the speakers. all speakers are english lecturers and they had just attended a workshop about english teaching and learning (elt). that makes the topic of their conversation is mostly about english teaching and learning mixed with personal matters. speech function analysis as halliday points out (in eggins & slade, 1997, p. 180) when people use language to interact, ―one of the things they are doing is establishing a relationship, between the person speaking now and the person who will probably speak next‖. halliday (in eggins & slade, 1997, p. 180) further elaborates that dialogue is ―a process of exchange‖ which involves two variables: a commodity to be exchanged (either information or goods and services) and roles associated with exchange relations (either giving or demanding). eggins and slade (1997) then develop halliday‘s basic speech function into more detailed speech function classes which are used in this paper to analyse the conversation. the summary of the speech function is described in the table 10. from table 10, it can be seen that s1 is the most dominant speaker. she produces 117 turns, 143 moves, and 198 clauses. while the most passive speaker is s2 that produces only 81 turns, 91 moves, and 83 clauses. s1 also has the initiative to open the conversation by attending other speakers, giving questions and asking opinions while s2 and s3 just initiate new topics occasionally during the conversation. it is interesting to note that s3 produces continuing moves more often than other speakers. she elaborates her utterance to make the audiences understand better. even though her utterances are interfered by other speakers, she tries to get back and gives elaboration to her previous utterances. s2 who plays a quite passive role throughout the conversation is actually not that passive. she gives responses quite often (50 moves) that mostly consist of registering and agreeing. it seems that she just wants to follow the conversation without making any debate or confrontation. even though she makes 2 confronting moves that she denies acknowledgement of certain information, both moves are aimed to provide a different point of view about something. table 10. the summary of speech function 1 speech function s1 s2 s3 the speech function no. of turns 117 81 94 no. of moves 143 91 103 no. of clauses 198 83 157 non verbal (laugh) 19 13 8 open attending 3 command 1 1 question: open: opinion 2 question: closed: fact 1 1 latifa ika sari & ria hermina sari what do people do to sustain a conversation: analysis of the features and the speech function of a casual conversation 118 question: open: fact 1 1 1 statement: fact 2 2 4 statement: opinion 3 2 total 13 6 6 continue monitor 2 2 4 prolong: elaborate 9 3 13 prolong: enhance 3 1 6 prolong: extend 4 append: elaborate 10 3 15 append: enhance 3 append: extend 4 1 3 total 32 10 44 react: responding support: register 29 17 6 support: reply: acknowledge 10 2 11 support: reply: agree 22 18 12 support: reply: answer 2 1 5 support: reply: affirm 2 support: develop: elaborate 4 6 3 support: develop: enhance 4 3 support: develop: extend 7 2 3 confront: disavow 2 1 total 78 50 44 react: rejoinder support: track: clarify 1 2 3 support: track: confirm 4 4 1 support: track: probe 2 3 1 support: response: resolve 5 2 4 confront: challenge: rebound 2 confront: challenge: counter 1 1 total 13 12 11 thus, it can be concluded that mostly s2 provides supporting moves when responding to other speakers. the number of responding moves also indicates that s2 is strikingly dependent on the other speakers. she talks most only in reaction to the contribution of other speakers. rejoinders have a function to sustain the interaction. they express a willingness of the speakers to maintain contact and sustain conversation (eggins & slade, 1997). in this conversation, the number of rejoinders produced by each speaker are about equal. s1 produces 13 moves, s2 produces 12 moves and s3 produces 11 moves. therefore, it indicates that all speakers contribute to the maintaining and sustaining of the talk. almost all rejoinders produced by speakers is supporting rejoinders. it shows that all speakers want to support each other to sustain the conversation and to create a harmonious talk between them. conclusion spoken language has different characteristics from written language. it has features of spontaneity, interactivity and interpersonality. filled pauses, repetitions, false start and backtracking and incomplete utterances produced by the speakers involved in this conversation indicate that they talk spontaneously. the pauses and repetition are used by the speakers as timegaining strategies. they give the speakers time to think about what they are going to say. false start and backtracking are used as self-monitoring strategies. the speakers correct their utterances when they realize that they make errors in speaking. the speakers also show the use of chunks in their conversation. chunks is a part of formulaic competence that can ease the speakers‘ burden to memorize grammar rules and can enhance the speakers‘ fluency. the speakers also cut off long utterances into short ones as one of the strategies to make people understand more about the topic that is being discussed. this conversation is also interactive. this is indicated by turn-taking, interruptions or overlapping utterances, signals of amusement (laughs and chuckles), backchanneling, and the use of discourse markers such as well, yeah, but, you know, etc. the speakers use those strategies to keep the conversation ―alive‖ and interactive. beside interactivity, interpersonal features also appear in many parts of the conversation. the speakers complete and repeat each other‘s utterances and use exaggeration language to show solidarity. they also use certain expressions to indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 119 blunt the force of a disagreement. coherence in the conversation is established by the cooperation of the speakers to give relevant responses towards each other‘s moves. by giving relevant responses, the speakers can sustain the conversation. analysis of negotiation of meanings shows that the speakers mostly negotiate interpersonally. they negotiate feelings and attitude more frequently than negotiate message or news. this can happen because the speakers have a close interpersonal relationship and they talk in a casual conversation setting. since this is a casual conversation, the opening, the closing, and the story sequence has no fixed structures. the topic changes several times and there are several openings and closings. the analysis of speech function shows that s1 is the most dominant speaker while the most passive speaker is s2. however, s2 gives responses quite often that mostly consist of registering and agreeing. it indicates that s2 is strikingly dependent on the other speakers in which she talks most to support other speakers. s3 produces continuing moves more often than other speakers. she elaborates her utterance to make other speakers understand better. the number of rejoinders that each speaker produced indicates that they are willing to support each other to sustain the conversation. these findings have a great pedagogical implication in language teaching and learning. english teacher should include communication strategies when teaching speaking. teacher should not only teach vocabulary, sentence structure, or pronunciation but also strategies to sustain conversation to achieve the goals of communication. time-gaining strategies, selfmonitoring strategies, and interactional strategies may be utilized in communication to help individuals to sustain the conversation and to create a harmonious talk. acknowledgement i would like to thank to the fellow lecturers who have been willing to be involved in this study as participants. references akmaliyah, n. 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(2016). exploring the gap between vietnamese workplace communication in english and english language teaching at a university. asian esp journal, 12(1), 8–38. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 149 padlet for english speaking activity: a case study of pros and cons on ict trisnendri syahrizal english education department, the faculty of language education, ikip siliwangi, indonesia e-mail: trisnendri@ikipsiliwangi.ac.id silpia rahayu english education department, the faculty of language education, ikip siliwangi, indonesia e-mail: silpiarahayu@ikipsiliwangi.ac.id apa citation: syahrizal, t., & rahayu, s. (2020). padlet for english speaking activity: a case study of pros and cons on ict. indonesian efl journal, 6(2), 149-156. doi:10.25134/ieflj.v6i2.3383. received: 12-01-2020 accepted: 22-03-2020 published: 01-07-2020 abstract: as millennial generation, students nowadays have limitless concept of time and space, they broke logical and physical barriers during the process of communication including in the process of learning. blanded learning and hybrid learning are one of the latest phenomenon in education. in shortest perception students will encoder positive effect toward the uses of technology in school but in fact some of them also encounter obstacle and problems. this research aims to project the students‟ pros and cons on the use of one of ict called padlet during the process of speaking activity. this research uses 35 students of one private university in cimahi, indonesia. qualitative method used to provide detail finding associate with supportive theories. observation that was taken from both online processes during submitting and commenting the speaking video and offline situation were used and then strengthen by the use of open questions interview. from the data, it showed that students pros on the idea of; (1) collaboration, (2) flexibility. (3) autonomous learning. while on cons students mark on; (1) technicality issue, (2) psychological elements. keywords: ict; padlet; pro; cons; speaking. introduction in millennial era, learning is moving to technological restoration, students as global citizen that live under technology through all live span. terminology related to technology application in education comes with various name; ict in education, blanded learning, hybrid learning, learning management system (google classroom, schoology, edmodo and others), learning gamification. ict stands for “information and communication technology”. it refers to technologies that provide access to information through telecommunication. it is similar to information technology (it) but focuses primarily on communication technologies. this includes the internet, wireless networks, cell phones and other communication devices. in educational context, nowadays, learning has even moved into web based tools such as web-ct, online courses, online journals and i-pod downloads. by the fact, we should help the teacher in providing a training for teacher in implementing ict in class. in line with that, people have more opportunities to use ict in teacher training program and improve quality of teacher for teach effectively (ratheeswari, 2018). in 2003 world begin to familiar with an online tool that call as web 2.0. o‟relly media is the platform that firstly introduced this web. web 2.0 known as web tool that provides a various function in utilizing life, internet become the main sector of this web 2.0 where people can read and write in the real time with no space and time boundaries. the term of web 2.0 refers to the “next generation” of internet technologies that facilitate interaction with the user (velagapudi, 2013). in other word, web 2.0 tools can help teacher to develop new learning strategies that can enhance student motivation, improve participation, facilitate learning and social skills, and increase self-directed learning. moreover, the technology, especially learning tools are beneficial for improving student‟s critical thinking skill (thomas, morin, & ly, 2014) in the different point of view, these phenomena also give a several issues to both the teacher and the students. some hypothesis said that students will eagerly do the learning process by using the ict, but many students also discover various problems in promoting ict in their learning process. multiple studies have proven that the existence of web 2.0 tools or the ict in education does not guarantee learning. in many trisnendri syahrizal & silpia rahayu padlet for english speaking activity: a case study of pros and cons on ict 150 cases, it was found that successful employment of web 2.0 tools in teaching requires innovation in teaching methods (an, aworuwa, ballard, & williams, 2019) and are really relay on the ways they are deliberated pedagogically by lecturers. by the use of the ict teachers then can enhance their pedagogies practice, they can also assist students in their learning process (hernandez, 2017). in the students‟ point of view, a study from ahmed, almuniem and mbhuh (2016) found that one of the main barriers of incorporating web 2.0 tools was because students were “uncomfortable with openness”. more over other technicalities issues also make students least comfortable and face many obstacles. the technicalities such as virus treat, low speed computer, slow internet connection, and load shading (siddiquah & salim, 2017) the connectivity feature of web 2.0 tools which is hailed as supportive of learning, in other words, could become an obstacle when it heightens anxiety among students. it is thus essential for teachers to plan the use of web 2.0 tool technology so that aspect of „openness‟ does not hinder learning. among the debates, one of the web tools that commonly used lately is padlet. padlet features an online wall web-based where ideas are collating via virtual post from the users. this tool offers various benefits to the users without having a special account. as long as user has a google email they can use padlet. users can create 3 limited walls (for trial version for each g-mail account) but unlimited for premium user. padlet also allows the user to invite others to collaborate on their walls, in classroom setting, padlet works well with activities such as brainstorming, discussion and project work (stannard, 2015). students can learn through padlet at anytime, anywhere, with internet-enable devices such as smart phone, tablet, and computer with internet connection (haris, yunus, & badusah., 2017) padlet or virtual wall can be used as tool to manage virtual collaboration between communities. padlet, a „free‟ web 2.0 tool, is a platform where virtual walls can be created (ann & zainor izat, 2018). a virtual wall functions like sticky note or a white board where one can post various and different types of files (word documents, pdfs, images, audio files, videos, link such as youtube link and web link). the creator of a wall has a wide access to manage the wall; content, design, layout and privacy of the walls. in designing a wall, the creator can choose various wall background given to design background of a wall. other things, the creator also can manage the wall into various layout, i.e., stream, freeform or grid, this kind of layout suit to various needs of the users. the creator of a wall can also control who can access the walls by making changes to the privacy setting, the privacy setting can be operated by providing the qr code, the links and/or passwords to the walls or make the walls public (walls can be „found‟ through internal or google searches). the links/addresses to the walls can be personalized. furthermore, padlet also allows the creator can also limit the visitor‟s activity; allow visitors 1) to only read what is on the wall, 2) write on the wall and edit their own posts (but cannot edit or approve other visitors‟ posts), or 3) moderate (can view, post and edit and approve others‟ post (padlet.com). the creator can also moderate posts before letting others view them. the content of a wall is permanent unless it is deleted or the wall is deleted. one other feature of padlet is that it allows any number of writers to post comments or upload a file at the same time (goh & sandar, 2016). posting on a padlet wall will be viewed at real time. like any other web tool, activities on padlet require internet connection. speaking regarded as the most essential skill since it is the basic for communication yet it is also regarded as difficult skill for learners in particular. limited time for constructing good english speaking make the web tool like padlet can be an alternate solution for the teacher. as we know that good communication is not just having good pronunciation but adequacy of fluency and communicative effectiveness that highlight the focus of speaking skill (kavitharaj, 2017). in contradict the web tool like padlet also requires various internal element of the students; confident, openness, self-esteem, and external factor; connectivity, alternate link ant others. seeing how padlet can help he teacher in anticipating the speaking process, this problem then emerging the interest of the research to see the students‟ point of view toward the uses if this web tool in speaking activity. in short, this research tries to answer, the question; what the students pro and cons in the use of padlet in their speaking activities. method to reveal the students position; pro or contra in the use of padlet in their speaking activity, a indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 151 qualitative study was deliberated. as known that qualitative research is a form of social action that stresses on the way of people interpret, and make sense of their experiences to understand the social reality of individuals (mohajan, 2018). case study used to undercover the non-generalized context of finding. this research attempt to find the pro and cons in specific context of speaking class in one of the university in cimahi, indonesia. as mention that qualitative research comprises of the following methods: logic, ethnography, discourse analysis, case study, open-ended interview, participant observation, counselling, therapy, grounded theory, biography, comparative method, introspection, casuistry, focus group, literary criticism, meditation practice, historical research, etc (cibangu, 2012). the study involved first-year degree students from one of the private university in cimahi. there were 35 students asked to perform their speaking and uploaded it into the padlet wall. the students give a week length time with various theme of speaking related to the topics that have been discussed in the padlet wall. the students give a week length time with various theme of speaking related to the topics that have been discussed in the classroom. to reveal the impact of incorporating padlet into the speaking activity, data were collected through observations portrayed in the virtual wall, the comment in virtual wall given by the students become a source to determine whether they are comfortable or not in using padlet for speaking activity. in padlet we can find a students‟ and teacher‟s reactions; analyses of students‟ responses to video posted on padlet walls and teacher‟s feedback, and peer feedback. moreover, observation during the process of making the video also becomes data of this research. as a matter of fact, observation may be regarded as the basis of everyday social life for most people; we are diligent observers of behaviours and of the material surroundings. we watch, evaluate, draw conclusions, and make comments on interactions and relations. (ciesielska, boström, & öhlander, 2018). other tool used in validating the position of the students toward the use of padlet in speaking activity is by giving the open interview to the students. this interview allowed the researcher to conclude the students‟ position toward the use of padlet. interview given after all process of speaking video conducted. the question of the interview was based on how students feeling toward the used of padlet during the speaking activity. this is open-ended question expected to reveal the real and more flexible answer from the student. semior unstructured, open-ended, informal interviewing is preferred to allow for more flexibility and responsiveness to emerging themes for both the interviewer and respondent. results and discussion in the process of implementing padlet, students required to use their self-awareness due the practicing their speaking independently. by hypothesis, all students will find their positive atmosphere during the process. moreover, as millennial students and also as native of global village, student seems will not encounter any problem in using ict in learning process. but in contradictory, some students discover obstacles and feel threaten by implementing this ict. based on the interview and observation, students show their consent on the use of pdlet during speaking activity, and other interesting fact is that several students also think that padlet harms their learning process. the positive position toward the use of this application showed that students pros on using padlet by the idea of; (1) collaboration, (2) flexibility, (3) learning autonomy. while on cons students mark on; (1) technicality issue (2) psychological elements. pro on the padlet collaboration during centuries collaborative learning regarded as a beneficial process to develop not only student‟s cognition but also their social interaction skill. collaborative learning seems to several aspect of students in both knowledge and affective skills such as improving memory, producing fewer errors, and motivating them in learning. on the process of online observation by reading the comments in the padlet page many students give fruitful comments on their friend speaking video. as example: “i love your video but your batak is strong” by this comment we see that students give a wider range of comment. prior expectation is student can determine whether their friend produce a standardized pronunciation, and proper diction but in fact they also commenting the socio-cultural element of the speaking. by this comment we also can see how the students engaging their cognition with the speaking video, their share their personal knowledge about a good and bad standard on producing spoken action. as well as (dewiit, alias, & saedah., 2014) said that cognitive trisnendri syahrizal & silpia rahayu padlet for english speaking activity: a case study of pros and cons on ict 152 interactions in online learning platforms can enable the learning of concepts and principles as learners build knowledge, while social interactions engage and motivate learners in the learning activity. other comments appeared in the padlet wall is “hallow brow, amazing video. bahasa inggris nya enak banget, bantuin and ajarin gue dong” (hallo brow, amazing video. your english is so good, please teach me and help me to do that), this comment projects the student‟s appraisal toward their friend, additionally the students also asking for advice in making his own video, by this comment we can see that padlet can help the students to manage their own standard, the teacher as facilitator only give a major direction, set rules, and create a regulation related to the spoken activity. this comment also emerging collaborative action among the students. moreover, students then make the commented video as his standard in making their speaking video. on interview by the question “is padlet ease you making the speaking activity” the answer is “ia sir, bantu jadinya aku bisa liat dulu contoh temen aku jd gk bingung bingung amat gitu sir” (translated: yes, because i can see an example from my friend first so i am not feeling confuse when making it). by this, we can see that this padlet acts similarly like social media but in upgraded version, its enable media sharing, social bookmarking, collective, knowledge development and construction, content aggregation and organization, tagging, instant messaging and multi users virtual environment (bejjar & boujelbene, 2014). peer feedback also becomes one of the phenomena in students‟ collaboration. some feedback projects students‟ awareness toward what is wrong and correct related to pronunciation, diction and content of the speaking. for example, “itu nyebutnya bukan gitu” (translated: it is not sound like that). by that finding, seen that students use their cognition to collaborate their knowledge and the phenomenon. by giving several corrections to their friend speaking video. this action helps them to improve their learning quality, because it allows students to construct knowledge through social sharing and interaction. in the interview some students also give various responses that by using padlet they can give a comment to their friend and in the same time learning from other comments given by other students. more data show in collaboration is form another comment given by the students “i think this can help me to understand the topik, thank you ya”. by this comments we strengthen the theories and finding that the uses of collaboration such as giving a peer feedback are very beneficial in sustaining powerful learning process. besides the students‟ peer feedback, the teacher feedback given to the students through padlet seems also very useful in enhancing the sense of collaboration, the student not only collaborate with students but also collaborate with teacher. “what a talk, i love how you pronounce your word, yet there is some problem in the theory that you explain, good job!!”, this is one of the comment given by the teacher by this we can see that teacher. by getting the feedback some students respond a new video by following the suggestion from the teacher and friend. this fact shows that by giving feedback student get more focus on production. by using padlet in the speaking activity especially through giving feedback students commit a collaborative action, all students engage by giving a feedback to other students speaking activity they use their root knowledge to assess the quality of the content without teacher help, peer feedback encourages student to participate in the classroom activity and make them less passively teacherdependent. by the finding, students in affirmative group agree that padlet facilitate them to manage then collaborative learning both with teacher and other students. flexibility teaching and learning process through web tool has been proven effective in breaking the special and time element during the process. during the process of observation students feel comfortable during the process since that have a longer time to do the job and did not require being forever in class room. as stated, flexibility was to encourage students‟ participation and increase their motivation to be active on padlet (ann & zainor izat, 2018). by this project all students can simply participate in the speaking activity even they have no access to classroom, this made students get more motivated in participating the activity. “wih udh berse aja, enak yang ngerjainya santai bosen dikelas jadi asiiik nih kelas bahasa nggris ya” (translated: wow, you just finished your project, it is so fun, we don‟t need bored by finishing the project in class, it makes the english class feel fun). from the comment, we can indicate that students feel motivated and fun during the speaking activity. giving flexibility does not mean giving a total freedom to the students, flexibility by this indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 153 context is that students did not to stay at classroom with very limited time. teacher still give some range of time of students that can be used to track the scheduled the project. emphasis on allocating specific time for students to complete tasks to motivate them to stay on task, the idea for not setting time limit for students would cater to students with different needs, learning styles and backgrounds. in wall of padlet, the rules and the regulation of the assignment has been published since the beginning of assignment announcement, the regulation including but not limited to the due time, the speaking topic, commenting regulation and others. link provided by padlet and share by the teacher give students a flexible access to the wall. by online observation through the comment in virtual wall, student said “ enak ya bisa ngerjain d mana aja santai jadi ya” (translated: it so fun, right? we can do the task where ever we want it make feel relax), other comments, “ia thank you ya sr, pas kebetulan lagi banyak tugas lain jd ini tugas bisa dikerjain kapan aja sesuai jadwal yang sir buat” (translated: yes, thank you sir, now we have many assignment to do and you assignment can be done at any time based on time agreement) by this finding students express the ease they get from the speaking activity using padlet, this in line with core reason that flexibility learning using web tool emerging, the central focus of flexibility learning is to offer choices about when, where, and how the students learn. other emerging phenomena projected from another student‟s commented “ini enak yang d aksesnya gk ribet-ribet, link nya juga pendek and gk using log in log in nan” (translated: it so easy to access, the link is short and we don‟t need to log in). by this we can see that padlet give flexibility to students to access the information given by the teacher and also to see the speaking activity committed by their friends. they can simply copy past the link and get direct access to the virtual wall, upload the video, type the comment, watch the video, or just read other comments. on interview, a student responded that padlet give them easy access, “ia yes enak pake nya gampag tingal klik kik aja bisa kapna aja dimana aja n gk harus log in” (yes sir it easy to use, just click it anytime anywhere and we don‟t need to log in). by this finding, students believe that padlet give the flexibility in using it, not only in the term of time and space but also the system that friendly user. “ini mah yang penting ounya kuota aman, gk usah mikir aturan upoadnya gimana komen gimana dll” (the point is i have an internet connection, i don‟t to think about how to upload to comment and others). autonomous learning the debates on independent learning emerging due to not only students‟ capacity in managing themselves in learning and also teacher capacity in creating and managing free access to all materials for the students. but as debate goes one the phenomena of ict in education continue to develop. one of the benefits appeared is the opportunity to have an independent learning. the technology in this term specified to padlet promotes students with high accessibility. “saya jadi enak sir buat vidionya soalnya saya bisa nentuin sendiri and cari-cari sendiri bahanya” (translated: it make me comfortable in making the video because i can decide what i want and find my own materials). students in this condition get freedom in contextualizing the video, they make the video in various places; hall, garden, home, dormitory even airport and train station. this finding in line with a theory that said education today focuses more on personalized and selfdriven learning. (monica & peter, 2014). by this we can see how padlet bring the students to act not only as students but also as manager. other finding projected from the the data:“sir kita belajarnya jadi lebih efektif ya sir, gk usah nunguu antri-antri dikelas buta praktek speaking” (translated: sir, we get more effective learning we should not need to make a line for practicing speaking in classroom). in theories, it elaborates on the on students‟ learning, autonomous learning is more likely to be efficient and effective, since it is specific and focused on what the learner is interested (little, 2019). also from little (2019) if learners are proactive in their learning, the problem of low motivation is automatically solved. this theory supports the finding, students were having a problem in motivating themselves to be participated in classroom speaking activity, but by using padlet students is getting involve in the speaking activity with less hesitation. moreover, the finding also has shown that students getting more relay on themselves in promoting learning, in line with little (2019) language learning is seen to depend on language use, then learners that are already socially independent should find it easier to be effective and spontaneous communicators. trisnendri syahrizal & silpia rahayu padlet for english speaking activity: a case study of pros and cons on ict 154 cons on the padlet technicality issue as other finding form various researches show that students and teacher face a mutual problem in implementing ict in the classroom. in students‟ point of you as this research specified to, student discovered various technicality issues. as early prediction students will not face any technical issue since they might a sufficient knowledge about it but in fact students still encounter many issues. internet connection becomes one of the most appearing problems. students argue that they have a limited access to the internet, padlet as one of the web tools requires internet accesses to get it, and when students have limited access to the internet it is very frustrating for them, as the result they feel uncomfortable in conducting the speaking activity, even several students make it as excuse to not do the speaking activity moreover, student also encounters regular alternate link error. this condition also very frustrating for them, as the result the students wish to submit it using alternative media like flash drive. beside error, losing the link also make them should ask their teacher and friend about the link padlet. manual typing of the link somehow also makes students hard to get to the correct page. by this condition the students also loosing their interest to continues the process of learning or even to asked assignments, moreover students concerned difficulties in navigating through the resources and technical problems in accessing the platform (assar, 2019 ) psychological elements in the introduction, ahmed, almuniem and mbhuh (2016) one of the most problematic situation faced by students is the “openness”. this problem relates to the uncomfortable feeling when they publicize themselves. “malu sir diliat banyak orang” (translated: it is embarrassing, many people see me”, “aduh sir, gk pd tau sir” (owh no sir, i‟m felling not confident). those is expression emerge from students. by the situation students find that showing their speaking activity make them feeling insecure. padlet as open access web make them worries that many people will see them. waiting for what kind of comment that might appear in the wall also generates more uncomfortable feeling. some of the students thinking that public comment will give a significant impact toward how people see them in real life. seeing other videos posted by other students also make students getting less confident, they focusing on watching a good video and they feeling have less ability to speak like others. this situation might motivate them, but in fact this also discourages them to speak in english and create a video. this condition somehow rejects the idea on how online media learning help students to improve their confident to do self-publications. conclusion padlet as web tool provides multiple benefits and also various disadvantages perceive by the students. this research found that students agreed of pros that padlet helps them to manage their speaking. their pro opinion in the use of this web tools is by three things; first, it allows them to collaborate with their peers and teacher, second, it gives flexibility to the students to do the speaking activity, and the last, by doing autonomous leaning students get opportunity to set their goals and standard of good speaking activity. in contrast, padlet also make some students get some obstacles that regarded as the cons on the use of this web-toll; first, students hard to manage their technicality issue like internet connection, uploading problems, alternate link problems and others, second they also find that it affects their psychology, some students hard to control their confident and openness to show they speaking activity to public. by this finding it show others possibilities to see how students‟ response and position toward the use of padlet in other language skill such as listening, reading, and writing. many researches has conducted similar research but most of the see of the effectivity of this web tool in improving certain skill, research on how students perceive the web tool like padlet also regarded as very important to be examined in the future research. in using padlet the research also should consider as important to manage the virtual wall as easy access as possible for student but still support their preview as individual to make them feel less threaten by the public comments. acknowledgment the highest gratitude was delivered to all parties that help in completing the research. research team from ikip siliwangi, all subject of the research at one the university in cimahi. references ahmed, a. m., abdelalmuniem, a., & almabhouh, a. (2016). the current use of web 2.0 tools in indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 6, issue 2, july 2020 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 155 university teaching from the perspective of faculty members at the college of education. international journal of instruction, 9(1), 179– 194. an, y. j., aworuwa, b., ballard, g., & williams, k. (2019). teaching with web 2.0 technologies: benefits, barriers and best practices. in proceedings of annual meeting of the association for educational communications and technology,. louisville, ky. retrieved from https://www.aect.org/pdf/proceedings09/2009/0 9_1.pdf. ann, d., & zainor izat, z. (2018). padlet as an educational tool: pedagogical considerations and lessons learnt. ictc (pp. 156-162). tokyo : acm digital library. assar, s. (2019 ). information and communications technology (ict). international encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences, elsevier, 66-71. bejjar, m. a., & boujelbene, y. 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(2017). impact of ict. propósitos y representaciones, 325-347. kavitharaj, k. (2017). ict to enhance speaking skills. intenational journal of english language, literature and humanity (ijellh), 843-847. little, d. (2019, 10 7). learner autonomy and second/foreign language learning. retrieved from: https://www.llas.ac.uk/resources/gpg/1409#ref1 0. mohajan, h. (2018). qualitative research methodology in social sciences and related subjects. journal of economic development, environment and people, 23-48 . monica, h., & peter, w. r. (2014). how flipped classrooms can benefit the development of students. the kyushu academic society of english language education (kasele). ratheeswari, k. (2018). information communication technology in education. journal of applied and advanced research, s45-s47. redecker, a. a. (2010). learning 2.0 – the use of social computing to enhance lifelong learning. seville, spain: european commission, joint research centre, institute for prospective technological studies (ipts). siddiquah, a., & salim, z. (2017). the ict facilities, skills, usage, and the problems faced by the students. eurasia journal of mathematics science and technology education, 4987-4994. stannard, r. (2015). english teaching professional. webwatcher. thomas, j. d., morin, d., & ly, s. (2014). delivery method and persistence and performance. proceedings of world conference on educational multimedia, hypermedia and telecommunications (pp. 1797–1801). finland: tampere. velagapudi, m. (2013). 18 free web 2.0 tools for teachers. wiziq, inc. trisnendri syahrizal & silpia rahayu padlet for english speaking activity: a case study of pros and cons on ict 156 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 61 the representation of local culture in indonesian efl textbooks: rationales and implications yogi saputra mahmud faculty of education, monash university, australia e-mail: yogisaputramahmud@gmail.com; ymah0001@student.monash.edu apa citation: mahmud, y. s. (2019). the respresentation of local culture in indonesian efl texbooks: rationales and implications. indonesian efl journal, 5(2), 61-72. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v5i2.1727. received: 07-03-2019 accepted: 15-05-2019 published: 01-07-2019 abstract: this article discusses the representation of local culture in efl junior high school textbooks in indonesia. the two primary objectives of this paper are: 1) to reveal the primary reasons of incorporating local culture in efl textbooks, and 2) to suggest further implications in responding to the incorporation of local culture in efl textbooks. the discussion begins with the current efl context in indonesia with the emphasis on the considerable changes of the curriculum implementation in the indonesian context, in which it attempts to reveal the representation of local culture implied within the 2013 curriculum. as its main arguments, this article argues that there are two predominant reasons for representing local culture in the efl junior high school textbooks in indonesia which include promoting the sense of familiarity to junior high school students in learning english as well as strengthening the aspects of national culture and identity portrayed in the textbooks. furthermore, this article also discusses the future implications in responding to the representation of local culture in efl junior high school textbooks in indonesia, including the needs to enhance the role of teachers as well as the importance of incorporating more diverse cultural representation in the textbooks. keywords: cultural representation; efl; indonesia; local culture; textbook. introduction it has been widely acknowledged that globalization has impacted on revolutionary changes in terms of english usage around the world. consequently, the english use in the global context has been categorised through the use of terms inner, outer, and expanding circles (kachru, 1985, as cited in fiedler, 2011). in this case, indonesia is classified as one of the countries in the socalled expanding circle (kachru, kachru, & sridhar, 2008). although english is not formally utilized within the society of the countries regarded as the expanding circle, this language is taught due to its importance as communication means with people with different cultural and national identities (fiedler, 2011; sharma, 2008, as cited in, jayanti & norahmi, 2014). as a consequence, english gains popularity and even becomes one of the first foreign languages to be taught in indonesia (sukyadi, 2015; yusny, 2013). in addition, this language is formally taught since the level of junior high school. in relation to the english language learning, many researchers have also emphasized on the inseparability between the notion of language and culture (choudhury, 2013; hall, 2013; hermawan & noerkhasanah, 2012; kramsch, 1998; purba, 2011; sorongan, susanti, & syahri, 2014). as a result, this topic becomes an excellent source for researchers to investigate various topics, including what culture is represented and how the notion of culture is adopted, represented, and disseminated in the learning materials used in the classroom context (hermawan & noerkhasanah, 2012). this research trend also emerges significantly in the indonesian context. in indonesian efl context, the contention of which culture is represented in the learning materials has been widely debated by numerous indonesian scholars in various levels of schooling (see erlina, et al., 2018; yogi saputra mahmud the respresentation of local culture in indonesian efl texbooks: rationales and implications 62 hermawan & noerkhasanah, 2012; munandar & ulwiyah, 2012; prastiwi, 2013; santosa, 2015; sorongan, susanti, & syahri, 2014). however, these studies primarily focus on analyzing the classification of which culture is portrayed in the textbooks, such as the so-called local culture, target culture, and international culture (see cortazzi & jin, 1999), with fewer emphases on discussing the justification of why the cultural components are represented that way as well as the implications for the teachers and policymakers. therefore, this paper attempts to extend the focus of discussion as well as enrich the body of literature in exploring different aspects of cultural representation in indonesian efl textbooks. this investigation is primarily driven by the previous research findings which discover the integration of students’ cultural values in language learning materials for junior high school students in indonesia. furthermore, it is also stimulated by several concepts, including the english teaching phenomena in junior high school, the inseparability between language and culture, the justification on why culture should be integrated on that schooling level, as well as some problems that might emerge in the learning context. ultimately, this paper is constructed to navigate the discussion through two research objectives: 1) to discover the reasons for incorporating students’ local culture in the efl learning materials for junior high school and 2) to discuss some future implications in responding to the representation of local culture in the efl material. efl context in indonesia the efl curriculum in indonesia regards english as a compulsory subject in junior and senior high school which eventually also be included in the national examination (jayanti & norahmi, 2014). although some students might start learning english prior to junior high school, this subject is classified either as an optional subject or as a localcontent subject in the public primary schools (hawanti, 2014). consequently, depending on the available resources in the schools, english might or might not be taught in primary schools. therefore, it can be stated that the students in indonesia officially start acquiring english lesson intensively at junior high school level. since many indonesian students begin learning english in junior high school, it is likely for the students to face unfamiliarity as they embrace a new language with different linguistic and cultural norms. furthermore, as a so-called ‘foreign language’, this language is not used in daily contexts within indonesian society. in other words, language can be primarily encountered in the classroom context. graves (2008) utilizes the notion of ‘target-language removed’ context to portray the english usage that is mainly discovered in the classroom, rather than in the levels of educational institution, community, state, as well as the nation. furthermore, the english curriculum in the ‘target-language removed’ context is primarily framed by provincial and national policies in education (graves, 2008). this statement is also in line with the indonesian efl context in which the country has faced some different curriculum changes in the last decade. as stated earlier, indonesia has experienced considerable changes in terms of curriculum implementation. according to prihantoro (2015), the curriculum changes in indonesia can be classified into six significant periods, including (1) the 1975 curriculum; (2) the 1986 curriculum; (3) the 1994 curriculum; (4) the competency-based curriculum (2004); (5) the school-based curriculum (2007); and (6) the characterbased curriculum (2013). as the latest curriculum policy in indonesia, the 2013 curriculum was formally introduced in 2013, but it has just been implemented nationally in 2016 (puspitasari, 2016). in this curriculum, it has been mandated clearly that the efl context for junior high school should include the cultural values within the learning context, including the learning materials. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 63 before delving into the place of students’ cultural identity in the 2013 curriculum, the focus of national education in indonesia will be examined first which enacts as the foundation of conducting teaching and learning activities in indonesia. according to the law on the national education system (no. 20/2003), the general principle of teaching and learning in indonesia refers to the education that is “…based on pancasila and the 1945 constitution, and is rooted in the religious values, national cultures of indonesia, and one that is responsive to the needs of the ever-changing era.” this statement implies that there is a need to integrate the aspects of students’ cultural identity in the curriculum context through the portrayal of pancasila as the five foundational principles of the indonesian state. since this law also determines the basis of the curriculum establishment, the 2013 curriculum also mentions several concepts regarding cultural identity integration in the efl context which will be examined further below. in the 2013 curriculum, there are several documents which mention the emphasis on cultural identity integration regarding english language teaching in the classroom. the content standard of the 2013 curriculum clarifies that the purpose of efl in the junior high school level is to enable students to communicate interpersonally, transactionally, and functionally about themselves, family and others, as well as concrete and imaginary objects surrounding the students’ daily contexts and activities, including at home, school and the society (see ministry of education and culture [moec], 2016). from this statement, it can be implied that there is an emphasis on the use of the students’ cultural experiences as a great resource for english language learning. this statement is also strengthened by the mandated suggestion in the syllabus for junior high school students in which the teachers are encouraged to adapt the learning materials based on the cultural and geographical characteristics of the students (see moec, 2016c). when the students engage with descriptive texts, for instance, they are encouraged to learn how to describe and promote traditional elements (e.g. tourist attractions, traditional food, crafts, and so on) surrounding their community (see moec, 2016c). consequently, this will also impact on the integration of students’ cultural identity in the learning materials published officially by the government. the educational policies implemented in a particular region will mostly impact on the learning materials production, including textbooks (widodo, 2018). furthermore, the textbooks also enact not only as a learning document, but also as “a social and cultural artefact” that features several concepts, including cultural values, social norms, national ideologies, and others (widodo, 2018, p.132). in indonesian context, textbooks should also be in line with the values of pancasila, the 1945 convention as well as the positive norms within the society (see moec, 2016b). therefore, it can be implied that textbooks, not to mention the textbook for the english subject, can guide learners to engage with the cultural and ideological values as well as to enlighten them on the shared ways of perceiving and valuing as a member of society. regarding the types of english textbooks utilized in public junior high school in indonesia, there are two types of textbooks used in the classroom. first, the government textbooks endorsed by the moec that can be accessed at the center of curriculum and materials (puskurbuk) website and the textbooks published by local publishers accepted and supervised by the moec. cultural representations in efl textbooks language researchers have pointed out the elaboration of which cultural elements are represented in the efl textbooks. cortazzi and jin (1999) argue that there are three significant elements of cultural representation in the efl materials, including (1) the source culture which represents the culture of learners; (2) the target culture which portray the culture where the language learned is utilized as the yogi saputra mahmud the respresentation of local culture in indonesian efl texbooks: rationales and implications 64 l1; and (3) the international cultures which cover the cultures that do not belong to the source nor the target cultures. furthermore, these international target cultures can represent either anglophonic or nonanglophonic countries (messekher, 2014). even though there are different classifications of the cultural representations in the efl materials, it is argued that there is always a constant issue regarding the representation of culture in these textbooks. the everlasting contention in the efl materials deals with the cultural elements of a language is often underrepresented because they only represent a few cultural elements for one language (kramsch, 1993). messekher (2014) further explicates that textbooks often have “a simplistic approach to the representation of a culture” (p.70). in other words, it can indicate that the cultural representation is often reduced in terms of the quantity as well as quality in the textbooks. as widely known that language learning in the target-removed context, such as indonesia, is never neutral. the efl context is continuously constructed and shaped by provincial and national policies, including the curriculum documents (graves, 2008). in this case, this will also impact on the decision of which cultural elements should be represented and taught for the students. consequently, this phenomenon has attracted many researchers to identify cultural elements represented in the efl textbooks, including in the indonesian efl context. numerous studies have attempted to identify the cultural representation in the indonesian efl textbooks for junior high school students. most of the studies identify the cultural elements by categorizing these elements into three categories as proposed by cortazzi and jin (1999), including source culture, target culture, and international culture. in relation to the sample, the researchers analyzed the textbooks endorsed by either the government or private companies that are licensed by the government to publish english textbooks. table 1 below informs the findings reported by several studies in analyzing cultural representation in efl junior high school textbooks in indonesia. table 1. studies on cultural representation in efl junior high school textbooks in indonesia studies sample findings (%) sc tc ic santosa (2015) when english rings a bell (grade 7) 73. 63 % 8.1 7% 18.18 % erlina et al. (2018) when english rings a bell (grade 8) – paragraphs analysis 6.4 % 8.4 % n/a picture analysis 43 % 10. 1% n/a when english rings a bell (grade 9) – paragraph analysis 16. 9% 4.5 % n/a picture analysis 88. 7% 3.2 % n/a silvia (2016) english in focus (grade 7) 40 % 18 % 2% english in focus (grade 8) 23 % 53 % 11% mulfian ti (2013) english in focus (grade 9) 79 % 20 % 1% based on the research results reported in table 1, it is implied that source/local culture, which represents the students’ culture, (see cortazzi & jin, 1999) dominates the proportion of cultural elements in the textbook compared to target culture and international culture. among the six learning materials being analyzed, there are only two textbooks that are dominated by target culture in terms of the cultural representation in the textbooks (e.g. ‘when english rings a bell’ for grade 8; ‘english in focus’ for grade 8). by reviewing the related policy in the previous section as well as some research findings reported in this section, it can be argued that there is a strong tendency to represent the source/local indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 65 culture more in the efl textbooks for junior high school students in indonesia. therefore, the paper attempts to discuss two arguments regarding the representation of source/local culture in the efl textbooks that will be presented in the next section. representing the local culture: rationales there are two arguments that will be presented regarding the integration of the students’ cultural identity in the efl materials for junior high school students. the first argument deals with the way to promote familiarity for the students in english language learning. meanwhile, the second argument discovers the integration of the students’ cultural identity as a way to promote their national cultural identity to the global contexts. the concepts of language, cultural identity, and difference will also be discussed further throughout these two arguments. promoting ‘the sense of familiarity’ in learning english as stated in the initial part of this paper, english is formally regarded as a compulsory subject in junior high school. although english can be found in many public primary schools in indonesia, this subject is not classified as a mandatory subject in that level of schooling. consequently, it can be stated that many indonesian students start learning english intensively in junior high school. in addition, since there are disparities regarding the linguistic and cultural contexts between bahasa indonesia and english, the students will be embraced with different meanings when they learn english. therefore, the students may find difficulties in acquiring language proficiency. in relation to the issue above, culture as a shared meaning is produced through the system of representation which involves two different concepts, including mental representation and language (hall, 1997). in a broader sense, further, language comprises of numerous signifying systems, such as words, images, sounds, and so on. besides, these representational systems are agreed by the so-called social conventions where people consider certain ways of signifying the concepts they have in mind (hall, 1997). furthermore, this is what constructs someone as a member of a particular cultural group as language can also express and embody the cultural realities of the speech groups (see kramsch, 1998). based on the discussion above, the different representation between bahasa indonesia and english can be one of the problems that indonesian students might encounter. in terms of language learning, for instance, the concept of things can be represented and encoded differently by indonesian students when they learn english since they may have different mental representation and how to signify such concepts by utilizing specific linguistic codes. for instance, there are some differences in terms of addressing people’s names, greeting and leave-taking as well as cultural discourses between bahasa indonesia and english. furthermore, the students’ difficulties can also stem from the fact that english is not widely used outside the classroom context (see graves, 2008). consequently, it is argued that the incorporation of the students’ cultural identity aims to make english acquisition more accessible and more accommodating for junior high school students who are still in the initial phase of language acquisition. language researchers also discuss the importance of incorporating students’ cultural identity in efl materials. it is argued that integrating the reading materials that are replete with the cultural symbols shared by both the students and teachers can reduce the feeling of alienation since the learners are familiar with the topic being learned (nault, 2006; neba, 2016). furthermore, it is also suggested that learning english through the use of such materials will not only make the learning acquisition more accommodating for the students but also preserve the students’ cultural identity. moreover, the students will be easier to discuss their cultural realities through english toward people from other cultural backgrounds (nault, 2006). in relation to the yogi saputra mahmud the respresentation of local culture in indonesian efl texbooks: rationales and implications 66 students’ level, barrios and de debat (2014) argue that incorporating the students’ cultural identity when their l2 competence is still considered limited could facilitate the learner’s autonomy since the learning materials are familiar with their existing knowledge. consequently, this implies the importance of incorporating the students’ cultural identity in the efl textbooks for junior high school students. to illustrate the use of local culture in the efl discourse, an excerpt from a textbook published by the moec in indonesia for grade 9 of junior high school is presented below. figure 1. an excerpt from the book “think globally act locally” for grade 9 (see wachidah, diyantari, & khatimah, 2015) this excerpt is taken from a book published by the government for grade 9 of junior high school published by the center of curriculum and materials (puskurbuk) for the implementation of the 2013 curriculum in indonesia. in this chapter of the book, the students are expected to learn how to describe things surrounding their environment. in this case, the students are encouraged to learn how to describe things through the portrayal of a traditional musical instrument called ‘angklung’. in addition, it can be identified that this excerpt attempts to integrate the local cultural components through ‘angklung’ in order to help the students understand the concept of describing things. the phenomenon above is also discovered by nomnian (2013) when the researcher analyzed the textbooks published for secondary school students in thailand. the researcher suggests that thai students will be more accessible to refer the concept of a three-wheeled vehicle by signifying it as tuk-tuk since the students have possessed to ‘imagine’ their existing mental representation and ‘emerge’ and ‘translate’ it into english. as a consequence, this will eventually create shared meanings between the students and they will be easier to describe things familiar with their daily contexts. similarly, the excerpt from a textbook endorsed by the government for junior high school students also utilize the traditional musical instruments to make the learning materials more accommodating for the students because they are already familiar with the content of the discussion. therefore, engaging the students’ cultural experiences will lead to better comprehensibility to utilize language by the students. the integration of local culture in efl learning materials, however, is not unproblematic. since indonesia is comprised of various ethnic groups, there are even cultural disparities within their society. this statement is also highlighted by nomnian (2013) who suggests that not all students in thailand might comprehend specific topics in the efl materials as there are several different cultural concepts and practices. for instance, the researcher clarifies that “tuktuk” is only used in the metropolitan area of bangkok (nomnian, 2013). similarly, the use of angklung in picture 1 should also be balanced with the other cultural experiences of the students because some students might not understand the concept of angklung, which is from west java, to be described by using english. besides promoting familiarity for the junior high school students as the beginner learners of english, the inclusion of students’ cultural identity in the indonesian indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 67 efl materials is also understood as a strong indication regarding the shift of focus in learning english to promote the national identity of the students through the efl learning materials. this phenomenon occurs due to the needs to share the cultural identities in the nation to global communities through the utilization of english (gunantar, 2017) that will be discussed further in the next section. reinforcing national identity as stated in the initial part of this article, english is regarded as a compulsory subject since junior high school level. furthermore, as a country in the tl-removed contexts (see graves, 2008), english is not primarily used in society outside the classroom context. consequently, unlike the tl-embedded contexts which have target needs present within the society, e.g. malaysia, singapore, nigeria, the tl-removed contexts should create or even imagine a particular context in which english should be used. in the countries where english is not mainly communicated within their society, the english learning context is actively shaped, adapted, and changed in order to accommodate the distinct needs of each nation (nault, 2006). in this case, the curriculum policies in indonesia shape the decision to integrate the students’ cultural identity within the efl materials as they need to contextualize the english learning for the students. the purpose of learning english in the junior high school level is to enable the students to express about themselves, family, as well as other activities that they conduct within their daily context (see moec, 2016a). based on the statement in the government syllabus of english for junior high school, the teachers are also encouraged to adapt the learning materials based on the cultural and geographical characteristics of the students (see moec, 2016c). consequently, the incorporation of the students’ cultural identity in the efl material can indicate that there is a strong desire from the governments to equip the students with the knowledge of the students’ cultural identity while learning english. in other words, english is now perceived as an access for the students to bring and introduce the students’ cultural resources and national identity to the global community (see gunantar, 2017). based on the constructionist view, the notion of national cultural identity refers to the collective identities formed by the national cultures as one of the primary sources of identity through the production and exchange of meaning as a so-called nation to identify one with others (hall, 1996, as cited in tsui & tollefson, 2007). according to hall (1997), people belong to the same culture when they share a similar way to encode and interpret signs from a language. consequently, the use of local cultural values is perceived to signify that the students are indonesians. in relation to the use of the students’ cultural values in the english textbooks, the government would like to enable the students to compete in the international level and eventually belong to ‘the international community’ without neglecting their own national identity. in addition, tsui and tollefson (2007) argue that the identification of national cultural identity proposed by hall (1996, as cited in tsui & tollefson, 2007) is closely related to the notion of imagined communities. furthermore, they also explicate the discussion of national cultural identity through the four elements. first of all, the notion of national identity can have a close relation to the national spirit to express the unprecedented features of a nation and national culture (tsui & tollefson, 2007). second, the national identity can be invigorated by the shared historical memory of a nation, whether it is real, partly real or even imaginary (tsui & tollefson, 2007). third, the future orientation of a nation can also emphasize the incorporation of national identity within learning contexts which strictly deals with global competitiveness (tsui & tollefson, 2007). fourth, the emphasis on the origin, tradition, and the cultural realities of a nation (tsui & tollefson, 2007). from the analysis of the yogi saputra mahmud the respresentation of local culture in indonesian efl texbooks: rationales and implications 68 national identity promotion through these concepts, the inextricable relationship between these concepts and the efl materials for junior high school in indonesia will be explored further in the next paragraphs. the first and fourth concepts of national identity proposed by tsui and tollefson (2007) can indicate a significant role of difference in constructing identities. in relation to that, identity is also considered relational since identity can only be constructed through the difference between one and another (hall, 1997; woodward, 1997). thus, we should be able to know other identities in order to understand our distinct features as a nation or national culture. in the context of efl materials in indonesia, the textbook materials are primarily driven by the enactment of curriculum policies. in this case, the national education, including the efl in indonesia should be based on the values of pancasila as the uniting principles for the indonesian students. through the cultural contents of the efl materials, students are further expected to promote the sense of belonging as well as to show their unique features to the international community (gunantar, 2017). the second concept of national identity proposed by tsui and tollefson (2007) is represented through the incorporation of the historical stories of a nation, whether it is real, partly real or even imaginary. in this case, these concepts are represented in the efl textbooks for the indonesian junior high school students through local folktales when the students learn about narrative texts, for example in grade 9 (see moec, 2016c). in response to the fact that local cultures are integrated into the textbooks, kirkpatrick (2007) argues that it can reflect the necessities of indonesians to talk about the values due to social, political, and cultural changes that are experienced by the indonesians. he further explicates that providing opportunities for indonesian students to acquire their cultural values will equip the students to talk about their cultural identity to other communities in english (kirkpatrick, 2007). in conclusion, integrating the students’ cultural identity can be perceived as a way to promote familiarity for the students as well as to make the learning more accommodating. since english is only regarded as a compulsory subject at junior high school, many students are assumed to find the learning process difficult to follow if they are not familiar with the learning contents. in addition, the incorporation of the students’ cultural identity is also seen to promote the national cultural identity to the international community by using english. ultimately, the discussion above leads to further considerations that should be concerned by related parties, such as teachers as the user of the textbooks as well as the policymakers to consider the future direction of the indonesian efl curriculum. future implications for indonesian efl context although the integration of local culture has been justified, it is not unproblematic since there are several implications that different parties should consider. in this paper, two predominant implications should be concerned in responding to the incorporation of local culture in efl textbooks for junior high school students in indonesia. teachers role it has been widely acknowledged that teachers, as the textbook users, have an essential role in culture-based teaching in the efl context. messekher (2014) suggests that “no matter what cultural representations are used in textbooks; their effectiveness depends on how they are taught” (p. 83). in other words, teachers contribute significantly to the success of efl teaching no matter which cultural elements are represented in the efl textbooks. furthermore, teachers should also understand the overall purposes of teaching culture as well as the cultural aspects represented in the textbooks. when teachers possess the ability to comprehend the reasons why the cultural elements are represented that way in the textbook, they will help develop the students’ cross-cultural indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 69 understanding which eventually leads to the students’ cultural awareness and acknowledgment of the cultural diversity (messekher, 2014). although the importance of teachers’ role in the culture-based efl teaching has been widely acknowledged, the indonesian efl context has its own complexities. kirkpatrick (2007) argues that insufficient numbers of trained english teachers are one of the major problems in the indonesian efl context. therefore, there is a strong indication that teacher training is essential in order to achieve effective english teaching with the integration of students’ cultural identity within the learning materials. by conducting training for english teachers, it is expected that the integration of students’ cultural identity will be more effective. in relation to the skills that english teachers should possess, kirkpatrick (2007) has elaborated several points that teachers should have in the multicultural efl paradigm. first, teachers should understand the social and cultural contexts of the school environment as well as acknowledge the language of their students (kirpatrick, 2007). in other words, teachers should recognize that the students’ social and cultural identities are the excellent resources to acquire a new language, i.e. english. second, teachers should also understand that different varieties of english have developed in various ways, including in phonological, linguistic, grammatical, and cultural ways (kirpatrick, 2007). therefore, teachers should not regard the students to talk about their cultural identities in english as inferior as those who talk about what so-called target cultural norms. third, it is also essential for the teachers to critically evaluate the textbooks utilized in the efl context and to adapt the materials with the specific needs of their students, with the equal proportion of cultural representations without neglecting each cultural element in the community (kirkpatrick, 2007). consequently, the integration of the students’ cultural identity in the efl textbooks requires the trained plurilingual teachers who can critically evaluate the cultural elements represented in the materials by considering the students’ specific needs, the equal proportion of the cultural representations as well as the sensitivity of cultural diversities in indonesia. furthermore, the incorporation of cultural elements in the efl textbooks should also consider the future direction of the efl curriculum implemented in indonesia which will be elaborated further in the next section. moving beyond the local culture besides the role of teachers as the textbook users and the cultural agents in the classroom, the future direction of the indonesian efl curriculum should also be considered. as discussed above, the 2013 curriculum dramatically emphasizes to include the students’ cultural values within the curriculum, including the prescribed learning materials. however, since it is widely known that indonesia has diverse cultural varieties, the students’ cultural values in the specific geographical area might not be presented. consequently, the curriculum should specifically point out the flexibility of the teachers to appropriate the learning materials in order to transmit relevant cultural values for the students in the specific area. in other words, the curriculum policies, starting from the content standard to the prescribed efl textbooks for junior high school should also consider the cultural diversity. the complexity of efl context in indonesia is also increased by the fact that the globalization and the community integration of the asean (associated of the southeast asian nations) countries have been established within the asean economic community (aec) since 2015. throughout this period, english has been utilized as a lingua franca, or the communication between the asean people themselves (kirkpatrick, 2007). consequently, the economic and cultural partnership between the nations will also have impacts on english education within yogi saputra mahmud the respresentation of local culture in indonesian efl texbooks: rationales and implications 70 the countries. for instance, tantiniranat (2015) has indicated the needs to not only reinforce the students’ cultural identity of their nation, but also acknowledge the sense of belonging and citizenship in the wider community, including asean and the global community. in other words, the efl curriculum in indonesia should also address these issues in order to enhance the cooperation and partnership by accommodating both the students’ cultural identity as well as the cultural values of the other asean nations to promote crosscultural awareness and understanding. however, this issue is also considered very complex since asean is also comprised of different nations with very diverse cultural identities. this is also acknowledged by kirkpatrick (2008) who argues that english in asean consists of multiple varieties. in other words, the english learners in indonesia might expect to meet a wide range of english varieties when they communicate with the asean members. therefore, the students might get confused when they are not introduced with these kinds of variations in the curriculum, including in the learning materials. as the biggest country in terms of population and geographical area, indonesia will receive a significant increase of the tourism and investment influx from the other asean countries. consequently, the needs to rebalance the representations of cultural identities between the students’ nation and other nations should be taken into considerations. conclusion in summary, several concepts have been presented and elaborated in this paper. first, the context of the efl curriculum in indonesia has been explained thoroughly from the elaboration of the national education system in indonesia. furthermore, the 2013 curriculum as the latest curriculum implemented in indonesia, the content standard, the syllabus for junior high school students, until relevant policies regarding the use of textbook materials in the indonesian efl context has also been discussed. second, the cultural representations in the efl materials have also been addressed through the analysis of language researchers. third, two arguments have also been justified regarding the incorporation of the students’ cultural identity in the efl textbooks for junior high school students. fourth, the implications to enhance the role of teachers in the indonesian efl context, as well as the needs to consider the future direction of the indonesian efl curriculum by extending the focus of incorporating culture in the textbooks have also been discussed. thus, in relation to the future research agenda, there are three dimensions of research that can be explored further by future researchers who are interested in this topic. first, researchers are encouraged to investigate the categories of culture beyond the notion of the source, target, and international culture. in this case, future researchers can focus on the types of cultural elements, including practices, beliefs, aesthetic aspects, and many more. second, the study on analyzing cultural elements in efl textbooks should also aim to examine teachers’ attitudes and strategies in dealing with the cultural elements represented in efl textbooks. third, it is also recommended that researchers discover the students’ beliefs and preferences regarding the 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(1997). identity and difference. london: sage in association with the open university. yusny, r. (2013). efl in indonesian context: issues and challenges. englisia, 1(1), 81-99. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 21 elt learning media for young learners: family-themed picture stories anselmus inharjanto department of english language education, faculty of humanaities and education, universitas katolik musi charitas, indonesia e-mail: anselmus@ukmc.ac.id lisnani department of primary teacher education, faculty of humanities and education, universitas katolik musi charitas, indonesia e-mail: lisnani@ukmc.ac.id apa citation: inharjanto, a. & lisnani. (2021). elt learning media for young learners: family-themed picture stories. indonesian efl journal, 7(1), 21-32, https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i1.3987 received: 29-09-2020 accepted: 27-11-2020 published:31-01-2020 introduction it is believed that english is the principal language of international collaboration and, in today’s world, the english language demonstrates a strong network effect. indonesia is one of south east asian countries that always attempts to develop english language teaching (elt) in order to equip its citizens in the globalized world characterized with the advance of information technology and international communication. however, referring to ef english proficiency index 2020, which ranks 100 countries and regions by english skills, indonesia’s level is classified as low proficiency (ef, 2020). indonesia is ranked 74th and still lags behind its neighboring countries in south east asia, such as vietnam, malaysia, philippines and singapore which is ranked 65th, 30th, 27th, and 10th respectively. as for the importance of english language, despite its low proficiency level, elt in indonesian context can play an important role in addressing the issue. two aspects that appears directly from the title are learning media and young learners. it is indeed challenging to teach language to young learners, particularly when it is learnt as a foreign language (reftyawati, 2017; baranowska, 2020). english is one of foreign languages taught in primary school level even though the practice of elt seems to vary in every school. it is beyond the scope of this paper to examine the government policy, especially minister of education and culture, who is responsible for the country’s education. there have been different policies implemented regarding english subject in elementary school. for instance, referring to decree of the minister of education and culture no 060/u/1993, english may become local content subject and is taught at fourth grade and above. since then, english subject was taught in all elementary school, both public and private, and appeared to progress very rapidly (maili, 2018). the writer also argues that, despite many problems in implementing elt at primary school, there are several advantages: young learners could learn the language easily, english is widely used in this digital and technology era, and pupils may prepare abstract: the study aims at investigating whether the family-themed picture stories for young learners were valid as learning media for english language teaching (elt). the researchers developed three picture stories related to family as prototypes. the research procedure was proposed by akker, which comprised analysis, design, evaluation, and revision. the validity was reviewed by the experts of content, instructional design and media or product design. the mean of content validity of three prototypes is 4.26 which is at very highly valid level. in term of construct validity, the average score of construct validity of three stories is 4.23 which is at very highly valid level. the average score of media or product design validity of the prototypes is 4.36 which is at very highly valid level. thus, the study result shows that, overall validities of content, construct, and media or product design of the three picture stories are 4.28, which is at very highly valid level. in conclusion, the set of family-themed picture stories as learning media are valid and categorized as very highly valid level; consequently, they are likely to facilitate teaching english to young learners (teyl). keywords: learning media; teyl; picture stories mailto:anselmus@ukmc.ac.id mailto:lisnani@ukmc.ac.id https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i1.3987 anselmus inharjanto & lisnani elt learning media for young learners: family-themed picture stories 22 themselves for learning english at junior high school. apparently, english is regarded as a favorite subject added to the elementary school’s curriculum, although especially state schools would find some challenges during its implementations (suharsih & hamidiyah, 2012). these challenges include insufficient schools’ condition, lacks of facilities (i.e. particularly books), classroom management (i.e. media, method or technique), and teacher’s educational background. besides, the status of local content subject, the limited number of qualified primary school teachers, and the lacks of learning media or sources have become other problems to consider (sutardi, 2011). on the one hand, the aforementioned issues should be addressed thoroughly, but on the other hand, the improvement of elt’s practices is a must. the regulation of ministry of education and culture no. 65 of 2013 underlines that the learning process in educational units, including elementary education, should be conducted interactively, inspiringly, enjoyable, and motivates learners to participate actively, and facilitates initiatives, creativity, and independence based on students’ talents, interests, and physical and psychological development (kemdikbud, 2013). indeed, it is important to create fun and interesting classrooms (suharsih, hamidiyah, 2012). two factors which influence the effective and efficient of learning are media and learners’ characteristics (reftyawati, 2017). the writer also discusses the significance of selecting language learning media so as to overcome students’ boredom and to create learning enjoyment. in light of recent development in elt, it is becoming extremely difficult to ignore the existence of innovative and creative teachinglearning process. an endeavor which may be applied to support the teaching-learning process (or shortly named learning process to describe both processes) and deal with some hindrances in learning is via the utilization of learning media. learning media is defined as all things which are utilized to deliver messages from the sender (i.e. teacher) to the recipient (i.e. students) in the form of physical devices or objects, which effect communication and interaction between them during classroom’s learning (negara, 2014). learning media is, therefore, a component of learning. furthermore, learning media is an instrument that may be employed to facilitate the comprehension of concepts that should be pursued in learning (zulkardi, 2005). to understand concepts is often challenging. so, the concepts that are abstract and difficult to explain directly to learners may be made concrete or simplified via learning media (hernawan, susilana & julaeha, 2013). it is evident that learning media may become an alternative due to its emphasis on innovation and creativity. therefore, this study is hoped to make a major contribution to research on learning media and teaching english to young learners (teyl) by developing the family-themed picture stories. referring to its functions as learning media, the picture stories are expected to increase motivation, provide and enhance learning variations, present the structure of materials in order for pupils to learn more easily, offer the gist and the points systematically to facilitate learning, stimulate learners to focus and analyze, and create conditions and situations of learning without pressure (sanaky, 2009). beside learning media, this research is concerned with elt to young learners or children. the young learners may be divided into two main groups: 5-7 year olds and 8-10 year olds (scott & ytreberg, 2004). some experts, quoted by siswanto (2017), state that there are 4 groups of young learners based on their ages: 2-4, 5-7, 8-10, 11-14. thus, in the context of indonesia, young learners mainly relate to the age of elementary school students. to teach young learners, there are some characteristics to consider, such as: intellectual development, attention span, sensory input, affective factors, and authentic-meaningful language (brown, 2001). therefore, teachers should find some practical approaches in teyl including sorts of learning media. regarding language development among students, the factor of age plays an important role, and consequently, to teach english earlier would be beneficial because children acquire language with greater ease (dewi, 2017). the cognitive development of young learners lay on concrete operational stage, that is, beginning to think logically and use experiences to solve problem (aini, 2013). according to pinter (2011), the problem solving is usually applied to concrete instances and objects in real life. next, another children’s characteristic is a very short attention and concentration span (scott et al., 2004). mustafa (2010) states that children only have attention span less than 15 minutes so that creating effective instruction is essentially required. in this study, the researchers conducted research and development in the form of learning media for teyl, namely, family-themed picture indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 23 stories. grounded on the interview with english teachers of the selected elementary school, the utilization of picture stories usually improves learning and motivates students to learn in the target language. as well as that, teaching-learning process emphasizing on pupils’ activity is likely to enhance learning motivation, thinking abilities, creativity, and learning independence (inharjanto, lisnani, 2020). as suggested by sutardi (2011), in order to develop learning materials that interest students, its look should be considered like the use of colored pictures, simple and meaningful stories, games that encourage dialog and enjoyment. this is also underlined by ur (1996) who states that pictures, stories and games are very important sources of interest for pupils in the classroom. it is because pictures may be a visual stimulus and stories are visual and aural. further, the themes of family are to relate young learners to their day-to-day lives. hopefully, the family’s themes may contribute to promoting character education, which is highlighted in indonesia’s curriculum 2013 (putri, harto, moecharam, 2017). to date, a number of studies have indicated that good learning media in form of picture stories may benefit teyl. for example, aygun and abaci (2014) who examined illustrated story books for 4-8 age group children in terms of illustration. their study results demonstrate that children should be supported with visual perception through pictures beside auditory perception. next, preparing visual illustration carefully and according to children’s characteristic development can lead to more qualified publication. next, some researchers have examined the illustrated colored pictures to improve english vocabulary for young learners (widiastuti, kusmaryati, romadlon, 2019) and the use of indonesian culture-based comic for teyl (saputri, 2017). finally, rusiana and maharani (2019) have conducted the study which helped children to acquire pre-reading skills via reading stories. the research’s findings reveal that learners showed that they performed the phonological acquisition awareness, letter knowledge, print awareness and print motivation. however, the previous studies have some differences to the current research. the importance and originality of this study are that it develops family-themed picture stories as learning media for teyl. method this study was qualitative research. the method of the study was development research. the development research method was to develop family-themed picture stories as elt learning media for young learners. akker (1999) states that development research aims to design a product for certain purpose through certain procedures (i.e. analysis, design, evaluation, and revision). in this study, formative evaluation model proposed by tessmer (1993) was also used in the evaluation phase to improve the quality of intervention. there are three main criteria for quality of intervention, that is, validity, practicality, and effectiveness. akker (1999) describes those criteria as follows: validity refers to the extent to which the intervention under the development is in line with the state-of-the-art knowledge (content validity) and that all contents and components included in the intervention are consistently related and connected among each other (construct validity). in this study, the validity of the developed product was determined by the experts of content, instructional design, and media in the expert review. the developed family-themed picture stories for young learners was supposed to be evaluated by the students of one of private elementary schools in palembang particularly those who were third to fifth grades, second semester, and the academic year of 2019/2020. however, the global pandemic of covid-19 influenced the process of the research. the government regulated school from home for all students in palembang. that was the reason why the researchers changed the subject of the study, which was limited to the expert review. the researcher chose three experts to validate the family-themed picture stories as elt learning media for young learners. as for the procedures of the study, as proposed by akker (1999), it consists of several phases: analysis, design, evaluation, and revision. in analysis phase, the researchers analyzed instructional analysis, environmental analysis, students’ need analysis, and students’ reading level analysis. meanwhile, in the design stage, the researchers designed the first prototype especially paper-based design of picture stories such as the content of the family-themed picture stories. the last phase was the evaluation and revision. in this step, the researchers used the formative evaluation by tessmer (1993) in figure 1. figure 1 shows that the formative evaluation consists of 5 steps namely self-evaluation, expert review, one-to-one evaluation, small group evaluation, and field test. in the self-evaluation phase, the researchers examined the product in anselmus inharjanto & lisnani elt learning media for young learners: family-themed picture stories 24 terms of the quality of content, construct, and media. from the self-evaluation, the product was evaluated in the next phase, i.e. expert review. the aspect evaluated in this phase was the validity of the product concerning its content, construct, and media or product design. consequently, there were three experts validating the product which are described in table 1. figure 1. general sequence of formative evaluation (tessmer, 1993) table 1. description of experts no experts experts’ description 1 english (content) lecturers or teachers of english education study programs (consideration: a master of english education) 2 instructional design (construct) lecturers or teachers of english education study programs (consideration: a master of education) 3 english (media or product design) lecturers or teachers of english education study programs (consideration: a master of english) in the phase of expert review, the product was shown to the experts to be reviewed and they provide their judgement to validate the product. their comments and suggestions were used as the basis for some product’s revisions to improve its validity. the procedure of study is concisely presented in figure 2. however, this research had to cease at the stage of expert review, that is, to validate the content, construct and media or product design. a rudimentary prototype 2 was produced, after revision was made based on the comments and suggestion from the expert review and the readability of the designed colouring book was analysed. it occurred due to the covid-19 pandemic which halted the researchers from completing this study optimally. in other words, the researchers only succeeded in the validation stage to test the validity of the family-themed picture stories. thus, the formative evaluation stage will surely be carried out in the next stage of research. this research aimed to develop a familythemed picture stories for young learners which is valid, practical, and has potential effect. therefore, to determine its validity, practicality, and potential effect, instruments used in this study were questionnaires (likert-scale) and reading comprehension test. the likert scale comprises strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, and strongly agree with score ranging from 1 to 5 (sugiyono, 2010). to perceive the potential effect of the product, an evaluation was realised in this study by using reading comprehension test in the form of multiple-choice (i.e. ranging from a, b, to c) and true-or-false questions, as well as short answers. the reading comprehension test was constructed based on the developed product in this study. furthermore, it included several aspects, such as main idea, inference, vocabulary in context, cause and effect, etc. furthermore, the validity of the product was determined in expert review. after reviewing the family-themed picture stories for young learners, selfevaluation expert review one to one small group field test revised? revised? indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 25 the experts provided their judgement through a questionnaire in the form of likert-scale with score ranging from 1 to 5 and wrote their comments on it. their comments were used as the basis for revision of the developed family-themed picture stories for elementary school students. to determine the validity level of the product, the average score of the obtained total score from the three experts’ judgement was calculated and interpreted. the validity categorizations were very high, high, moderate, low, and very low (kubiszyn & borich, 1993; sopian, inderawati, & petrus, 2019, p. 106). table 2. specifications of validation sheet of content aspect (s) number (s) of statement 1. the appropriateness of contents with students’ characteristics (currency) 1, 2, 3, 4 2. the accuracy of the content 5, 6 3. the presentation of content 7, 8 4. linguistics aspects of the content 9, 10, 11 5. exercises and evaluation aspects 12, 13, 14, 15 table 3. specifications of validation sheet of instructional design aspect (s) number (s) of statement 1. the appropriateness between materials and curriculum 1, 2 2. material presentation 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 3. the appropriateness of materials with the students’ character 8, 9 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14 4. the appropriateness between exercise and standard competence and learning goals 15 5. the number of exercises 16, 17 and 18 table 4. specifications of validation sheet of media or product design aspect (s) number (s) of statement 1. media or product design 1, 2, 3, and 4 2. usability 5, 6, 7, and 8 no no instructional analysis environmental analysis students’ needs analysis students’ reading level analysis paper based design prototype 1 self evaluation expert review one to one test valid? practical? revise prototype 1 (revised version) prototype 2 analysis design figure 2 the procedure of the study anselmus inharjanto & lisnani elt learning media for young learners: family-themed picture stories 26 the data which were collected tabulated and the result of each instrument was calculated and classified based on validity level as follow in table 5. table 5. validity categorization average score category 4.21-5.00 very high 3.41-4.20 high 2.61-3.40 moderate 1.81-2.60 low 1.00-1.80 very low results and discussion analysis phase in the analysis phase, the instructional design of third to fifth graders of the selected elementary school in palembang was improved based on curriculum 2013. the researchers decided to design family-themed picture stories. they then succeeded to develop three family-themed picture stories entitled two sisters, going shopping, and playing with friends. these titles are obviously related to family and the daily life within family. elementary school students are considered young learners that should be close to their parents, family members, and friends around them. promoting and supporting the physical, emotional, social, and intellectual development of a child from infancy to adulthood, is also the core of the story. therefore, the three titles may represent the idea of family-related themes and, hopefully, are able to contribute to children’s character education in indonesia. first of all, reading level of two sisters was analyzed by using flesch-kincaid grade level. the grade level of siblings is 5 and the reading level is fairly easy to read. it is also stated that two sisters is suitable for 8-9 years old, or approximately second or third graders in indonesia. this classification is in accordance with the regulation of indonesia’s ministry of education and culture no. 44/2019 on the new student’s enrollment. the regulation states that elementary schools normally require 7 years-old pupils to start with. secondly, reading level of going shopping was analyzed by using flesch-kincaid grade level too. the grade level of going shopping is 6 and its reading level is fairly easy to read. however, reader’s age shows that going shopping is suitable for 10-11 years old, or around fourth or fifth graders in indonesia. even though the reader’s age is relatively higher, other aspects of text readability seems to be relevant. thirdly, reading level of playing with friends was analyzed by using the same tool. the grade level of playing with friends is 4 and the reading level is very easy to read. it means the picture story is suitable for 8-9 years old, or approximately second or third graders in the indonesian context. based on the report of english scores of class 3d, one of the classes in the primary school participating in this study, it can be concluded that the students' abilities are fairly satisfactory. the report shows that the english’s average score of class 3d students is 88.12 despite the fact that some students acquire lower scores (i.e. 70). thus, the researchers are interested in developing students' abilities not only limited to english lessons but also improving students' reading skills and developing students' character values towards indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 27 their family environment and its surroundings. besides, grounded on the direct interview with one of the english teachers in the chosen primary school, there were some ideas to consider. the teacher argued that the designed picture stories involves reading comprehension and reading is part of four main english skills (i.e. writing, writing, listening, and reading). so, if student’s reading skill is excellent, it would affect other three skills positively; consequently, their study report would also satisfactory. furthermore, the teacher appreciated that the picture stories were designed by using story telling’s style. the prototype was not a cartoon or an animation, but drawings or pictures related to daily life of the children as young learners. next, english coursebooks the school were using also incorporated texts for reading. the process of teaching-learning started with reading followed by a comprehension in the form of questions and exercises. this comprehension section was considered to be important for students to gain more understandings and insights. design and development phase in the design and development phases, there were three family-themed picture stories developed as reading materials in a set of english subjects. the first was reading material for reading practice and the second was reading material for the reading comprehension test. the developing picture stories, which was available for reading material, was related to family’s themes. the themes of family were considered necessary for these young learners and their education as discussed previously. the result of this phase was the availability of family-themed picture stories, namely, three prototypes of a picture stories on family’s themes which were used by young learners. implementation in validating this product, three experts validated this product in content, instructional design and media or product design. there were some suggestions which needed to be paid attention were as follow table 6. table 6. suggestions from three experts review no expert review judgement suggestion 1 validation sheet of content expert 1: excellent, very good, well-done, please use proper sentence structure, expert 2: please provide the exercises/ question items, it is suggested do analyze students’ competence from their english achievement report in order to be able to identify their real competence and construct suitable media/ material for learning, reading questions are not available please add the questions, it is recommended to add some pictures or present the story in more interesting design, it’s better to be consistent on the use of proper verb 2, please provide various questions and clear instructions. expert 3: the content of the story is easy to understand for the students, the story is suitable for grade 1-3 and the questions are easy to understand for the students, but appropriate for school that use international system. 2 instructional design expert 1: very good, expert 2: please provide the instruction and exercises/ question items, please provide the questions with different types (at least two types) expert 3: the materials and the questions are appropriate, the length of the story is a little bit long, but in good standard, so it will be beneficial for the students 3 media or product design expert 1: very good expert 2: reading questions are not available, please add the questions and use more interesting lay out, it is recommended but add some pictures or present the story in more interesting design, providing picture will help students to be more interested in reading text and understand is better, questions should be provided as well, expert 3: the product is easy to use an appropriate for the students, the medium is very easy to use and simple, good anselmus inharjanto & lisnani elt learning media for young learners: family-themed picture stories 28 medium, font and pictures referring to the result of the product’s validity level, the researchers divided it into three kinds of validities: validity of content, validity of construct and validity of media or product design. there are three stories in the picture stories: 1) two sisters, 2) going shopping, 3) playing with friends. the results of validities are as follows: first, the average score related to the validity of content of two sisters was 4.2 (table 7) which was at highly valid level, the validity of content of going shopping was 4.3 (table 7) which was at very highly valid level and the validity of content of playing with friends was 4.3 (table 7) which was at very highly valid level. it could be concluded that in term of content validity, the average score of content validity from three prototypes were 4.26 (table 11) which was at very highly valid level. secondly, the average score related to validity of construct of two sisters was 4.2 (table 8) which was at highly valid level, validity of construct of going shopping was 4.2 (table 8) which was at highly valid level and validity of construct of playing with friends was 4.3 (table 8) which was at very highly valid level. it could be concluded that in term of construct validity, the average score of construct validity of three stories were 4.23 (table 9) which was in very highly valid level. thirdly, the average score related to validity of media or product design of two sisters was 4.4 (table 9) which was at very highly valid level, validity of media or product design of going shopping was 4.3 (table 9) which was at very highly valid level and validity of media or product design of playing with friends was 4.4 which was at very highly valid level (table 9). it could be concluded that in term of media or product design validity, the average score of media or product design validity of the three prototypes were 4.36 (table 10) which was in very highly valid level. finally, to determine overall validities of content, construct, and media or product design of the three stories of the family-themed picture stories were 4.28 (table 10) which was in very highly valid level. in conclusion, the set of family-themed picture stories as elt learning media for young learners was valid and categorized as very highly valid level. table 7. recapitulation of three experts review (content validity) of three family-themed picture stories experts the appropriateness of the content to students’ characteristic (currency) the accuracy of the content the presentation of the content linguistic aspects of the content exercises and evaluation aspects average score q1 q2 q3 q4 q5 q6 q7 q8 q9 q10 q11 q12 q13 q14 q15 two sisters expert 1 5 5 5 4 5 5 5 4 4 5 5 5 5 5 5 4.8 expert 2 5 3 4 4 4 4 5 2 4 3 5 4 3 3 4 3.8 expert 3 4 4 4 4 5 4 4 4 4 4 3 4 4 4 4 4 average 4.7 4 4.3 4 4.7 4.3 4.7 3.3 4 4 4.3 4.3 4 4 4.3 4.2 remark vh h vh h vh vh vh m h h vh vh h h vh h going shopping expert 1 5 5 5 4 4 4 5 4 4 5 5 5 5 5 5 4.7 expert 2 5 4 4 4 5 4 5 4 4 3 4 4 3 3 4 4 expert 3 5 4 4 4 5 5 4 4 5 4 4 3 4 5 4 4.3 average 5 4.3 4.3 4 4.7 4.3 4.7 4 4.3 4 4.3 4 4 4.3 4.3 4.3 remark vh vh vh h vh vh vh h vh h vh h h vh vh vh playing with friends expert 1 5 5 5 4 4 5 5 4 4 4 5 5 5 5 5 4.7 expert 2 5 4 4 4 5 5 5 4 4 4 4 4 3 3 4 4.1 expert 3 4 4 4 5 5 4 4 4 5 3 4 4 4 4 4 4.1 average 4.7 4.3 4.3 4.3 4.7 4.7 4.7 4 4.3 3.7 4.3 4.3 4 4 4.3 4.3 remark vh vh vh vh vh vh vh h vh h vh vh h h vh vh indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 29 table 8. recapitulation of three experts review (construct validity) of three family-themed picture stories experts the appropriat eness between material and curriculum material presentation the appropriateness of materials to students’ characteristic the appropriatenes s between exercise and evaluation and standard competence and learning goals the number of exercises and evaluation avera ge score q1 q2 q3 q4 q5 q6 q7 q8 q9 q10 q11 q12 q13 q14 q1 5 q16 q17 two sisters expert 1 5 5 5 5 4 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 4 4 5 4.8 expert 2 4 4 3 4 4 4 3 3 3 4 5 4 4 4 4 4 4 3.8 expert 3 4 4 5 4 5 4 4 4 4 3 4 4 4 4 5 3 4 4.1 average 4.3 4.3 4.3 4.3 4.3 4.3 4 4 4 4 4.7 4.3 4.3 4.3 4.3 3.7 4.3 4.2 remark vh vh vh vh vh vh h h h h vh vh vh vh vh h vh h going shopping expert 1 5 5 5 5 4 4 5 5 5 5 5 5 4 4 5 4 5 4.7 expert 2 4 4 3 5 5 4 4 3 4 4 4 4 3 4 4 3 4 3.9 expert 3 4 4 4 4 4 5 4 4 4 3 4 5 4 4 5 4 4 4.1 average 4.3 4.3 4 4.7 4.3 4.3 4.3 4 4.3 4 4.3 4.7 3.7 4 4.7 3.7 4.3 4.2 remark vh vh h vh vh vh vh h vh h vh vh h h vh h vh vh playing with friends expert 1 5 4 5 5 4 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 4.9 expert 2 4 4 3 5 4 4 4 4 4 5 4 4 3 4 4 3 3 3.9 expert 3 3 4 5 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 5 5 4 4 4.1 average 4 4 4.3 4.7 4 4.3 4.3 4.3 4.3 4.7 4.3 4.3 4 4.7 4.7 4 4 4.3 remark h h vh vh h vh vh vh vh vh vh vh h vh vh h h vh table 9. recapitulation of three experts review (media or product design) of three family-themed picture stories experts media or product design usability average score q1 q2 q3 q4 q5 q6 q7 q8 two sisters expert 1 5 5 5 4 5 5 4 5 4.8 expert 2 5 4 3 3 5 5 4 4 4.1 expert 3 5 3 4 4 5 4 5 4 4.3 average 5 4 4 3.7 5 4.7 4.3 4.3 4.4 remark vh h h h vh vh vh vh vh going shopping expert 1 5 5 5 4 5 5 4 5 4.8 expert 2 5 5 4 3 4 4 3 4 4 expert 3 5 4 4 4 5 4 4 4 4.2 average 5 4.7 4.3 3.7 4.7 4.3 3.7 4.3 4.3 remark vh vh vh h vh vh h vh vh playing with friends expert 1 5 5 5 5 5 5 4 5 4.9 expert 2 5 5 4 4 4 4 4 4 4.2 expert 3 4 4 4 4 5 4 4 4 4.1 average 4.7 4.7 4.3 4.3 4.7 4.3 4 4.3 4.4 remark vh vh vh vh vh vh h vh vh anselmus inharjanto & lisnani elt learning media for young learners: family-themed picture stories 30 table 10. recapitulation of validity validity two sisters going shopping playing with friends average score remarks content validity 4.20 4.30 4.30 4.26 vh construct validity 4.20 4.20 4.30 4.23 vh media/ product design 4.40 4.30 4.40 4.36 vh the developed product is a set of familythemed picture stories in relation to reading comprehension for young learners. there are some phases that should have been realised in the process of developing reading simulation material and reading evaluation material. the phases are a sequence of addie model: analysis, design and development, implementation and evaluation. unfortunately, the researchers were not able to conduct the implementation phase because of the global covid-19 pandemic. referring to the expert reviews of content validity, construct validity and media or product design validity, the prototypes have been revised. generally speaking, the experts commented that the content of the picture stories is excellent, welldone, easy to understand and suitable for lower grades at elementary school. the researchers have revised some grammatical errors, managed the suitable questions and instructions for comprehension, and considered to implement the picture stories at international schools when possible. analyzing student’s competence from their english achievement report has also been conducted to identify their real comprehension and competence. as well as that, for construct validity, the expert judgment has enriched the idea for some revisions. overall, the construct validity is greatly satisfactory, for instance, because the materials and questions have been appropriate, the stories have been in a good standard, and the picture stories is believed to be beneficial for elementary students. next, in terms of media or product design validity, the prototypes have had a minor revision. the product was evaluated by the experts and is considered easy to use, simple, and appropriate for pupils. the medium, fonts and pictures were commented as fairly good. however, it is recommended to add some pictures and present the story in more interesting design so as to assist young learners be interested in reading texts and better understand the stories. therefore, the researchers have attempted to vary the design especially on the pictures’ drawings and hoped the young learners would enjoy their learning. this section compares the results with the literature review, whether the results concur or differ from what the literature has discussed. it is evident that the r&d has succeeded in developing learning media in form of a family-themed picture stories that can be used for teaching-learning. the idea of using educational media is echoed by aect (1972), negara (2014), hermawan et al. (2007) and sundayana (2015). even though the process has not been accomplished yet due to the novel coronavirus crisis, the research has developed the prototypes. based on the expert reviews, the developed family-themed picture stories is likely to support what sanaky (2009) has argued that it may increase learners’ motivation, enhance learning variations, facilitate students, stimulate learners to focus and analyze, create enjoyment in learning, and so forth. concerning reading comprehension, the result of this study indicates that young learners are likely to be fostered when they perform the exercises in the comprehension section. as suggested by liao (2011), the pupils could extract the required information from the developed learning media. the pupils may even proceed beyond reading texts since they are possible to experience emotion, culture, norm and attitude. this is similar to the arguments of brown (2007), klinger, vaughn & boardman (2007) and collins (1991). apart from learning english, the developed family-themed picture stories may enrich students’ knowledge to improve their thinking abilities. the researchers believe that english might be learnt or taught since early ages, such as elementary school students. to conclude, the developed picture stories is regarded as significant to improve english skills of young learners. conclusion this study purposed to develop a set of validities of the family-themed picture stories. the researchers developed the three family-themed picture stories. there are three stories in the picture stories: two sisters, going shopping and playing with friends. the developed learning media of the three family-themed picture stories were valid in term of content validity, construct indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 31 validity and media or product design validity after reviewed by three experts of english especially lecture and teacher of english. from the three experts, it could be concluded that in terms of content validity, the average score of content validity from three prototypes were 4.26 which was at very highly valid level. it could be concluded that in terms of construct validity, the average score of construct validity of three stories were 4.23 which was in very highly valid level. in conclusion, in terms of media or product design validity, the average score of media or product design validity of the three prototypes were 4.36 which was in very highly valid level. finally, to determine overall validities of content, construct, and media or product design of the three stories of the family-themed picture stories were 4.28 which was in very highly valid level. from the result and discussion in the previous chapter, the conclusions could be drawn the set of the three family-themed picture stories was valid and categorized as very highly valid level. based on the result and discussion previously, the development research of this study had found that family-themed picture stories for teyl was valid. however, there is a limitation of the developed family-themed picture stories. the stories only reached the initial stage, that is, the validity test which was conducted by three experts on the expert reviews. the validity is based on content, instructional design, and media or product design of the family-themed picture stories. acknowledgement the researchers would like to express the deepest gratitude to the private elementary school participating in this study. next, the researchers also would like to extend their appreciation to musi charitas catholic university as a funding supporter of this study. references aect. 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(2019). illustrated colored pictures: improving vocabulary mastery for young learners. proceedings of the 3 rd international conference on teylin, 68-75. zulkardi (2005). pendidikan matematika di indonesia: beberapa permasalahan dan upaya penyelesaiannya. makalah disampaikan pada pengukuhan guru besar fkip universitas sriwijaya https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v8i1.1813 indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 12 the implementation of task-based instruction in efl teaching speaking skill hanif nurcholish adiantika faculty of teacher training and education, muhammadiyah university of cirebon, indonesia e-mail: hanifadiantika@gmail.com halim purnomo faculty of teacher training and education, muhammadiyah university of cirebon, indonesia e-mail: halimpurnomo@gmail.com apa citation: adiantika, h. n., & purnomo, h. (2018). the implementation of task-based instruction in efl teaching speaking skill. indonesian efl journal, 4(2), 12-22. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v4i2.1371. received: 19-03-2018 accepted: 20-05-2018 published: 01-07-2018 abstract: the present study aims to examine the implementation of task-based instruction in efl teaching speaking skill. it covers the advantages and shortcomings faced by teachers and students in implementing task-based instruction particularly in teaching speaking skill. this study employs a qualitative approach by using a case study design. this study was initiated in one of senior high school in kuningan covering one class of eleventh grade students. the data were obtained through interview and questionnaires. the findings showed that task-based instruction result in several advantages and shortcomings. it was found that task-based instruction enables students to be more active in teaching and learning process and it was also proven to enhance students’ speaking skill. meanwhile, there were also some shortcomings identified in this study i.e. teacher’s ability, time availability, and different students’ proficiency level. therefore, it is suggested to implement task-based instruction in a long time period and in a very proper way by considering different students’ ability inside a certain classroom. keywords: task-based instruction; teaching speaking skill; advantages and shortcomings of taskbased instruction. introduction inside the circumstance of english language teaching in indonesia as a foreign language (efl), one of the objectives of english language teaching is to improve oral communication skill as an output of the learning outcomes. in other words, efl students are considered to be successful in language learning when they are able to speak fluently using the target language. it is because the oral communication or commonly known as speaking skills are regarded to be the most crucial skills or abilities in english learning (aleksandrzak, 2011; bashir, azeem & dogar, 2011; hasan, 2014; malihah, 2010; oradee, 2012). it is also in line with harmer (2000) that speaking skills are an instrument to in facilitating a communication process which covers several aspects of language i.e. grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. this is also relevant with the fact stated by richards (2008) and nunan (1991) that speaking skills (speaking proficiency) are generally used as an indicator of students’ competence in learning english. nevertheless, speaking is regarded as a difficult and challenging skill to realize. it is because, in the realization, speaking skill needs courage as a psychological aspect and also a proper preparation to produce english as a target language (malihah, 2010; bashir et al., 2011; orade, 2012). in addition, students’ lack of exposures, lack of confidence, lack of motivation, and lack of speaking skill knowledge are also several factors why students are difficult to comprehend and develop speaking skills (richard & rodgers, mailto:hanifadiantika@gmail.com mailto:halimpurnomo@gmail.com https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v4i2.1370 hanif nurcholish adiantika & halim purnomo the implementation of task-based instruction in efl teaching speaking skill 13 2001; harmer, 2001; febriyanti, 2011; rohani, 2013). in other words, the students feel insecure to speak because they tend to be nervous in delivering material orally in front of many people. according to the preliminary observation, several shortcomings of speaking are also identified in a senior high school in kuningan. the result of preliminary indicates that most students tend to be reluctant and nervous to speak english. some students are not motivated to raise their hand even answer teacher’s questions. it also infers that the students need more time to practice and get used themselves in the context of real communication to speak communicatively instead of training them to work in companies or institution. therefore, it is suggested to implement an instruction to accommodate the mandates of curriculum and also the students’ needs. furthermore, it is very crucial to create an interesting teaching and learning environment which enables students to speak english. based on the problems aforementioned, a proper teaching technique is very necessary to implement to address those problems. inside the context of speaking, task-based instruction (tbi) is an alternative method that can be implemented to fulfill demands as aforementioned particularly in providing optimal circumstance for efl students to improve their speaking skill which is in line with what ‘communicating effectively’ and ‘meaningful communication’ (luchini, 2004). tbi refers to an instruction which encourages students to have an abundant interaction or in other words promotes students’ activeness (students-centered learning) (larsen, 2000; richard and rodgers, 2001; ellis, 2003; nunan, 2004). tbi uses tasks as the center of instruction to complete the tasks (prabhu, 1987; skehan, 1996, 2003; ellis, 2000, 2006; nunan, 1989, 2004; littlewood, 2007; kumaravadivelu, 2012). tbi, according to several researchers, is implemented in the classroom through different sequencing frameworks (prabhu, 1987; skehan, 1996; willis, 1996; ellis, 2003). generally, they have three essential stages which reflect the chronology of a task-based lesson. willis (1996) divides tbi into three sequencing phases namely pre-task, the task, and language focus. meanwhile, ellis (2003) categorizes tbi into three stages i.e. pre-task, during task, and post-task. the components of task-based learning framework enable teachers to follow teaching steps effectively because tbi offers sequences which are different with other teaching methods. the first stage of tbi is pre-task stage (including topic and task). pre-task prepares students to perform tasks in ways that promote acquisition. lee in sae-ong (2010) delineates that it is very crucial to provide an advance overview concerning what the students will be required to do and the nature of the outcome they will achieve. this stage comes about in the beginning of the lesson to prepare various activities in order to inspire and motive the students before the teacher starting the task (dornyei in sae-ong, 2010; aliakbari and jamalvandi, 2012). in this stage, the teacher has to introduce the topic by defining the topic area. secondly, the teacher identifies and uses the topic language to help students recall/learn useful vocabularies, words, or phrases to ensure that they understand the task instruction. third, the teacher has to make sure the students understand what to do and what to achieve in the task. the second stage of tbi is defined as task cycle which refers to the ‘methodological options’ or ‘task performance options’ available to the teacher during the task stage. different options or lessons, related to how the task is done, are available. in other words, this stage encourages students to show their attempts to achieve the goal (berretta & davies, 1985). this stage is a crucial phase for students to use language, by working simultaneously either in pairs or small groups, to achieve the goal of the task (hyde, 2013). in this phase, the students are stimulated to use language skills while the teacher monitors and encourages them. the third stage, according to willis (1996) and ellis (2003), delineates the language analysis and practice stage which emphasize on language form and use. this stage is indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 14 divided into two activities i.e. language analysis and language practice activities. the language analysis activity is also defined as a consciousness-raising activities or language awareness activities. this activity encourages students to identify the language features from the task stage by providing them the explicit instruction of teaching form or grammar (ellis, 2003; nunan, 2004; branden, 2006). meanwhile, language practice activity is initiated to increase students’ confidence and assist them to improve their fluency in using language features (ellis, 2003; nunan, 2004; branden, 2006). the teacher, in this stage, provides activities to practice the language the students have done and analyzed in the previous activity either in form of spoken or written. moreover, there have been studies focusing on the implementation of tbi in teaching speaking skill conducted in different countries where english is taught as a foreign language. the first previous study was in thai context conducted by uraiwan (2010). the findings of the study indicated that the implementation of tbi helped students improving their speaking ability. this study also showed that tbi was contextual and relevant to language across the world. secondly, the empirical study was in turkish context investigated by kurkgoz (2011). this study asserted that the implementation of tbi was able to improve students’ speaking ability and created a meaningful interaction of teaching and learning process. the next previous study was in korean context conducted by yim (2009) as cited in witchiwarit (2014). this study stated that the implementation of tbi was beneficial to increase the intensity of students’ participation to get involved more in teaching and learning process. it was also crucial to improve students’ confidence to speak english in the classroom. furthermore, there have been studies concerning the implementation of tbi in teaching speaking skill conducted in indonesian context, where english is taught as a foreign language, which are relevant with the present study. the first empirical study was conducted by yuniarisda (2004). this study showed that the implementation of tbi was successfully initiated in teaching speaking skill. it was because tbi created a meaningful environment for students to speak frequently. in other words, they possessed high confidence in speaking english in the classroom. the next relevant study was conducted by rohani (2013). it showed that there was a significant improvement of students’ positive communication strategy. in addition, there was a tendency where students were getting more active to get themselves involved in the teaching and learning process. the previous empirical studies, as aforementioned, have investigated the implementation along with the result of tbi towards speaking skill in efl context. however, the implementation of tbi in teaching speaking skill in senior high school level is still rarely found. most of them are conducted at junior high school level (yuniarisda, 2004) and university level (rohani, 2013). hence, this study attempts to investigate the advantages and shortcomings of tbi in teaching speaking skill at senior high school level. method the present study puts an emphasis on the advantages and shortcomings of tbi in teaching speaking skill faced by either by teacher and students. this study is characterized as a qualitative study by using case study design. it is because the setting of this study is natural which is conducted in conducted in a natural setting (merriam, 1991; creswell, 2008; see also guba and lincoln, 1985: 39-43, as cited by alwasilah, 2009) involving an english class that consists of students and teachers. it is also called interpretive research (see denzin and lincoln, 2000; dunne, pryor, & yates, 2005: 50) because it is based on interpretive paradigm where qualitative researchers study things in their natural settings, attempting to make sense of, or to interpret, phenomena in terms of the meanings people bring to them. hanif nurcholish adiantika & halim purnomo the implementation of task-based instruction in efl teaching speaking skill 15 the study was conducted in one of public senior high schools in kuningan, west java. the selection was based on several considerations. first, the english teacher shared a same interest in implementing tbi in her classroom. in addition, he had been implementing and conducting research concerning tbi in different contexts and aspects. therefore, it can be assumed that the teacher might have possessed knowledge regarding tbi along with its theoretical foundation. hence, the present study is expected to develop efl students’ speaking skill by using tbi. second, the selection was merely based on the accessibility in terms of permission and location. the data, in this study, were obtained through several data collection techniques i.e. observation, teacher’s and students’ interviews, and questionnaires. interview, in form of a semistructured interview with open-ended question, was initiated to obtain the data concerning the advantages and shortcomings of the implementation of tbi in teaching speaking skill. this data were analyzed through several procedures i.e. transcribing, coding, categorizing, and interpreting the data. in addition, open-ended questionnaires were also used as an instrument to obtain data from the students. results and discussion according to the result of the present study, there are two aspects which are covered in the analysis. they are (1) the advantages of tbi in teaching speaking skill, (2) the shortcomings of tbi in teaching speaking skill. with regard to the advantages of tbi in teaching speaking skill, there are three advantages namely (a) intensifying and increasing students’ speaking skill, (b) contributing to students’ engagement/active participation in teaching and learning process, (c) creating students’ positive attitudes towards tbi. meanwhile, with regard to the shortcomings of tbi in teaching speaking skill, there are at least three shortcomings which are covered in this study particularly (a) teacher’s ability, (b) time availability, and (c) different students’ proficiency level. the advantages of the implementation of tbi in teaching speaking skill referring to the findings and discussion in this study, there are two advantages of the implementation of tbi in teaching speaking skill i.e. 1) intensifying and increasing students’ speaking skill, 2) encouraging students to get more involved in teaching and learning process. contributing to students’ engagement/active participation in teaching and learning process according to the result of preliminary research, most students tend to be passive during the teaching and learning process. instead of speaking english, they mostly speak indonesian when they are confused to express their ideas. most students possess limited vocabulary to respond oral activities. they frequently ask their peers by using indonesian when they do not recognize certain vocabularies. therefore, it is difficult enough for them to create a smooth conversation due to too many pauses. moreover, the occurrences of wrong pronunciation and intonation, which lead to serious phonological errors, frequently occur when they present their spoken task. the excerpts below are the examples of students’ performance in the first cycle. there are no modifications made to words, grammar, and syntax. the slash // used to show the pauses or gaps done by the students. meanwhile, the wall brackets (( )) used to indicate students’ wrong pronunciation. first pair: a: what will you do tomorrow? b: i will berenang eh swimming with (my family). ////after that i will go to the (campus) a: anything else? b: //// i will // to // go // to // the // (campus). //// what (about) you? a: //// i will to // go // visit //// my (grandmother) b: ok. //// be (careful) second pair: a: (excuse me). (would) // you (mind) bicara no no i mean talking to you for a (moment)? b: sure. //// emmmm, what’s the (matter)? a: //i find it // (difficult) to understand the english sentences. b: if so, // you (should) learn english grammar indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 16 a: i see ada lagi anything else //, sir? b: besides, you // have to (improve) your (vocabulary) a: thank you very // much, sir. b: you’re so welcome according to the result of preliminary research above, before tbi is implemented in teaching speaking skill, which are in form of students’ oral performance, there are still many errors occur. there are still many grammatical errors and limited vocabulary master that leads them to frequently use indonesian as their mother tongue during the conversation. they tend to be hesitate and afraid to make mistakes either in grammar and pronunciation. the students are still unable to perform this conversation smoothly although they have been provided several vocabularies and expressions related to the topic performance. therefore, the result indicates that there are still many pauses and incomplete expressions. they make a lot grammatical mistakes and inappropriate pronunciations. due to the result of preliminary research, there are still many grammatical errors and pronunciation mistakes done by the students. it becomes a fundamental reason to implement tbi in teaching speaking skill. the result of the implementation of tbi in teaching speaking skill can be seen through the transcription of oral students’ performance below. there are no modifications made to words, grammar, and syntax. the slash // used to show the pauses or gaps done by the students. meanwhile, the wall brackets (( )) used to indicate students’ wrong pronunciation. first pair: a: good afternoon b: good afternoon. what can i do for you? a: yes, i want to borrow a book. b: what kind of book you want to borrow? a: i want to borrow an english book. b: what is the title of the book anyway? a: excuse me? b: i mean the title of the book, sir. a: ah. i see. the title of the book is systemic functional linguistics. b: who is the writer? a: pardon? b: whose book is that? in other words, who was the book written by? a: it was written by m. a. k halliday and ruqaiya hasan. b: when was the book published? a: the book was published in nineteen seventy six. b: what is the publisher’s name? a: the book was published by longman. b: all right then. wait a minute. i’ll take a look for you, sir. a: thanks a lot. b: you’re welcome, sir. second pair a: what are you doing here? b: i’m reading a book. a: what kind of book you are reading now? b: i am reading a history book. a: is it good? is it interesting? b: yes, it really is interesting. you should read this too. a: what does the book tell about? b: it is about the history of islamic kingdoms in indonesia a: i see. wow, that sounds great. enjoy your reading then. b: thanks a bunch. the implementation of tbi offers several significant changes which is a way much better than the result of preliminary result. during the task, they tend to encourage their peer when they get stuck what to say. they are also fully aware to take turn with their peer to speak. they seem to enjoy their interaction with their peer during the task, get a lot of opportunities to use language and explore themselves more, and provide appropriate expressions during the task and report stage. what they perform are much better compared with the result of the preliminary research. overall, it can be inferred that tbi encourages students to get involved more in the teaching and learning process. in other words, they tend to be more active to get to know about the task particularly in spoken/oral performance with their peers. intensifying and increasing students’ speaking skill according to questionnaires and interview, it is revealed that the implementation of tbi contributes to students’ speaking skill. most students, 34 out of 36 students, believe that tbi contributes to their speaking ability. in other words, 34 students state that their hanif nurcholish adiantika & halim purnomo the implementation of task-based instruction in efl teaching speaking skill 17 speaking ability is improved through tbi. the students’ feedback towards questionnaires can be seen in the excerpts below. excerpt #1 “guru memberikan kosa-kata dan tugas yang bervariasi di setiap kegiatan belajar mengajar. hal ini membuat kemampuan speaking saya sedikit demi sedikit bertambah. hal ini juga berimbas terhadap kepercayaan diri saya ketika berbicara dalam bahasa inggris.” (s2) (teacher always shares new insights about vocabulary mastery in every single teaching and learning process. it also leads me to be more confident in speaking english) excerpt #2 “kemampuan speaking saya meningkat karena mendapatkan pelajaran yang baru tentang grammar dan vocabulary. membuat saya lebih percaya diri untuk berbicara dalam bahasa inggris.” (s1) (my speaking ability is much improved because of varied interesting lesson about grammar and vocabulary. yet, it makes me to be more encouraged to speak english) excerpt #1 indicates that the implementation of tbi, particularly vocabulary mastery and varied tasks, increases student’s speaking skill. in addition, it also affects positively to their confidence to enthusiastically speak english. meanwhile, excerpt #2 shows that their speaking skill is much improved because of the existence of varied tasks related to grammar and vocabulary. it stimulates them to be more active in the teaching and learning process. furthermore, there is a tendency where the students not only practically applying how to speak by using target language (tl) but also how to communicate it properly. it is also relevant with teacher’s interview that students perform conversation smoothly in a confident way after tbi is entirely implemented. in other words, after several sessions initiated, tbi enables students to speak and actively communicate. it can be seen from teacher’s interview that emphasizes on students’ improvement below. excerpt #3 inside the circumstance of students’ speaking skill, i think…personally…their speaking ability is much improved. emmm, in other words, after tbi is implemented in teaching and learning process, their speaking ability is significantly improved as they are able to recognize and deliver the message in an appropriate way. in addition, tbi also encourages students to be more confident to speak english either individually or with peers. they are no longer afraid to share what they want to say. it is very crucial for students to possess such kind of courage like that. it is a…good start to begin with. once you have possessed what so called confidence, it means that you have already had a good thing to proceed to the next level. it is because, previously, they tend to be more passive to participate in every single teaching and learning process. after the implementation of tbi, i feel like i find a new spirit from students as they are easily engaged with the activities offered in the classroom. regardless some negative factors done by the students, still…the most important thing is that they are still motivated to learn, in particularly, speaking english. (teacher interview) according to the transcription of teacher’s interview above, the implementation of tbi plays important roles to increase even intensify students’ speaking ability. it is because the activities in tbi provide students some solutions i.e. encouraging students to be more active in speaking, offering them an opportunity to comprehensively learn about the aspects of speaking skill (pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar), allowing them to share ideas, stimulating them to learn either individually/independently or with peers/in group, and providing them an environment to interact in english. therefore, it can be inferred that the activities in tbi are relevant and appropriate to allow students to share ideas, encouraging them to be more actively involved in the teaching and learning process, and creating an environment for students to interact on an individual level and also within group work (nunan, 2004; muller, 2006: ruso, 2007). creating students’ positive attitudes towards tbi during the implementation of tbi, the teacher gives feedback to the students immediately, returns the result of the task and papers punctually, and tells what they have achieved as soon as possible. those activities are done to tell students how good they have achieved and how much they are improved. moreover, indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 18 the teacher also provides topics and activities which are relevant to positively encourage them. those activities stimulate them to be actively engaged in the teaching and learning process. in addition, the teacher gives them specific feedback in the last phase of tbi. therefore, besides encouraging them to actively get involved more in participation, the teacher also gives them self-evaluation worksheet and their recording of oral performance in each session. some students believe that self-evaluation worksheet and recording of oral performance are able to reflect and evaluate their own learning progress and performance. it can be seen from translated interview obtained from some students below. “i, personally, think that the implementation of tbi helps me to memorize many vocabularies that i am not aware before. tbi also encourages students, particularly myself, to practice it regularly meeting by meeting. in addition, self-evaluation worksheet is very beneficial to highlight the vocabularies i have already possessed in each meeting.” (students 4) “i have to admit that both self-evaluation worksheet and students’ performance recording are very crucial for us, especially me, to figure out how much i am improved from one session to another. in other words, it encourages me to give a correction towards my grammatical knowledge and enrich my vocabulary. personally, tbi invites students to actively get involved more in the teaching and learning activities.” (students 2) “honestly, tbi is quite difficult to comprehend in the very beginning of the implementation. however, because of tbi, i get a lot of insights and knowledge about how to speak english well. i think i have figured out certain strategy how to speak because of this way of learning. i also find myself much improved in pronouncing words, possessing new vocabularies, and even creating complex sentences presented orally. overall, the implementation of tbi is really helpful for the students to allow them to actively speak in a confident and fluent way either with pairs or in a group.” (students 6) “i think the use of transcript is very important and positive as it can help me to comprehend the meaning. it is different with recording which is too fast to listen. it is really difficult, i think, for the students to listen and understand when the recording is too fast.” (student 3) “the way the students, in particular myself, learn english currently is really different with the previous one. the tasks or tbi seem to be challenging and it allows me to keep answering questions asked by my friends. yet, it is also my very first time to compare my own work to fluent speakers’ work. hence, it encourages me to keep improving my pronunciation or my speaking skill.” (students 8) according to the translated interview above, two students state that the use of selfevaluation worksheet is able to enrich their vocabulary mastery. on the other hand, recorded performance helps them to improve their listening sensitivity. the next two students believe that recorded performance is really helpful to the way they pronounce words or vocabularies in a proper way. another student thought that self-evaluation is very fundamental to compose and use more complex sentences. besides, this kind of learning is crucial to improve her vocabulary mastery along with the pronunciation. the other students assert that comparing their own work with others are good pronunciation practice tools. overall, most students believe that the implementation of tbi provides them many opportunities to speak english more in the teaching and learning process. besides, they are able to assess their speaking after listening their recorded performance. three students state that tbi is very beneficial to build their self-confidence. self-confidence leads to students’ motivation to speak english more during the learning process. one student admits that tbi is very flexible and appropriate to allow her to listen her own recording many times. by listening her own recording over and over again, she will figure her mistakes and then fix them as an attempt to improve her speaking skill. only one student who has a negative attitude towards the use of recorded performance. he thinks that the recording is quite fast to listen and comprehend which is unlike a real person talking. it becomes his obstacle to understand the meaning from the recording. nevertheless, most students respond that every single activity in tbi is very important to build selfconfidence and also self-reflection to speak hanif nurcholish adiantika & halim purnomo the implementation of task-based instruction in efl teaching speaking skill 19 either in academic context or in daily life context. the shortcomings of the implementation of tbi in teaching speaking skill with regard to the findings and discussion in the present study, there are three shortcomings during the implementation tbi. they are: (a) teacher’s ability, (b) time availability, and (c) different students’ proficiency level. teacher’s ability in accordance with the result of the interview, the first shortcoming is related to teacher’s preparation and the way the teacher communicates in target language during the teaching and learning process. concerning teacher’s preparation, the teacher asserts that a good preparation is very necessary to implement tbi. it covers materials, contexts, teaching strategy, and media which is relevant with students’ characteristics. it can be seen through the interview below. int#1 r: did you experience any problems or shortcomings during the implementation of tbi in teaching students’ speaking skill? t: well, actually, i found several problems in implementing this kind of learning. one of them is you have to prepare your best before you actually teach and implement tbi. in other words, you have to be well-prepared in selecting proper strategy along with the media for certain basic content. as a teacher, i have to prepare something which is in line with my own concept because, as a matter of fact, between practice and theory are somehow contradictive. therefore, it is suggested to implement this kind of learning to identify the contexts, materials, students, and students’ learning environments. it is such a big task for english teachers to implement it in an appropriate way. the way how tbi is initiated is a challenging thing and it is not an easy task to do. it, even, becomes more complicated for the teachers when they are needed to introduce the topic that allows them to communicate in target language. teacher has a great influence because everything is in teachers’ hands. as long as the teachers well-prepared the teaching and learning process will run smoothly as expected. we can prepare something, like varied materials brought to students by media such as video, power point, and questions and answers strategy, which is appropriate and contextual with the students’ learning environment. (interview#1, 03/03/2018) according to the interview above, it is a must for the teachers to be well-prepared before implementing tbi. it is because they way teacher designing an effective lesson plan, delivering materials, and managing classroom is very fundamental. according to the observation result, the teacher provides students different types of media particularly video and power point. besides, the teacher encourages students to actively get involved in a discussion. according to the teacher, those strategies along with the use of media are effective to give students new insights and motivate them to be more active during the learning process. therefore, it is very necessary for english teachers to design effective teaching activities which could lead students to achieve the learning targets. time availability time availability is also considered as one of shortcomings in the present study. most students, particularly 36 % or 13 out of 36 students, state that they have limited time to finish entire tasks or instructions in tbi. it can be seen from the following excerpts taken from students’ questionnaires. materi yang diajarkan misalnya grammar, vocabulary, dan pronunciation melalui tbi sebetulnya bagus namun waktu yang sedikit membuat siswa tidak semuanya faham (s20) (not all students understand tbi instructions in delivering certain materials particularly grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. it is because of lack of time. metode ini bagus untuk diterapkan hanya saja membutuhkan waktu yang relatif lama (s3) (this method is quite good to implement. however, it needs more time) untuk memahami instruksi-instruksi maupun materimateri tbi membutuhkan waktu yang tidak sebentar (s32) (comprehending tbi instructions along with the materials need a plenty of time) according to the excerpts above, it can be inferred that the students need more time to comprehend certain materials in particular grammar and vocabulary. it is because the students tend to put an emphasis on indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 20 grammatical rules, spelling/pronunciation, and vocabulary mastery. hence, in relation with the limited time, this study emphasizes on students’ awareness to communicate. it can be seen from the teacher’s interview below. tbi, i think personally, is much related with the way we communicate or the way we speak, in this context by using english. this is the reason why grammar is not the first priority for students to learn. here, the students are able to freely communicate and explore themselves by performing certain expressions and comprehend several contexts in speaking/oral communication. in other words, this instruction is expected to lead students to be more fluent in speaking english or at least they are confident enough speak in front of the class either with pairs or in group. when i put a priority on speaking rather than grammar, it does not mean that i entirely neglect grammar. i deliver grammar focus after they are confident enough to speak and they have obtained enough knowledge about context in oral communication. that’s i think the most important beginning for the students to get started. later, after the students are considered good enough in speaking, i highlight grammatical errors by showing their own recoding of oral performance. from this point i can tell what mistakes they have done and they understand what to fix. therefore tbi, as i have stated aforementioned, should put an emphasis on the way the students communicate by using english in oral/spoken context. on the other hand, grammar is important to tell them what to fix in their own performance to make it a way better than before. (teacher’s interview) according to the result of the questionnaires and interview above, therefore it can be inferred that it is a must for the teacher to encourage students’ communication competence or, in other words, students’ speaking skill. the way they communicate in several context is very important to master. tbi encourages students to speak confidently and also enables them to recognize different contexts of communication. however, the teacher is suggested not to entirely neglect grammar in the implementation of tbi. it is because grammar also plays an important role in students’ speaking even though the proportion is not as much as speaking. different students’ proficiency level the last occurrence of shortcoming in this study is different students’ proficiency level. some students, 28 % or 10 students of 36 confess that they possess insufficient language proficiency. they tend to lack of vocabulary mastery, grammar, and also pronunciation. it can be seen from the excerpts below. umumnya materi-materi dan instruksi-instruksi berbahasa inggris dan tidak ada versi bahasa indonesia-nya untuk memudahkan kita memahami apa yang harus dilakukan. sedikit membuat jenuh bagi yang kurang mengerti seperti saya (s16) (the materials and instructions are mostly in english without indonesian version. it brings confusion to students who lack of language proficiency like me) kurang bisa dimengerti karena guru selalu menggunakan bahasa inggris ketika mengajar. akibatnya saya tidak bisa mengerti bahkan menjawab pertanyaan yang diberikan oleh guru (s24) (i can barely understand the material because teacher mostly speaks english. it makes me difficult to understand even answer the question given by the teacher) as a result of this shortcoming during the implementation of tbi, the students mostly speak by using their mother tongue (indonesian), which is relevant with carless (2004) bruton (2005), and littlewood (2007), rather than english as their target language. they tend to respond and even answer teacher’s questions/instructions by using indonesian. it is because students possess different english proficiency level i.e. they lack of vocabulary mastery, grammar, and pronunciation. therefore, it is very crucial for the teacher to provide appropriate materials along with proper lesson plans to facilitate entire students’ proficiency level i.e. from low proficiency, middle proficiency, until high proficiency. conclusion according to the result of the study, this study indicates that the implementation of tbi provides several contributions for students in particular speaking skill. there are three contributions or advantages found in this study i.e. contributing to students’ hanif nurcholish adiantika & halim purnomo the implementation of task-based instruction in efl teaching speaking skill 21 engagement/active participation in teaching and learning process, intensifying and increasing students’ speaking skill, and creating students’ positive attitudes towards tbi. those contributions or advantages enable students to encourage students to be more active in speaking, offering them an opportunity to comprehensively learn about the aspects of speaking skill (pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar), allowing them to share ideas, stimulating them to learn either individually/independently or with peers/in group, and providing them an environment to interact in english. in other words, tbi offers students many opportunities to speak english more in the teaching and learning process. nevertheless, some shortcomings are also found in the implementation of tbi. they are related with teacher’s ability, time availability, and different students’ proficiency level. therefore, it can be inferred that the present study provides an alternative method to teach efl students by implementing tbi (taskbased instruction). tbi is positively proven to give some contributions in improving speaking skill of senior high school. it can also be stated that tbi is considered relevant method to be implemented in indonesian context where english is taught as a foreign language. references aleksandrzak, m. 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(1996). a framework for task-based learning. harlow: longman. belief, perception, and challenge to learn english indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 1 belief, perception, and challenges of non english department students to learn english in globalization era erna iftanti english language education, faculty of teacher training and education iain tulungagung, indonesia email: erna@iain-tulungagung.ac.id binti maunah islamic education, faculty of teacher training and education iain tulungagung, indonesia email: uun.lilanur@gmail.com apa citation: iftanti, e. & maunah, b. (2021). belief, perception, and challenges of non english department students to learn english in globalization era. indonesian efl journal. 7(1), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i1.3985 received: 29-09-2020 accepted: 27-11-2020 published:31-01-2021 introduction globalization is indicated by the continuous process to intensify social, economic, and cultural. it exchanges across the globe has increasingly coordinate and integrate those fields. the global economic has also forced people to stimulate their migrations in a great number from and to every corner of this universe which subsequently result in either cultural or language exchange and integration. this makes the old boundaries and the aspired cultural coherence and homogeneity of the nation-state be increasingly untenable. this further leads to the rise of the breadth of social networking in any fields such as education. the importance of english has then increased on social media (kamran & mansoor, 2017) which affect to the building an online community (habibi, mukinin, riyanto, prasohjo, sulistiyo, sofwan, & saudagar 2018). the globalization era which has meant dramatic social, economic, educational, cultural changes and distinctions from what it used to be, has triggered the global force instead of not having particularizing and localizing one anymore. english language for example has such global power in almost all aspects of life. this affects the global people to be proficient in english in order to be globally competitive (shobikah, 2017). japan ministry of education for example initiates english as medium of instruction to foster global human resources (rose & mckinley, 2018). it is then taken as part of education with which people transfer a range of english skills, culture, and values as well. education can be broadly conceived as formally or informally structured, socially organized, and directed teaching and learning as well. the english instructional activities in schools which tend to be highly formalized because of the strict time, subject, and level or grade border does not always bring about high achievement in learning english. schooling in formal education today needs more cultural sophistication, collaboration skills, better communication, higher-order cognitive skills for abstract: this study was carried out in response to the demand that in this 4.0 era, indonesian students should be proficient in english. hence, in indonesia, english has been taught and learnt since elementary school level up to tertiary level of education. this long period of learning should lead the students to be proficient in english which is proved by passing the minimum score of 450 toefl test. yet, many of them did not meet the minimum score. thus, this study investigates their perception and belief in learning english and the challenge of being able to be proficient in english. the study was done qualitatively through interviewing 80 students of non-english department who were taking toefl course. it reveals that english is perceived like a two-side coin which in one hand, it is misperceived as a difficult subject because of its complicated rules to be memorized. in the other hand, it is thought to be joyful and meaningful that they believe as a means of bringing educational, social, and economical success. therefore, they are challenged to be proficient in english. this study is then pedagogically implemented through building positive belief and perception that learning english is fun and helpful. keywords: belief, perception; challenge; and globalization era mailto:email:%20erna@iain-tulungagung.ac.id https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i1.3985 erna iftanti & binti maunah belief, perception, and challenges of non english department students to learn english in globalization era 2 critical thinking, and the meta-cognitive abilities to reflect on their own learning. therefore, they become lifelong learners. accordingly, it is essential to know how much the learners perceive and believe in english as one of the foreign languages taught to equip them with skills of using english. considering the global changes in this globalization era, learning english is also challenging. thus, it is also essential to investigate challenges that they might think about english. perception, as according to cambridge online dictionary, is as belief or opinion, which is often held by many people and based on how things seem. meanwhile, belief is the feeling of being certain that something exists or is true. kumaravadivelu (2012) discussed two types of beliefs and suggested core and peripheral beliefs. these shape the teachers’ professional development and how they work which are significant to the comprehending of their teaching methods and their decisions in the classroom (gilakjani & sabouri, 2017). he further described core belief as more effective in shaping teachers’ instructional approaches. peripheral belief, in the other hand, is not as effective as core belief because it paves way to the conflict between what teachers’ claim they do and what they actually do in the classroom. in the domain of efl learners, their sophisticated epistemic beliefs determine their learning strategies (rahmiati & emaliana, 2020) which appear to get impact on their learning performance (broadbent, 2017; loh & teo,2017). and belief itself is proved to be strongly associated with motivation (amrullah, 2018). in the context of classroom, several studies prove that there are some contributory factors that the students bring with them in the learning process and success, i.e. the perceptions (manurung et.al.,2020; metruk, 2020 ) , beliefs (al-malki & zahid javid, 2018); dislen daggöl, 2019), attitudes (katawazai & saidalvi, 2020; miqawati, 2020), and metacognitive knowledge (hamiddin & saukah, 2020; teng, 2020). foreign language students for example might have strong beliefs about the nature of the language they learn, the difficulties, the acquisition process, the success of implementing certain learning strategies, teaching strategies and their own expectations about achievement. a study by aslan & thompson (2018) proves that beliefs contributes much to the efl students performance. positive beliefs about language learning is meaningful to reduce anxiety and boost confidence in language learning. in addition, a study carried out by wei et.al. (2018) implied that how students perceive about the application of autonomous activities helped to improve learners’ languages skills and successful learners tended to be more autonomous which brings about success in efl performace. it is also revealed that students with high degree of efl epistemic beliefs also have high level of english language proficiency in listening, speaking, and writing (emalia, 2017), and reading (florida & mbato, 2020). there are a number of studies concerning with belief, perception, and challenges in language learning. a study concerning with english instruction with esp approach in indonesia indicated unsuccessful story which was proved that many students have achieved only minimal english proficiency (poedjiastutie & oliver, 2017). they further revealed that because they have pragmatic reasons for learning english such as to get greater life opportunity, then to fulfill the their need, the teachers should develop their teaching capacity. similarly, abubakar, et.al. (2017) in their study in a more specific contextenglish speech training through muhadloroh program in an islamic boarding school which was followed by students of grade 2 and grade 6also showed that they were challanged with grammatical factors, anxiety and the program itself. abrar, et.al. (2018), in their research found the limited skills of efl students of a public university in indonesia. this is parralel to a study by alharthi (2020) revealing that one of the problems challenged by the esp saudi arabia students is related to the limitation of the input. however, the result of reviewing related previous studies indicates that the attention on the learning needs of the efl learners of non-english department in an islamic university covering perception, beliefs, and challenges is hardly given. meanwhile, the global changes affect efl students of any level of education either public or religion-basededucational institution as exist in indonesia. thus, by investigating learners’ perception, beliefs, and challenges of non english department in religion-based university, the efl instructional practices can be better achieved and it further gives meaningful data on what to be better planned in preparing the efl learners to face the global changes and as well as to be competitive. as demonstrated by tang & tian (2015) in their study https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/belief https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/opinion https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/held https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/people https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/based https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/seem https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/feeling https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/certain https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/exist https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/true indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 3 that to identify students' perceived beliefs and strategy used is useful to build effective and productive classroom instruction. method this exploratory study was done to the third semester students of 21 non english departments of state islamic institute of tulungagung, indonesia. they were about 1920 years old who could be categorized as digital native. they were from social science department (hereafter tips), biology department (tbio), chemistry department (tkim), physics department (tfis), indonesian language department (tbin), teacher education of elementary school department (pgmi), islamic education department (pai), math department (tmt), syariah banking department (ps), family law department (as), alqur’an tafsir science department (iat), syariah monetary accounting department (aks), arabic language department (pba), syariah economic department (es), syariah business management department (mbi), islamic psychology department (pi), islamic philosophy (afi), state administration law department (htn), islamic broadcasting commission department(kpi), syariah accounting department (as), and islamic early child education department (piaud). those students were taking toefl course, because they did not pass the minimum passing grade of toefl, 450. there were 80 students participated in filling out the questinnaire of this study. the questionnaire showed that they claimed themselves to have learnt english since elementary school and some others have even started learning english at their pre elementary age, but they said not to be successful. this is due to the fact that when they took toefl test, most of them did not reach the minimum passing score (450). therefore, they need to take english toefl course in order to help them to reach the score. however, during the instruction, some students could actively take part in the instructional process and some others passively get involved. they were not quite eager to learn english either. thus, it is significant to comprehensively investigate what really happen in the students’ mind concerning with englishwhat is their perception and belief about english and what is their challenge towards english in this 4.0 era. the data concerning with their perception, belief and challenge on learning english in this 4.0 era were collected through interviewing them. the semi structured interview consisting of two main partsstructured questions and open ended question. the struture questions asked about their perception and belief and open ended questions investigated the challenges they were facing during learning english. this interview was done in written, so that they could freely answer the questions of interview. the data obtained from this stage were classified and coded. the same data recorded from the participants were reduced. subsequently, they were qualitatively described. the result of data analysis is used as the basis to draw conclusion on the perception, belief, and challenge of learning english among the students of non english department. results and discussion there are some important findings about the students’ perception, belief, and challenges in learning english. the perception of non-english department students towards english there are various perception concerning with learning english as organized in table 1. erna iftanti & binti maunah belief, perception, and challenges of non english department students to learn english in globalization era 4 table 1. perception on english and the possible reasons english as difficult subject the students of non english department perceive english as difficult subject with various levels of difficulty. the first, they think english as a really difficult subject for some reasons such as memorizing vocabularies and constructing english sentences. this can be seen from this quoted interview:” english is difficult for me, because there are many things to be memorized and i need to note the sentence construction”(tmt3). “..too many patterns to be memorized and confusing (aks2). the statements imply that their perception on memorizing patterns while learning english has driven them to think that learning english is difficult. this finding is in line with alsowat (2016) who prove the highest provoking causes of students' anxiety were worrying about consequences of failing, forgetting things they knew and feeling uneasiness during language tests. besides, their perception on learning english gets worse when they think of constructing english sentences. this perception might lead to some limitations in their efl personal performance in mainly writing skill. yet, such a limitation, as revealed by yuliani & fadhly (2020), can be overcome by appropriate students’ choices on using a certain strategy. another study reported that teacher’s personal performance is believed to be motivational strategy in the efl classroom (al-mahrooqi et.al., 2016). thus, both teachers and students play significant role to build positive perception in learning english. this present study also shows that english is not only thought difficult but also boring because of the teachers’ less interesting teaching technique. this can be inferred from the student’ quoted interview “ i think to learn english is difficult and a bit boring…it will be interesting if the english instruction is carried out as interesting as possible. (ps6). motivational teaching strategies and helpful, interactive, engaging, and enjoyable learning environment are proved to be influential to stimulate the learners’ interest and enthusiasm (abdullah et.al. 2019). implementing meaningful learning such as using digital game (shahriarpour, 2014) during efl instruction do increase learners’ motivation. the other reason noted from the students’ perception that english as a difficult subject is because to start learning english takes serious and hard effort. in this condition, this is explicitly stated in the student’ quoted interview: “the first step to understand new thing is a language and i don’t understand this english language, so that i need to seriously try hard...” (iat2). it is accepted that language be the central to social life, while language development and speech is the cornerstone to get success in life. n o perception possible underlying reasons 1 english as difficult subject memorization as a misconception learning style uninteresting teaching technique the purposes of learning english languages as the gate to learn anything reluctant to read lack of willingness and spirit lack of using it for daily communication difference between pronunciation and spelling is a big problem for indonesian learners their belief that english is difficult is the source of their difficulty in learning english 2 english is easy and joyful if mastering its grammar and vocab depending on the purpose of learning english. to learn english for speaking is easier that that for academic purposes to have sufficient number of vocabulary containing various knowledge feeling proud as if staying in overseas and being beautiful 3 . learning english is a need international language covering all fields of life a means of instruction indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 5 the other thing which might affect the students’ perception of the difficulty level of learning english is the learning purpose. different purpose of learning english brings about the different perception of difficulty toward learning english. some respondents claim that to learn english for speaking is considered easier than that for academic purpose. this can be explicitly pictured out from the student’s quoted interview. “english is actually easy, but it depends on the purposes of learning english. to learn english for speaking is easier than that for academic purpose. (ps2). as digital native they are mostly engaged with online media application such as orai application which is helpful to alleviate fear of speaking (halimah et.al., 2018). moreover, they perceived learning english is difficult because they are reluctant readers. this can be sum up from the student’s quoted interview stating that “my perception on english is that i have been reluctant to read, to translate…and that is the main reason why i get difficulty in learning english.” the statement implies that if a learner of english is keen on reading english text, he/she can tackle problems encountered during his learning english. the willingness and spirit also contribute to determine the student’s perception of learning english. this is implied from the quotation of a student from islamic psychology below. “in my opinion, learning english is exciting. for me, if i have willingness and spirit to do anything, it will run easily and interestingly because the power comes from the deepest of mind. english will also be difficult to be learned if i do not have any willingness to learn it, but i am eager to learn it, so it will be easily learnt.”(pi2) the other students (ips4 and ps3) also perceived english as not a difficult subject as long as the learner has willingness and patience. learning english is sometimes difficult, but at some other time it is easy. this depends on the willingness, patience, and how much grammar and vocabulary that they can master. this is parrallel to fadilah (2018) who found that efl students’ perception, motivation, and communicative selfconfidence affect directly and indirectly to the students‟ willingness to communicate in english. “learning english is easy, it depends on the willingness and patience” (ips4) english teacher is also considered as the influential basis to determine whether english is thought to be difficult or easy subject. this present study also pointed out that the students’ success in learning english is much more depending on the teachers. this finding is explicitly mentioned in one of the student’ quoted interviews:” to learn english in my opinion depends on who teaches it” (tfis3). this proves that teachers play essential role in determining the classroom environment and students satisfaction during the instruction. however, ruzek et.al. (2016) have revealed that teacher emotional support on students’ engagement and motivation indicates significant mediating effects of autonomy and peer relatedness experiences, but not competence beliefs. still, there is positive correlation amongst students’ academic adjustment, patterns of teacher behavior and practices related to classroom quality (zee & koomen, 2016). the other possible reason which makes students perceive english as difficult subject is the difference between spelling and its pronunciation. this can be inferred from the student’s quoted interview stating that “the difference between pronunciation and spelling makes me often misunderstand to learn english.” (tbio4). moreover, to learn english is also perceived to be difficult because it is seldom used. this implies that they are not actively involved in the instructional activities. the students claimed themselves to find some difficulties because when they learn it, they do not practice it. as a result, they always start from the basic whenever they learn english and it has easily gone after finishing the course. ”i do not understand english because of lacking use in my daily communication. (tmt2). a study found that to promote learners' active participation, they should be given chances to practice using authentic english language in context and the teachers should integrate various activities in a lesson to meet their needs and goals (gudu, 2015). in addition, the students’ belief that english is difficult comes from their own belief that english is difficult. this can be clearly implied from the student’s statement that “before knowing english, i imagine english as difficult subject, but after i understand the patterns of english, i myself find english is easy.”(htn1) english as an easy and interesting subject the result of data analysis also reveals some important points. it is found that after they gradually learned and enjoyed learning english, they noticed english as interesting subject which can trigger the pride of its users. using english through reading texts in english brings the readers about “being beautiful” since it seems like internationally recognized. as a result, english is erna iftanti & binti maunah belief, perception, and challenges of non english department students to learn english in globalization era 6 thought to be interesting. this is implied from the student’s quoted statement: “english is joyful, interesting, and funny. when i read english texts i feel like in overseas, and it attracts me to be beautiful.” (as1). student from the other study program also considered that although english is difficult for him, it is interesting to be learned. “for me english is difficult, but it is interesting to be learned” (tmt 1). his statement shows that he finds the joy in learning english. the obstacles found during their learning english do not inhibit them to learn english, so that they keep being attracted. this can be proved from one of the students’ claim that “english is interesting …and attracting.”(tkim1). to struggle against the lack of vocabulary number does not mean that the learners perceive english as difficult subject, because to keep studying english will make them getting a lot of knowledge. this finding is implied from the student’s quoted interview “i think english is interesting subject although i find many difficult words, and i can find a lot of knowledge from learning english.” (ps4). learning english is a need as being discussed previously, english is considered to be difficult. however, they perceived that learning english is a need since it is international language used by almost all people in all over the world. “in my opinion, english is a language that should be learnt by everybody because it international language, so, if we go abroad, english is really needed” (tmt5). people agree that life has become global at present, trade relations and political interdependence among nations have grown, and foreign travel for business, study and pleasure have all intensified contacts across linguistic and cultural borders. hence, it is necessary to have a language which can be used world-wide as means of international communication. english language is the first and at the same time successful choice for this function (knapp, 2015). it is found that they perceived english as means of economic relation as stated in the student’s quoted interview that “english covers all fields of life such as economics, people cooperation, knowledge, and so on.”(mbs1). this point supports a study conducted by hayes (2016) proving that english is considered as a tool for personal economic advancement. besides as a need, learning english is also perceived as examination and problem as stated in the student’s quoted interview “learning english is a need, examination, and problem.” (pai3). it can be inferred that the need and examination/problem are perceived equally. because to be less proficient in english language is also proved to create trouble to understand knowledge of subjects learned (khatoon et.al, 2018).. this is also in line with a study carried out by zheng et.al. (2016) who found that learner' unsophisticated conceptions of language learning correlate with achieving examination success. moreover, the problems faced by the non english department students as portrayed in this present study can be reduced by implementing appropriate learning styles. “learning english for me is necessity because english is international language. even though it is difficult, by using good learning style, learning english will be easy.”(pgmi1). it is also found that english is sometimes used as a means of instruction, so that the learners are demanded to be able to use english or at least recognizing terms used in their field of study. as stated in the statement below. “actually it is important to master english, because it is used in my study program. my lecturers sometimes use english to deliver materials, even though they sometimes only use some terms in english. however, for me it is significant because although it is only some terms, it affects my understanding on my lecturers’ explanation.” (tfis2) in addition, it is also essential to learn english because it is used as a means of transferring innovation and technology. thus, in order not to be left behind with the advancement, being able to use english and to communicate in english is a need. as reflected in one of the students’ quoted interview:” it is a must for everybody to master because it is helpful keep up to date with the technological advancement which is mostly in english” (iat2). the various functions of english that the students perceived have challenged them to be independent and autonomous in learning english so that they can keep up to date with the global information. using learning style appropriate for their own characteristic and needs is one of the ways to be autonomous which will further trigger them to be proficient in english. yunus & arshad, (2015) in their study also suggest that learners should be able to identify and employ the appropriate strategies with their learning styles and preferences because learner training has the capability to foster and develop learner autonomy. to sum up, it is revealed that the students of non english department perceived english in a-threetier notes. in 4.0 era, they perceive english as a indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 7 necessity to be learned and mastered. however, english, in one hand, is noticed to be difficult for some reasons, namely 1). misconception on learning style that learning english needs to be memorized, 2). uninteresting teaching technique; 3). different purposes of learning english, 4). reluctant readers, 5) lack of willingness and spirit to learn and use english regularly, 6). different linguistic system and 7). misbelieve that english is difficult. in the other hand, they perceive english as interesting and joyful subject because of the appropriate purpose of learning, sufficient number of vocabulary and grammar mastery, and as a means of creating one’s pride of using english. the beliefs of non english department students towards english the result of data analysis reveals some important notes: the beliefs brings about the reality. this finding means that the students’ belief in english will affect much on what will really happen to them. if the people believe something is difficult, then they will find what they believe. this is implied in a study which demonstrates that teachers' beliefs are indeed reflected in their classroom practices (alghanmi & shukri, 2016). this can be inferred that what students believe can be portrayed in their learning practices as explicitly stated in the student’s cited interview:t” one hatred thing must be difficult to be accepted…therefore, i strongly believe that english is not difficult, so that i will get an ease to learn and use it.” (ips2). thus, to set positive belief affects the real context of learning. a means to study abroad and go around the world. the students believe that english is a means to continue their study abroad. they also believe that in order to be able to go around the world, they have to master english. this can be clearly seen from the student’s statement: “if i can communicate in english, i can continue my study in overseas and go vacation in around the world”(tips3). it is implied that they believe english to be influential towards their academic success which is indicated by taking further study abroad. studies prove that proficiency in english is significantly connected to standardized achievement scores, as well as grade point averages ( martirosyan,et.al, 2015) and impacts academic performance (geide-stevenson, 2018). students who communicate better in the classroom also reached higher level of achievement in college learning (aydin, 2017) and workplace (shrestha et.al. (2018). moreover, to master english is also meaningful to expand social networkingmeeting people and going around the world, as reflected in this quoted statement ”if i can use english, i believe that i can go around the world and meet people from various countries.”(tmt1). li et.al (2020) found that english language proficiency of chinese employees is positively related to their willingness to accept international assignments through openness to corporate globalization. a means of expanding carrier. in addition to the previously mentioned beliefs, it is also noted that they believe english as a means of expanding carrier. as revealed by sukarni (2020) that vocational school students of accounting department need to learn esp for seeking a job after their graduation. the success in building, developing, and expanding carrier is believed to be influenced by how much a person can use english either orally or in written. english takes part in determining the creation of this globalization era. for example, traffic light in public building is written in english languages, specification of merchandise is written in english, language used in computer instruction is english, and english is everywhere. japan as an advanced country in technology has expanded the use of english language japanese places of employment to remain successful globalization. nixon (2015) stated that several japanese multinational corporations have adopted english as their official language and japanese companies also use english in the workplace to remain global and succeed in foreign markets. in can be inferred that those who can use english is believed to be lucky to build and expand their career. this is what most of the students believe, as reflected in one of their statements below: ”if i am able use english either orally or in written, i believe that my world carrier seems to be easier because it is now demanded to use english in almost all field of life.”(tmt2. “i also believe that if i use english well, i will internationally expand my business to the global people.”(mbs5). some positive believes have been noted from students of various study programs either those from education study program, religious study program, economics or math and science study programs. they believe that “by using english, i can expand my chance to build cooperation with both domestic and foreign institutions and i will have broader opportunity to continue my study abroad through scholarship program.” (as6). erna iftanti & binti maunah belief, perception, and challenges of non english department students to learn english in globalization era 8 this belief indicates that one of the keys to expand their careers is by mastering english as revealed by nam at.al. that the ideal career can be successfully obtained through being proficient in english. as a means of sharing knowledge, go international and getting luck in carrier. it is found that english is not only believed as the influential basis to reach success in carrier and going international, but it is useful as a means to share knowledge. to share experience, knowledge, and stories in english will be more easily accepted and recognized in all over the universe. this is due to the fact that english is commonly accepted as the global language, as reflected in the following students’ statements: “i believe that if my english is good i can teach math in all over the world, go international, and improve my carrier relatively easy.” (tmt4); “…especially in my department, banking, i can communicate with foreign customer” (ps2) it is implied that their belief in english as a means of chasing their dream to go abroad, share knowledge, and to get good carrier is seriously established. this present supports a study by sener & erol (2017) showing that the aim of learning english as a foreign language was mostly to find a good job. thus, english teaching should bring students to establish healthy and upward outlook on life, values, world outlook and entrepreneurship and break them away from the traditional teaching mode and seize the psychological characteristics by always focusing on them so as to actively mobilize their learning enthusiasm, and integrate the concept of innovation and entrepreneurship education into college english teaching well (yu ma, 2019). to support academic and social success this study noticed that they believe english is able to support their academic and social success such as to get good job and better life. this can be explicitly seen from the students’ quoted statements below. “i believe that if i am proficient in english, it will be easier for me to find literature on alqur’an studies in the west and it will be my plus point to my articles about alqur’an science and tafsir which hopefully can be published in journal”(iat1) it is implied that he put a big dream to be able to learn alqur’an studies from the west point of view which he believes written in english. this indicates that so far he has a big constraint to read and understand literature on alqur’an science in english. thus, he dreams of and believes that mastering english language can be of his meaningful and helpful means of learning alqur’an science from the west point of view. besides, this study demonstrates that english is believed to be able to help people to find their expected job, as clearly stated;” …easy to build carrier and to get job”(aks3). moreover, it is also believed that to master english orally or in written will be very advantageous to support their studies which mostly use references in english. not to be able to understand english literature becomes a big constraint to their academic success. this can be explicitly found in the student’s quoted interview: “i believe that if can use english well, it will be easier for me to understand biology courses because the references are mostly written in english. moreover, most of the assignment give by the lecturers is about reviewing international journal which are written in english, so that i find difficulties because i am not good at english.”(tbio4) to be good at english is also found as a means that bringing them to get good job and better life, because in this globalization era almost all things are delivered in english. it can be acceptable that without understanding english, one will get many problems in facing the world. this can be found in on of the students’ quoted interview: “i believe that if i am successful in english, it will be easier for me to create new carrier and get better life.’(pgmi5). it is implied that the student put their hope and dream on english and mastering english so that they can change their life. furthermore, by mastering english, it is believed to be able to transfer knowledge to people around the world, as can be clearly noted from the student’s quoted interview:” if i am good at english, i will transfer my knowledge to other people in this world.”(pai3). in short, it is believed that english contributes as means of achieving academic and social success. prestigious language, to increase pride and confidence english for the students of non english department is also believed to be a prestigious language that can bring them about increasing pride and confidence. from interviewing them, it can be clearly portrayed that they will feel more confident anytime they are able to deliver their thought in indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 9 english. it is proved from one of the students’ quoted statements: ”in my opinion, i believe that english is a prestigious language which is useful to get prestigious jobs for prestigious people....”.(es1) “if i am good at oral or written english, i must be very proud if sometimes later i am abroad i will not insecure to be among people.”(es4) it can be clearly concluded that the students put their big hope to be good at english in order to improve their psychological state and increase their social status. as a means of recognizing the world it is also found that one of the instruments to recognize this world is english. they believe that to get success in learning english is helpful for them to know and get closer a look at this world. this is due to the fact that in this globalization era, english takes very great contribution in all aspects of life. therefore, they believe that without english they will get much obstacle to get involved in the world community. they claim that “if i get success in learning english i believe that i can recognize this world.”(tfis3), “english is means to pass through this world,...” (kpi1). students have positive belief towards english as a means of recognizing this global community indeed, the students of non english department believe that english play significant roles as means of catching dream into reality, supporting academic, social, and economical success, transferring or spreading knowledge, and that of creating and improving one’s pride and prestige. the challenge of students of non english department towards english there are some findings dealing with challenges for non english department students beyond their perception and beliefs about english. firstly, the advancement of technology which is presented mostly in english has challenged them to be able to use english so that they can keep up to date with the innovation in this world. this challenge is committed by the students that besides the difficulties that they might face during learning english, they should not be trapped to be hopeless in learning english. this challenge should have motivated them to keep doing efforts so that they can use english well. this can be clearly stated in the student quoted statement: ”the advancement of technology has challenged me to be able to use english, because all technology is presented in english.”(pgmi1). they are also aware that if they do not understand english, they will get serious problem such as getting difficult to get job. to have skill in english means to hold the key to open up the world. as being clearly stated below: ”for those who do not know english, they will get difficulties to get jobs. for example, nowadays anything is in english, in 4.0 era the competition is getting more...”(tbio1) “ all is written in english so that we have to be able to use english.”(tbio2b). in this digital era, most people use internet to communicate and search anything. the digitalized information as that in internet is also delivered in english, so that to be proficient in english is an important challenge for whoever wants to get informed. this challenge is also clearly claimed by the student in his quoted interview:” nowadays, it has been 90% people use internet and the language used in the internet is english. thus, to master english is essential for me so that i can see any information through internet.” (htn). secondly, in this global market, people around the world interact economically by means of international language, english, which is universally acceptable. therefore, in order to get involved in the global market, people should prepare themselves with the skill of english. the students in this case have also been aware that they are challenged to be good at english. they should take aside on the problems they face during their learning english such as language constraints i.e. low proficiency (alharbi, 2015) and psychological problems i.e lack of motivation, lack of either self or collaborative practices (abrar et.al. 2018). instead, they must keep trying to learn english so that they can use english well in order to be competitive in this free market. unless, they won’t left behind with the advancement and fast pace economical progress, they do not improve their language. as being reflected in the students’ point of view below: “in this global market, the use of english is needed.” (es1b) “because english is taken as the formal language of the world, so, this is my challenge, because by learning english and understanding technology used english is essential for me.”(ipsb) erna iftanti & binti maunah belief, perception, and challenges of non english department students to learn english in globalization era 10 the innovation of any field is presented, informed, and passed through using english. considering the significant role of english, students are aware that they are challenged to be proficient in english and this is clearly stated in the student’s quoted interview:” i must be able to make innovation which can pass through this world by using english.” (kpi). he demands himself to both make innovation and use english well. the third point is that living in this globalization era, the students are challenged to be competitive in the world of economics so that they get their expected position. to expand the interaction with the people around this universe is also meaningful to chase their carrier and among the ways, english as international language is used as means of achieving it. “i am challenged to master english so that i can do several jobs and expand my interaction with people in this world”. (as5). they claim that they will be left-behind if they can not use english. “if i can not use english, i will be left-behind” (pai8). in the 4.0 industrial era in which almost all is delivered in english, people are not able to well compete without equipping themselves with english proficiency. innovation which are mostly published in journals are mostly written in english, so that people are challenged to be proficient in english. this fact is explicitly stated in one of the students’ quoted statement: ”many scientific works are published in english, so that students are demanded to able to use english.” (tfis7) in conclusion, with the fast advancement of information and technology in this 4.0 era at which all innovation is tremendously expanded and spread mostly in english, learning english has become more crucial. this study results in some challenges of the non english department students to learn english. this challenge was resulted from their awareness as the product of their perception and beliefs in learning english. they are challenged to keep up to date with the innovation mostly presented in english, to get involved in the global market, and to be competitive. one of the ways is by equipping themselves with good english proficiency. conclusion this study reveals that the students of non english department perceived english as a two-side of a coin that in one hand they portray english as difficult subject and in the other hand, they think it as joyful, interesting, and meaningful subject that they believe as a means of triggering them to get social, academic, and economical success. as demonstrated in this present study that their perception and belief are affected by some factors such as teachers, teaching strategies, and learners’ view on the connectedness between english and globalization era. hence, it is beyond their perception and belief that they are challenged to be proficient in english so that they can keep up to date with the global innovation, compete in the global market, and improve their quality of education. therefore, as suggested by yunus & arshad (2015), efl learners of non english department should practice the lifelong learning and to become more creative and innovative learners and human capital in this challenging industrial age. efl teachers at the same time are supposed to improve their quality teaching innovation in order to guide their students to be proficient in english so that they can be a competitive generation living in this competitive wide-world. references: abdullah, m. y., ghafri, a., harib, h. m., yahyai, a., & hamdan, k. s. 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(2016). the relationship between chinese university students' conceptions of language learning and their online selfregulation. system,57, 66-78. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2018.05.003 https://doi.org/10.3126/jie.v14i1.20088 https://doi.org/10.1080/17501229.2019.1615493 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2018.05.003 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 11 the impact of critical thinking on learners’ efl vocabulary retention: the arab context tariq elyas european language department, faculty of arts & humanities, king abdulaziz university, saudi arabia e-mail: telyas@kau.edu.sa budor s. al-zahrani english language centre, university of jeddah, jeddah, saudi arabia e-mail: telyas@kau.edu.sa apa citation: elyas, t., & al-zahrani, b. s. (2019). the impact of critical thinking on learners’ efl vocabulary retention: the arab context. indonesian efl journal, 5(2), 11-30. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v5i2.1901. received: 22-03-2019 accepted: 29-05-2019 published: 01-07-2019 abstract: the aim of this experimental study was to investigate the impact of a critical thinking based pedagogical approach on learners’ retention ability of efl vocabulary. there were two groups in the study: an experimental and a control group. the experimental group received vocabulary instruction with a critical thinking-based approach whereas the control group was taught in the conventional methods of vocabulary teaching. the treatment consisted of seven lessons delivered over 12 weeks. at the end of the treatment, the immediate post-test was administered and two weeks after the immediate post-test, the delayed post-test was administered. the resulting data was subjected to descriptive and inferential statistical analysis using spss software. the results showed that the experimental group outperformed the control group in their vocabulary retention. based on these results, the researchers concluded that the adopted critical thinking-oriented language instruction to efl vocabulary has a positive effect on vocabulary retention, with implications for policy-makers, teacher trainers and teachers. keywords: arab context; english as a foreign language; critical thinking; memory; retention; vocabulary. introduction defining critical thinking is by no means an easy task. despite many definitions and conceptualizations of critical thinking, “there is still no universal consensus on a definition of critical thinking amongst educators, philosophers and psychologists in the field” (ab kadir, 2007, p. 1). one can claim, “critical thinking is a liberating force in education and a powerful resource in one’s personal and civic life. while not synonymous with good thinking, critical thinking is a pervasive and self-rectifying human phenomenon” (facione, 1990, p. 3). scriven and paul (2003) define critical thinking as “the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action” (p. 1). powerful strategies to teach, learn and think critically is learning “how to ask and answer questions of analysis, synthesis and evaluation” (paul, 1992, p. 521). strategies adopted for data analysis in this paper is based to develop critical thinking skills include socratic questioning, which is “at the heart of critical teaching” (paul, 1992, p.360). developing curricula to include critical thinking is also necessary (algabrey, 2007). some views also assume critical thinking as innate to all humans, developed through the “natural developmental process” (judith et al., 1985, p. 492). for many l2 learners, learning vocabulary is tedious because it means to them memorizing lists of words and using their bilingual dictionaries to resolve their tariq elyas & budor s. al-zahrani the impact of critical thinking on learners’ efl vocabulary retention: the arab context 12 lexical gap (read, 2000). however, vocabulary learning is more than just learning individual words and their meanings in isolation (cook, 2008). it is a multifaceted process which involves many factors in addition to memorizing words, such as being able to recall them, and, most importantly, using them appropriately (nation, 2004; verhallen & schoonen, 1993; elyas & shah, 2018). according to webb & chang (2012), certain activities, which are designed around using target words, are: activities designed around using target words are also necessary because they help learners to develop productive knowledge of the items. critical to the effectiveness of vocabulary development through productive activities is ensuring that the target vocabulary will be used rather than ignored or replaced with a more frequent synonym (p. 658). just as the size of vocabulary knowledge matters, similarly, the quality and the depth of this knowledge is equal if not far more important. initial encoding of new lexical items, by means of memorization for instance, and repeated encounters are not sufficient to support fluent language use; students must be able to reliably store the new items in long-term memory and successfully retrieve them when needed (golonka, et al., 2012). for instance, webb and chang (2015) examined english as a foreign language (efl) learners studying two levels of texts (level 1 and level 2) and found that students’ learning gains were quite similar. theoretically, reading an easier text should enable a student to acquire more words than reading a more difficult one because easier texts tend to lead to higher level of comprehension. research has shown that considerable learning can occur within a short period. for example, webb (1962) found that participants were able to learn from 33 to 166 word pairs per hour over a four hour period. cobb and horst (2001) found that 140-180 words were learned in two months through one hour a week of concordancebased learning. however, few studies have investigated l2 vocabulary growth over longer periods of time. milton (2006) examined the difference in vocabulary size between french foreign language learners at seven grade levels. he found that about 170 words were learned per year when students received between 58.578 hours of tuition and approximately 530 words were learned per year when students received 117-175.5 hours of tuition. clark and ishida (2005) found that there was no significant difference on the vocabulary levels test (vlt) scores after one semester of study for english as a second language students (see also nation, 1983, 1990; schmitt, schmitt, & clapham, 2001). nation (2006) found that the most frequent 1,000 word families in the british national corpus (bnc) accounted for just over 77.86% of the words in the lob corpus, the second most frequent 1,000 word families made up 8.23%, and the third most frequent 1,000 word families accounted for 3.70% of the corpus. according to houston (2001), retention is intertwined with acquisition (as cited in sanatullova-allison, 2014). vocabulary retention, which is the ability to recall the meanings of words and actively use the words days or weeks after they have been processed (schuetze, 2014), is a perquisite to their acquisition process. successful vocabulary learning requires an efficient encoding and storage of words with chances of retrieval when needed as a result of an extended process of practice (golonka, et al., 2012). our first research question seeks to shed light on the number of words that are learned by efl learners each year over four years of instruction. one view on vocabulary learning and teaching is that retention depends “on the amount of mental and emotional energy used in processing a word” (hedge, 2000, p. 118). given that attention, practice, deeper processing, and linking to existing knowledge are all necessary to promote chances of vocabulary retention, the purpose of this research is to investigate the effectiveness of a critical thinking (hereafter referred to as ct) based https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0033688212439367 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0033688212439367 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0033688212439367 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0033688212439367 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0033688212439367 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0033688212439367 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0033688212439367 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0033688212439367 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0033688212439367 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0033688212439367 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0033688212439367 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0033688212439367 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 13 approach in developing the retention of vocabulary ability of efl saudi university students. this paper aims to answer the research question: “what is the effect of a ct-based pedagogical approach on vocabulary retention of efl saudi university students?” finding “a concrete definition of ct on which most researchers can agree remains elusive” (lai, 2011, p. 41). however, a plethora of definitions have been proposed by experts and researchers in the fields of philosophy, cognitive psychology and in education. one of the most famous definitions of ct argues that ct is a “purposeful, self-regulatory judgment that results in interpretation, analysis, evaluation, and inference, as well as an explanation of the evidential, conceptual, methodological, criteriological, or contextual considerations upon which that judgment is based” (facione, 1990, p. 3). this study adopted the definition that “ct is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action” (scriven & paul, 2004, p.1). defining ct based on bloom et al.’s taxonomy, as in the latter definition, is recognized as ‘the educational approach’ (lai, 2011). this definition combines higher-order thinking skills and the often missing component of ct, reflection; which is a “meaning-making process” (rodgers, 2001, p. 843). in ct-based language instruction, learners are required to put forth more cognitive and linguistic effort by requiring them to do problem solving tasks, where they compose pieces of writings, or induced to participate in discussions, make opinions or provide justifications and so forth. such challenging activities are better described as ‘desirable difficulties’. desirable difficulties effect is a learning principle that activities that increase the level of learning difficulty initially can result in better long-term term retention of information (golonka, et al., 2012). when examining the literature of l2 vocabulary teaching and learning, few studies are found compared to other skills of language. this apparent gap has been noted by saudi scholars who claimed that linguists rarely addressed this issue (al-zahrani & elyas, 2017). similarly, not enough studies have tackled the issue of vocabulary learning and retention in efl classrooms in the saudi context. for example, al-masrai and milton (2012) discussed the aspect of vocabulary learning among efl saudi learners. al-hadlaq (2003), investigated the influence of different teaching activities on efl saudi vocabulary retention (as cited in golonka, et al., 2012). lately, one of the proposed questions is: “what strategies do learners use to acquire new words or to retain them?" (hedge, 2000, p. 111). similarly, taking into consideration the lack of a sufficient exposure to english outside classrooms, another question can be added which relates to the pedagogy is: what strategies can efl teachers implement in order to facilitate vocabulary acquisition and retention? amen’s (2008) study analyzed critical thinking and achievement and retention among second year high school students in history through role switching. her findings showed that it is necessary for curriculum planners to devise courses that will develop critical thinking in students. furthermore, the study also revealed in order for teachers to develop critical thinking skills in students, they need to undertake courses in teaching strategies for this purpose. rafi (2011) states that, “learners may become proficient in english language if they are motivated and taught how to display ct in english language usage” (p. 107). however, the relationship between engaging the students' ct and l2 vocabulary learning has not yet been described clearly. this study aims at implementing a ct-based approach to teach efl vocabulary in order to enhance students’ retention abilities. thus, the present study can be classified as unique to tariq elyas & budor s. al-zahrani the impact of critical thinking on learners’ efl vocabulary retention: the arab context 14 some extent because it is the first study, to the best of the researchers’ knowledge, that relates ct to vocabulary retention locally, and among the very few that do so globally. several studies explored the impact of some of ct techniques or strategies on the development of an efl learner’s lexicon. some of these studies focused on techniques including discussions and dialogues (webb, & chang, 2012; 2015). for instance, shore, ray, and gooklasian (2015) investigated the relationship between science vocabulary and the use of some cognitive science principles, particularly, drawing pictures and talking about the definitions of the lexical items. the study compared outcomes of such practices to those of the common practice of copying the definitions with no interaction. post-test results showed significant improvement in vocabulary retention. this research intends to form a preliminary statement about the relationship between ct and vocabulary retention in foreign language teaching and learning, both of which are areas of cognitive psychology research. as cognitive psychology involves the study of such mental processes, its findings as well as findings of other fields such as linguistics are applied to obtain a deeper understanding of the ideas under investigation in the current study. the relevant theories selected for this purpose, clarified respectively, are: the multi-store model of memory, the levels of processing theory and the generative learning theory. memory is one construct that is greatly involved with learning vocabulary. it refers to the mental processes of retaining information for later use and retrieving. atkinson and shiffrin’s (1968) multi-store model is among the most influential in literature on memory. it has a three-scale processing model of memory: sensory memory, short-term memory (later becomes working memory), and long-term memory, as demonstrated in figure 1. according to this model, it is suggested that we receive the information through our senses to be held briefly in our sensory memory. with attention and selection, the information is held temporarily in our short-term memory. this process of information entering into the short-term memory is called ‘working memory’. retention of vocabulary occurs when they are transferred from the working memory to the long-term memory in a process known as encoding. on attention encoding retrieval figure 1. the memory multi-store model craik and lockhart (1972) suggested a framework that attempts to explain what alters an input to become encoded and transferred to the long-term memory. according to their levels of processing framework, a word is instantly processed at different levels, and its possibility to remain in the long-term memory depends on the “depth of processing”. in other words, a learner needs to consider the word while an elaborative rehearsal of that word occurs. a learner shall spend more time and cognitive effort on absorbing that information. as deeper processing of a word takes place, the word is internalized and stored in the longterm memory for future retrieval. nation (n.d.) while indicating the significance of this theory states that, “in learning, the amount of efforts is not that important; what is important is the quality of activity in the brain” (as cited in schmitt, 1995, p. 5). knowledge without any deep processing, for input sensory memory working memory longterm memory indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 15 example, learning words from lists, will be easily forgotten” (yu, 2011). another cognitively oriented hypothesis is the generative theory which was proposed by wittrock (1974) to promote long-term vocabulary retention through merging new knowledge with old. using target words to formulate sentences where the semantic connection is established between the new words and other words or linguistic knowledge is suggested as to permit longer retention. wittrock stated that “although a student may not understand sentences spoken to him by his teacher, it is highly likely that a student understands sentences that he generates himself” (as stated by lee, lim, & grabowski, 2008, p. 112). joe (1998) also reported that generative tasks promoted the retention of target l2 vocabulary words. similarly, according to yu (2011), productive tasks (as sentence writing) are more likely to lead to a long term memory than rote repetition and learning words from lists by l1 translation. method the aim of this research is to measure the effectiveness of ct on l2 vocabulary retention. an experimental study was designed to examine the effect of a vocabulary teaching intervention using a ct-based approach on efl students’ retention of newly-learned vocabulary. this experiment adopts a two-group pre and posttests design where the independent variable was intervention versus no intervention (experimental versus control, respectively), while the dependent variable was student performance on assessments of vocabulary retention immediately after the intervention and also after an interval of delay. as the study sample was relatively homogenous in terms of factors such as proficiency level, age, and gender, the effect of such extraneous factors on the study’s outcome may be expected to be minimal. the study was conducted in a foundation year english language program at a university in saudi arabia. the aim of this program is to provide first year undergraduate students with a one-year, preparatory, intensive course in english language. the program has a quarter system and four levels, the last of which, level 104, brings them to an intermediate proficiency level. students must pass this level as a prerequisite for continuing with their university studies. developing the use of vocabulary is one of the main objectives of the language course and it is placed in clear contexts in the language curriculum. the mid and final tests and progress tests have complete sections that are devoted to vocabulary testing. at the time of the study, the participants in this research were saudi female students between the ages of 18-20 years in the preparatory year of the baccalaureate degree program at a saudi university. a convenience sample was assembled for the study. participants were drawn from four different classrooms at the foundation year at an intermediate level (104), which is equivalent to language proficiency level b1+ according to cefr (common european framework of reference for languages). students belonging to two classrooms constituted the experimental group while students in the other two classrooms constituted the control group. at the beginning, there were a total number of 96 students, but after removing those who missed a/ the post-test/s, 67 students remained (of which 34 were in the experimental group). their ages ranged from 18 to 25 years old. the selection of the four classrooms was a function of instructor willingness to participate in the study and the availability of class time in which to run the study. the assignment of the classrooms to experimental or control groups was random. this study made use of three different tests for different purposes. they were used at different stages of the research. one of these tests was administered before the intervention. the other two were administered on different days after the intervention. a detailed explanation of each tariq elyas & budor s. al-zahrani the impact of critical thinking on learners’ efl vocabulary retention: the arab context 16 of these tests’ design and purposes is provided below. prior to the intervention, a test was administered to all study participants in both the experimental and the control groups. this was a diagnostic test and its main purpose was to measure the participants’ baseline familiarity with the targeted words. the pre-test was yet another mean to ensure homogeneity of experimental and control groups with respect to vocabulary knowledge. the instrument used for generating this test was the vocabulary knowledge scale (vks). it was developed by paribakht and wesche (1993, 1997). it collects participant self-reports of vocabulary knowledge and assesses the depth or the quality of second language vocabulary knowledge. it can be used with any set of words (read, 2000). it includes five categories or levels of knowledge and test-takers have to select the category that best reflects their knowledge about a particular word. this study adopted the version of alghamdi (2004) which includes only three preliminary categories or levels of vocabulary knowledge. these levels, escalating in depth, are as follows: i. i do not remember seeing this word before. ii. i have seen this word before, but i don’t know what it means. iii. i have seen this word before, and i think it means. the other two categories: level iv (recognize the word and be able to give the meaning of the word), and level v (be able to use the word in a sentence) were not employed for this study because they demanded higher levels of word knowledge than was required for this study. the target was to assess the participants’ preliminary knowledge and familiarity with words that were new to them prior to the experiment. participant self-reports of any minimal level of familiarity with a certain word was sufficient for excluding that word from the study. thus, revealing more complex or deeper lexical knowledge was not necessary. a translation of the test was included in the participants’ native language, arabic, to ensure more valid reporting of their real vocabulary knowledge. a sample of the vks is presented in figure 4 in the english language version. immediately after all the seven sessions were completed and without further notice, the immediate post-test was administered to evaluate the participants’ retention ability of the target vocabulary. after two weeks from the end of the intervention and also without further notice, the delayed post-test was administered. both tests were objective tests that consisted of two sections and ten items. the first section includes multiple-choice tasks with three distractors in the response option for each item. the second section includes gap-filling tasks. each post-test includes a different set of vocabulary. the immediate post-test is presented in figure 5 as a sample. one of them was administered immediately after the intervention, and the other was administered after a delay of two weeks post-intervention. a comparison between the groups’ results determined whether the intervention affected the vocabulary retention of the experimental group’s participants at different times. also, a comparison between the same group’s results on both tests would indicate the change in the participants’ retention ability over time. administration of two post-tests instead of just one is advised when one has the goal of building a better and more complete idea of the impact of a certain treatment. the study aims to measure vocabulary learning, and specialists agree that it is integral to utilize a delayed post-test since immediate post-tests often overestimate learning (waring & takaki, 2003; as cited in golonka, et al., 2012). sometimes, test results taken too soon after an intervention can trivialize or maximize an effect, while in a later test, the effect may have faded. also, the researcher preferred to use achievement tests instead of using self-report tests similar to the pre-test. this was to avoid repetition. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 17 figure 2. the immediate post-test the times, types and purposes of the tests used in the experiment are shown below in table 1. table 1. details of test administration and purposes test time type purpose before the intervention diagnostic pre-test to remove words familiar to the participants from the experiment’s targeted vocabulary. after the intervention immediate post-test to compare vocabulary retention abilities of the experimental and the control groups immediately after the intervention. delayed post-test to compare delayed vocabulary retention abilities of the experimental and control groups, four weeks post-intervention. to compare, within group, each group’s immediate and delayed vocabulary retention ability. the researcher ensured that the control group teachers did not implement teaching methods that might (clearly) promote their participants’ ct abilities and that they adhered to the syllabus material. conventional methods of vocabulary teaching were used, such as, synonym and definition, contrasts and opposites, translation and examples. often the use of such methods was aided by an application that includes a gap-filling tasks. no type of technology was included in teaching the experimental group, in order to avoid any possible influences of extraneous factors on the outcome. the researcher taught seven sessions over the period of 12 weeks to each class. the allocated time for each session was around 50 minutes. one of the researchers taught the experimental group. the experimental group experienced a teaching intervention for vocabulary involved use of a ct-based approach. the target vocabulary was derived from the english language curriculum course book following the pacing guide at the time the experiment. the target vocabulary includes 28 words and fixed expressions. the vocabulary teaching intervention materials were designed in accord with scriven and paul’s (2004) tariq elyas & budor s. al-zahrani the impact of critical thinking on learners’ efl vocabulary retention: the arab context 18 definition of ct that combines ‘the educational approach’ with the component of reflection. bloom et al.’s taxonomy represents an efficient framework for incorporating ct in the educational system since it is more applicable to education (abudawood, 2015). the general learning objectives were designed to tap the cognitive process involved in higher-order thinking skills drawn from the revised bloom et al.’s taxonomy; these processes are, from the simplest to the most complex, to analyze, evaluate and create. the learning outcomes of each session’s tasks targeted all the three higher-order thinking levels aided by a visual description of ct skills or process involved. a sample of the vocabulary teaching intervention materials designed followed a visual description of ct skills or process involved is presented in figure 2 and 3. figure 3. the vocabulary teaching intervention materials indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 19 figure 4. vocabulary teaching intervention materials (continued) the teaching materials contain challenging activities that are better described as ‘desirable difficulties’. students were required to put forth more cognitive and linguistic effort in doing problem solving tasks, or participate in discussions and debates, make opinions, provide justifications and so forth. in figure 4, the sample contains an example of such activities. in some tasks they had to compose pieces of writings. figure 5. the vocabulary teaching intervention materials the manner of vocabulary instruction was explicit instruction and the researchers posed challenging questions, invited various opinions, cast doubts or sought justification while facilitating the learning process. in addition, the tasks were designed in order to target the participants’ reflective thinking. students had to practice reflective thinking through the requirement that they relate the themes and ideas in the material to their tariq elyas & budor s. al-zahrani the impact of critical thinking on learners’ efl vocabulary retention: the arab context 20 interests, experiences and social contexts or backgrounds. multiple opportunities were created for them to review and apply their knowledge. also, the students had to frequently monitor and evaluate their own progress or performance. examples of opportunities where students were stimulated to practice such reflective thinking in relation to the activities are:  visualizing their day without using mobiles (figure 1).  revising and assessing previous judgments based on newly presented information or facts.  assessing their attitude towards elderly people around them in saudi contexts.  every time they have to evaluate their performance in the self-evaluation box after every activity; they have to selfassess and judge their own performance. figure 6. the vocabulary knowledge scale results and discussion in this section, the data collected for this research are presented and analyzed. the aim is to identify the relationship between ct and l2 vocabulary retention. in order to analyze the data, statistical analyses using ibm spss statistics ver. 20.0 (statistical package for social sciences) was conducted. the pre-test the vks was used as a pre-test. it was based on a one-point scale where the participants would attain a score of zero if they report total unfamiliarity with the target word or if they declared familiarity with the word but fail to provide its meaning correctly. in case of reporting the correct meaning of the word, they would attain a score of one. the total possible score is 35 points (one x 35). this pre-test had two objectives: 1. the first objective was to delete familiar words from the target list of vocabulary that was based on their institute’s pacing guide. 2. the second objective of administering the pre-test was to assess homogeneity of the experimental group and the control group. to achieve the first objective, all participants’ scores were coded into spss for locating words which 30% of participants declared as familiar. after calculating the students’ scores, words which received 30% familiarity by the students were deleted from the study’s tests. in order to calculate 30% indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 21 familiarity words, the following equation was run manually based on the number of the pre-test takers’ in both groups (96 students) and their scores per each word: any word that received 29 points (statistically calculated as 28.8 but resided at 29) was deleted from the study’s targeted vocabulary. the original number of the study’s targeted words was 35 words, and the number of words that were left out after this procedure was 28 words (after deleting 7 words). to achieve the second objective, which is assuring that both groups are homogenous, a comparison between both groups’ pre-test scores using statistical tests was applied. as vks serves as an indicator of the learners’ depth of knowledge about words, it can also be an indicator of the test takers’ language proficiency. however, before the comparison was conducted, a numerical testing was run to assess the normality of the pre-test data using a shapiro-wilk test. the significance value for this study was set at 0.05. the significance values of the experimental and the control groups scores were sig. = 0.01, sig. = 0.027 respectively, where p < 0.05. this rejects the null hypothesis of assumption of normality and indicates that the pre-test data was not approximately normally distributed which is expected in a test of untaught materials. accordingly, the nonparametric test, mann-whitney u test, was used to analyze the pre-test scores of the two groups. as can be seen in table 3, the analysis shows that mann-whitney u = 1028.000, while the two tailed (sig. = 0.361) is greater than 0.05 (p > 0.05). hence, there is no statistically significant difference between the pre-test scores of the experimental group and the control group. accordingly, it can be concluded that the two groups are homogenous. table 2. ranking for the mann-whitney u test of the pre-test scores group n mean rank sum of ranks experimental group 47 51.13 2403.00 control group 49 45.98 2253.00 total 96 table 3. the mann-whitney u value and significance level of the pre-test scores test statistics pre-test mann-whitney u 1028.000 wilcoxon w 2253.000 z -.913 asymp. sig. (2-tailed) .361 a. grouping variable: group the post-test this study investigates the relationship between the two variables, ct and vocabulary retention. thus, it attempts to test two hypotheses. the first hypothesis, which represents the null hypothesis (h0) of the present study, states the following:  the use of a ct-based approach to teach efl vocabulary does not affect the efl learners’ vocabulary retention. the second hypothesis, which is the alternative one (h1), states the following:  the use of a ct-based approach to teach efl vocabulary can enhance efl learners’ vocabulary retention. in order to accept or reject the study’s null hypothesis, two post-tests were administered. one was an immediate post-test and the other was a delayed post-test (after two weeks). the calculation of post-tests scores was done as follows: for each correct answer, tariq elyas & budor s. al-zahrani the impact of critical thinking on learners’ efl vocabulary retention: the arab context 22 participants received the score of one and for each incorrect answer, they received the score of zero. the overall score was 10 points (one-point x 10 words). later, all participants’ overall test scores were coded and were subjected to statistical analyses using spss. the statistical analyses served two main purposes: 1. to compare between the results of the experimental group and the control group in both tests, the immediate post-test and the delayed post-test. 2. to explore any associations, if any existed, between the immediate and the delayed post-tests within each group, the experimental group and the control group. to determine the type of the statistical test (parametric or non-parametric) to be used in order to compare the results of the experimental group and the control group in both post-tests, the normality of distribution test was utilized twice, once for the immediate post-test data and again for the delayed post-test data. later, to further understand and assess any changes in the same group’s performance, a comparison between the same group’s post-tests scores was conducted. additionally, the bivariate pearson correlation was applied in order to further explore any associations between both post-tests scores within each group. the immediate post-test when running the normality test, the significance values of the experimental and the control groups scores successively were sig. = 0.023, sig. = 0.050, ≤ 0.05. this indicates that the immediate post-test data of both groups were approximately normally distributed. thus, the means of the scores represented a reliable measure and the parametric test, the independent t-test, was used to compare between the means of both group. table 4. the independent t-test for the immediate post-test scores the independent t-test (table 4) revealed that the mean score of the experimental group (m = 7.00, sd = 2.015) is statistically higher (t = 4.472, df = 64.614), (sig. 2 tailed = 0.000) than the control group (m = 4.91, sd = 1.809). thus, there is a highly significant difference between the immediate post-test means of both groups. the mean difference was (2.091) with [95% ci, 1.156 to 3.026] (see table 5). table 5. the levene test for the equality of variance between the immediate post-test scores of the experimental and the control groups independent samples test levene's test for equality of variances t-test for equality of means f sig. t df sig. (2tailed) mean difference std. error difference 95% confidence interval of the difference lower upper immediate post-test equal variances assumed 1.092 .300 -4.46565 .000 -2.091.468 -3.026-1.156 equal variances not assumed -4.47264.614 .000 -2.091.468 -3.025-1.157 group statistics group n mean std. deviation std. error mean immediate posttest experimental group 34 7.00 2.015 .346 control group 33 4.91 1.809 .315 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 23 figure 7. the means of the results of the immediate post-test of the experimental and the control groups the delayed post-test for the delayed post-test scores, the data was not approximately normally distributed. numerically, according to the normality test, the significance level for the experimental group was p = 0.001 (p > 0.05). graphically, the experimental group’s test takers’ scores created a positively skewed distribution (see figure 7). all the experimental group scores were above the half score of the test (5), where all the scores range between (6) as the minimum score and the full score (10) as the maximum. figure 8. the skewed distribution of the delayed post-test scores of the experimental and the control groups. a parametric test cannot be applied as it assumes the normality of the data. the mean constitutes an unreliable measure while the median score represents a more reliable alternative measure in this case. the non parametric equivalent test for the independent t-test, mann-whitney u test, was used to analyze the delayed post-test scores. the test indicates that there is a highly statistically significant difference between the delayed post-test median scores of both groups, mann-whitney u = 189.00, twotailed (sig. = .000), (p < 0.05) (table 8). as demonstrated in tables 6 and 7, the experimental group’s mean rank and median score are (44.94) (m = 9) respectively, which is statistically significantly higher than the control group’s mean rank and median score (22.73) (m = 6). tariq elyas & budor s. al-zahrani the impact of critical thinking on learners’ efl vocabulary retention: the arab context 24 table 6. npar tests-mann-whitney u test for the delayed post-test scores statistics experimental group n valid 34 missing 0 median 9.00 percentiles 25 8.00 50 9.00 75 10.00 control group n valid 33 missing 0 median 6.00 percentiles 25 5.00 50 6.00 75 8.00 table 7. rankings for the mann-whitney u test of the delayed post-test scores of the experimental and the control groups ranks group n mean rank sum of ranks delayed post-test experimental group 34 44.94 1528.00 control group 33 22.73 750.00 total 67 table 8. the mann-whitney u value and significance level of the delayed post-test scores test statistics delayed post-test mann-whitney u 189.000 wilcoxon w 750.000 z -4.735 asymp. sig. (2-tailed) .000 a. grouping variable: group figure 9. the delayed post-test scores frequencies for the experimental and the control groups in summary, the experimental group’s scores were significantly greater than the control group in two different times, in the immediate post-test and in the delayed posttest. figure 9 displays a comparison between the distributions of the two posttests data of both groups. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 25 figure 10. the distributions of the scores of the immediate and the delayed post-test in the experimental and the control groups the immediate post-test versus the delayed post-test the researchers aimed at comparing between the results of the immediate post-test and the delayed post-test within the same group. as mentioned in the previous section, the experimental group’s delayed test scores do not constitute parametric data. thus, a nonparametric test for a paired sample, wilcoxon signed-ranks test, was applied to determine if there is any statistically significant difference in the performance of the experimental group in the two post-tests. the test indicated that a statistically significant difference was found between the results of immediate post-test and the delayed post-test. the immediate post-test ranks were statistically significantly higher than the ranks of the immediate post-test (z = 4.137, p = 0.000, p < 0.05). a similar procedure was conducted to the control group. however, the equivalent parametric test to wilcoxon test, t-test for a paired sample, was applied to determine whether there is a statistically significant difference between the means of the immediate posttest and delayed post-test. a significant difference was evident where the mean score for the delayed post-test (m = 6.52, sd = 2.093) was statistically higher (t = 3.620, df = 32, two-tailed p = 0.001) from that of the immediate post-test (m = 4.91, sd = 1.809). additionally, the bivariate pearson correlation (table 9) was used to measure the strength and direction of any association that might exist between the post-tests data within each group. a statistically significant positive correlation was found between the experimental group’s scores in both tests (r = 0.385, sig. = 0.025). on the other hand, there was no significant correlation between the control group’s scores in both post-tests (r = 0.153, sig. = 0.395). table 9. correlations between the immediate post-test and the delayed post-test in both groups paired samples correlations group n correlation sig. experimental group pair 1 immediate post-test & delayed post-test 34 .385 .025 control group pair 1 immediate post-test & delayed post-test 33 .153 .395 tariq elyas & budor s. al-zahrani the impact of critical thinking on learners’ efl vocabulary retention: the arab context 26 figure 11. correlations scatterplots between the immediate and the delayed post-test scores for both groups. the analysis of the results showed that the experimental group by far outperformed the control group in both post-tests. this result rejects the null hypothesis and supports the research hypothesis which states that the use of a ct-based approach can enhance efl vocabulary retention. also, the comparison between the results of the immediate posttest and the delayed post-test within each group showed that both groups performed better in the delayed post-test than in the immediate post-test; yet, the experimental group showed greater improvement. moreover, when applying a correlation test to examine any changes within each group, the analysis showed a positive correlation between the results of the immediate posttest and the delayed post-test in the experimental group. this indicates a constant and increasing improvement in the students’ ability of vocabulary retention. on the other hand, no significant correlation was found between the control group’s post-test achievement. this conveyed that an almost arbitrary and non-constant achievement can be observed. however, a possible explanation for the control group’s better performance in the delayed post-test as opposed to the immediate post-test does not necessarily indicate an improvement in their retention ability as a result of instruction. instead, such improvement (although arbitrary among students) can be the result of a ‘testing effect’. to the researchers’ surprise, a vocabulary quiz was scheduled after only one week from the end of the intervention assigned by their institution. the researchers tried to avoid or minimize its possible effect by postponing the second post-test for another week (it was originally planned to be administered after one week only from the end of the intervention). the ‘testing effect’ is an improved retention of materials that results when they are retested at a later time (delaney et al., 2010; roediger & karpicke, 2002; as cited in shore, ray, & gooklasian, 2015). thus, the fact that the students had studied and were tested for the institutions’ official quiz might have interfered with the groups’ achievements in the delayed posttest leading to a better performance. if the advantage of the ‘testing effect’ has occurred, it would have affected both groups equally. however, it still does not explain the far greater improvement in the experimental group which can only be the result of the ct-based approach implementation. the literature lacks empirical studies that have adopted the same purpose or examined the variables of the current study in efl contexts. however, this study’s result aids and elaborates on the findings of other studies that observed a clear association between ct and vocabulary learning strategies (nosratinia, abbasi, & zaker, 2015; nosratinia & zaker, 2015). it also confirms the existence of a positive relationship between ct and lexical knowledge reported in faramarzi, elekaei and tabrizi’s (2016) study. in addition, the indonesian efl journal (ieflj) volume 5, issue 2, july 2019 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 27 results of the current study of establishing a relationship between ct and vocabulary retention is consistent with the findings of other studies that have found a relationship between ct and the reading ability with unfamiliar words (kamali & fahim, 2011) and also between ct and the translation ability since lexical knowledge is an essential part of translation (azin & tabrizi, 2016). furthermore, the link found between the ct-based approach in general and the vocabulary retention in the current study supports the observed effectiveness of some of the ct strategies or techniques on efl lexicon learning and retention; for instance, the positive effect of negotiation on vocabulary learning and retrieval (nixon & fishback 2009). the findings in this study also support other studies that have proved the effectiveness of some of ct strategies on efl learners’ vocabulary learning and retention such as collaborative dialogue. conclusion the aim of this study was to investigate the impact of adopting a ct-based approach on learners’ retention ability of efl vocabulary. an experimental study was employed in a two-group pre and post-test design to measure such possible impact. the experimental group received vocabulary instruction with a ct approach whereas the control group was taught in the conventional methods of vocabulary teaching. the treatment consisted of seven lessons delivered over two weeks. the targeted vocabulary includes 28 words and fixed expressions that are drawn from the language curriculum course book. two post-tests were administered after the intervention, one immediately after the treatment and another two weeks later. the findings showed that the experimental group outperformed the control group. several pedagogical implications can be drawn from this study. the first pedagogical implication is for efl syllabus designers and material developers; ct should not be considered merely an additional thing that teachers may or may not incorporate in their lessons but it should be treated as an integral part of efl teaching materials. many advantages have been attributed to the use of ct in efl classrooms, for example, improving the learners’ speaking proficiency (alnofaie, 2013), and writing skills (mallamiri & sheikhy, 2014). therefore, more serious efforts should be devoted to the infusion of ct in efl syllabus and materials. providing more intellectually challenging vocabulary tasks which provide plenty of opportunities for students to practice elaborate rehearsal is important for helping them achieve better retention of the learnt vocabulary. the second pedagogical implication concerns efl instructors; it is highly recommended that they use ct strategies and problem-solving tasks to promote discussions, debates and students’ reflections and to raise their level motivation and engage their cognitive abilities. turner (1995) claims that complex and challenging tasks that promote ct and demand higherorder thinking skills can trigger students’ motivation (as cited in lai, 2011). the current study was carried out in a saudi context, where classroom dynamics and students’ beliefs are shaped by the unique religious, societal, economic and educational variables of the region. similar studies should be conducted in different contexts to gain a broader understanding of the role of ct in efl learning and the extent of its impact. furthermore, the participants in the current study were students in the intermediate level (b1+). similar studies conducted with students in different levels of language proficiency might lead to more insights on how cognitive or intellectual involvement might be hindered (or not) by the learners’ language proficiency. this could lead to a better understanding on how language and intellect interact. consideration could also be given to the advisability of including a third follow-up post-test after the whole course to gain a broader understanding regarding vocabulary retention. tariq elyas & budor s. al-zahrani the impact of critical thinking on learners’ efl vocabulary retention: the arab context 28 references ab kadir, m. 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(1962). the effects of prolonged learning on learning. journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior, 1, 173-82. http://search.proquest.com/docview/200387909?accountid=142908 http://search.proquest.com/docview/200387909?accountid=142908 http://doi.org/10.1007/s10984-015-9178-1 http://doi.org/10.1007/s10984-015-9178-1 https://doi.org/10.1177/0033688212439367 tariq elyas & budor s. al-zahrani the impact of critical thinking on learners’ efl vocabulary retention: the arab context 30 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 2, july 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 139 protection of arabic language in relation with influx from english taking over with shops title and advertisements maher ahmed ali saleh english department, abyan university, yemen e-mail: maheralnakhai@yahoo.com apa citation: saleh, m. a. a. (2021). protection of arabic language in relation with influx from english taking over with shops title and advertisement. indonesian efl journal, 7(2), pp.139-142. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i2.4592 received: 19-03-2021 accepted: 20-05-2021 published: 15-07-2021 introduction this research is related to protect of the arabic language while promoting english when using it in shops title and advertisements within aden province. historically aden province was occupied by british for around 129 years, surprisingly not any form of effect from the people using english language was left behind as people preferred using their own dialects or languages. arabic is the official language of south of yemen, nowadays, english is used only as a subject in schools, some of parents send their children to english medium schools, hoping this will secure a better future for them. moreover, in the field of protecting the language, qatar’s cabinet in 2012 organized laws on the "protection of arabic language", and submitted them to the country's supreme education council so as to ban the use of any foreign language in nature of advertisements and shop names or titles, in efforts to promote the use of arabic language and protect cultural identity. therefore, customer’s being convinced by the titles of shops are forced to trust the products however, advertising is defined by leech (1966) as “a fundamental communication tool for the consumers”. this study aims at four main points: (1) to protect the arabic language and link it to modern cultures. (2) to prove that arabic is not an outdated language. (3) to limit the use of english language advertisements for foreign visitors. (4) to evaluate advertisements used in shop titles in adeni environment. meanwhile, the research questions of the study are: (1) does the english language used in shops title affect the costumer’s attitudes towards buying the advertised products or not? (2) what are the effects of english language in use of shops titles? (3) how should the english language be used in advertisements for foreign visitors? (4) adens’ customer attitudes towards the attractiveness of shops with english titles? method the samples of the study are taken from 200 customers who were selected randomly by the researcher and further investigated them within abstract: this study intends to explore on protection available for arabic language as compared with english in shops titles and advertisements in aden province as being engulfed by the latter. the use of english as a lingua franca in communication has increased in the last decades in the field of advertising. the purpose of the current study is to enquire into consumers’ attitudes towards the use of english in advertisement and compare them with the views of those inclined towards the use of arabic. however, some shop owners who are using english language in advertisements is due to many reasons which include; they tend to think that their costumers believe more on products from outside the country and thus they are sure when customers see foreign names it directly inclines to have more confidence towards the products. the study attempts to promote the use of arabic language in aden province towards customer satisfactions and beliefs in products named in their language. that means, not fighting against other languages as much as promoting the use of arabic to go with all the challenges in the world. as a result, the customers trust using foreign language leads to arabic language to become a dead like languages such as latin or ancient greek and hence the interest to using only arabic language in names of the shops. keywords: protection of arabic language; shop titles and advertisements. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i2.4592 maher ahmed ali saleh protection of arabic language in relation with influx from english taking over with shops title and advertisement 140 aden province. the samples of the study asked about their attitude regarding 20 shops titles written in english. the 200 customers were grouped in group a and group b, i.e., one hundred in each group in two main districts in aden province, group a were investigated in al-shaikh othman district whereas group b in crater district. there are different types of instruments which were used by researchers in collecting the data for their study such as questionnaires, interviews, observations, tests, experiments, etc. this qualitative study used a structured interview process that ensured all the interviews delivered a detailed candidate feedback which the researcher needs to make the right decision. an interview is a collecting data instrument whereby, the researcher meets the customers and asks questions orally and records their answers. the purpose of using this tool is stated by seliger and shohamy (1989, p.160) who said that “interviews elicit unforeseen data”. interviewing is deliberated as one of the most useful means for examining people's attitudes. arskey and knight, (1999, p.2) said that, interviewing is a “valuable research method because it allows the researcher to explore data on understanding, opinions, what people remember doing, attitudes, feelings and the like”. it can be defined as a verbal interaction between the interviewer and interviewee to get some material about the problem under investigation. kothari (2004, p.97) defined interview ‘‘as a method of collecting data which involves presentation of oral-verbal stimuli and replay in terms of oral-verbal responses.” in this part of the study the researcher would like to give the reader an idea as to what advertising is. the word ‘advertising’ comes from the french word ‘avertir’ which means ‘to inform’. the definitions of advertisements are different; according to oxford encyclopedic of language, the advertising means “business that deals with the publicizing of goods, especially to in increase sales”. regarding to this definition the shop’s owners intend to choose the appropriate names for their shops to attract the customers and increase the price of the products. whereas cook (1996, p.182) stated that “advertising is not some external curiosity which we examine, from which we are separate and superior, but something of which we are part, and which is part of us”. that means, it is something internal to the customers who are reacting to it. therefore, the owners of shops always look for distinctive names for their shops, and they always try to find a name that can attract the customers. findings and discussion the following section will describe the results carried out to explore the issue of using english language in shop titles and advertisements within aden province and further trying to focus on why the shops’ owners do not use only arabic language. however, english language has been widely used in modern advertising to be the most frequently used in the world in addition, it is used as foreign language in product advertisements in non-english speaking countries. however, there are various reasons behind of using of english by some of the shop owners who think it is a shortcut to convey to the customers to get confidence in regards to the sale of the products, some of them also believe english language lead the customers to trust the products as it is an international language and further a few of them, see that the concepts are easier to convey in their original english language. this issue in not only seen in aden province and for example, wustmann (1903) and pound (1913) discussed individually the use of foreign words in german advertisements and the use of spanish in advertisements in the united states. recently the prince of makkah region khalid al-faisal, directed the governors, secretaries, and heads of centers and municipalities in all cities of makkah region and gave them a period of six months to arabize all names of shops, halls and streets and to exclude all foreign names from the makkah region as a decisive decision. as a result, the decision was welcomed by educative, writers and lovers of the arabic language. while analyzing the study, the customers’ respondents within aden province suffered from some foreign names in some places and shops titles. however, the history of the south of yemen attests to its civilization and its constant preservation of its arabic language and islamic heritage. using english language names reveals the state of "westernization" where some have been the launch of foreign names of the "places" of some shops, restaurants, hotels and internet cafes where some shops do not care about their names. in fact, in some cases the use of translation is strange as the language combinations used for the shops’ titles that do not take into account of the indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 2, july 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 141 origins of the arabic language, not even the rules of grammar and dictation, it seems that written by an uneducated who does not know the language and collect arabic words next to each other without giving any proper meaning. eventually, advertising is an aspect to reflect the attraction of advertising to the audience so as persuade the customers about the product. however, the language selected for the advertising goes ahead to the population whom the advertisements are sent. so, in an environment like aden where only arabic is the main language for communication it is much better to use it in shops names and advertisements. moreover, unfortunately by taking one tour of the street in aden province reveals instances of westernization of some shops, restaurants and hotels. some of them name foreign restaurants, cafes, shops, barbershops, grocery stores, women's shops and others. in conclusion, culture plays an essential role in the advertisement strategies especially in areas like the arab world, the advertising approaches are prepared in a way that do not affect the consumer's culture and needs. as a result, majority of customers disagreed and advocated using only arabic language in advertising, it is not acceptable to use the foreign language in advertisement in environments speak only arabic language such as aden province. conclusion the results of the study show that customer’s attitudes are expectedly supporting the use of arabic language in advertisement and shop titles justified by several reasons; shops deliberately use foreign names to draw attention for their customers, the majority of them are a reaction of shops that carry out the same activity in other foreign countries. the researcher takes in mind how the same can be overcome with this issue by highlighting the questions on how the commercial street restored their loss of arab identity in aden province and investigated on what methods to be suggested to solve this enigma. accordingly, we should pay attention to our language more, preserve it and be proud of it. it is the language of the quran. the name is supposed to be written in arabic by large size. if the shop’s owner wants to add any other language to give more details the size should be smaller under the arabic name because the nonarab visitors need words in english in restaurants, pharmaceuticals, catering, hospitals, police, taxi, airports and other places. references arskey, h. and knight p. (1999). interviewing for social scientists. an introductory resource with examples. london. sage. cook, g. (1996). the discourse of advertising. london: routledge kothari, c. (2004). research methodology methods and techniques. new age international (p) ltd. new delhi, india. pound, l. (1913). word-coinage and modern tradenames. dialect notes, 4, 29–41. leech, g. n. (1966). english in advertising: a linguistic study of advertising in great britain. london: longmans. seliger, h. and shohamy, e. (1989). second language research methods. oxford: oxford university press. wustmann, g. (1903). all manner of linguistic stupidities. leipzig: grunow. maher ahmed ali saleh protection of arabic language in relation with influx from english taking over with shops title and advertisement 142 the analysis of interlanguage produced by 3rd grade high school students in narrative writing text nida amalia asikin department of english education, university of kuningan email: nidamaliasikin@gmail.com apa citation: asikin, n. a. (2017). the analysis of interlanguage produced by 3 rd grade high school students in narrative writing text. indonesian efl journal, 3(1), 39-44 received: 21-11-2016 accepted: 26-12-2016 published: 01-01-2017 abstract: this research is a descriptive case study concerning interlanguage in efl students’ narrative writing. the study explores the occurrence of interlanguage in students’ writing, and the reason(s) why interlanguage exist in their writing. the data of the study are ten narrative texts produced by nine twelfth-year students of a senior high school in kuningan. the study used a qualitative research design. there was one data collection procedures applied in this study, namely document analysis. the data from students’ texts were analyzed on the basis of the concept of interlanguage by selinker (1972). the results of the study revealed that from the ten texts, the interlnguage appear in forming passive sentence, choosing incorrect verb agreement, choosing wrong auxiliary, making the unparalleled sentence, and translating sentence word by word. for that reason, it is concluded that interlanguage exist due to the strong influence of native language. therefore, it is suggested that students should be exposed to the use of appropriate english grammar in their writing. keywords: interlanguage, narrative writing, passive sentence introduction recently, many research on sla focus on the phenomenon of interlanguage produced by l2 learners. the terms interlanguage was firstly defined by selinker (1972). the terms “interlanguage” refers to the language system of the second language learner, a system distinct from both the native as well as the target language. this concept validates learners’ speech, not as a deficit system, that is, a language filed with random errors, but as a system of its own with its own structure (gass and selinker, 2001, p. 14). thus, l2 learners should pass the phase where they speak interlanguage. it means, errors which are caused by l2 learners’ interlanguage is not a bad thing, as long as their interlanguage is not stable or it is called as “fossilization”. however, in efl teaching, the research about interlanguage is also increasing. it is related to the position of english as foreign and second language. furthermore, english is a compulsory lesson in indonesia. therefore indonesian efl learners should have the capability to convey the meaning of a language through oral or written text. this ability can be seen by the method used by the teachers to evaluate and measure the learners’ ability in speaking and writing like native. yet, no matter how hard the teacher tries to make the students like native, there might be an obstacle which is a gap between l1 or native language with l2 or english as foreign language. this gap is called as interlanguage. interlanguage occurred perhaps due to some factors. the factors such as there are four previous research which focus on students’ interlanguage in efl teaching context. the first one is conducted by martinez and carbera (2002) which concerned on the interlanguage and the different ways teachers manage to make their oral input comprehensible. the participants of their research are five primary school teachers. moreover, the result of the research is there is cross-linguistic influence in the interlanguage produced by the students. the second one is conducted by kil (2003). the focus of the research is indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 39 examining three types of errors – word order; inversion; co-occurring articles – produced by five korean english learners. the conclusion of the research is that the errors they made showed that the learners went through a developmental process. their acquisition of the target language must be on the continuum of the interlanguage. the third research is conducted by fauziati (2009). the focus of this research is finding the errors in english textbooks for junior high school students. the finding of the research shows that the textbook writers have been most confronted with problems on vocabulary and the writers also have got difficulties in translating indonesia culturalbound words into english. then the last research is conducted by luna (2010). this research focuses on interlanguage in undergraduates’ academic english. the purpose of this research is to find common linguistic patterns in a simple spanish university students’ written evidence in english. the conclusion of the research is that interlanguage provides a complex, unique and rich linguistic environment from where teachers can withdraw students’ weak areas of development in l2. however, in indonesia, teachers are required to teach l2 learners by applying genre based approach (gba). to begin with, genre-based approaches start with the whole text as the unit in focus rather than the sentence. the focus on the whole texts implies that there is higher level of order and patterning in language than just in sentencegrammar at the level of discourse organization and meta-patterning of grammatical features. genre –based approaches emphasize that this higher order must be attended to for effective language use. the specification of genres to be taught is based on the classification used by many systemic functional linguists, especially in application to classroom teaching of english. the present research will focus on interlanguage produced by 3rd grade high school students in narrative writing text. the skill of writing, according to harmer (2007, p. 265), belongs to productive skills where students actually have to produce language themselves. people are thought as literate if they can read and write in certain situations and for certain purposes, some of which are more prestigious than others (hyland, 2002, p. 53). somehow, the skill of writing is believed as the most difficult skill for l2 learners. it is because they have to write correctly so that the target readers can easily understand the meaning of the writing. writing narrative is the activity of genre writing which focuses on fictional story. in this type of the text, the students are required to have a better imagination to imagine fictional story. the common generic structure of writing is orientation, complication and resolution. besides generic structure, the grammatical features of writing are also observed in this research. the study would be started by collecting students’ narrative writing. then the writing papers were analyzed to find the occurrence of students’ interlanguage. the focus of the study is the generic structure and the grammatical features of student’s narrative writing. therefore, it is believed that doing a research on interlanguage especially in students’ writing is considered important. several reasons strengthen the statement. first, because writing is one of the four english skills and teaching four skills of english is the requirement of ktsp curriculum. second, writing is considered as the hardest skill for l2 learners. the last reason is by knowing students’ interlanguage, teacher could find the best method of teaching. the writer believes that the research on sla especially on high school students writing is still insufficient. therefore, by conducting this research, the writer also believes that it can give contribution to the teaching method of efl. in the other words, the teachers can acquire their students’ interlanguage and do not treat the interlanguage as a mistake. based on the explanation above, this present research is conducted to answer two questions. the first one is to find the types of errors in students’ narrative writing. the second one is to explain how and why those errors occur. nida amalia asikin the analysis of interlanguage produced by 3rd grade high school students in narrative writing text 40 finding the types of errors in students’ narrative writing will give the teacher a description about students’ writing ability. it is hoped that knowing types of error helps the teacher to solve the problem in teaching english as second language. moreover, besides knowing the types of errors that occurred, it is also important to know how and why those errors occur. the reason is that the teacher can choose the best method to teach english especially writing narrative text. the present study is begun with the term interlanguage. interlanguage is a term that refers to the integrated system of knowledge about the target language that the language learners are constructing in their minds (kil, 2003). it is very similar to the concept of competence in that it is the learners’ internalized and systematic knowledge or ability to use the target language to communicate. in fact, it could be considered a kind of competence, however, in the fact that the term interlanguage implies that the internal language system is still unfinished. thus, the concept of interlanguage validates learners’ speech, not as a deficit system, that is a language filled with random errors, but as a system of their own with their own structure (gass and selinker, 2001,p. 14). this system is composed of numerous elements, not the least of which is elements from the native language to target language. selinker (1977, 1988) has presented a comprehensive discussion on interlanguage which is believed as errors produced by l2 learners. he correlates the issues of the sources of errors with the second language learning process. he has argued that interlanguage is resulted from the learner’s attempts to produce the target language norms. there are five process proposed by him: (1) language transfer, (2) transfer of training, (3) strategies of second language learners, (4) strategies of second language communication, and (5) overgeneralization of the target language linguistic materials. method descriptive qualitative approach is applied in this study. the participants of this study are 10 students of third grade senior high school who have collected the final test of writing. those students wrote narrative story based on their imagination. those students are students of sman 2 kuningan west java. the purpose of choosing third grade students of senior high school is because it is assumed that they have a lot of english learning experiences. in addition, after graduating from high school they tend to continue their study or to continue working. therefore it is important to know how far the interlanguage exist, so the teacher can solve the problem sooner. the data were collected by applying purposeful sampling strategy to answer both of the research’s problems. patton (1990 in alwasilah, 2002, p. 146) proposed a qualitative research applying purposefulsampling strategy or criterionbased selection. purposeful sampling is a strategy to make particular person, settings or events strictly selected to give some important information that other strategy can’t (alwasilah, 2002, p. 146). the data that had been collected were classified based on the grammatical production and generic structures. the table to classify the data is presented below. after the data classified, then those were analyzed by the errors in order to find out the answer of the research problems. table 1 below represents how the data are collected in order to get the findings. table 1. form of data analysis student number grammatical production generic structure 1 2 3 … 10 indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 41 results and discussion this section presents the findings of the analysis of interlanguage in l2 narrative writing and hands over the discussions. it focuses on the types of errors in students’ narrative writing and how and why those errors occurred. there are ten students’ writing were analyzed in this study. the findings of the study show that there are ten types of errors occurred. those errors are in passive construction, verb agreement, modality, missing verb, illogical meaning, translating problem, parallelism, sentence structure, missing preposition, and if conditional. some students did more than one error in their writing. those errors influence the development of generic structure of narrative writing. the findings show that there are four generic structure developments that are bothered by the errors. the developments are hanging resolution, complicated story development, incomplete resolution and less development in resolution. table 2 below clearly stated the interlanguage occurs in students’ writing. table 2. findings of interlanguage student number grammatical production generic structure 1 passive construction hanging resolution 2 verb agreement modality story developed in complication 3 missing verb story developed in complication 4 illogical meaning verb agreement wrong auxiliary story developed in complication 5 only three paragraph, no development process in each structure. 6 translating problem story developed in complication 7 parallelism story developed in complication 8 sentence structure preposition missing incomplete resolution: only one sentence 9 verb missing if conditional verb agreement less development in resolution 10 verb agreement less development in resolution after analyzing the data, it could be found that there are many grammatical errors found in students’ narrative writing. it was found for about nine errors in grammar. for the discussion will be stated below. 1. passive construction it is found in student 1 who failed in constructing passive sentence. the sentence is: the letter wasn’t reply. grammatically, this kind of construction is not correct. constructing passive voice in english should follow this pattern: subject + to be (past) + past participle or v3. yet, in this case, the student did not use past participle of “reply” which is “replied”. this can be happened since in their l1, indonesian, there is no verb difference between active and passive form. however, in english grammar, the construction of the sentence seems like active sentence but meaningless. it should be the letter wasn’t replied. 2. verb agreement the example of interlanguage in the form of verb agreement is: he went to sold. the problem arises when the student choose “sold” instead of “sell” after the preposition “to”. the agreement is “to” should be followed by bare infinitive”. in this example, the student perhaps wanted to be consistent that in writing a nida amalia asikin the analysis of interlanguage produced by 3rd grade high school students in narrative writing text 42 narrative he/ she should use past tense. yet, the student forgot that the second verb should be in “to infinitive” form. the correct one should be he went to sell. 3. wrong auxiliary it is found that student 4 was not correct in choosing the auxiliary. actually, it seems like the students was confused about whether it is auxiliary or to be. the detected sentence is: zebra did not white color like today. perhaps in this case, the student was confused when they should use dummy do in past form and past to-be (was and were). based on the rules or agreement, if subject is modified by adjective, the sentence should contain to be after the subject. in this case, to be for past tense are “was and were”. therefore, the right sentence should be: zebra was not white color like today. 4. parallelism sentence elements that are similar in function should also be similar in construction. these elements should be in the same grammatical form so that they are parallel, it is called as parallelism. using parallel structure in your writing will help you to avoid redundancy, make your sentence clear and equal. parallelism is intended to make the reader satisfy. moreover, parallelism is important in constructing english sentence. yet, for l2 learners it is hard to apply, just like what has been found in this study. it is found in student 7 who wrote: gara saw the people says that gara will not kill the dragon. the underlined word above indicates the failure of creating sentence in parallel form. in this case, the student is inconsistent with the grammatical feature f narrative. perhaps in his point of view, it has been sufficient by applying past tense at the beginning. the sentence should be: gara saw the people said that gara would not kill the dragon. it should be consistently in past form because the text is narrative. therefore, it is inferred that besides being confused of parallelism, the student perhaps is having lee comprehension toward narrative text. 5. problem in translating indonesian language has different structure compared to english. therefore, when we change our idea in indonesian we will find some obstacles. the obstacles appeared due to the needs of natural translation. translating idea word by word is the easiest way yet the most unnatural. it is found in student 6: the king didn’t want this accident to happen anymore. the underlined phrase shows that in this case, student was influenced by the structure of native language. from the grammatical analysis, it can be seen that students are still influenced by native language, in here indonesia. sometimes they are confused when they have to change the pattern from native language, which already stays in their brain to the pattern of target language. in terms of generic structure of the text, it was found that students were trying to apply the pattern of narrative given by the teacher. most of the writings developed in the complication phase. however, perhaps most of them lack of idea how to finish the story. thus, many stories have hanging resolution. besides that the general pattern found in the analysis is the use of “once upon a time” in the very beginning of the story. conclusion from this study, it can be concluded that the students tried to apply what they learned in the class to the writing. the errors they made showed that the learners went through a developmental process. their acquisition of the target language must be on the continuum of the interlanguage. therefore, the teacher cannot treat the errors as something bad. however, the errors can help the teacher to find out the best methodology to teach l2 to the students. the last is that scaffolding is important to guide students in comprehending the l2. indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 43 references ardiantin, u. d. (2012). narrative text. power point presentation. eggins, s. (2004). an introduction to systemic functional linguistics (2nd ed.).. continuum: new-york. fauziati, e. (2009). interlanguage errors in english textbooks for junior high school students in surakarta. a teflin journal. gass, s. m., & selinker, l. (2001). second language acquisition: an introductory course. mahwah, n. j: lawrence erlbaum. harmer, j. (2007). the practice of english language teaching (4th ed.). longman. hyland, k. (2002). teaching and researching writing. pearson education ltd. kil, i. (2003). interlanguage development of five korean english learners. usa: community college of baltimore county. luna, r. m. (2010). interlanguage in undergraduates’ academic english: preliminary results from written script analysis. issn 1989-0796. martinez & cabrera. (2002). input and interlanguage in the efl classroom: a case study with primary school teachers. a published journal. martin, j. r. (1984). language, register and genre. deakin university press. selinker, l. 1972. interlanguage, iral 10. nida amalia asikin the analysis of interlanguage produced by 3rd grade high school students in narrative writing text 44 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 45 digital platforms in elt learning as the tool for young learners ima frafika sari shariah faculty, institut agama islam negeri ponorogo, indonesia email: ifrafika@gmail.com apa citation: sari, i. f. (2022). digital platforms in elt learning as the tool for young learners. indonesian efl journal, 8(1), pp. 45-52. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v8i1.5586 received: 27-09-2021 accepted: 28-11-2021 published: 30-01-2022 introduction since the covid-19 epidemic, the use of digital platforms in english language teaching (elt) has been extensively advocated. many studies have been undertaken on digital platforms learning in elt, even before the epidemic age. all indonesian schools and institutions, without exception, have begun to implement e-learning, making this a hot topic among elt scholars today. the use of technology in language education, such as gamification, applications, and devices, is not new. language education and learning have significantly benefited from digital tools, social media, and virtual worlds. the majority of people in the twenty-first century use modern technology in their daily lives. many industries, such as education, manufacturing, and hospitals, utilize new technology to carry out their tasks. people believed that they could be active and inventive to accomplish something in this period. many technologies are available to assist them in their operations. thus, people should embrace the new modern. furthermore, as tutors, teachers should be creative in their teaching methods. for pupils, teaching, according to berg, is a creative process. when adopting new technology, the teacher should create an engaging learning environment. teachers should pay greater attention to technology in their classes, according to chun et al. (2016), because it affects language use. on the other hand, the current situation does not appear to be a well-planned daily teaching process involving advanced technology gadgets in the classroom, nor does it appear to be typical online instruction. teachers and students are in a critical situation these days, teaching with limited resources and in a hurry. in a study, hodges et al. (2020) compared everyday online learning versus emergency online learning. atmojo & nugroho (2020) looked into the challenges of implementing online learning. in addition, amin and sundari (2020) discuss students' preferences for digital platforms used in online learning. in this industrial revolution 4.0 era, advances in information and communication technology (ict) have influenced all areas of people's lives, including education. teachers and students are affected by the use of technology in the classroom since it provides both benefits and obstacles, which is unavoidable in this century. teachers must be aware that today's kids are digital natives who have grown up with technology. abstract: the goal of this study is to uncover: the use of digital platforms in english language instruction for young learners. it's a type of qualitative study aiming at showing the use of digital platforms as a tool for young learners in elt learners. because there is still a scarcity of research on digital platforms in the english language as a foundation for young learners, this study is essential. the following is a summary of the study findings: first, the teacher constantly listens to and observes the pupils, allowing them to check their spoken language, provide immediate or delayed feedback, and encourage active involvement and engagement in the speaking activities. speaking looks to be the easiest of the four basic language abilities to teach online. the teacher monitors the pupils' spoken language, provides immediate or delayed feedback, and encourages active involvement and engagement with the speaking exercises. second, edmodo, seesaw, sway, class dojo, and show my homework are examples of online learning programs that allow young learners to apply english language learning effectively. keywords: digital platforms; elt; elt learning; young learners. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i2.4564 ima frafika sari digital platforms in elt learning as the tool for young learners 46 each year, the number of people using the internet in indonesia grows. according to data from hootsuite (in riyanto, 2019), indonesia's internet users climbed to 150 million in 2018, up from 268.2 million in 2017, or 56 percent of the entire population. the study also shows that they are all active social media users, with 130 million mobile social media users. there have been numerous researches on digital platforms in english language teaching and learning. different findings have been reported in these investigations—some advocate using digital platforms to teach english as a second language. english learning in indonesia is more effective when technology is used (especially in elementary school). students should learn a foreign language to master it. learning is an integral part of a student's education. students will get a lot of new information and knowledge due to their learning. learning can take place in various settings, both formal and informal. furthermore, learning can take place in a classroom, at home, in an out room, and so on. furthermore, learning english as a foreign language can be done in classrooms and other settings (at home, garden, etc.). english is a foreign language and an international language that students and adults in indonesia should study. in indonesia, pupils begin learning english in primary school. english language learning should engage pupils while studying to grasp the language. easy online learning can be used to study english at home. there are numerous tools or software that can assist students in studying english as a second language. as a result, they will learn it effectively at home. as a result, the research was created to address the following research questions: what are digital platforms in english language teaching for young learners? method descriptive qualitative research aims to demonstrate the digital platforms in elt learning for young learners. the researcher explained the application of theories in locating and discussing qualitative research. the supporting sources come from books, journals, and various additional sources relevant to the topic. qualitative research aims to understand a phenomenon from the participants' point of view. the results of qualitative research are descriptive rather than numerical, verbal, or visual representations of the research topic chosen by the researcher. it should be highlighted that data obtained using a qualitative method is nondescriptive. a research subject is an individual who takes part in the research. result and discussion online benefits in elt teaching speaking. speaking appears to be the most accessible four basic language skills to online teaching. the teacher continuously listens and watches the students, monitoring their spoken language, providing immediate or delayed feedback, and encouraging active participation and engagement with the speaking activities. when it comes to delivering feedback, which is required when teaching productive skills, the teacher can offer immediate feedback via the chat box or the shared screen or delayed feedback if the task is intended to be completed at the end of the task. holding up a colorful card to indicate an error that needs to be corrected is another option for fast correction while speaking. because of the time lag or unanticipated delays between computers, the teacher should allow the pupils additional time to respond when posing a question, regardless of choice (accuracy vs. fluency). the ability to record the lesson or the speaking activity for later use and progress is the fundamental benefit of teaching speaking online. teaching reading. following the integration of speaking into online teaching, reading comprehension is another ability that can be taught as successfully as in a physical classroom because all hardcover student books and photocopiable teacher resources and worksheets may be used in their electronic counterparts. in any case, becoming paperless would meet all environmental requirements for tree preservation and environmental protection. aside from the various types of texts and interactive exercises available with a single click, the teacher can also extract short texts or stories from dedicated websites and use the screen-sharing feature for the reading process and drawing/texting tools for direct annotations on the screen. teaching listening. having the correct equipment is more important than any other ability to listen to audio and video files. students should wear headphones or earplugs to block out outside indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 47 noise in most listening situations. at the same time, the teacher should share the sound from their computer while assigning listening activities. a headset will ensure that the message is delivered flawlessly during listening practice if a working microphone and a dependable camera are required for successful speaking practice. teaching writing. the writing activities are limitless and can include every stage of the writing process, including brainstorming and organizing inspiring ideas, reflecting on text structure, and collaborative proofreading. students can enhance their writing skills by linking ideas, punctuation, vocabulary, and register by studying various text types and layouts. the computer screen is far more sufficient for taking the time to teach writing off and on. with or without the acceleration of the coronavirus pandemic and the resulting lockdown, increased digitalization of educational tools, aids, and resources has proven to be inevitable for some time, and educational experts have become increasingly aware that all misfortune is a stepping stone to fortune informal education and beyond. digital platforms in elt edmodo it is the online platform to send messages, share class materials, and make learning accessible anywhere. it can help teachers who made a difference in their life. with communication tools like posts and messages, edmodo helps teachers and students. picture 1. screenshot of edmodo (https://go.edmodo.com/teachers/?utm_source=main&utm_medium=visitorsite&utm_content=teacher-block) edmodo is an essential social networking website with similar features to facebook, such as a scrollable "wall" or "timeline" where you can view posts ordered by date, an individualized profile page, push notifications to show what's new, easy access to sharing links, and the ability to send messages to groups or individuals. the main distinction is that edmodo was designed with students and teachers in mind, combining social networking capabilities with classroom management system features. as an instructor, you may create assignments, quizzes, poll audiences, manage small groups, grade activities, and even issue badges, all inside a self-contained environment that allows students and instructors to keep their academic and social lives separate. students and teachers can collaborate in an environment where the focus is entirely on teaching ima frafika sari digital platforms in elt learning as the tool for young learners 48 and learning, with no chance of mistakenly peering into one other's personal lives. edmodo provides several features that can be used to supplement various sorts of courses, namely: information sharing. edmodo makes it simple for students to communicate with their peers and professors. instructors can react immediately on edmodo to more challenging questions, allowing all students to see and profit from their responses. students in a research methods course might share survey links from google forms, while students in a public speaking class might share links to youtube video presentations. group work. small student workgroups can be easily formed with edmodo. each group can name their team and work in their own space to share ideas, articles, news, and resources. mobile notifications. students can send or receive mobile notifications from their teachers by email or text message when they create their accounts. assignment and grading. it's simple to add assignments to edmodo. grading can be done instantly on edmodo using a simple touchscreen tablet, and students can see their grades on the site right away. edmodo can be utilized instead of a classroom management system in this case, allowing students to manage their classroom information on one site rather than two. control and visibility. by preserving access to talks on the internet, instructors can maintain a level of oversight and administration. seesaw seesaw for schools is a digital platform that allows students, teachers, and parents or guardians to complete and share classroom work. according to the company's website, seesaw is a platform for student engagement. students can use the seesaw app to exhibit what they know using various media such as images, videos, drawings, text, links, and pdfs to demonstrate their understanding. all of this is stored on the seesaw platform, which means it can be viewed and evaluated by teachers, a standard with parents and guardians. the student portfolio develops throughout time, allowing users to carry it to their academic careers. other teachers will observe how the student has improved over time and worked to get the desired outcome. picture 2. screenshot of seesaw (https://web.seesaw.me/) seesaw is a digital platform that allows students to demonstrate and share their learning, unlock creative thinking for all students in any subject, provide teachers with information about their students' students and growth, and, last but not least, engage families in conversations about their children's learning. a free app lets students document and exhibit their work in a digital portfolio, makes it easier for teachers to keep track of their students' progress, and allows parents to indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 49 provide constructive criticism on their children's work. it also functions as a collaborative platform for students to work with their peers by perfecting their classmates' comments to yunus et al. incorporating ict into the classroom promotes learners' freedom and self-discovery abilities. furthermore, this web program can make it more adaptable, regardless of time or location. as a result, this is an effective method for encouraging students to increase their self-esteem. seesaw, the digital portfolio, improves students' performance and interest and encourages teachers to reflect and learn. according to melland and volden, portfolios are a method of documenting educational success based on resources chosen, presented, and structured by the teacher. this is consistent with murray's suggestion that a portfolio helps encourage professional development among teachers because it motivates and guides personal renewal and progress by allowing instructors to examine, keep, and track their development in their teaching and learning. in a nutshell, seesaw, the online platform, promises both students and teachers teaching and learning. as a result, it was chosen as the study's intervention to pique students' interest in the reading classroom. classdojo class dojo is a digital platform for students to communicate and complete their assignments. this program was created to help teachers improve student behavior in the classroom. students are asked to manage their classroom environment to keep active (czikk, 2013). learning in the twentyfirst century emphasizes active engagement and providing feedback. the presence of a teacher does not have a substantial impact. students can arrange their lessons, but they must adhere to the teacher's instructions. class dojo is a valuable tool for students and teachers who want to learn through social networking. figure 3. screenshot of classdojo (https://www.classdojo.com) classdojo is a web-based classroom management system that incorporates gamification. when students exhibit excellent behavior in class, this app rewards them with virtual points. teachers must first set up a class. second, they enlist the participation of all of their students in this course. third, the software creates an avatar for each pupil. on the other hand, each student can personalize their avatar and select the one that best describes them. finally, the app is complete and ready to use. show my homework ima frafika sari digital platforms in elt learning as the tool for young learners 50 picture 4. screenshot of satchel (https://www.teamsatchel.com/) it is a home learning platform for pupils. this platform has several beneficial features for students, teachers, and parents. this application will provide students with high-quality homework reports that can be completed at home, making it convenient for online students. sway sway is a web-based microsoft office product that lets users create newsletters, presentations, and documents to share information. with headings, text, video, and photos, users may personalize their sway. sways can be made from scratch, a template, or a pre-existing file like a word outline. figure 5. screenshot of sway (https://support.office.com/en-us/article/getting-started-with-sway-2076c468-63f4-4a89-ae5f424796714a8a) the material is then arranged into cards, dragging and dropping to reorder. presenters, teachers, and students can use sway to graphically organize the material they wish to offer. each sway has its link, allowing sways to be readily shared on the web, via email, or through social media. sway is a new microsoft office program that uses interactive reports, personal stories, presentations, and more to make learning easier. aside from that, this app provides many communications and photo-editing features. it begins with the addition of your text and images. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 51 sway is a more current and helpful program for instructors. conclusion in the teaching and learning process, a digital platform is modern technology. it has the potential to assist pupils in their educational endeavors. edmodo, seesaw, sway, class dojo, and show my homework are examples of online learning applications that enable proper application in english language learning for young learners. by leveraging the internet, these applications can be used in english. in addition, numerous features or applications are available in online learning. still, four abilities should be covered in english learning, including (writing, reading, listening, and speaking) so that the pupils can assess their english learning abilities. references adams, aubrie., & barbara, santa. 2017. e-tools: using edmodo in the classroom, https://www.natcom.org/sites/default/files/pages/e tools_edmodo_february2017.pdf. amin, fakhrurrazi m., & sundari, hanna. 2020. efl students' preferences on digital platforms during emergency remote teaching: video conference, lms, or messenger application?, studies in english language and education, 7(2), 362-378. atmojo, a. e. p., & nugroho, a. (2020). efl classes must go online! teaching activities and challenges during covid-19 pandemic in indonesia. register journal, 13(1), 49-76. chun, d., smith, b., & kern, r. (2016). technology in language use, language teaching, and language learning. modern language journal, 100, 64-80. czikk, j. (2013, september 23). classdojo, the "world's fastest growing education startup", launches in canada. retrieved from betakit: https://betakit.com/calssdojothe-worlds-fastestgrowing-education-startuplaunches-in-canada. hodges, c., moore, s., lockee, b., trust, t., & bond, a. (2020, march 27). the difference between emergency remote teaching and online learning. educause review: https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/thedifferencebetween-emergency-remote-teachingand-online-learning. jardet coutonho dos santos, mayra, velez. 2021. using classdojo to motivate kids participation in the english as foreign language online classes during the covid-19 pandemic: a case study. atoz: novas práticas em informação e conhecimento, 10(2), 58-65. melland, h. i., &volden, c. m. (1996). teaching portfolios for faculty evaluation. nurse educator 21(2), 35-38.https://doi.org/10.1097/00006223199603000-00012. murray, j. e. (1994). why teaching portfolios? community college review, 22(1), 33. nordin, n. m., hamzah, m. i., yunus, m. m., &embi, m. a. (2010). the mobile learning environment for the in-service school administrators. in procedia social and behavioral sciences, 7, 671679.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2010.10.091. riyanto, a. (2019). [infographic from survey results]. hootsuite (we are social): indonesian digital report 2019. retrieved from https://andi.link/hootsuite-we-are-socialindonesian-digital-report-2019/. sari, ima frafika. 2020. online learning for english language teaching, jurnal pendidikan dan pembelajaran, 1(2), 2721-1169. sari, mariska intan. 2019. the use of web 2.0 tools for learning in efl context: pre-service teachers' voice. journal of foreign language teaching & learning, 4(2), 135-149. seesaw. (2019). online available from:https://web.seesaw.[5]me/. yunus, m.m., nordin, n., salehi, h., sun, c. h. &embi, m. a. (2013b). pros and cons of using ict in teaching esl reading and writing. international education studies, 6(7), 119-130. https://doi.org/10.5539/ies.v6n7p119. https://andi.link/hootsuite-we-are-social-indonesian-digital-report-2019/ https://andi.link/hootsuite-we-are-social-indonesian-digital-report-2019/ ima frafika sari digital platforms in elt learning as the tool for young learners 52 the effect of teacher’s written feedbacks on indonesian efl learners’ recount writing competence marwito wihadi & ine martiana the effect of teacher’s written feedbacks on indonesian efl learners’ recount writing competence the effect of teacher’s written feedbacks on indonesian efl learners’ recount writing competence marwito wihadi department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesiaemail: m_wihadi@yahoo.com ine martiana department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesiaemail: inemartiana@yahoo.co.idapa citation: wihadi, m. & martiana, i. (2015). the effect of teacher’s written feedbacks on indonesianefl learners’ recount writing competence. indonesian efl journal, 1(1), 58-62received: 03-10-2014 accepted: 06-11-2014 published: 01-01-2015 abstract: this paper investigated the effect of teacher’s written feedbacks in recount writingcompetence and the students’ attitudes towards written feedbacks. giving written feedbacks helpsstudents to decrease their errors and gives guidance in writing as a beginner writer. this studyemployed a quantitaive and qualitative research design. the experimental group given writtenfeedbacks. for measuring the effect of written feedbacks, a pretest and posttest was administered toboth group. meanwhile, for getting their attitudes toward teacher’s written feedbacks wasadministered questionnaire and open-ended interview. based on the data, teacher’s writtenfeedbacks gave positive effects on their improvement in recount writing competence. the result ofquestionnaire and interview showed that students got real guidance and special attentionindividually in their writing process as a beginner writer. keywords: written feedbacks, recount writing competence, attitudes. introductionenglish foreign language learners learnenglish as integrated process that needsappropriate guidance in order to balance theall of skills. everyone has agreed that fourskills including reading, listening, speakingand writing should be well-balanced forlearners' actual language development. inthis present study, writing skill will become amajor focus. harmer (2001) assumed thatwritten text has a number of conventionswhich separate it out from speaking. apartfrom differences in grammar and vocabulary,there are issues of letter, words, and textformation, layout and pronunciation. itmeans that in writing competence there are alot of aspects that should be achieved.brown (2000) revealed “foreignlanguage contexts are those in which studentdo not have ready-made context forcommunication beyond their class room”. itmeans that foreign language learners are noteasy to put and generate their ideas directlyin writing form. their effort must be made to create some opportunities. such as specialmedia, special treatment from the teacherand so on.hyland (2003) cited in hyland & hyland(2006) affirmed that teacher writtenfeedbacks are substantial comments onpapers to provide a reader reaction tostudents’ efforts, to help them improve aswriters and to justify the grade they havebeen given. gulcat and ozagac (2006) alsorevealed “the most important aspect whilegiving feedback is adopting a positiveattitude to the students writing”. so, whenthe teacher only highlights the all ofmechanical errors, the students will be hardto correct the errors because they becomediscourage to revise their writing task.duppenthaler (2002) lists that there arethree types of written feedbacks: (1)meaning-focused feedback, in which heengaged in an ongoing and cumulative,interactive dialog, providing commentaryon the content, suggesting future topics, andasking for additional information and 58 mailto:inemartiana@yahoo.co.id indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427 clarification; (2) positive comments, inwhich he responded with phrases such as“well done,” “keep up the good work” and“keep writing,” and with occasional shortpositive comments on the content, but didnot engage in an ongoing interactive dialog,or ask for additional information andclarification; and (3). error-focused feedback,in which he corrected all errors, in red ink, inthe participants’ journal entries with norevision required on the part of theparticipants.in teaching and learning writing,feedback becomes a tool for measure ourquality and the accuracy. in efl learners,they still lack in understanding and cannotcomment their or the others work. it becauseefl learners still need a real guidance that isteachers’ responses on their writing task.although, responding to and commenting onstudent writing consumes the largestproportion of teachers’ time. specifically,however, we comment on student writingbecause we believe that it is necessary for usto offer assistance to student writers.williams (2003: 101) affirmed that thereare three major innovations in the processapproach in improving students writing: (a)asking students to write often, (b) providingfrequent feedback on work in progress, (c)requiring numerous revisions based on thatfeedback. those three factors involved instudent-centered instruction. so, that whythe researcher interested in providingwritten feedback on their writing progressand let them revise the feedback individually.while, wilson (2009: 96) argued that“giving feedback is a key to successfuldevelopment of potential, increasingmotivation and assessment. feedback is partof learning process, because it tells thelearners how they are doing”. it means thatfeedback has crucial effect in learningprocess. that is not only in their writingachievement but also in their attitude.this study seeks the effect of writtenfeedbacks on students’ writing recountcompetence and students’ attitude towardsteacher’s written feedbacks. in getting thedata in score form the researcher conductstwo times of treatments to the experimental group. besides that, to know the students’attitude towards the teacher writtenfeedbacks the researcher gives aquestionnaire and interview. methodthis study employed a mixed-methodresearch. quantitative and qualitativeresearches are employed to get the dataneeded. the experimental research designwith pretest-treatment and posttest used toget the data. four meetings held for pretest-two times of treatments-posttest which doneduring two weeks. the treatments areteacher’s written feedbacks on their writingrecount competence.the participants of this study were 40students of class x iis 1 and x iis 3 in one ofsenior high school in darma. the aims of thetest are to evaluate the students’ backgroundknowledge and the treatments’ effectstoward students’ improvement in theirwriting recount competence. meanwhile, ingetting students’ attitudes the researchergiven questionnaire and open-endedinterview after tests were done. thequestionnaire given in indonesian, it consistsof ten questions adopted from chen & hamp-lyons (1999: 216) and lee (2008: 163). thefive open-ended questions also given to someof sample. the question delivered inindonesian. there is no different learningprocess between experimental and controlclass. the difference is the treatment only.experimental class received teacher’s writtenfeedbacks on their writing tasks. theresearcher corrected their errors on each text.the results of each test were calculated to seetheir improvements. findings and discussionall scores were computed to analyze thedata. a technique such independent t-test isused to compare the output of the two tests(pretest and posttest). in order to answer thefirst research question, independent samplet-test regarding the experimental and thecontrol class was calculated first. as table 1displays, both experimental and control classhad almost the same significance on the 59 marwito wihadi & ine martiana the effect of teacher’s written feedbacks on indonesian efl learners’ recount writing competence pretest and there was no significantdifference between the two groups.as the findings in table 2 show, therewas a highly significant difference betweenthe experimental and control class in theposttest-pretest total gain scores (ttable =4.838, sig > 0.005). the result shows anincrease from the pretest to the posttest and improvement in learning occurred moresignificantly in the experimental class andcontrol class. thus, the experimental classperformed significantly better the controlclass by showing significantly higher gainscore from the pretest and posttest. table 1. independent sample t-test related to both groups’ performances on the pretest table 2. independent sample t-test related to both groups’ performances on posttestlevene's testfor equality ofvariances t-test for equality of means sig. (2-tailed) meandifference f sig. t df sig(2-tailed) meandifference std. errordifference 95% confidenceinterval of thedifferencelower upperpost1 post2 equalvariancesassumed 4.525 .040 4.838 37 .000 16.068 3.321 9.339 22.798equalvariancesnotassumed 4.891 32.607 .000 16.068 3.285 9.382 22.755one outstanding factor which made bothclasses different was teacher’s writtenfeedbacks. the control class less, even neverreceived written feedbacks on their writingprocess in this study, compared with thewritten feedbacks or experimental class. thisis a welcome development by many as itshows the direction in which writtenfeedback becomes guidance for their writingprocess as a beginner.the main purposes of this research is toknow the effect of giving feedback instudents’ recount writing competence. thedata of students’ recount writing successfullycollected through test. after the writeranalyzed the data, the writer found that thisresearch or ttest > ttable the result is 4.838 > -2.336. it means that there is different significance between pretest and posttestscore in experimental class. so, writtenfeedbacks have positive effect in improvingstudents’ recount writing competence.the students’ attitudes toward theteacher’s written feedbacks were collectedfrom two major ways. those arequestionnaire and interview. the two waysconducted to get the real and validinformation toward the teacher’s writtenfeedbacks on their writing task.with regard to the second question, itcan be stated that experimental classexpressed satisfaction about the positiveeffect of the teacher’s written feedbacks.they stated that the treatment is very usefulfor their writing process and theirunderstanding about how to compose a good levene'stest forequality ofvariances t-test for equality of means f sig. t df sig.(2-tailed) meandifference std.errordifference 95% confidenceinterval of thedifferencelower upper 60 indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427 recount text. they also revealed thatteacher’s written feedbacks becomes aspecial contact with the teacher were allreally beneficial and motivating to them tocorrect their mistakes.written feedbacks prevent the studentsfrom being discouraged and the studentsbecome more enthusiastic in learningrecount writing. the responses of studentshave a good response towards teacher’swritten feedback for students’ recountwriting competence. it is shown from theresult questionnaire’s answer from students.although, it is only half of them understandwhat the entire comment. but more than halfof them can correct the errors. it can be seenin their result of post test that experimentalclass got higher means score than controlclass. the result of interview indicates thatteacher written feedbacks had good effect intheir writing recount competence. all of themagree they could enhance their errors writingafter received written feedbacks. they do notneed much time to correct their mistakes.they assert it is very useful for them as abeginner writer. all of them agree if theirenglish teachers also apply this method inthe future.based on the interviewing, theresearcher gets viewpoints towards thestudents’ attitudes on the written feedbacks.generally, students understand towardsteacher’s written feedback but still confusedto understand red marks, or circle marks.although the students do not understand thewhole written comment, they asserted thatthe written feedbacks are very useful fortheir comprehending in their process ofwriting. they are more easy to understandthe meaning-focused feedbacks suchsuggestion than error-focused feedbackssuch red ink. because writing learning needsmuch time and more attention so threestudents of five get easy to feel bored. but allof them realize that teacher’s writtenfeedbacks are very useful for theirimprovement in writing learning process.eventually, they agree if their english teacherespecially can apply this method in the futurewith creatively teaching learning. eventually, there are many positiveeffects of written feedbacks for their writingcompetence in efl learners. analysis of thedata has indicated that there is a positiverelationship between the usage of writtenfeedbacks and improvement of writingcompetence achievement. conclusionbased on the objectives of research, theresearcher undertook the present study todetermine the effect of teacher’s writtenfeedbacks for efl learners in improvingrecount writing competence. this was doneby comparing the improvement gained by theexperimental class. both classes were givenwriting tasks at the low level of intermediatelevel.the analysis revealed that theimprovement obtained by two groups were,to a certain degree, different. the number ofstudents’ errors in certain aspects wasdecreased as students worked with writtenfeedbacks. most students declared thatwritten feedbacks have many beneficialeffects in their writing process. although, thepositive effects of written feedbacks on theirwriting tasks are concerned, it is necessary toconduct further research involving othersubjects within the context of efl learning. itis nevertheless to be expected that thesefindings will be beneficial to efl learners.finding of the study showed that the useof giving feedbacks enhancing students’achievement in writing. there are manyreason why giving written feedbacks isadvantageous for students and teacher ineducation. first, by giving written feedbacksstudents realize their mistakes and theirmisunderstanding and finally they candecrease their mistakes. secondly, throughwritten feedbacks, teacher easily to interactwith each student individually with eachneeded. so, teacher’s written feedbacks cantake place between a teacher and student(group of students) over writing tasks is notlimited to the confines of a classroom.finally, giving written feedbacks alsogive individual attention to the students.teacher gives revision and suggestion incertain assignment due to the particular 61 marwito wihadi & ine martiana the effect of teacher’s written feedbacks on indonesian efl learners’ recount writing competence procedure, teacher also free in revise theirmistakes in each students without disturbingthe other students’ focus. referencesbrown, h. d. (2000). teaching by principle. an interactive approach to language pedagogy: second edition. san francisco: longmanduppenthaler, p. m. (2002). feedback and japanesehigh school english language. jalt journal, 24(2).eagly, a.h & chaiken, s. (1993). the psychology of attitudes: fort worth. texas: harcourt bracejovanovich.ferris, d. (1999). the case for grammar correction in l2writing classes: a response to truscott (1996). journal of second language writing, 8(1), 1–10.fraenkel, j. r & wallen, n. e. (2009). how to design and evaluate research in education. new york: mcgraw-hill companies, inc.giorgi, a. (1975). an application of phenomenologicalmethod in psychology. in a. giorgi, c.t fischer, & f.murray (eds.), duquesne studies in phenomenological psychology, ii (pp. 82-103).pittsburgh, pa: duquesne university press.gulcat, z & ozagac, o. (2006). correcting and givingfeedback to writing. bogazici: university sflhamp-lyons, l & chen, j. (1999). an investigation into the effectiveness of teacher feedback on student writing. english language teaching and learning. thehong kong polytechnic universityharmer, j. (2001). the practice of english language teaching. cambridge: longmanhattie, j. & helen, t. (2007). the power of feedback. review of educational research, 77(1), 81-112.doi:31021003465430298487hornby, a. s. (1995). oxford advance learner’sdictionary of current english: fifth edition. oxford:oxford university press.hyland, k & hyland, f. (2006). feedback on secondlanguage students' writing. language teaching, 39(2), 83-101.hyland, k. (2003). second language writing. new york:cambridge university pressjayathilake, c. (2013). correcting errors: the relativeefficacy of different forms of error feedback in second language writing. english review: journal of english education, (1)2, 136-152.koentjaraningrat. (1990). metode-metode penelitian masyarakat. jakarta: pustaka jayakvale, s. (1996). interviews: an introduction to qualitative research interviewing. california: sagepublication.lee, i. (2007). student reactions to teacher feedback intwo hong kong secondary classrooms. journal of second language writing, 17, 144-164.doi:10.1016/j.jslw.2007.12.001marczyk, g. r., dematteo, d. & festinger, d. (2005). essential of research design and methodology.canada: john wiley and sons, inc.munawaroh, m. ( 2014). analisis literasi kuantitatif siswa sma dalam konsep pertumbuhan dan perkembangan tumbuhan. bandung: upi. retrievedfrom http//repository.upi.edu |perpustakaan.upi.eduoskamp, s & schultz, p.w. (2005). attitudes and opinions: third edition. london: lawrence erlbaumassociates, inc.priyatno, d. (2009). 5 jam belajar olah data dengan spss 17. yogyakarta: c.v andi.rassaei, e & moinzadeh. (2011). investigating theeffects of three types of corrective feedback on theacquisition of english wh-question forms by iranianefl learners. english language teaching 4(2).srichanyachon, n. (2012). teacher written feedback forl2 learners’ writing development. silpakorn university journal of social sciences, humanities, and arts, 12(1), 7-17.sugiyono. (2012). metode penelitian pendidikan: pendekatan kuantitatif, kualitatif dan r & d.bandung: alfabeta.truscott, j. (1996). the case against grammarcorrection in l2 writing classes. language learning, 46(2), 327369.wahidi, r. (2008). genre of texts. retrieved fromhttp://rachmatwahidi.wordpress.com.williams, j.d. (2003). preparing to teach writing: research, theory, and practice. united state ofamerica: lawrence erlbaum associates, inc.wilson, l. (2009). practical teaching: a guide to ptlls & dtlls. canada: cengage learning emea. 62 http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_2/180-4592594-7728369?_encoding=utf8&field-author=david%20dematteo&search-alias=digital-text&sort=relevancerank http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr_dp_sr_3/180-4592594-7728369?_encoding=utf8&field-author=david%20festinger&search-alias=digital-text&sort=relevancerank english – indonesian translation methods in the short story “a blunder” by anton chekhov aditya nugraha department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia e-mail: aditya.huft@gmail.com muhammad aprianto budie nugroho department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia e-mail: muh.apriantobn@gmail.com yudi rahman department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia email: yuman_nsh@yahoo.com apa citation: nugraha, a., nugroho, m. a. b., & rahman, y. (2017). english – indonesian translation methods in the short story a blunder by anton chekhov. indonesian efl journal, 3(1), 79-86 received: 04-11-2016 accepted: 28-12-2016 published: 01-01-2017 abstract: this study contains analysis of translation method in the short story “a blunder” by anton chekhov which is translated into indonesian by students as the participants of this research. in translation analysis processes, the researcher used theory of translation method based on newmark theory. while to find out the equivalence in the translation, the researcher used baker theory. the researcher thought that there are a lot of variations methods appear in the results of translation, so he wants to know the kinds of equivalence translation used by the participants to make the target language (tl) more comprehensible. qualitative descriptive method that includes observation and document analysis was used in this research. here, the result of document analysis were consulted to the translation and literature expertise to check the result of the analysis. as the conclusion, the researcher finds 6 methods used by the participants to render the short story “a blunder” into the target language (tl). besides, the researcher finds two kinds of translation equivalence in the translations. keywords: translation, translation method, translation equivalence, short story introduction translating is an activity when someone (translator) transfers a language in a text form or source language (sl) to another language or target language (tl) accurately. accuracy is needed in the process of translating in order to make the good result of the translation. catford (1965, p. 20) states that translation means replacing a textual material in one language (sl) by equivalent textual material in other language (tl). basically, there are many definitions of translation. translation is generally defined as the process of translate text or something from one language to other language. newmark (1988, p. 5) states that “translation is rendering the meaning of a text into another language in the way that the author intended the text.” catford (1965, p. 20) explains that “translation is the replacement of a textual material in one language (source language) by equivalent textual material in another language (target language).” roger t. bell (1991, p. 6) states that “translation is the indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 79 replacement of a representation of a text in one language by a representation of an equivalent text in a second language.” so, translation is a general term that refers to the removal of reflections and ideas from one source language (sl) to the target language (tl). in translating, a translator should carefully keep attention for every word that is translated because it will influence the equivalence meaning between sl and tl on its translation. to translate a text from source language into target language, the translator should consider the process of translating. nida as cited in hatim and munday (2004, p. 45) argues that the translator should: 1. analysis the sl message into simplest and structurally clearest forms; 2. transfer the message; 3. restructures the message in the tl to the level which is most appropriate for the audience addressed. further, a good translator should be able to translate a lot of text types through the correct methods. newmark (1988, p. 45) explores that “there are eight types of translation method: word-for-word literal, faithful, semantic, adaptation, free, idiomatic, and communicative.” here is the diagram of eight types of translation method: sl emphasis tl emphasis word-for-word translation adaption translation literal translation free translation faithful translation idiomatic translation semantic translation communicative translation word for word translation newmark (1988, p. 46) says that “the main use of word-for-word translation is either to understand the mechanics of the source language or construe a difficult text as a pre translation process.” example: (sl) i can run. (tl) saya bisa lari. literal translation newmark (1988, p. 46) states that “in literal translation, the sl grammatical constructions are converted to their nearest tl equivalents but the lexical words are again translated singly, out of context. it means that when the translator translates, the words are translated literally from sl into tl.” example: (sl) jangan bawa hatiku. (tl) don’t bring my heart. faithful translation newmark (1988, p. 46) says that “a faithful translation attempts to reproduce the precise contextual meaning of the original within the constraints of the tl grammatical structures. it means that in faithful translation, the translator translates the meaning from sl to convey the researcher's intention.” example: (sl) raden ajeng kartini adalah orang jawa. (tl) raden ajeng kartini is a javanesse. semantic translation newmark (1988, p. 46) states that “semantic translation may translate less important cultural words by culturally neutral third or functional terms but not by cultural equivalents and it may make other small concessions to the readership.” example: (sl) dia adalah orang yang gemar belanja. (tl) she is a shopaholic. adaptation translation newmark (1988, p. 46) says that “this is the freest form translation. it is used to translate literary works (comedies, poetry, short story, narrative, etc.) and the sl culture is converted to the tl culture and the text rewritten.” aditya nugraha, m. aprianto budie nugroho, & yudi rahman english – indonesian translation methods in the short story “a blunder” by anton chekhov 80 example: (sl) the rising sun is found not to be rising sun. it is the world which goes around. (tl) matahari terbit ternyata bukan matahari terbit. dunialah yang sebenarnya mengorbit. free translation newmark (1988, p. 46) states that “free translation is part of in tl emphasis which reproduces the matter without the manner, or the content without the form of the original.” example: (sl) sambil menyelam minum air. (tl) killing two birds with one stones. idiomatic translation idiomatic translation reproduces the 'message' of the original but tends to distort nuances of meaning by preferring colloquialisms and idioms where these do not exist in the original. example: (sl) ini sangat mudah. (tl) it’s a piece of cake. communicative translation communicative translation tries to render the exact contextual meaning of the original in such a way that both content and language are readily acceptable and comprehensible to the readership. example: (sl) awas ada anjing! (tl) beware of dog! literary works is a kind of texts which is usually translated by many translators. short story is a type of literary works. klarer (1998) states that short story, a concise form of prose fiction, has received less attention from literary scholar than a novel. as with the novel, the roots of short story lie in antiquity and the middle ages. story, myth, and fairy tale relate to the oldest types of textual manifestation, “text” which were primarily orally transmitted. short story is a literary work which is shorter than a novel and it is a part of fiction in literature. relating to the literary work above, adaptation is the most suitable method to be used to translate the short story. as newmark (1988) said that adaptation method is the 'freest' form of translation. it is used mainly for plays (comedies and poetry where the themes, characters, plots are usually preserved), the sl culture converted to the tl culture and the text is rewritten. the deplorable practice of having a play or poem literally translated and then rewritten by an established dramatist or poet has produced many poor adaptations, but other adaptations have ‘rescued’ period plays. translating literary work is more difficult than translating other types of text since literary works have specific values called the aesthetic and expressive values. so, the translator should have a special quality, especially in transferring message from sl to tl which is make a translation is acceptable or easy to be understood by the reader. the researcher believes that there are some problems, like cultural gap between sl and tl, strange word or vocabulary, missed the real message, etc., which will be found in translating literary works. thus, the researcher is challenged to translate literary works especially short story since translating the literary works is not an easy work. here, the researcher chooses the short story from anton chekhov entitled “a blunder” and expects to find out methods of translation used by the translators and also to analyze the translations equivalence. equivalence in translation becomes the first attention especially for the readers when they read a text which has been translated and compared with a real text (sl). the readers are usually questioning whether or not the sl and tl is equivalent. according to bell (1991, p. 6), “texts in different languages can be equivalence in different degrees (full or partly equivalent), in respects of different levels of presentation (equivalent in respect of context, of semantic, of grammar, of lexis, etc.), and different ranks (word-for-word, phrase-for phrase, sentence-for-sentence). baker (1992) distinguishes three kinds of indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 81 equivalence in translation, namely grammatical equivalence, textual equivalence, and pragmatic equivalence. grammatical equivalence refers to the diversity of grammatical categories across languages. she notes that grammatical rules may vary across languages and this may pose some problems in terms of finding a direct correspondence in the tl. in fact, she claims that different grammatical structures in the sl and tl may cause remarkable changes in the way the information or message is carried across. these changes may induce the translator either to add or to omit information in the tt because of the lack of particular grammatical devices in the tl itself. amongst these grammatical devices which might cause problems in translation, baker focuses on number, tense and aspects, voice, person and gender. textual equivalence refers to the equivalence between a sl text and a tl text in terms of information and cohesion. texture is a very important feature in translation since it provides useful guidelines for the comprehension and analysis of the st which can help the translator in his or her attempt to produce a cohesive and coherent text for the tc audience in a specific context. it is up to the translator to decide whether or not to maintain the cohesive ties as well as the coherence of the sl text. his or her decision will be guided by three main factors, that is, the target audience, the purpose of the translation and the text type. pragmatic equivalence refers to implicatures and strategies of avoidance during the translation process. implicature is not about what is explicitly said but what is implied. therefore, the translator needs to work out with implied meanings in translation in order to get the st message across. the role of the translator is to recreate the author's intention in another culture in such a way that enables the tc reader to understand it clearly. triggered by the background above, this research tried to analyze the kinds of translation methods used by the sixth students as the translators in translating a short story entitled “a blunder” by anton chekhov. besides, this research also tried to analyze the kinds of equivalence translation based on baker’s theory which can be found in the results of the translation. the sixth semester students of english education department at university of kuningan was chosen as subjects of the research and they were then called as translators in this research. method the method used in this research is qualitative descriptive. this method is applied in order to know the kinds of methods used by the students in translating the short story and to know the translation equivalence between source language and target language existed at translation of short story “a blunder” by anton chekhov. the research is conducted in university of kuningan, where the participants were the sixth semester students of english education department. the researcher took five volunteers whose backgrounds were considered will support this research such as their experiences in several subject like introduction to literature, principle of translating, translating english – indonesia, and translating indonesian – english. the data in this research was collected through observation and document analysis. in this research, the researcher conducted observations in detail and depth towards the subjects of the research. meanwhile, the document is the result of students’ translation. then, the data was analyzed based on newmark’s and baker’s theories. there are eight methods of translation based onnewmark; word-for-word, literal, faithful, semantic, adaptation, free, idiomatic, and communicative. while, there are three types of equivalence translation by baker that includes grammatical, textual, and pragmatic equivalence. aditya nugraha, m. aprianto budie nugroho, & yudi rahman english – indonesian translation methods in the short story “a blunder” by anton chekhov 82 results and discussion the first research’s problem concerns with the kinds of method found in translations of “a blunder” short story. translation method is the way of a translator in translating or when she or he translates a text from source language (sl) into target language (tl) to achieve equivalence in translation. newmark (1988) stated that there are eight methods of translation, namely word for word translation, literal translation, faithful translation, semantic translation, adaptation translation, free translation, idiomatic translation, and communicative translation. as result, the researcher found 6 methods of translation which is taken from 5 participants in which they used more than one method to translate the short story. the findings of the research can be seen in the following table. table 1. findings of translation methods n o method participant 1 participant 2 participant 3 participant 4 participant 5 tota l 1 word for word 10 15 11 8 8 53 2 literal 28 17 15 15 12 87 3 faithful 7 9 12 5 33 4 semantic 5 adaptation 8 4 4 10 20 46 6 free 2 3 3 7 15 7 idiomatic 8 communicative 12 17 20 20 25 94 the table showed the six methods used by the participants. from the table, it can be seen that the most dominant method used by the five participants was communicative method (94 times) where participant 5 is the one who frequently used this method (25 times). the second dominant method was literal method with total 87 times, based on the table above, the participant 1 is the one who frequently used literal method. while, the lowest number of translation method used by the participants was free translation with 15 times in which participant 4 is the one who frequently used this method. whereas, word for word method was used 53 times by the participants, adaptation method 46 times, and 36 times for faithful method. here, the researcher would like to present the sample of data about kinds of translation method used by the the participant of this research based on newmark (1988) theory. word-for-word translation newmark (1988, p. 45) states that “the source language word order is preserved and the words translated by their most common meanings.” so, in translating text with wordfor-word translation, the translator uses common word. newmark (1988, p. 46) adds that “the main use of word-for-word translation is either to understand the mechanics of the source language or construe a difficult text as a pre translation process.” the example of word-for-word translation was taken from participant 2: sl: you'll be crazy when you read it. tl: kamu akan menjadi gila ketika kamu baca itu. literal translation newmark (1988, p. 46) notes that “in literal translation, the sl grammatical constructions are converted to their nearest tl equivalents but the lexical words are again translated singly, out of context.” it means that when the translator translates, the words are translated literally from sl into tl. beside word for word, the participants of this research also using literal translation to render some sentences in source language (sl) into target language (tl). the example of literal translation was taken from participant 1: indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 83 sl: “i never wrote you any letters!” tl: “aku tidak pernah menulis surat apapun untukmu!” faithful translation newmark (1988, p. 46) declares that “a faithful translation attempts to reproduce the precise contextual meaning of the original within the constraints of the tl grammatical structures.” it means that in faithful translation, the translator translates the meaning from sl to convey the researcher's intention. the example of faithful translation was taken from participant 2: sl: shchupkin's mouth fell open with amazement and alarm. tl: mulut shchumpkin seperti terbuka dengan kekaguman dan alarm. adaptation translation adaptation translation method is the suitable method to translate literary works. the translator could adapt the source language (sl) freely into the target language (tl), as newmark (1988, p. 46) says that “this is the freest form translation. it is used to translate literary works (comedies, poetry, short story, narrative, etc.) and the sl culture is converted to the tl culture and the text is rewritten.” the example of adaptation translation was taken from participant 1: sl: you'll be crazy when you read it. tl: kau akan terperangah ketika membacanya. free translation newmark (1988, p. 46) explains that “free translation is part of tl emphasis which reproduces the matter without the manner, or the content without the form of the original.” the example of free translation was taken from participant 1: sl: that's nothing much! tl: tak masalah! communicative translation communicative translation tries to render the exact contextual meaning of the original in such a way that both content and language are readily acceptable and comprehensible to the readership. the example of communicative translation was taken from participant 5: sl: "he's rising!" tl: “dia bangun!” equivalence of translation equivalence in translation becomes the first attention especially for the readers when they read a text which has been translated and compared with a real text or source language (sl). the readers are usually questioning whether or not the sl (source language) and tl (target language) is equivalent. in this research, the researcher has 5 students as participants to be the translators. based on the second research problem regarding the equivalence of translation, the researcher would like to present the samples of data about the kinds of translation equivalence based on baker (1992) theory which is found in the translations. baker (1992) distinguishes 3 equivalences in translation, namely grammatical equivalence, textual equivalence, and pragmatic equivalence. the researcher found 2 translation equivalences from the five participants. each participant successfully achieved two kinds of equivalence to make the target language easier to be understood by the reader. table 2. findings equivalence of translation no equivalenc e participant 1 participant 2 participant 3 participant 4 participant 5 total 1 textual 13 6 9 6 24 58 2 grammatical 7 6 6 4 6 29 3 pragmatic aditya nugraha, m. aprianto budie nugroho, & yudi rahman english – indonesian translation methods in the short story “a blunder” by anton chekhov 84 based on the data above, the participants successfully achieved textual equivalence and grammatical equivalence. textual equivalence found 58 times in the participants’ translations, in which participant 5 achieved textual equivalence 24 times in this research, whereas the participant 1 achieved it 13 times. while, participant 3 successfully made 9 textual equivalences, participant 2 and participant 4 made 6 textual equivalences. besides, the total of grammatical equivalence found in the data were 29. the researcher found 7 grammatical equivalences in the translations of participant 1, whereas participant 2, 3, and 5 achieved 6 grammatical equivalences. but, the researcher only found 4 grammatical equivalences in participant 4’ translation. textual equivalence textual equivalence refers to the equivalence between sl text and tl text in terms of information and cohesion. texture is a very important feature in translation since it provides useful guidelines for the comprehension and analysis of the st which can help the translator in his or her attempt to produce a cohesive and coherent text for the tc audience in a specific context. it is up to the translator to decide whether or not to maintain the cohesive ties as well as the coherence of the sl text. his or her decision will be guided by three main factors including the target audience, the purpose of the translation, and the text type. sl: we'll catch him. . . . tl: kita pergoki dia... the example of a translation above is taken from participant 1. the translator translated “we’ll catch him…” to “kita pergoki dia..” based on english – indonesia dictionary, word “catch” has meaning as “tangkap” in indonesian, but the translator translated it into “pergoki.” the situation of the short story makes the translator figure out other words beside “tangkap” to make the target language more acceptable. the translator tried to achieve textual equivalence and it made the readers more easily understand about the plot of the short story. grammatical equivalence grammatical equivalence refers to the diversity of grammatical categories across languages. baker (1992) notes that grammatical rules may vary across languages and this may pose some problems in terms of finding a direct correspondence in the tl. in fact, she claims that different grammatical structures in the sl and tl may cause remarkable changes in the way the information or message is carried across. these changes may induce the translator either to add or to omit information in the tt because of the lack of particular grammatical devices in the tl itself. amongst these grammatical devices which might cause problems in translation, baker focuses on number, tense and aspects, voice, person and gender. sl: what had happened? tl: apa yang telah terjadi? the example of grammatical equivalence above is taken from participant 2. the translator changed the source language (sl) into target language (tl) grammatically but it still easy to be understood, not out of context, and acceptable to the reader. conclusion the two research problems proposed in this research have been answered. the first is about translation method used in translating “a blunder” short story. here, the researcher used newmark theory as a basic theory to analyze translation method used by the participants in translating “a blunder” short story. as results, there are six methods used by them including word for word, literal, faithful, adaptation, free, and communicative methods. there are 94 items are translated by using communicative method, 87 items are translated by literal translation method, 53 items are translated by word for word method, 46 are translated by adaptation method, 33 are translated by indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 85 faithful method, and 15 are translated by free method. here, the participants used more than one method to translate the short story to achieved equivalence in translations. based on the data, communicative method is the most dominant method used by the participants. it happens because the participants tried to achieve a correct, equivalence translation between source language (sl) and target language (tl), and a comprehensible translation. the second research problem is about the translation equivalence found in students’ translations in translating “a blunder” short story. the researcher found textual and grammatical equivalence in students’ translations. the total of textual equivalence achieved by the participants is 58 items, and 29 items for grammatical equivalence. the students as the participants and as the translators successfully makes some parts or paragraphs achieved its equivalence between source language (sl) and target language (tl), so it makes easy to be understood by the readers. references baker, m. (1992). in other words: a coursebook on translation. london: routledge. bell, r. t. (1991). translation and translating: theory and practice. london: longman. catford, j. c. (1965). a linguistic theory of translation. london: oxford university press. hatim, b., & munday, j. (2004). translation an advanced resource book. new york: routledge. klarer, m. (1999). an introduction to literature studies (2nd edition). london: routledge. newmark, p. (1988). a textbook of translation. london: prentice hall. nida, e. a. (1969). toward a science of translation. leiden: e.j.brill. http://www.facebook.com/komunitas.siraru/posts/31 1410719036566 http://www.online-literature.com/anton_chekhov/ 1144/ aditya nugraha, m. aprianto budie nugroho, & yudi rahman english – indonesian translation methods in the short story “a blunder” by anton chekhov 86 meaning on translation of indonesian-english ads text purwani indri astuti department of english education, university of veteran bangun nusantara, indonesia email: indripuspo@gmail.com apa citation: astuti, p. i. (2017). meaning on translation of indonesian-english ads text. indonesian efl journal, 3(1), 93-100 received: 01-11-2016 accepted: 24-12-2016 published: 01-01-2017 abstract: this research was actually about the meaning of translation in indonesian-english ads text, the booklet of pud in sukoharjo regency. translating ads text is not simple because ads text has certain structure to be fulfilled. then, to translate some cultural terms in ads text, it needs some considerations to keep the quality of the translation itself. one of the consideration s is about the concept of readibility that consists of length of sentence average, new words, and grammatical complexity. the research belonged to qualitative research and the data were all the phrases and the sentences in the booklet of pud sukoharjo regency. the methods of data collecting were questionaire, in-depth interview, and content analysis with the instrumens of questions, interview guides, and data card. the data were then analyzed by using miles and huberman interactive model while the data validity was data triangulation. the result of the research showed that the readibility of indonesian-english ads text was rather low for the score of the readibilty rating instrument was 2.2 from the total score of 3. keywords: translation, ads text, readibility introduction in a world of business, it is needed a marketing strategy to promote the products. one of the strategies usually used by the producers is advertisement (ads). by using ads, producers can introduce some new products to consumers. it can also remind the consumers that the products are still better than others. even that ads can keep the brands in ones’ mind by showing the superiorities of the products (wiratno in sumarlam, 2005, p, 180). in some mass media, ads is effectively considered to be able to attract ones’ attention because ads could be the attention-getting device. that is why, ads must represent the image of the product. a good ads is an ads that all messages can be transfered well to consumers. it has some important elements to support it, such as pictures and colors, languages, lay out (for printed media) and harmonization among the actors, story board and languages (for electronic media). for some products that will be promoted in foreign countries, languages become the key aspect that determine the success of ads. in this case, ads could become a good mediator for the ones having different languages and different cultures. sukoharjo is one of regencies in central java that has some superior local products to promote, such as traditional music instruments, traditional furniture, shuttlecocks, clothes, traditional foods and beverages, etc. such these products are very famous around sukoharjo and become the speciality there. even some of them are potentially to export, and few of them have been exported to some abroad. the producers (and most of them), are traditional ones that usually do not care about their markets or how to promote their products. they just produce and usually there are some brokers who can sell the products. in a short, the producers still use traditional marketing. sukoharjo government that catches this opportunity to increase the local economic growth, tried to support in marketing sector. the government, through its certain institution helped the producers to promote their products to some other foreign countries by making some ads (printed and electronic media). jefkins (1994, p, 45-46) said that commercial ads which was indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 93 advertised by local government could be classified into commerce ads, and was famous for informative-commercial ads. in this ads, sukoharjo government promoted the superior products to international consumers. this research only focused on printed media, especially booklet to promote some superior local products outside the country that released by sukoharjo regency. the booklet used bilingual texts, they were indonesian and english. so, it is needed translation area to transfer the messages from producers to consumers. translating an ads is not easy because ads actually has its own style of language. the structure of the language is also different to the common ones. it has the specific characteristics. they are short, fluent, simple, neutral, straight to the point and interesting. language plays an important role in making good ads. it can be started from the title, the selection of words for the title (something that is promising some benefits or words resulting miracles for the consumers) (ogilvy, translated by pertiwi, p. 75). more than that, if the ads involved the culture, the translator should think twice before he translates it. some cases, there are some words don’t have equal meanings in taret language (tl) because of the cultural terms, but the translator should be smart in deciding the the translation. the translation of ads should be effective, having aesthetic sense, and must be easy to understand for the readers. if the translator can’t translate the uniqueness of the cultural terms, it will effect the sustainability of the products. in other word, the quality of translation must be paid attention to. there are some aspects to determine the quality of translation. barnwell (1983) as citated by suryawinata (2003) said that the quality of translation depends on accuracy, clarity and naturalness. accuracy is about the understanding message of sl and transferring the meaning of the message correctly to tl. the main point of this aspect is about the loyalty of meaning in target language. loyalty in translation doesn’t refer to the form, but it refers to the meaning of sl to tl. next is clarity. clarity shows the easiness level of a text to understand the meaning. the involvement of readers to determine the level of clarity and readibility becomes the important thing in language factors. clarity has close relation to readibility. in other word, clarity means readibility. readibility here is, of course, involving both sl and tl. it tends to discuss about the concept of words from sl to tl. a good translator ability for the concept of words can help him in doing translation. theoritically, there are some factors determined the level of readibility. they are: 1) length of sentence average, 2) numbers of new words, 3) grammatical complexity of the language (richards et.al (1985) in nababan, 2003, p. 63). by this definition, it can also be said that clarity is affected by the translator’s strategy. the translator’s decision in choosing the meaning of a word or the decision in using foreignization or naturalization can make the translation becomes clearer or not. the last is naturalness. naturalness is about the effectiveness of translation. naturalness means that the translation is interesting to read and enjoyable for the readers. in other word, the result of translation is very smooth so the reader doesn’t realize that the text is a result of translation. talking about effectiveness, nababan (2003, p, 87) said that the effectiveness of translation is determined by 3 dimensions. they are : linguistics and cultural knowledge, purpose, intuition. a translator must have linguistics knowledge because in doing his job, he must be able to transfer meaning from sl to tl. besides that, he must also know the cultural knowledge of sl and tl. so, to get good meaning, a translator must understand the difference structure of sl and tl and also understand the culture context of sl and tl. as the main actor in translation process, a translator must make some decisions about his purpose that he would like to get. his decisions is very important to determine whether the result of translation is still loyal to sl, the style of language is suitable to sl, the level of readibility suits to the ability of readers and the use of purwani indri astuti meaning on translation of indonesian-english ads text 94 translation strategy without making the ambiguity of meaning. in the process of translation, it involves translator’s intuition (nababan, 2003, p. 92). intuition has a function to determine the beauty of translation works, although one’s can be different to others. based on the phenomenon and the theories mentioned above, the researcher determined the problem statement of the research was follow: how is the meaning on translation of indonesian-english ads text based on readibility concept in translation? method this research belonged to descriptive qualitative research. it meaned the researcher tried to describe and identify in detail about the translation of indonesian english ads text in details. in this case, the researcher found out the equal meaning of indonesian-english ads text. the equal meaning here was seen from the understanding of the readers and measured by using readibility rating instrument level. some numbers that appeared in this research symbolized the meaning of readibility level and were not operated into statistics formulas. the data of the research were all phrases and sentences in indonesian-english ads text of booklet, released by sukoharjo regency, in the year of 2012. the number of total data were 92 data. after reducing data, the researcher still got 69 data (23 phrases and 46 sentences). the method of collecting data were questionnaire, in-depth interview and content analysis. while the instruments of the research were question list, interview guide and data card.questionaire was given to some informants to know the equal meaning of some indonesian-english phrases and sentences that became the data. in-depth interview was held to some foreign informants to know their comments related to the meaning of translations for some phrases and sentences that potentially having the problem for meaning. next, content analysis is technique of data collecting used by document notes. in this research, content analysis was used to collect the data (phrases and sentences) found on ads text of the booklet. then all collected data were given the code number based on the classification. example of data code was like this: 1/wcn.tc/fr/1b means 1 = number of data wcn = wacana tc = tujuan & cara pemaparan fr = frasa 1b = halaman 1 butir b the data sources were the indonesian-english ads texts of booklet released by sukoharjo regency and the informants. the informants were taken by purposive sampling with the criteria of indonesian experts (indonesian lecturers) and some foreign readers to know whether the english ads text could be understood or not. the validity of the research was data triangulation. here, the researcher got the data from some informants and foreign readers by using questionnaire and interview methods. for the data analysis, the researcher used interactive models of miles and huberman. this model consists of 3 stages, they are reduction, display data and verifying or conclusion (sutopo, 2002, p. 93). indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 95 figure 1. the interactive model of miles & huberman the steps of this model were 1) data collecting, 2) data reduction, 3) data display and 4) conclusion. in this research, the researcher got enough data, so it was not necessary for the researcher to get back to data collection again before conclude the result, finally. results and discussion in analyzing the data, the researcher got 92 data but then the researcher reduced 23 of same data . so, the total data were 69 data that classified into 23 phrases and 46 sentences. the researcher revealed about meaning on translation of indonesian-english ads text based on readibility concept. in the concept of readibility, it refers to clarity that consists of 3 elements. they are a) length of sentence average, b) numbers of new words, and c) grammatical complexity of the language. the first point (length of sentence average) refers to the average numbers of sentences in a text. the second poin (new words) can possibly happen in tl because of the different culture between sl and tl. while the third point (grammatical complexity) refers to complex sentences used by translator. based on the result of data analysis, the researcher got some variations of the length of sentence average. to know about the length of sentence average, the reseacher gave the questionairre to some informants. the result could be visualized in the table as follow: table 1. length of sentence average no length of sentence average no of data frequence criteria 1 21 words more than 29 words per sentence 24/wcn.tc/kal/2 25/wcn.tc/kal/2 28/wcn.tc/kal/4 31/wcn.tc/kal/5 37/wcn.tc/kal/6 40/wcn.tc/kal/7 41/wcn.tc/kal/7 44/wcn.tc/kal/8 45/wcn.tc/kal/7 47/wcn.tc/kal/9 52.b/wcn.tc/kal/11 59/wcn.tc/kal/13 70/wcn.tc/kal/16 88/wcn.tc/kal/21 14 difficult 2 15 words – 20 words per sentence 29/wcn.tc/kal/4 35/wcn.tc/kal/6 51/wcn.tc/kal/10 51.b/wcn.tc/kal/10 55/wcn.tc/kal/12 57/wcn.tc/kal/12 14 fair data collection data reduction data display conclusion/ verification purwani indri astuti meaning on translation of indonesian-english ads text 96 63/wcn.tc/kal/14 67/wcn.tc/kal/15 73.b/wcn.tc/kal/17 77/wcn.tc/kal/18 79/wcn.tc/kal/19 84/wcn.tc/kal/20 85/wcn.tc/kal/20 87/wcn.tc/kal/21 3 14 words – below 8 words per sentence 32/wcn.tc/kal/5 33/wcn.tc/kal/5 33.b/wcn.tc/kal/5 36/wcn.tc/kal/6 48/wcn.tc/kal/9 56/wcn.tc/kal/12 60/wcn.tc/kal/13 61/wcn.tc/kal/13 64/wcn.tc/kal/14 67/wcn.tc/kal/15 68/wcn.tc/kal/15 73/wcn.tc/kal/17 75/wcn.tc/kal/18 76/wcn.tc/kal/18 81/wcn.tc/kal/19 82/wcn.tc/kal/19 86/wcn.tc/kal/20 89/wcn.tc/kal/21 18 easy total number 46 100,00 from the table above, it could be seen that 39,13 % of the sentence average length were categorized into ‘easy’. it means that the length of a sentence was built by maximally 14 words. most of them were simple sentences either active or passive sentences. the examples are taken randomly: table 2. examples of sentence average length variation no coding sl tl 1 61/wcn.tc/kal/13 jumlah produksi mencapai 125.000.000 buah per tahunnya. the production can reach about 125.000.000 items in a year. 2 76/wcn.tc/kal/18 jumlah pengrajin terdapat 534 orang dan menyerap tenaga kerja 1.122 orang. there are 534 people, which absorb 1.122 workers. 3 86/wcn.tc/kal/20 hasil produksinya telah dipasarkan ke seluruh wilayah indonesia. the production has been sold to every region in indonesia. 4 55/wcn.tc/kal/12 industri gamelan ini ada di desa wirun dan desa laban kecamatan mojolaban the industry of gamelan tkes place at wirun village and laban village the mojolaban sub district. 5 28/wcn.tc/kal/4 kabupaten sukoharjo terkenal dengan sebutan kota tekstil, karena lebih dari 10 perusahaan besar dan menengah bergerak di bidang tekstil, diantaranya: sritex, batik keris, danliris, tyfountex, sukoharjotex, sandang anggun moratex, panca bintang, panrama vista garment, sumber sandang artogunan dan telah menampung sekitar 61.268 orang tenaga kerja dengan jumlah produksinya mencapai 545.270.000 meter per tahun nya. the regency of sukoharjo is well known as a toen of textille, because more than ten big and middle companies active in textille industry, for example sritex, batik keris, danliris, tyfountex, sukoharjotex, sandang anggun moratex, panca bintang, panrama vista garment, sumber sandang artogunan and held 61.268 workers. length of sentence average isn’t the one and only determination to see whether the sentence is readable or not. but there are other factors can also become causes of indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 97 readibility, for examples new words and grammar complexity. data number 61, 76 and 86 were categorized into easy level of readibility. data number 61 belongs to simple sentence and can be easy to understand. this is because length of the sentence is short enough (only having 10 words in a sentence) and no new words there. data number 76 is relatively easy to understand and shorter than previous sentence (having 8 words in a sentence), though it doesn’t belong to simple for having 2 predicates. while data number 86 is a passive sentence and has more words (10 words in a sentence) but it is still easy to understand. for data number 55, it belongs to fair level of readibility because there are much more words in a sentence (16 words) and there is a new word (gamelan) in tl. the last example, data number 28 is the longest sentence in the examples. it has more than 29 words in a sentence and categorized into difficult level of readibility. in fact, this sentence can be easy to understand for it is simple sentence and most of the words in that sentence are about name of companies. the category above are not always true for the fact that long sentences can also be easy to understand. this is because the sentence only consists of 1 subject and 1 predicate, no new words in tl and most of the words in the sentence are only mentioning the name of companies or the name of area, etc. the second point is about new words in tl. new words have relation to meaning, the most important thing in translation. talking about meaning, it can’t be separated by the culture covering the context of both languages (sl & tl). so, it must be very careful for the translators to transfer meaning having different culture between sl and tl. in some cases, it is impossible for the translators to find out the equal meaning for some terms. in this case, the translator usually try to convey the concept of the word. related to the culture itself, there are many things considered as culture, for examples: clothes, art, weapon, foods, tradition and so on. translating ads text is different to translating other texts because it has certain style of language. translator must think about the essence of the ads, by transferring the meaning in simple way with limited space but must be understandable and interesting for audience (mass). for the booklet of pud in sukoharjo regency, the result of the research showed that the construction of sl ads text was effective enough to translate. it could be explained furthur in the table below: in the booklet of pud in sukoharjo regency, it was found 69 data. the new words rose in phrases and were repeated insome sentences. from 23 data of phrases, 18 data (78,26 %) were about cultural terms (cloth, foods, drink, music instrument and furniture). based on the research result, 5 from 18 data (27,78 %) of cultural terms are still endured in the original terms (transliteration), 6 from 18 data (33,33%) of cultural terms belong to naturalization and 7 data (38,89 %) can be translated as well. for the detail data, they can be seen in the table below: table 3. data of new words related to cultural terms no number of data terms tl note 1 6/wcn.tc/fr/1.d industri tekstil textille industry ntrl 2 7/wcn.tc/fr/1.e mebel kayu the wooden furniture done 3 8/wcn.tc/fr/1.f mebel rotan rattan furniture ntrl 4 9/wcn.tc/fr/1.g industri kaca grafir dan ukir kaca an engraving & glass carving done 5 10/wcn.tc/fr/1.h kerajinan tatah sungging enameling inlaid craft done 6 11/wcn.tc/fr/1.i kerajinan gitar guitar craft ntrl 7 12/wcn.tc/fr/1.j kain batik batik trnslt 8 13/wcn.tc/fr/1.k alkohol alcohol ntrl 9 14/wcn.tc/fr/1.l kerajinan gamelan gamelan craft trnslt 10 15/wcn.tc/fr/1.m industri genteng a tight roof industry done 11 16/wcn.tc/fr/1.n kerajinan shuttlecock shuttlecocks trnslt 12 17/wcn.tc/fr/1.o kerajinan tenun sarung goyor sarong goyor spindle craft ntrl 13 18/wcn.tc/fr/1.p hortikultura horticulture ntrl purwani indri astuti meaning on translation of indonesian-english ads text 98 14 19/wcn.tc/fr/1.q industri jamur lingzhi lingzhi mushroom industry done 15 20/wcn.tc/fr/1.r emping mlinjo emping mlinjo trnslt 16 21/wcn.tc/fr/1.s industri jenang rasikan jenang rasikan industry trnslt 17 22/wcn.tc/fr/1.t jamu the healing herb done 18 23/wcn.tc/fr/1.u keripik belut the eel chips done from the data above, it could be explained that 26,08 % of total data were about cultural terms. some of them could be translated well because of the equal meaning, but some of them couldn’t be translated for the different cultures between sl and tl. the ones didn’t have equal meaning were about traditional music instrument (gamelan), clothes (batik) and traditional foods (emping mlinjo and jenang rasikan). based on the result of questionaire, the translation of jenang rasikan and emping mlinjo couldn’t be understood well by the foreign readers. this was because jenang rasikan and emping mlinjo didn’t have same concept in tl, and also were not so popular yet in abroad. this condition was different to a data of guitar craft which became the translation of kerajinan gitar. this translation could be understood well because guitar had same concept and equal meaning between sl to tl. for the terms that couldn’t be translated well for not having equal meaning were about batik cloth, foods, traditional music instrument. while the ones that could be translated as adopted terms were about drink (alcohol), music instrument (guitar), furniture (rattan). the third point is about grammatical complexity. usually, grammatical complexity happens in complex sentence. complex sentence is more difficult to understand than simple sentence. this is because in complex sentence, it may consist of more than one idea. so, it must have more than one clause. from the analysis of grammatical complexity in the ads text of booklet pud kab. sukoharjo, it could be performed below: table 4. grammatical complexity no data coding sl tl 1 37/wcn.tc/kal/6 produksi rotan ini, 90 % telah mampu menembus pasaran internasional di berbagai negara the production can reach about 400.000 bonus in a year and 90% of it has broken through to the international market in several countries. 2 70/wcn.tc/kal/16 potensi produksi tanaman hortikultura di kabupaten sukoharjo adalah melon, dengan luas lahan 173 ha. the potential production of the horticulture plants at sukoharjo regency consist of melon with the land wide of 173 hectares can produce 5.690 tons, mango the total number of 78.198 mango’s trees can produce 12.138 tons, kedondong with 12.823 trees can produce 1.023 tons, mlinjo is produced around 787 tons and banana which is produced around 3.619 tons. from the table above, we can see that complex sentence usually uses complex grammar because there are dependent clauses that has function as modifiers. this situation can make the text becomes difficult to understand. more than that, if there are many new words that don’t have the equal meaning or same concept in tl, the readibility becomes lower and lower. the more the complex sentences in a text is, the lower the readibility of a text is. for example, data number 70 is a simple sentence in sl, but it changed into complex sentence in tl. the length sentence average in tl is long (59 words). besides that, there were some new words that didn’t have any equal meaning in tl. so, it is difficult for the foreign reader to understand the meaning of the text. on the other hand, indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 99 data number 69 belongs to grammatical compexity for the complex sentence. it also came to category of fair in length sentence average (23 words), but it was still rather easy to understand for the foreign readers because it didn’t have any new or difficult words. so, complexity grammar had to get much pay attention for the translator because it became the translator’s determination in transferring the message. conclusion meaning is the most important thing in translation works. in this research, meaning was shown by the concept of readibility that had 3 items in it. they were length of sentence average, new words, and grammatical complexity. from the analysis of those three items, it can be concluded that the length of sentence average in the booklet of pud sukoharjo regency was in the criteria of easy (39,13%). this criteria showed that each sentence was built not more than 14 words. then about the new words, the booklet of pud sukoharjo regency was completed by some cultural terms that didn’t have the same concept in tl. this situation could make difficult for the foreign readers to understand the meaning. last, grammatical complexity in the booklet of pud sukoharjo regency was not found much. only 4,34% belonged to grammatical complexity. besides, from the result of questionairre that were distributed to the informants, it showed that the average score for readibility of text was 2,22 (for the maximal score 3). it means that the result of translation couldn’t be fully understood. references jefkin, f. (1994). periklanan. jakarta: penerbit erlangga. ogilvy, d. (n.d). pengakuan orang iklan. jakarta: pustaka tangga nababan, m. r. (2003). teori menerjemah bahasa inggris. yogyakarta: pustaka pelajar sumarlam. (2005). teori dan praktik analisis wacana. surakarta: pustaka cakra. sutopo, h. b. (2002). metodologi penelitian kualitatif: dasar dan terapannya dalam penelitian. surakarta: sebelas maret university press. suryawinata, z., & haryanto, s. (2003). translation (bahasan teori dan penuntun praktis menerjemahkan). yogyakarta: penerbit kanisius purwani indri astuti meaning on translation of indonesian-english ads text 100 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 79 content analysis of when english rings a bell student’s textbook maria melati sitorus english department, faculty of teacher training and education universitas prima indonesia, indonesia email: mariamelati17@gmail.com lauren hotmauli silalahi english department, faculty of teacher training and education universitas prima indonesia, indonesia email: laurensilalahi25@gmail.com hana rajagukguk english department, faculty of teacher training and education universitas prima indonesia, indonesia email: hanarajagukguk2094@gmail.com erikson saragih english department, faculty of teacher training and education universitas prima indonesia, indonesia email: erikson.saragih@unprimdn.ac.id apa citation: sitorus, m. m., silalahi, l.h., rajagukguk, h., & saragih, e. (2021). content analysis of when english rings a bell student’s textbook. indonesian efl journal, 7(1), pp. 79-88. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i1.3996 received: 23-11-2020 accepted: 15-12-2020 published: 31-01-2021 introduction in the process of learning, textbook is a necessary thing. it is a compass for a teacher in teaching. the textbook is the main element that is necessary for english learning especially in indonesia. in indonesia, english is a foreign language. through textbooks, students are able to learn independently. the curriculum changes constantly. every 5-10 years ministry of indonesian education and culture government constantly changes the curriculum. they believe that along with the development of humans, the curriculum can be increased. the curriculum that is used by indonesian is 2013 curriculum (k-13). this curriculum has a lot of differences compared to the previous one. the main value in the k-13 curriculum is character. the curriculum consists of competence core (ki) from 1 to 4. ki-1 consists of competence in spiritual, ki-2 consists of competence in social, ki-3 consists of knowledge competence and the last is ki-4 that consists of skill competence. ahmad (2014) believes that the paradigm of learning consists of an indirect and direct learning abstract: this study's objective was for analyzing materials relevance in psychomotor and cognitive-based on 2013 english curriculum of competence in textbook of the eighth grade of junior high school "english rings a bell". the methodology of this study is qualitative. based on anderson and krathwol (2001) theory, the textbook analysis consists of simpson's and cognitive domain of taxonomy (1972) which aim to focus more on material's relevance in the textbook. the instruments for data collection used were the analysis of document and checklist observation. the study found that 23 materials consist 74.19% relevance in the cognitive domain, 7 materials consist 22.58% relevance, and 1 material only consists 3.2% relevance. while the psychomotor domain found that 10 materials consist 32.25% relevance and 11 materials consist 35.48% relevance. therefore, the researcher concluded that in the cognitive domain, the textbook's materials are relevant to the 2013 curriculum. although its lack of materials is relevant to the psychomotor domain. keywords: textbook analysis; when english rings a bell; 2013 curriculum; cognitive domain; psychomotor domain. mailto:mariamelati17@gmail.com mailto:laurensilalahi25@gmail.com mailto:hanarajagukguk2094@gmail.com mailto:erikson.saragih@unprimdn.ac.id maria melati sitorus, lauren hotmauli silalahi, hana rajagukguk, & erikson saragih content analysis of when english rings a bell student’s textbook 80 model. ki-3 and ki-4 are reflecting direct learning, while ki-1 and ki-2 are reflecting indirect learning. there are no specific materials of learning in both of these competencies as they are integrated into psychomotor and cognitive domains. due to that reason, usually textbook only provides materials that based on psychomotor and cognitive domains. ki-3 consists of the cognitive domain and ki-4 consists of the psychomotor domain. indonesian ministry of education and culture's government also participate in publishing a medium learning that is based on the k-13 textbook. the textbook is provided in two versions. one is intended for students and another is intended for teachers. english textbook for english learning is a textbook entitled "when english rings a bell". pusat kurikulum dan perbukuan balitbang kemdiknas stated that the textbook from the government is one of necessary textbooks. thus, in indonesia, almost every school uses a textbook. indonesian schools need to use dana bos (bantuan operasional sekolah) which is provided by the government of indonesia to purchase the textbook. this textbook with the title "when english rings a bell has already been published before in 2013 then revised by researcher in 2014, 2016, and 2017. some researchers conducted a study that is similar about content analysis of the book that is intended for students with the title "when english rings a bell" in (revised edition) for grade viii's students in junior high school. kamila (2014) analyzed the relevance in textbook materials for junior high school of seventh-grade students using the 2013 curriculum. the result of the study found that a few materials of the textbook are not relevant to psychomotor and cognitive domains contained in english standard competence (2013). hashemnezhad and maftoon (2011) also analyzed a textbook of english language grammar that is intended for college students of iranian. the result found that vocabulary, structure, physical makeup, and subject matter are emphasized in the book. checklist data analysis showed that in the cognitive domain, only the first stage is emphasized but the last stages are being ignored. razmjoo and kazempourfard (2012) using the six levels of bloom's taxonomy, reported the activities and exercises for three units of each of the four interchange series course books. the findings showed that in interchange course books, lowerorder cognitive skills were the most common. the various researchers who already analyzed english textbooks are chyntia (2013), kamila (2014), zareian (2015), and al-mashaqba (2017). they have different materials that they analyze such as english skills, physical appearance mood realization, assessment, content, gender, etc. even though many researchers already analyzed the level of the cognitive domain in the textbook but unfortunately they only provided cognitive level percentages based on high order thinking skills and low order thinking skills. in learning, a process textbook is a necessary element. according to awasthi (2006) in nguyen (2015), both for teacher and learners, textbook is learning sources and teaching material to get the best result in teaching and learning process. the textbook is very helpful for student's learning process. they can take a look at the textbook when they cannot hear the teacher's explanation. english words have various pronunciations with their letters. hence, the analysis of the textbook is needed. the analysis of the textbook is helpful for evaluating the textbook content as the readers will be able to know the textbook compatibility. according to romine in hamalik (2006, p.65), curriculum is aimed to arrange activities, courses, and organized experienced in students under the supervision of the school. many curricula are used in indonesia. the most recent curriculum is the 2013 curriculum. 2013 curriculum stated that there are two types of english standard competencies such as core competencies and basic competences. core competence is subdivided into four aims. the first and second aims pressure the affective domain. the third aim emphasizes the cognitive domain and the fourth aim pressures the psychomotor domain (permendikbud no. 68 tahun 2013) the cognitive domain refers to the knowledge domain, based on bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives (1956). it is connected to the thinking of the learner. affective refers to the domain of emotion and value refers to the attitude of the learner. psychomotor relates to the creativity of motoric that is associated with the skill of the learner. in the learning process, cognitive and psychomotor domains become vital elements. the textbook should provide those domains. the researcher looked for several similar studies to support this research to verify this research. the researcher found many studies such as ika ayu hapsari’s (2017) research entitled a content analysis of “when english rings a bell” english textbook in 2013 curriculum for the seventh grade student of junior high school indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 81 published by kementerian pendidikan dan kebudayaan republik indonesia stated that in this era, an education field uses curriculum 2013 as a tool to conduct the teaching-learning process. education field has been using curriculum 2013 since 2013. the education field also does upgrade to complete curriculum 2013. according to one of the teachers of junior high school, the curriculum 2013 gets upgrade about three times. the improvement of curriculum 2013 has started in 2013. the second improvement is in 2014 and the last improvement is in 2016. in this study, the second improvement is in 2014 and the last improvement is in 2016. in this study, the reasons for the researcher choosing the book entitled “when english rings a bell” are that this book is based on the curriculum 2013 from the government that gets upgrade nowadays, the second reason is this book is newly produced as a recommendation for the textbook reference spreading out through the seventh grade of junior high school students. this book also has revised in 2014, dian setiawati’s (2015) research entitled content analysis of student book “when english rings a bell” for grade viii junior high school, syarif zainul, fuad (2020) research entitled “comparative study of cultural contents between when english rings a bell 7 and bright an english 1 textbooks for 7th grade junior high school”, dhiana pertiwi (2021) research entitled “a relevance analysis of english textbook “when english rings a bell” for grade viii (second revised edition)”, and kriswidyantara, gideon (2019) research entitled “cultural content analysis of an english textbook entitled "when english rings a bell" for eighth grade students of junior high school”. thus, this study aims to define the relevance of the materials in the student book with the title "when english rings a bell (revised edition)" for grade viii junior high school with the basic competence and core in cognitive and psychomotor domains in the 2013 curriculum. method in this study, as the research design, the researchers implemented the content analysis of descriptive qualitative. kothari (2004, p.8), stated that qualitative research consists of information than statistics and numbers that are mostly formed in words or images. since the data was in the form of words and documents, qualitative analysis of the data was carried out. the researchers used "when english rings a bell" as the objectives of the research for grade eight of the junior high school textbook and did the analysis by dividing it into two categories of materials in the textbook. through several steps of observation, the data from this study was obtained. first, the researcher thoroughly read and observed the textbook content. second, for the 2013 curriculum, the researcher collected the textbook materials in terms of the cognitive domain. third, in a related way, for the 2013 curriculum, the researcher has collected the textbook materials in psychomotor domain terms. as the observation instrument, the researcher used the observation checklist tables. one of the research tools in content analysis is the checklist, as stated in alavinia and siyadat (2013, p.154) by cunning worth (1995). the researcher has implemented as my instruments the bsnp (badan standar nasional pendidikan) checklist. there are 2 kinds of checklists for observation. the first is the observation checklist to observe the relevance of the 2013 english curriculum between the materials in the book with the cognitive aspect in basic competency three. the second observation checklist is to observe the relevance of four of the 2013 english curriculum for the psychomotor aspect of the book to the basic competence. my observation checklist of cognitive and psychomotor domains are illustrated by the figures below. table 1. observation checklist of cognitive domain basic competence three (cognitive domain) when english rings a bell notes basic competence materials (sub-basic competence) page example of materials relevance to basic competence relevant partly relevant irrelevant indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index the researcher has used bloom's modified cognitive domain taxonomy stated in anderson and krathwohl (2001) and the psychomotor domain stated by simpson (1972) in this research as my guidelines for document analysis. table 2. observation checklist of psychomotor domain basic competence four (psychomotor domain) when english rings a bell notes basic competence materials (sub-basic competence) page example of materials relevance to basic competence relevant partly relevant irrelevant here are the figures the researcher used to analyze the level of cognitive and psychomotor domains. table 3. cognitive domain level analysis level actions verbs page note remember understand apply analyze evaluate create table 4. psychomotor domain level analysis level actions verbs page note perception set guided response mechanism complex or overt adaptation origination in this research, four steps were used in the data analysis. first, the materials were classified as the cognitive domain based on competence three, and basic competence four as the psychomotor domain four. to classify the materials into basic competence three and basic competence four, the researcher used anderson and krathwohl's (2001) cognitive domain and simpson's (1972) psychomotor domain keyword levels. after that, the textbook data was collected and inserted into the table of the checklist to equate the materials on the textbooks with the materials needed in the 2013 curriculum. then, the researcher identified the variations and similarities between the textbook materials and those suggested by the basic skills of the 2013 curriculum. after that, the materials in the textbook were evaluated to find out their relevance to the 2013 curriculum's central and basic competence. result and discussion the findings are summarized in two categories, which are the materials' relevance to the cognitive and psychomotor domains. the materials' relevance to the cognitive domain in the student’s english textbook entitled when english rings a bell, the first result analysis of materials based on basic skills was done by referring to the cognitive taxonomy of anderson and krathwohl (2001). the categorization of cognitive level analysis was done. some activities or instructions did not use the original action verb mentioned in anderson and krathwohl, also rough (2001). therefore, with action verbs that have been stated in the theory, the researcher should find a similar meaning of the textbook activities or indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 83 instructions. three of the 2013 curriculum, after breaking down the materials written in the textbook according to the basic competence, and finding out its relevance to the cognitive area of learning, used the checklist tool, the researcher concludes that there is the relevance between textbook materials and the basic competence three. the following figure can be seen: table 5. the relevance of textbook materials to the basic competence three (cognitive domain) the relevance the basic competence four relevant sub-basic competence 4.5.1, 4.7.1, 4.8.1, 4.8.2, 4.10.2, 4.11.1, 4.11.3, 4.12.1, 4.12.2, 4.13.1. partly relevant sub-basic competence 4.2.1, 4.2.2, 4.3.1, 4.3.2, 4.3.3, 4.4.1, 4.6.2, 4.7.2, 4.9.1, 4.9.3. irrelevant sub-basic competence 4.1.1, 4.1.2, 4.1.3, 4.1.4, 4.4.2, 4.4.3, 4.6.1, 4.6.3, 4.9.2, 4.10.1, 4.11.2. the researcher created a percentage of the data analysis form. the researcher used a percentage of the cognitive domain relevance of the textbook. according to the 2013 curriculum standard, a total of 31 materials were included in the cognitive domain. first, there are 23 relevant products or about 74.19%. second, 7 materials are partly relevant or about 22.58%. third, only one or around 3,22 % is irrelevant to the cognitive domain. according to those percentages, the researcher concluded that about 74.19 percent of materials that are relevant to the cognitive domain and able of covering the purposes of the topic, language features, and social functions of the ideal materials that are intended by students to achieve are fulfilled in the textbook. the materials' importance to the psychomotor domain this is the second result study of materials in the student english book entitled when english rings a bell, based on basic competence four. by referring to simpson's (1972) taxonomy, the categorization of psychomotor level research is determined. the original action verb stated in simpson was not used in many activities or instructions (1972). therefore, with action verbs that have been stated in the theory, the researcher should find the similar meaning of the textbook activities or instructions. the researcher resumed the findings after the researcher classified the materials in the textbook and found out their relevance to the psychomotor domain using the checklist instrument. the relevance of textbook materials to basic competency four is shown in figure 6. the researcher made the data analysis percentage form after the researcher analyzed the data. the researcher used a percentage of the psychomotor domain's textbook relevance. according to the 2013 curriculum standard of content, there were 31 materials included in the psychomotor domain. first of all, 10 or around 32.25 % of the relevant materials are available. secondly, 10 or around 32.25 % of materials are also partly relevant. finally, 11 materials are irrelevant to the psychomotor domain, or about 35.48%. according to that percentage, the researcher concluded that only about 32.25 percent of materials are relevant to the psychomotor domain were fulfilled in the textbook and could cover the purposes of the topic, language features, and social functions of the materials that were intended for the students to achieve. table 6. the relevance of textbook materials to the basic competence four (psychomotor domain) the relevance the basic competence four relevant sub-basic competence 4.5.1, 4.7.1, 4.8.1, 4.8.2, 4.10.2, 4.11.1, 4.11.3, 4.12.1, 4.12.2, 4.13.1. partly relevant sub-basic competence 4.2.1, 4.2.2, 4.3.1, 4.3.2, 4.3.3, 4.4.1, 4.6.2, 4.7.2, 4.9.1, 4.9.3. irrelevant sub-basic competence 4.1.1, 4.1.2, 4.1.3, 4.1.4, 4.4.2, 4.4.3, 4.6.1, 4.6.3, 4.9.2, 4.10.1, maria melati sitorus, lauren hotmauli silalahi, hana rajagukguk, & erikson saragih content analysis of when english rings a bell student’s textbook 84 4.11.2. according to this research, the researcher stated that about 74.19 percent of materials that are appropriate to the cognitive processes and capable of fulfilling the aims of the topic, language characteristics, and social functions of the cognitive performance intended to be achieved by the students were covered in the textbook. as reported by kamila (2014), of above results have a significant gap with the earlier findings. for seven grade of junior high school, the researcher assessed bright textbook. the results showed that 80 percent of the applicable cognitive abilities materials were covered by the textbook. additionally, akbar (2016) has reported that throughout the selected eleventh graders, his research provided about 88 percent of relevant materials focused on both kamila (2014) and akbar (2016) results have greater percentage materials instead of the textbook 'when english rings a bell. additionally, chyntia (2013) also analyzed the textbook when english rings a bell. it is an effective textbook based on the 2013 english curriculum for grade seven of junior high school. the findings of her research showed that about 53 percent of the related materials were included in the textbook. this indicated that based on the cognitive domain, the textbook has a smaller percentage than my results. in addition, the textbook 'when english rings a bell' only used about 32.25 percent of resources that were applicable to the psychomotor category and could not serve the objectives of directing students to use their psychomotor abilities to produce something with their imagination that the students should accomplish and according to the syllabus. it was well supported by hashemnezhad and maftoon (2011) and tiffany and pusparini's previous results (2013). their research found that the psychomotor domain was frequently used in textbooks. in comparison to the first results, according to heriati (2017) and kamila (2014) conceived that 61 percent and 72 percent of appropriate psychomotor domain materials were used in their studies. the previous research in this field does not support my results. in reality, from what has been previously believed, the researcher realized that the results of the research can be distinguished by different textbooks and school grades. in addition, the researcher worked out the data analysis by evaluating the level from each domain, specifically cognitive and psychomotor. the research concentrated on each domain's action verbs that represented its level. the results showed that the most popular level found in the textbook was the level of remembrance. remember (c1) level using 9 verbs for action verbs, while the (c2) understand has 5 action verbs, apply (c3) level has 2 verbs for action. the stage of analyze (c4) has 5 action verbs. evaluate level (c5) has 2 verb action, create level (c6) has 2 verb action too, and totally there were 16 verbs action the complete level of low order thought (c1, c2, and c3). besides that, only 9 verbs were the average of the high order thinking rate (c4, c5, and c6). it can be assumed that the degree of low order thought was commonly used in this textbook rather than high level thinking ability. a lot of similarities were found in the above findings to hashemnezhad and maftoon (2011), razmjoo and kazempourfard (2012), and then with others too, as assaly and igbaria (2014), roohani et al. (2014), abdelrahman (2014), abudabat (2014), alfaki (2014), zareian (2015), assaly and smadi (2015), and the last ulum (2016). this research also finds that the textbook added a significant number of low-order thinking levels to high-order thinking levels. furthermore, it can be seen that there is no substantial difference in terms of the cognitive domain between the previous studies and my research. in reality, in junior high school, the use of high levels of thought should be incorporated. pursuant to muhajir effendy, indonesia's minister of education and culture, 10 percent of high-thinking level issues were implemented in 2018 by national inspection. a high level of thinking is therefore very important to the students. not only low thinking level practices, and also high-level activities should be trained. if they just attempt to answer low-level questions, they would not be used to answering high-level questions. consequentially, in national review, they may also have difficulty in answering the questions of a high thinking level. the material of the textbook should include materials or activities with a higher level of thinking for these purposes. therefore, students would be more conscious of events at a high level of thinking. the study also found that the most frequently found level in the textbook was directed response level (p3). the frequency of these levels was: perception (p1) level has 2 verbs of action; set indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 85 (p2) level has 1 verb of action; directed response (p3) level has 6 verbs of action; process (p4) level has 2 verbs of action; nuanced or overt (p5) level has 2 verbs of action; adaptation (p6) level has 1 verb of action; origination (p7) level has 2 verbs of action. of these action verbs, the number was 16. the results above match well with the analysis of heriati (2017). the total number of action verbs in the psychomotor context in her research was 11. but, on the other hand, in the cognitive domain, there were 34 action verbs used. this result is also confirmed by hashemnezhad and maftoon (2011). their research found that the psychomotor domain had 48 action verbs. at the same time, the total of action verbs in the cognitive domain was 56. in general, not as much as the cognitive realm was the number of psychomotor action verbs. consequently, this would influence the teaching and learning process. since the majority of the level has unusual verbs of action as the directions to do in the textbook teaching and learning materials. the 2013 curriculum, as already mentioned, explores affective, cognitive, and psychomotor domains. as a consequence, the application of the psychomotor domain that focuses on the strengths of students should be controlled. the result shows that repeat was the most common action verb used (p3). in the textbook, it has been used 44 times. this means that the textbook used listening and speaking skills the most. however, students can master listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills while studying english. even if in the textbook, the implementation of psychomotor domain behavior should be strengthened. not only the students get the skills from the materials, but they also can have a great ability in english. conclusion published by the ministry of education and culture of indonesia, after evaluating the information from the textbook materials entitled “when english rings a bell” for eighth-graders junior high school. in associated with cognitive and psychomotor domains, the researcher considered the importance of the significant content based on the essential competence curriculum. three items are written in the english curriculum syllabus for eighth graders of junior high school and the injunction of each subject with the cognitive domain action verbs mentioned in anderson and krathwohl with regard to the importance of the materials in the english student book “when english rings a bell” with the core and essential skill (2001), there were 23 materials in the book that were relevant, and about 74.19%, 7 materials that were partially relevant, or about 22.58%, and 1 material that was trivial, or about 3.2%. by those results, the researcher concludes that the textbook covers about 74.19% of materials applicable to the cognitive domain that are capable of fulfilling the social functions of the ideal materials designed for students to achieve. “when english rings a bell” with the core and fundamental knowledge of four topics provided in the english lesson syllabus for eighth graders of junior high school and the teaching of each material with the psychomotor domain action verbs mentioned in simpson (1972), there were 10 materials in the book that were important or around 32.22, and 11 irrelevant materials, or around 35.48%. by those results, the researcher concludes that only about 32.25% of materials that were applicable to the psychomotor domain were covered in the textbook. it can serve the function of guiding the students on using their psychomotor capacity with their imagination to construct something that the students should accomplish and according to the syllabus. the researcher gets some suggestions as follows for the book writer, the book user, the government, and other researchers after performing the study. in terms of both cognitive and psychomotor realms, the book's author should develop and enhance the materials written in the book so the materials in the book have only around 74.19% relevance to anderson and krathwohl's (2001). three of the english syllabus and about 32.25 % importance to the competence of the simpson's (1972) taxonomy psychomotor domain four of the english lesson syllabus. the researcher also recommends that book users search for other sources of materials in this book that can fulfill the materials. the researcher also suggests that if book users use this book as their primary source or learning source, in order to get a full understanding of the content, they must have a complementary origin of knowledge. the government should also provide teachers and students with adequate materials to understand and assess the school's teaching and learning process. if there were not enough outlets of learning for the teachers and students, the government could assist them to cover it. maria melati sitorus, lauren hotmauli silalahi, hana rajagukguk, & erikson saragih content analysis of when english rings a bell student’s textbook 86 the researcher suggests that other researchers interested in performing a study in the same field as a researcher has done, explore other words in the same textbook. references. adi, h. w., & astuti, p. 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(2020). an analysis of english textbook in the first grade of junior high school. journal of research on language education, 1(1). maria melati sitorus, lauren hotmauli silalahi, hana rajagukguk, & erikson saragih content analysis of when english rings a bell student’s textbook 88 indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 129 the relationship between grammar learning strategy use and language achievement of iranian high school efl learners sorour zekrati department of english language, bu-ali sina university, hamedan, iran e-mail: s.zekrati@gmail.com apa citation: zekrati, s. (2017). the relationship between grammar learning strategy use and language achievement of iranian high school efl learners. indonesian efl journal, 3(2), 129138. received: 08-05-2017 accepted: 24-06-2017 published: 01-07-2017 abstract: this paper sought to explore the relationship between grammar learning strategy use and language achievement of iranian high school efl learners. the participants of the study were 300 students from three different proficiency levels (elementary, pre-intermediate, and intermediate), 230 of whom completed and returned an oxford solution test, and a likertscale grammar learning strategies questionnaire (glsq) containing 35 statements. the participants were divided to the above mentioned proficiency groups based on oxford placement test categorization and their total gpas. the results of descriptive statistics, interview session, and rank-ordering indicated that cognitive and social affective strategies were the most frequently grammar strategies used by iranian efl learners. the analysis of the quantitative and qualitative data revealed that iranian high school efl learners used a variety of learning strategies while learning and using grammar structures; however, the results of one-way anova indicated that there was a significant difference in the frequency of use of grammar learning strategies among different proficiency levels. additionally, the results of ancova analysis showed that gender did not play a significant role in strategy use. furthermore, the results of pearson correlation coefficient indicated that there was a positive relationship between language achievement and grammar strategy use. the findings of the study might provide iranian efl teachers and learners with some helpful implications for teaching and testing, and learning grammar strategies respectively at high schools, as well as useful directions for future studies in this domain. keywords: grammar learning strategies, language proficiency, language achievement, gender introduction although there are vigorous debates concerning grammar place in language classrooms from time to time, still it appears to be of great importance in foreign/second learning and teaching. in this regard, it has been shown that the sole exposure to the target language input, especially in cases such as efl classrooms where the amount of exposure is limited, would not be sufficient for learners to ‘pick up’ accurate linguistic form (larsenfreeman, 2001). thus, it can be inferred that although grammar is one of the biggest components of every language course, it should be accompanied by some learning strategies in efl settings in order to be served as a means of accurate and fluent communication. learning strategies as defined by oxford (1990), and oxford, rang lee and park (2007, p. 117) refer to “actions and thoughts that learners consciously employ to make language learning and/or language use easier, more effective, more efficient, and more enjoyable.” thus, given that all other factors which may affect language learning such as gender, type of instruction and age are controlled, it is sorour zekrati the relationship between grammar learning strategy use and language achievement of iranian high school efl learners the type and amount of adopted learning strategy which discriminates poor and good language learners, not totally but for sure to a great extent, in a specified efl setting such as high school. through the remainder of the 1970s, when the focus of second language learning moved from teaching processes to learning processes, and into the 1980s different studies tried to make the controversial definition of learning strategies clear and add more information to this domain by finding the reasons due to which some learners are more successful in language learning than others. rubin (1975) conducted one of the earliest studies about learners’ differences. she observed language classes directly or on videotape and identified several strategies of good language learners. she suggested that these strategies can be learnt by poor learners in order to help them become successful ones. in the same year, stern (1975) as cited in stern (1983) identified successful learners’ strategies and categorized them into ten distinctive ones including planning, active, empathic, formal, experimental, semantic, practice, communication, monitoring, and internalization strategies. as stern’s study appeared to be based on anecdotal evidence (greenfell & macaro, 2007), naiman, fröhlich, stern, and todesco (1978) as cited in o'malley & chamot (1990) proposed a different classification after interviewing thirty-four good language learners. this scheme’s main strategies were: active task approach, considering language as a system, identifying language as a communication mean, management of affective requirements, and observing and monitoring l2 performance. rubin (1981) revised her previous scheme and divided the strategies into two main categories of direct and indirect ones. this new categorization was followed by oxford (1990) for her own taxonomy. by the mid-1980s, there was considerable and controversial confusion regarding the definition of language learning strategies (griffiths, 2008). o’malley and his colleagues (1985, p. 23) defined language learning strategies as: “any set of operations or steps used by a learner that will facilitate the acquisition, storage, retrieval or use of information”. o’malley and chamot (1990) identified a comprehensive list of strategies which were divided into three groups: metacognitive, cognitive, and social strategies. while metacognitive and cognitive strategies corresponded to a great extent with the indirect and direct categories of rubin, the social mediation was a new category which emphasized the outstanding role of interactional strategies in learning different languages (griffiths, 2008). in addition to o’malley et al., oxford (1990), proposed a comprehensive and practical taxonomy of language learning strategies which, as mentioned before, was based on the two major categories of rubin. in terms of strategy training, oxford devised a structured survey called the strategy inventory for language learning (sill) which was made of two distinctive categories of direct and indirect strategies. under the direct strategies there were memory, cognitive and compensation strategies, while indirect strategies comprised metacognitive, affective and social ones. this scheme, which is still used by different scholars, served as a data collection tool and was used in many studies related to the use of language learning strategies. through all these years, there were a tremendous amount of work which tried to shed lights on different aspects of language learning strategies. one of the most important fields is related to 130 indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n learning strategies for specific skills, which has been investigated by different researchers. for example, hosenfeld (1977) tried to find more, about students’ strategies used in reading tasks; then, on year later, another good language learner study was done by naiman, fröhlich, stern, and todesco (1978). cohen and aphek (1980) looked at the use of mnemonic strategies for the retention of vocabulary, and found out that students were more successful in recalling words which were learnt through association. one study for ma thesis by gürata (2008) investigated the learning strategies efl learners use when learning and using grammar structures. the findings of this study indicated that there is a difference in learning strategy use among different proficiency levels, and that using grammar learning strategies is influential in grammar achievement. in the words of gürata (2008), in preparation of the grammar learning strategies used in that study, “the researcher benefited from the general language learning strategy definitions that were suggested by o’malley and chamot (1990) and oxford (1990).” in addition to the three major strategy categories of o’malley and chamot (i.e., cognitive, metacognitive, and social-affective) compensation strategies from oxford’s taxonomy were used as the fourth category of the list used for the study. “practicing”, which is listed under memory strategies by oxford, was included among cognitive strategies for the study since oxford (1990) herself acknowledges the fact that memory strategies are occasionally considered to be cognitive strategies. grammar learning strategies as one of the main strategies, which would help the successful learning of a new language, possess distinctive characteristics, which griffiths (2008) summarizes as follows: (1) they are what students do, which in turn represents an active approach, (2) they are used consciously, at least to some extent, (3) they are elective means used to exploit information, (4) their use entails goaloriented activities, (5) they’re used to regulate, and (6) to facilitate the learning process. due to the importance of the issue and because cultural background and ethnocentric bias might jeopardize the generalizability of the results of previously done researches on language learning strategy (kouraogo, 1993), this study sets out to determine the strategies that iranian efl students use when they learn and use grammar structures. method this study was conducted at eight different high schools in two cities of isfahan and hamedan in january 2013. the participants of this study were 300 students, 230 of whom answered both questionnaire and the placement test completely. it included 45 boys and 185 girls. the age of participants ranged from 15 to 17 years old, and their proficiency level varied from elementary to intermediate level. to gain the goal of this research, three instruments were used, including oxford solution placement test, grammar learning strategies questionnaire, and interview. firstly, the second edition of “oxford solution placement test” designed by edward (2007) was used in order to identify the real proficiency level of each participant. secondly, grammar learning strategies (gls) questionnaire proposed by gutara (2008) was translated and consequently validated through expert view. the reliability of the translated questionnaire, after being piloted on 40 students, was reported to be .90 and .83 for respectively the first (frequency) and the second (usefulness) parts of the 131 sorour zekrati the relationship between grammar learning strategy use and language achievement of iranian high school efl learners questionnaire. the participants were expected to rate each item in the questionnaire by considering two questions: (a) “how often do you use this strategy?”, and (b) “i think this is a useful strategy (even though i may not use it).” a five-point likert-scale, ranging from (1) never to (5) always, was used for the first question and a three-point likertscale was used for the second question with following options: totally disagree (1), partly agree (2), and totally agree (3). lastly, five people from each high school were selected randomly and interviewed using ielts sample oral exam questions in order to confirm their proficiency level. results and discussion in order to answer the first until third research question, the type of strategy were compared and contrasted based on the learners' preferences. by following the calculation of frequency and mean for each of the 35 items, the means were then ordered in descending way to determine the most and least frequently used strategies. the scales, based on which the means of likert-scales were interpreted, were originally proposed and categorized by gurata (2008). the scales can be seen in table 1. table 1. scales used in the interpretation of responses frequency usefulness 1.0 1.4 (never) 1.0 1.4 (totally disagree) 1.5 2.4 (seldom) 1.5 2.4 (partly agree) 2.5 3.4 (sometimes) 2.5 3.0 (totally agree) 3.5 4.4 (usually) 4.5 5.0 (always) the overall analysis of the gls questionnaire yielded the following results for the first question. the means of the questionnaire items ranged between 1.90 and 3.80, which means that there were no strategies commonly rated as always used (4.5-5.0), and no strategies reported to be never used (1.0-1.4). the statistics may suggest that all the strategies were used by iranian efl learners to some extent. next, in order to answer the second question, descriptive analysis was run. the results of descriptive analysis are shown in table 2. table 2. the most frequently used strategies strategy mean item 9 i take notes when my teacher explains a new grammar structure 3.80 item 7 if i do not understand my teacher’s explanation of a new structure, i ask him to repeat 3.75 item 34 while writing or speaking if i am not sure of a grammar structure, i try to use another one 3.53 item 22 i ask my teacher questions about his corrections of my grammatical mistakes 3.47 the first four strategies on the top of the list were considered as the most frequently used strategies since they fall into the usually range (3.5-4.4). as it can be seen from the strategies reported in table 2, the first most frequently used strategy is a cognitive strategy (item 9), the other one is a social-affective strategy (item 7), and the remainders are compensation and social-affective strategies respectively. further, to answer the third 132 indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n question, five last strategies in the main analyzed list were chosen. the results are shown in table 3. table 3. the least adopted strategies by high school efl learners strategy mean item 12 i draw charts for the grammar rules i learn 1.90 item 28 i write emails, letters or compositions in order to practice newly learnt grammar structures 2.05 item 27 i try to practice a new grammar structure in speaking or writing 2.09 item 23 i study grammar with a friend or a relative 2.24 item 19 i preview the grammar subjects that will be covered before coming to the class 2.43 as can be seen in table 3, all five mentioned strategies fall into the seldom range (1.5-2.4). in other words, none of the strategies has been commonly rated as never used (1.0-1.4). the least frequently used strategy, item 12, with a mean of 1.90, belongs to a cognitive strategy. similarly, items 28 and 27 are also considered as cognitive ones. on the other hand, items 19 and 23 are metacognitive and social-affective strategies respectively. based on the strategies in the table 3, it is possible to conclude that the respondents do not like writing compositions in order to practice new grammar structures. besides, confirming similar results of the previous researches done in turkey, the results of this study showed that using grammar rules in charts is not a frequently used strategy among efl learners. similarly, the fourth question was also answered by using descriptive analysis. the results of descriptive analysis on second the part of the questionnaire are shown in table 4. table 4. the most useful reported strategies strategy mean item 9 i take notes when my teacher explains a new grammar structure 2.73 item 35 i encourage myself to speak english even when i’m afraid of making a grammar mistake 2.30 item 11 i underline, use different colors or capital letters to emphasize the important parts of grammar rules and explanations 2.26 item 8 if i do not understand my teacher’s explanation, i ask my friends for help 2.09 item 19 i preview the grammar subjects that will be covered before coming to the class 2.07 item 34 while writing or speaking, if i am not sure of a grammar structure, i try to use another one 2.03 item 33 when my teacher corrects my grammar mistakes, i repeat the correct form 2.02 item 21 i examine the mistakes which my instructor has marked in a written assignment and try to correct them 2.02 item 18 i use grammar books in order to review or better understand new grammar structures 2.00 item 20 i determine the grammar structures that i have trouble with and make an effort to improve them 2.00 133 sorour zekrati the relationship between grammar learning strategy use and language achievement of iranian high school efl learners from the table above, it is clearly known that the strategies which are considered as the most useful ones do not necessarily and exactly match with those used most frequently. as can be seen in results, except items 34 and 9, which can be found in both lists of most frequently used and usefulness, almost all the eight remainder items are believed to be useful by the participants, but not used very often. to discuss the above mentioned finding, first students’ tendency toward the use of cognitive strategies more than other types should be considered. such intendance may have roots in the teaching and training system of iran which has been based on memorization for many years and even now to some extent. in fact, students are taught and asked to memorize new concepts in most of the fields rather than analyzing and constructing them. due to such policy, the use of cognitive strategies, mainly memorization, as a principal tool for learning is observed. in a similar vein, the high frequency of use of socio-affective strategies among iranian efl learners shows culturally grounded issues. from past up to even now, the role of teacher has been considered as the only, or at least the main source of knowledge in the classrooms. this belief has made a strong kind of dependency on teachers; so that any question and problem should be solved by him/her and not the student her/himself. beside the teacher, peers are the second source of help for iranian students and this is why the students use social affective strategies more than metacognitive and compensation ones. to answer the fifth question and to assess whether boys had higher grammar achievement than girls after controlling for differences between boys and girls in proficiency level, an analysis of covariance was used. the results are shown in table 6. prior to presentation of the main findings, the means and standard deviations for boys and girls on grammar achievement, before and after controlling for proficiency level, are shown in table 5. table 5. adjusted and unadjusted gender means and variability for grammar achievement using proficiency level as a covariate unadjusted adjusted n m sd m se males 82 3.15 1.14 3.14 .086 females 148 3.10 1.21 3.12 .116 table 6 shows the results of analysis of covariance for grammar achievement as a function of gender. table 6. analysis of covariance for grammar achievement as a function of gender, using proficiency level as a covariate source df ms f p proficiency level 1 64.64 58.97 .000 gender 1 .031 .029 .866 error 227 1.09 it is clearly seen from this table that there is virtually no difference between boys and girls remained after differences proficiency levels are controlled (p = .866). this finding implies that strategies can be acquired regardless of gender and there is no inner superiority for males or females in 134 indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n learning and using them. in order to find any probable relationship between language attainment and the frequency of grammar strategy use, pearson productmoment correlation coefficient was used. the descriptive statistics are shown in table 7. table 7. descriptive statistics for language attainment and grammar strategy use mean std. deviation n questionnaire 86.19 16.54 230 test 25.75 7.06 230 then, the results of the pearson product moment correlation is shown in table 8. table 8. pearson product correlation gls questionnaire opt test gls questionnaire pearson correlation 1 .867** sig. (2-tailed) .000 n 230 230 opt test pearson correlation .867** 1 sig. (2-tailed) .000 n 230 230 **correlation is significant ar the 0.01 level (2-tailed) as table 8 indicates, the correlation of the two visualization scores is very high (r = .86, p< .001), so it can be concluded that higher frequency of the use of varying strategies results in higher language attainment. further, in order to examine the differences among students with different proficiency levels regarding the frequency of gls use, one way anova was run. the descriptive statistics of anova test are shown in table 9. while the results of anova test are shown in table 10. table 9. descriptive statistics for anova test n mean std. deviation std. error beginner 101 3.01 1.11 .110 elementary 92 3.60 .92 .096 intermediate 37 4.21 .58 .095 table 10. anova test for three proficiency levels sum of squares df mean square f sig between groups 42.730 2 21.36 22.64 .000 within groups 214.144 227 .943 as can be seen in table 10, there exists a significant difference among three proficiency groups regarding the frequency of grammar learning strategy use (p<.000). to find out where the exact difference existed, a post-hoc scheffe test was run, the results of which are shown in table 11. 135 indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n table 11. post-hoc scheffe test mean difference (i-j) std. error sig. begin elem -.58889* .13998 .000 inter -1.19641* .18665 .000 elem begin .58889* .13998 .000 inter -.60752* .18908 .006 inter begin 1.19641* .18665 .000 elem .60752* .18908 .006 as can be seen in table 11, all three groups are significantly different from each other; however, the difference between intermediate and elementary groups is less significant when compared to the difference between each one and the beginner group. finally, to find out the most frequently used strategies by good learners, descriptive analysis was run on intermediate students’ collected data. findings are categorized in table 12. table 12. good language learners’ most frequently used strategies males mean std. deviation females mean std. deviation strategy number item 35 3.88 1.26 item 16 5.06 8.33 item14 3.88 1.11 item 15 4.41 .553 item 31 3.76 1.09 item 35 4.33 .963 item 9 3.64 1.03 item 20 4.33 .865 item 32 3.64 .93 item 30 4.25 .944 item 6 3.58 1.05 item 7 4.16 .816 item 7 3.58 1.22 item 9 4.12 1.15 item 18 3.41 1.37 item 21 4.00 1.05 item 5 3.35 .93 item 24 3.91 1.10 item 34 3.35 1.22 item 32 3.87 .899 as it can be seen in table 12, the first 10 strategies differ from each other. although both groups seem to use all kind of strategies, but cognitive strategy (item 5, 6, 9, 14, 16, 18, 24) is used more frequently. regarding the difference in frequency of strategy use by students’ of varying proficiency level, two main point can be discussed. it has been shown through years that the good language learners use more strategies when compared to poor ones (o'malley & chamot, 1990; oxford, 2001). thus, it is logical to conclude that intermediate learners, having tested more ways to learn language, use more helpful strategies compared to elementary and beginner ones. in addition, the process of language learning is a complex one which needs different strategies in varying levels. it seems that in basic levels dependency on certain types of strategies like socio-affective ones is of vital importance, since they help new learners overcome main impediments. this heavy dependency on certain and vital type of strategies may result in rare use of other strategies and that is why great difference is seen in frequency of use of strategies in varying proficiency levels. the findings of this study may prove helpful for other efl learners and teachers all over the world whose educational system is based on memorization rather than analyzing and synthesizing new concepts. in fact, gaining higher language and academic achievement is a function of using varying cognitive, metacognitive, and socio-affective strategies. being 136 indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n dependent on certain types of strategy would not help students grow their knowledge in various aspects of language or any other scientific field. along with efl students, the instructors shall get familiar with different types of strategies to help both themselves and students use them in learning process. teachers with good knowledge of strategies can assign homework and projects which need certain type of strategies to be carried out. this technique is more useful in contexts where students are not interested in using specific type of strategy for the sake of convenience. a good example for grammar learning strategy is writing an email or a letter which is not a cherished learning strategy by learners but is, at the same time, very useful. the last implication concerns authorities and authors of school books. in an educational system, it is the responsibility of higher authorities to teach different strategies to teachers and learners. in fact, an educational system should provide students not only with resources to be studies but also with techniques and strategies that should be used to gain proper results. in this regard, authors are suggested to take benefit of provided strategy categories and dedicate certain sections of books to introduce useful learning strategies following proper exercises. in this way, both teachers and learners will become aware of the strategies and will modify their studying method which in turn can elevate the quality of educational system. all in all, although different strategies are used by iranian efl learners, it seems necessary to train the teachers before asking them to teach students how to deal with a foreign language grammar. conclusion oxford (2001) states that learning strategies “make learning easier, faster, more enjoyable, more self-directed, more effective, and more transferable to new situations” (oxford, 1990, p. 8) when certain conditions about strategies were met. as this study indicated, although efl learners use different grammar learning strategies; the variety and frequency of its use is not satisfying. the main reason for low frequency of use is that students are not formally familiar with different types of strategies. thus, as oxford (2001) points out, teachers should draw upon a wide range of instructional approaches to address the different learning styles and strategies of their students. the strategy instruction can be provided either explicitly; for instance, by raising students’ awareness about the strategies that distinguish high grammar achievers from low grammar achievers, or implicitly by asking students to perform a task. since in iran grammar is the base part of any english class in high schools and one of the main parts of any english test, teaching grammar learning strategies is highly recommended to help language learners gain better results. references cohen, a. d., & aphek, e. 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(1983). fundamental concepts of language teaching. oxford: oxford university press. 138 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 97 a study correlation between students’grammar mastery, their writing and listening comprehension achievement sanday jamaludin english language education department, faculty of education pancasakti university, tegal indonesia email: sandayjamalusin@gmail,com dede nurdiawati english education department, faculty of educational sciences and teacher’s training peradaban university, brebes indonesia email: dedenurdiawati7@gmail.com apa citation: jamaludin, s. & nurdiawati, d. (2021). a study correlation between students’ grammar mastery, their writing and listening comprehension. indonesian efl journal. 7(1), 97-104. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i1.4020 received: 29-09-2020 accepted: 27-11-2020 published:30-01-2021 introduction english is a foreign language in indonesia which is learned in almost all academic levels. in learning english, there are four language skills to be mastered. in indonesia, english is taught since elementary school, although in the curriculum 2013 english is taught only for junior high school and senior high school, there are some elementary schools where english is taught to their students. english itself is used for national examination in junior high school and senior high school. since the pandemics is still going on whether like or dislike the students must practice their listening skills, writing skills and also grammar by themselves. listening is a challenging skill for many efl learners. they seem to do the assignment without showing good comprehension on their answers. this research aims to find out the students' problems in listening comprehension and identify the factors contributing to the problems. listening comprehension is an active skill that has many processes. the problems which had been analyzed in this research deals with academic learning that is the students’ problem in listening comprehension which can be measured and known by the lecturer. the active skill produces the language. the learners know how to express the language. meanwhile, according to nurdianingsih and purnama (2017), writing is a complex process of an activity that allows one in transforming thoughts, constructing ideas, discovering meaning and organizing them into sentences and paragraphs which focuses on content first using the appropriate language through several stages rehearsing, drafting, and revising. writing required not only cognitive aspect but also affective aspect that could influence students. alnufaie & grenfell (cited in nurdianingsih and purnama, 2013) writing is abstract: listening and writing are the challenging skill for efl learners. it aims to find out the students' problems in listening a nd wr i ti n g c omprehension through the grammar mastery. the population of this research is 70 students which are divided into three classes. in taking sample from the population, the researchers selected randomly 10 students from each class so there will be 30 students on joining it, mostly they got some problems with grammar and listening also writing. from that case, we try to make a correlation between the listening comprehension and writing achievement through the grammar mastery. from the whole of actions that we had conducted, we have some great result that they have improved their abilities. it is connecting each other. it means that the three variables is strong enough. the conclusion that can be drawn based on the findings of this research is there is positive correlation between students’ grammar mastery and their writing achievement. in other words, the better students’ grammar mastery, the better their writing and listening comprehension achievement will be. keywords: a study correlation; grammar mastery; writing; listening comprehension sanday jamaludin & dede nurdiawati a study correlation between students’ grammar mastery, their writing and listening comprehension 98 claimed to be an emotional as much a cognitive activity. its affective constituents including emotions, apprehension and motivation influence all stages of the writing process. yavuz et.al (2015) the 7th world conference on educational sciences stated for language teachers the main problem is either not to know what to do with the listening skills or absolute obedience to the course book they have selected. if they cannot adopt, edit or change listening activities for their learner, the listening skill becomes the main anxiety source for them and instead of supporting the learners with a kind of comprehensible input it may become the reason for learners’ discouragement. the solution of making listening skills digestible for learners is in two ways: at word level and sentence level. horvathova (2014) stated that there are also skillrelated strategies that cut across all four skill-areas, such as vocabulary or grammar learning. learners need to learn new words or new grammar structures to be able to understand them when they hear them, while others are needed for speaking or writing. receptive strategies-aural reception (listening) and visual reception (reading)-involve identifying the context and knowledge of the world relevant to it, activating in the process what are thought to be appropriate schemata. productive strategies-oral production (speaking) and written production (writing)-involve mobilizing resources, balancing between different competences exploiting strengths and underplaying weaknesses-in order to match the available potential to the nature of the task. based on some definitions above, grammar is an important aspect of writing and listening comprehension skills and it is not easy to study, even for college students. many students think that grammar is difficult because there are many rules in usage. based on the explanation above, we know that grammar is one of the language aspects writing is one of the language skills that have an important role. writing cannot be separated from our lives, especially in daily activities such as when we want to make status in social media, dairy books, notes, or assignments for students. there are some things that must be expressed and one of them is how a sentence is arranged just like the other languages, english has also patterns to make sentences in other words, we need grammar in writing. garrison (cited in omar, 2019) stated that writing is what you have in your mind to say and your search for the right combinations of words to say it. bartholome (cited in omar, 2019) believes that writing is “a solitary activity and writers are limited by the assumptions they carry with them to the act of writing. they are limited, that is, by the limits of their ability to imagine what writing is and how writers behave. the challenges of writing at university is often difficult based on allen and britton (cited in omar, 2019) not only for the learner; for some kind of writing, in fact the difficulties may actually increase as the writer becomes more proficient. for english students especially in pancasakti university, grammar, writing and listening comprehension are the subjects which must be learned simultaneously but a lot of students find the hardness in learning them. we take the thirdsemester students of english education program teacher training and education faculty at pancasakti university as the object of the research. the third-semester students’ of english department have learned listening comprehension, writing and grammar, then the writer intends to study the correlation between, the students’ grammar mastery and their writing also listening comprehension achievement. grammar in writing, grammar is the basic knowledge on structure for making the good sentences. it has some text meaning and contextual meaning. from the writing and listening comprehension, based on those statements the grammar and writing also listening comprehension are related on making the great sentences. according to nurdianingsih and purnama (2017), it is a multi-functional view of language in which each meta fiction assigns a structure to the clause. systemic functional grammar view language as a r e s o u r c e for making meaning. this grammar attempts to describe language in actual use and so focuses on text and their context. there are three types of meaning within grammatical structures in grammar as resource for making meaning, they are experiential/ideational meaning, interpersonal meaning, and textual meaning. textual meaning is relevance to the context: both the preceding (and following) text, and the context of situation. the textual function of the clause is that of constructing a message. based on that statement, grammar include the important component that we need to make a good indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 99 writing. in addition to these definitions of grammar, weaver divides grammar into two definitions. first, grammar is a description of the syntax of a language, and the second is a set of rules or prescription of how to use language. based on the some definition of the experts, the writer conclude that grammar has two definition as grammar is structure (syntax) of phrase and sentences that considered it s order in language, and the second is a set prescription of how to use language. grammar especially in structural there are about twelve tenses that to be causing the hardness of students to learn grammar even when they will start to write. as many of the tenses, grammar needs to practice and pratice. writing according to arbain (2017), writing is a language skill that is used for indirect communication. the students can communicate their ideas and thoughts to others through written form such as letter, message, or invitation for communication. writing is not language. language is a complex system residing in our brain which allows us to produce and interpret utterances. writing involves making an utterance visible. our cultural tradition does not make this distinction clearly. thomas, gerde, piesta, logan, bailet, and zettler-greeley (2020) believed early writing is comprised of related, yet distinct, component skills; procedural knowledge; conceptual knowledge; and generative knowledge. procedural knowledge, reflecting transcription skills includes both handwriting (i.e. letter formation). conceptual knowledge includes a child’s understanding of concept related to print (e.g. relation between verbal and written output. generative knowledge, composing, captures how children generate ideas for what to write (e.g. selection of words). writing is an activity of pour ideas into paper. in daily activities, we often find some kind of writing, such as newspaper, magazine, novel, dictionary, even status in social media. writing is not to be something hard, not everyone has good skills in writing but it can be learned. the writing process is a learned skill. it comes from many hours spent writing a lot. it comes from a mind-set that whenever you write, you consider not only what you will write about but also how you will write well (calkins & ehrenworth, 2016). in english skills, writing is one of the hardest after skills to do mostly for students in indonesia. in addition, writing is a system of graphic symbols that can be used to convey meaning. here is the topics related to the writing system as follows; alphabet, graphemic, handwriting, ideogram, language, and letter. also writing is the act of composing a text and they are topics related to composition as follows; academic writing, the advantages of slow, reading and slow writing, basic writing, business writing, collaborative writing, composition-rhetoric, drafting, online writing, overwriting, prewriting, revision, technical writing, writer, writing process, your writing: private and public. writing is an important learning activity in expressing opinions about a certain topic, in reorganizing our opinions about a topic and in partly discovering our ideas and dream. the learner should be prevented from copying the information written by their lecturer; rather, they should be given the opportunity to make use of their ability to think so that they can write using their own voice of expression. the lecturer also needs to establish an appropriate learning environment and must encourage students to become engaged inn writing activity. listening comprehension bano (2017) stated that listening involves understanding a speaker’s accent or pronunciation, his/her grammar and vocabulary, and grasping his/her meaning. according to brown and yule (cited in gilakjani & sabouri, 2016), listening comprehension means that a person understands what he/she has heard through hearing and understand it. there are four skills taught in the efl classroom, reading, writing, speaking, and listening. they are all very important skills in the efl classroom. but many researchers believe that the most important two skills are listening then speaking. therefore, teaching the listening skill should be considered an important component of the language learning. mart, et al (cited in gilakjani & sabouri, 2016) express that there are three types of strategies in listening comprehension. they are cognitive, metacognitive, and socio-affective. cognitive strategy related to understanding input in short term memory or long term memory for later use. metacognitive strategy are management techniques to control their learning through planning, checking, and changing. meanwhile, socio-affective strategies are techniques sanday jamaludin & dede nurdiawati a study correlation between students’ grammar mastery, their writing and listening comprehension 100 that listeners use to cooperate with others, to check their comprehension and reduce their appreciation. according to bingol, et al. (cited in gilakjani & sabouri, 2016), major problems that learners face with listening comprehension are (1) quality of recorded materials, (2) cultural difference, (3) accent, (4), unfamiliar vocabulary, and (5) length and speed of listening. underwood (cited in gilakjani, 2016), there are some barriers to effective listening comprehension process. first, listeners cannot control the speed of speech. second, listeners cannot have words repeated and this can cause critical difficulties for them. third, listeners may face an unfamiliar word which can stop them and think about the meaning of that word and miss the next part of speech. fourth, listeners may lack of contextual knowledge. fifth, it is not very easy for listeners to concentrate on the listening text. graham (cited in gilakjani & sabouri, 2016) says that there are some other factors that increase learner’s listening comprehension problems such as restricted vocabulary, poor grammar, and misinterpretation about listening task. many english students believe that the most difficult things in listening comprehension is that the lack control the speed of the speaker by the students when listening activity. there is an impossible thing for the listeners to control the speed from source which cannot be controlled. such as, the students are listening to a radio or television broadcast, here they cannot ask for a slower speed through the media. secondly, the inability to get repetition often becomes problem for the learner. no repetition is the condition the listeners must get when listening to an uncontrolled source because listeners cannot always listen to the speakers for repeating the speech. they cannot ask for repetition when listening to the radio or watching television, and etc. puspitasari (2019) was to find out the effect of grammar mastery toward student’s writing skill. the result said that (1) both grammars learned by the students and critical thinking ability have effects on the student’s writing skill. this was evidence of the value both independent variables are f count = 339.539 and sig as big as 0.000 < 0.05. (2) the grammar learnt by the students has effect on the student’s writing skill, this was evidence by t count = 26.037 and sig as big as 0.000 < 0.05. (3) critical thinking ability has no effect on the student’s descriptive writing skill, this was evidence by t count = 0.858 and sig as big as 0.393 > 0.05. etfita (2019) was to find out the correlation between student’s grammar mastery and news writing ability of the fourth semester students of english language education at universitas islam riau. she concluded that the result of calculating correlation between student’s grammar mastery and their achievement in news writing was r = 0.874. it meant that there was a significant correlation between student’s mastery of grammar and news writing ability. fatikhah, martono, & asrori (2018) were found the result of their analysis of correlation between learning motivation, vocabulary mastery and listening comprehension. they concluded that there was positive correlation between (1) learning motivation and listening comprehension, (2) vocabulary mastery and listening comprehension, (3) learning motivation, vocabulary mastery simultaneously, and listening comprehension. it cannot be neglected that learning motivation and vocabulary mastery give contribution toward listening comprehension. method the quantitative approach was used to describe the characteristic of the data. in this case, the qualitative research is a case study because of its characteristics and result descriptive data. this study attempts to explore certain information about a phenomenon or case of a subject. the case of this research was students’ correlational study between students’grammar mastery and their writing and listening comprehension achievement at pancasakti university tegal. the population of this research is 70 students which are divided into three classes. in taking sample from the population, the researchers selected randomly 10 students from each class so there will be 30 students. it is analyzed by using pearson correlation product moment (r) and from the result of that analysis the value of r is 0. 503. meanwhile the value of coefficient table with 5% level of significance and n 30 lies in 0.361. result and discussion result based on the data which have been submitted, the writers analyzed the score lists of all the students from three classes that consist of 70 students. because of that, the writers took 30 students from three classes consisting of 10 students in every class. the writers didn’t do the validity and reliability of indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 101 the data since must be trusted because the data is from the legal institutions and the data already exist, thus the writer can not manipulate them. for this research, the writers calculate the r-test to determine there is correlation between two variables and answers the hypothesis. here is the data that the writers have been gotten. table 1. the score list of grammar (x) and writing and listening (y) no name score grammar (x) writing and listening (y) 1 la 72,6 78,6 2 sh 80 85,7 3 my 79,5 84,7 4 rz 78 82,5 5 cd 73 77,5 6 at 81 80,2 7 rs 81,5 81,8 8 dc 72,6 76,3 9 al 86,4 81 10 nr 81,5 81,2 11 au 86,4 79,8 12 sa 72,6 84 13 ac 72 79,5 14 dd 73 78,3 15 da 74,6 82,4 16 il 72,6 77,8 17 ta 72 75 18 tn 77,5 86,6 19 ma 72,6 72,1 20 mj 73 79,1 21 eo 72,6 72,5 22 si 72,6 75,1 23 nl 86,4 85,7 24 nn 72,6 75,5 25 fa 76,6 77,1 26 ll 75,1 79,4 27 cs 70 70,5 28 da 74,5 77,6 29 md 72 77,3 30 va 81 81,2 table 2. the table for calculating the formula no name x y x² y² xy 1 la 72,6 78,6 5270,76 6177,96 5706,36 2 sh 80 85,7 6400 7344,49 6856 3 my 79,5 84,7 6320,25 7174,09 6733,65 4 rz 78 82,5 6084 6806,25 6435 5 cd 73 77,5 5329 6006,25 5657,5 6 at 81 80,2 6561 6432,04 6496,2 7 rs 81,5 81,8 6642,25 6691,24 6666,7 8 dc 72,6 76,3 5270,76 5821,69 5539,38 9 al 86,4 81 7464,96 6561 6998,4 10 nr 81,5 81,2 6642,25 6593,44 6617,8 11 au 86,4 79,8 7464,96 6368,04 6894,72 12 sa 72,6 84 5270,76 7056 6098,4 13 ac 72 79,5 5184 6320,25 5724 14 dd 73 78,3 5329 6130,89 5715,9 sanday jamaludin & dede nurdiawati a study correlation between students’ grammar mastery, their writing and listening comprehension 102 15 da 74,6 82,4 5565,16 6789,76 6147,04 16 il 72,6 77,8 5270,76 6052,84 5648,28 17 ta 72 75 5184 5625 5400 18 ta 77,5 86,6 6006,25 7499,56 6711,5 19 ma 72,6 72,1 5270,76 5198,41 5234,46 20 mj 73 79,1 5329 6256,81 5774,3 21 eo 72,6 72,5 5270,76 5256,25 5263,5 22 si 72,6 75,1 5270,76 5640,01 5452,26 23 nl 86,4 85,7 7464,96 7344,49 7404,48 24 nn 72,6 75,5 5270,76 5934,3 5481,3 25 fa 76,6 77,1 5867,56 5944,41 5905,86 26 ll 75,1 79,4 5640,01 6304,36 5962,94 27 cs 70 70,5 4900 4970,25 4935 28 da 74,5 77,6 5550,25 6021,76 5781,2 29 md 72 77,3 5184 5975,29 5565,6 30 va 81 81,2 6561 6593,44 6577,2 amount 2285,8 2376 174839,9 188890,6 181384,9 n = 30 ∑x = 2.285,8 ∑y =2376 ∑x²=174.839,9 ∑y²=188.890,6 ∑xy= 181.384,9 rxy = 𝑁∑𝑥𝑦− (∑𝑥)(∑𝑦) √(𝑁∑𝑥2−(∑𝑥)²(𝑁∑𝑌2−(∑𝑌)2) rxy = 30(181.384,9)−(2.285,8)(2.376) √⦋30(174.839,9−(5.224.881,64)⦌⦋30(188.890,6−(5.645.376)⦌ rxy = 5.441.547−5.431.060,8 √(5.245.197−5.224.881,64)(5.666.718−5.645.376) rxy = 10.486,2 √(20.315,36)(21.342) rxy = 10.486,2 √433.570.413,12 rxy = 10.486,2 20.822,3536 rxy=0,503 based on the calculation above, it was shown that ro = 0,503 and r table = 0,361 with a standard of significant 5%. the value of correlation product moment is bigger than r table (0,503> 0,361). it means, the alternative hypothesis (ha) of the research is accepted, but ho is rejected. thus there is positive correlation between students’ grammar mastery and their writing and listening achievement. sarwono (cited in nasution 2017) says that correlational analysis is used to see the strength and weakness of the dependent variable and to determine the degree of relationship between two variables, we must judge it based on the criterion correlation coefficient interval as follows: 0: there is no correlation between the two variables > 0 0.25: correlation is very weak > 0.25 0.5: correlation is sufficient > 0.5 0.75: strong correlation > 0.75 0.99: correlation is very strong 1: perfect correlation meanwhile based on the classification of the table of pearson correlation coefficient values as follows: table 3. pearson correlation coefficient values coefecient interval level correlation 0,80 – 1,000 0,60 – 0,799 0,40 – 0,599 0,20 – 0,399 0,00 – 0,199 perfect very strong strong low very low based on the criterion above, the correlation of the data is strong because the coefficient value is 0,503 in coefficient interval 0,40 – 0,599. it indicates, there is strong positive correlation between students’ grammar mastery also their writing and listening achievement. discussion indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 103 this research, the writers used secondary data from english department of pancasakti university that form a score list. the documents of final semester score are taken from grammar and writing scores, in which grammar final test score is meant to measure the variable of grammar mastery, and writing final test score is meant to represent the students’ writing achievement. the writers examined the correlation between the two variables through the final test score of grammar and writing lessons by using microsoft excel and pearson correlation product moment (r) as the statistical procedure for this research and from the result of that analysis, it is found that the value of r is 0.530. meanwhile, the value of the coefficient the table with 5% level of significance and n 30lies in 0.361. therefore, the value of coefficient correlation (r) is higher than coefficient table (0.503> 0.361). from that inferential statistic, the writer concluded that there is positive correlation between students’ grammar mastery and their writing achievement. it is found that at the interval coefficient or the criterion that determines the degree of relationship between variables, the value of r 0.503 lies in between 0.400.599. it means that the degree of relationship between two variables is strong enough. the conclusion that can be drawn based on the findings of this research is there is possitive correlation between students’ grammar mastery and their writing achievement. in other words, the better students’ grammar mastery, the better their writing achievement will be. conclusion as previously explained in the previous chapter, the research aim is to find out the correlation between students’ grammar mastery also their writing and listening achievement through data analyzing. the score of grammar and writing also listening are considered the result of the learning process. to determine of the correlation, the writer calculates the sample use pearson correlation product moment, and the result shows the value of pearson correlation product moment (r) is 0,503 and table coefficient 0,361 in standard of significant 5%. the value of r is bigger than table coefficient (0,503 > 0,361) it means there is a positive correlation between students’ mastery and their writing also listening achievement, and the value of r 0.503 lies in between 0.40-0.599. it means that the degree of relationship between two variables is strong enough. based on the statement, the increasing of grammar score is followed by writing and listening scores in other words, students that are good at grammar they will be good at writing and listening. reference arbain. (2017). students narrative essay construction ability. jele (journal of english education) 3(1). bano. (2017). towards understanding listening comprehension in efl classroom: the case of the saudi learners. english language teaching. canadian center of science and education. 10(6). calkins, l & ehrenworth, m. (2016). growing extraordinary writers: leadership decisions to raise the level of writing across a school and a district. the reading teacher. 70(1), pp. 7-18. etfita, f. (2019). the correlation between students’ grammar mastery and news writing ability. alishlah; jurnal pendidikan. 11(1), pp. 58-70. fatikhah, e. n., martono, & asrori, m. (2018). the correlation between learning motivation, vocabulary mastery, and listening comprehension. english education journal. 6(2), doi: https//doi.org/10.20961/eed.v6i2.35951. gilakjani, a.p., & sabouri, n.b. (2016). learner’s listening comprehension difficulties in english language learning; a literature review. english language teaching. 9(6), pp. 123-133. horvathova, b. (2014). implementing language learning strategies into a series of second foreign language learning textbooks. journal of language and culture education. 2(1). marleni, l. 2016. improving students’ listening comprehension by using movies at 5th grade xi ipa of sman 2 bangkinang. bangkinang: research center and community services of stkip pahlawan tuanku tambusai nasution, m. k. (2017). the use of learning method in improving students’ outcomes. studia didaktika; jurnal ilmu bidang pendidikan. 11(1), pp. 9-16. nurdianingsih, f. & purnama, y.i. (2017). thematic progression pattern: a technique to improve students’writing skill viewed from writing apprehension. journal of linguistic and english teaching. 2(2), pp.237-247. omar, y. z. (2019). pedagogical grammar in context to enrich english language learner’s academic writing. international journal of linguistics, literature and translation (ijllt). 2(3) doi: 10.32996/ijllt.2019.2.3.24. puspitaloka, n. (2019). the effects of grammar mastery and critical thinking towards student’s descriptive writing skill. elt in focus. 2(1), pp. 19-28. sanday jamaludin & dede nurdiawati a study correlation between students’ grammar mastery, their writing and listening comprehension 104 thomas, l. j. g, gerde, h. k., piesta, s. b., logan, j. a. r., bailet, l. l., zettler-greeley, c. m. (2020). the early writing skills of children identified as at risk for literacy difficulties. early childhood research quarterly. 51, pp.392-402. yavuz, f., et al. (2015). problems and activities in listening skills in efl classrooms ; from tradition to a more comprehensible input. procedia-social and behavioral science. (197) 930-932, doi: 10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.07.275. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 287 prototype design flipbook media in teaching grammar “simple past tense” lilik purwaningsih english education department, universitas doktor nugroho magetan, indonesia lilikpurwaningsih@udn.ac.id arie hadianti english education department, universitas doktor nugroho magetan, indonesia ariehadianti@gmail.com marsini elementary school teacher study program, universitas doktor nugroho magetan, indonesia marsinimarsini341@gmail.com apa citation: purwaningsih, l., hadianti, a., & marsini. (2022). prototype design flipbook media in teaching grammar “simple past tense”. indonesian efl journal, 8(2), 287-294. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v8i2.6490 received: 01-03-2022 accepted: 14-05-2022 published: 31-07-2022 introduction the development of science and technology is increasingly encouraging efforts to update the utilization of technological results in the learning process. teachers are required to be able to use the devices that can provide by the school and not closed the possibility that the devices are by following the development and demands of the times. the device is media that will be used by the teachers as an intermediary to students in delivering learning materials. this media has its own meaning in the teaching and learning process. as presenters and distributors of messages, learning media in certain cases can represent teachers in presenting learning information to students (maárif & putri, 2022). therefore, verbal visual media the first drawing can be considered a stick figure. the instructional materials are presented visually to make them easier for pupils to understand. without a detail portion, that is a simple depiction of the main thing. second, paintings are the result of someone's artistic and symbolic representation of a thing or situation. (shadlikbaeva, 2022). the successful of learning support efl learners to have the occurrence of learning and be able to finish his course. along with successful efl learners, the development and advancement of learning media technology, instructional has increased from various sides, balanced with its usefulness in the world of education (perdana, wibowo & budiarto, 2021). learning media technology nowadays are better chosen according to student’s need and interest. teachers are gradually incorporating network-based learning activities into their curriculum (fierro et al, 2021). independent learning and staying at home at length can lead the reduction of students’ motivation to learn (utami & nur,2021). thus, a good and persistent collaboration between teacher and abstract: advances in science and technology with the help of existing applications in people's lives today have a great impact on the quality of human resources, especially in the field of education. therefore, educators must be able to propose innovations to improve the quality of education. flipbook-style teaching materials allow teachers to convey the teaching material clearly and well without being boring. by using research and development method (borg and gall), the researchers investigate the validity and practicality flipbook media in teaching grammar “simple past tense”. in collecting the data, researchers conducted both two qualitative data and quantitative data. analyzing the data, the researchers came to the concise that the developed product had a high level of validity achieved 84% and the practicality reached 86.5%. in nutshell, the flipbook learning media is effective and feasible to use in learning english simple past tense. keywords: prototype design; flipbook media; simple past tense. mailto:lilikpurwaningsih@udn.ac.id mailto:ariehadianti@gmail.com mailto:marsinimarsini341@gmail.com lilik purwaningsih, arie hadianti, & marsini prototype design flipbook media in teaching grammar “simple past tense” 288 learner is demanded so that learning objects can still be achieved suitably (novitasari & wijayati, 2020). the condition at once is a challenge for teacher to be more creative and skilled in developing their teaching methods (pratiwi, 2021). based on the results of observations in june 2021 at smpn 1 ngariboyo, the teaching and learning process was carried out online due to the covid 19 pandemic. the interview’s result with english teachers, it is found that the material which is delivered to students experienced obstacles. this brought great barrier because almost all students misunderstanding of the learning material provided by the teacher during online learning. the difficulties in understanding material is tend to be grammar especially in mastering tenses. knowledge of grammar helps the student correct mistakes and improve not only in communication but also in written work (oranggaga, 2022). grammar is considered to be the backbone of any language and the foundation for communcation (salman & hazem, 2020). grammar mastery in the realm of writing skills according to facts at smp 2 ngariboyo, most students hardly ever follow the writing stages in their writings. they often copied texts from the students who were good at english subject. sometimes they just rearranged jumbled sentences given by the teacher or taken from the textbooks. when the students were asked to write, they were reluctant to write even a very simple text, and the products of their writings were far from the expectation. actually, students were expected to be able to write a good text with good content and coherence, but in fact, they could not do it well. students did not have any ideas to write. in other words, they had blank minds when they were asked to write a text. therefore, some media were needed to bring out their ideas. the bridge which can be uncover the problem in teaching grammar during covid 19 pandemic is digital learning as delivery in the form of digital media (for example text or images) via the internet; and, the learning content and teaching methods provided are to improve student learning and aim to improve teaching effectiveness or promote personal knowledge and skills (sousa & rocha, 2019). in the era of information and communication technology (ict) that has developed rapidly as it is currently possible to be used in language learning in the form of multimedia-based learning development in a computer context such as flip book (prasetyono & hariyono, 2020; rusli & antonius, 2019; riyanto et al., 2020). several previous research revealed that the use of digital books packaged in the form of flipbooks has a positive impact on improving the quality of the process and student learning outcomes (isnaeni & agustina, 2018). flipbook as a multimedia contain combination of various media (file format) in the form of text, images, graphics, animation, and other which are package into digital files and use to convey messages to users (aqidatul, 2018). however, the application used in this study is flip pdf corporate. flip pdf corporate is software designed to convert pdf files to the back pages of digital publications. the software can change the look of a pdf to be interesting as a book. in corporate pdf files, we can add images, audio, video files, and it can also add files as quizzes. while the output or output of this software can be html, exe, zip, and app. html output can be uploaded to the website so that it can be view online. exe output can use when you want to save it on a cd. zip output can use to send files by email. thus, the opportunity to use flipbook-based digital teaching materials shows very positive results when applied to the learning process (roesmintoyo & budiarto, 2022). viewing the background, researchers are interesting to develop flipbook media as a prototype design to teach grammar as one of english language components. method this research uses a research and development strategy. research and development in a world of education aim to bridge between educational researchers and developers. the research procedure by the researcher in this development was taken from ten steps by borg & gall with limitations. given the limited time and funds owned by the researcher, the steps are simplified into four development steps, including: (1) research and initial information collection, (2) planning, (3) initial product format development, (4) field trials. collecting data in this study in the form of test learning results and student questionnaires, including: (1) test learning result, (2) questionnaire, and (3) interview (simanjuntak, 2018) indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 289 technique of analyzing data are using qualitative data analysis and qualitative data qualitative. this study is designed "one-shot case study" that is by design there is a group given treatment/treatment, and then observed the results (sugiyono, 2019). in this study, the research variables are independent, therefore the research hypothesis does not form comparisons or relationships between two or more variables. the design pattern of this research is as follows: figure 1. one-shot case study design pattern note: x = treatment given (independent variable) o = observation (dependent variable) the results of this descriptive analysis are used to determine the level of accuracy, effectiveness, and product development in the form of media flipbook development as a learning medium simple past tense in improving the writing skills of grade viii junior high school students. here is the formula used to know the feasibility of the product (tsaniyah, 2018): p = x 100% note: p : wanted presentation ∑xi : the number of answers is the ideal value for one item ∑x : number of answers 100% : constant number while the criteria of feasibility assessment of developing products use the following value criteria: table 1. learning media eligibility criteria percentage qualification criteria 90 – 100% very valid not revised 75 – 89% valid not revised 65 – 74% quite valid not revised 55 – 64% not valid revision 0 – 54% very not valid revision source: (tsaniyah, 2018) results and discussion results prototype design flipbook media in teaching grammar simple past tense has gone through the stages need analysis, material development, expert validation, try out, and final product. the result are achieved as follows: need analysis need analysis shows that the needs of students in english are expecting an innovation which is encourage them in expressing the idea both orally and written form (mahbub, 2021). based on observation found that during the online class students were not so fond and not so passionate about english lessons. the students think that just reading textbooks does not guarantee they can improve their skills in english lessons. the students also said that they needed more explanation, in learning english. furthermore, english taught a basic understanding. thus, students find it difficult to understand because they are constrained by their incompetence in english. material development the effort in making students enthusiastic in online learning activities is to develop learning media using flip pdf corporate flipbook maker. this media can access by students through their cellphones and can access anywhere. it is supposed to help students in learning english, especially the simple past tense material. in the progress of the media flipbook maker in learning english, the researcher used the borg and gall development model, which consists of 10 stages. therefore, researcher took 4 stages to 10 stages is due to pandemic. here are the steps performed by the researcher: research and preliminary information collection at this stage, the researcher collects information of supporting theory for the material to be made. the sources used by the researcher are the english curriculum on core competency standards and basic competencies, english language textbooks for junior high schools, and other sources relevant to the research. planning after conducting research and collecting preinformation, the researcher made a flipbook media format that would be used. in making this product format, several components need to be included in the learning media. so, it is arranged neatly, systematically, and achieve the learning objectives. x 0 lilik purwaningsih, arie hadianti, & marsini prototype design flipbook media in teaching grammar “simple past tense” 290 figure 2. prototype flipbook media planning flowchart expert validation at the expert validation stage, the validation is carried out by media experts and material experts. the assessment of media experts and material experts is carried out by filling out a questionnaire in the form. meanwhile, the recapitulation of material expert and media validation are shown in table 2. table 2. material expert and media expert validation expert % average criteria material 100 % 90 % valid media 86 % english learning 84 % the result validation that average assessment of media expert, material expert, and learning expert show almost 90% of the criteria are valid. it can show the flipbook media in simple past tense english lesson is feasible to be used as an interactive learning media. try out the product trial was given to class viii smpn 1 ngariboyo students. this stage is carried out to determine the effectiveness of the developed product. at this stage, the researcher distributed questionnaires to 19 students. here is the percentage result on each detail consisting of 10 components: table 3. the students’ result no component (%) explanation 1. the media make it easy to learn simple past tense 82% quite easy 2. the media gives enthusiasm in learning 88% enough to give enthusiasm 3. the media make it easy to understand the material 81% enough to understand 4. the media design is interesting 91% very interesting 5. the media have attractive display and theme 89% quite interesting 6. the instructions in the media are easy to understand 84% quite easy 7. the language in the media is clear and easy to understand 81% quite clear 8. in the media, there are no find difficult words 83% enough not to find 9. the students are interest in learning with flipbook media 92% veri interesting 10. the students are feeling happy after using the flipbook media 94% very happy the product trial was given to class viii smpn 1 ngariboyo students. this stage is carried out to determine the practicality of the developed product. at this stage, the researcher distributed questionnaires to 19 students. the assessment is done by asking students to fill out the questionnaire that has been given by the researcher. the results of field trial calculations showed a validation rate percentage of 86.5%. after converting with a 5 scale conversion table, the 86.5% rate percentage is at an attractive qualifying level so this flipbook medium is worth using in simple past tense english lessons. besides questionnaires, the test is used to measure the practicality of the flipbook media. the test shown that the average value of the pre-test is 69 and the final test is 92. indeed, students’ progress in learning english simple past tense after using the media, especially writing skill are improved. the initial test was carried out after the researchers only played videos in the media before going to the explanation. the final test is carried out after students read all the material and explanations contained in the media. from the implementation of field trials class viii smpn 1 ngariboyo can be presented data in the form of the following table: table 4. pre-test and final tests result by student score first test final test total 1305 1740 average 69 92 based on the table data above, shows that the average value of the pre-test is 69 and the final test is 92. this shows that students are progressing in learning english simple past tense after using the media, especially writing skill. the value in the indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 291 data above is the student's score in the written test, at the time of delivery of the media. final product the prototype design stage of this flipbook-assisted teaching material development product are covered several steps. the steps of preparing the design of this teaching material product, including adjusting the standards of competence and basic competencies and syllabus based on the 2013 curriculum. the design of the presentation of teaching materials is arranged in sequence consisting of the front cover, table of contents, author page, material content, and problem exercises. pdf file creation has been designed before. figure 3. cover page the cover page described watch which is indicate time. in english grammar, time has substantial role in differencing the utterances or sentences on one’s intention in expressing the idea or stating their activity. the differentiate time in grammar called tenses. the material used in flipbook media is simple past tense. next page is table of content which shows us the whole component in flipbook. then, we can see the content of the flipbook. figure 4. material content pdf file creation has been designed before. the overview instruction in the creation of learning media are first, open the flipbook maker application, here researchers use flip pdf corporate application in developing learning media in the form of soft files. second, select “new project”, in the "select version" choose html5, and then click ok. select browser to enter a pdf file containing pre-prepared simple past tense english material. then select import. third, select “edit pages” to add video, audio, animation, images, and others as needed after the file imported. fourth, choose movie to add the video, audio to add sound, the image to add the image, the slide to add an image file that can be slide-shaped, and can also enter some links when needed. fifth, replace the background flipbook if you want, select “metro h5” and select the background image and then click ok. sixth, save your media after adding a few items. the first way we have to prepare an empty folder that we will use to record the output of our media files. after that selection, click “browser” then selects the empty folder that we have prepared, on the “file name” rename. in “html title” fills the name according to the pdf file name. in the "loading sequence" select html5-flash and then check to create a basic htlm version. in the “publish as” section: select the *.html then select convert, wait until the process is complete. finally, look at the folder file that we make as a place to save our flipbook files. next enter all the audio, video, or images that we import in the flipbook into our flipbook file folder. the flipbook creation process has been completed. for flipbooks to be used and accessed by every student in online learning, the next process is to upload our media files to the internet. here's how to get our flipbook online. previously we had to prepare an e-mail that is active and can still be used. next, we log into google drive to upload a flipbook folder that contains html flipbooks, audio, video, and all images imported into the flipbook. the trick, right-click on google drive we choose to upload, upload our flipbook folder and wait until the process is complete. after uploading, the next step is make our google drive the main host that provides our online flipbook access address. the first way to right-click the uploaded folder, select share. on share get a change link to anyone on the internet who has this link. the next step is to open a new tab in the browser and then lilik purwaningsih, arie hadianti, & marsini prototype design flipbook media in teaching grammar “simple past tense” 292 type "drv.tw" and enter. after opening select host on google drive, then enter the e-mail where we put our flipbook folder earlier, click allow and wait a while. after that will appear a lot of http, to remember that used is the file name of our flipbook. after that, to make sure, next step is click the name of our flipbook then will appear the appearance of our flipbook on the web. the image below includes the url of our flipbook that has been online. the url can be shared. then, shorten the url and rename it as needed we can enter on the web "https:/home.s.id" or by opening a new tap directly type s.id and then enter. once you sign in, be sure to register first. then copy-paste the url address into the available section and then select short it and then we can change the name according to our needs. after changing the name, the name of the new url can be shared to be accessed. finally, flipbook learning media on simple past tense english lessons can already be used. it can be used for class learning with html5 files and can be accessed at the time of online learning with a link https://s.id/simplepastminibook. discussion quantitative data of the research questionnaires and qualitative data of responses, suggestions, and results of interviews with teach experts (teachers in the field of study). the average assessment of media experts, materials experts, and learning experts in the table above show that almost 90% of the criteria are valid. it can show that the flipbook media in the simple past tense english lesson can and is feasible to be used as an interactive learning media. the results of learning and testing conducted on students also show that this flipbook media is easy to use. the student's questionnaire shows that the average student answers get a value of 86.5%. it indicates that students are interested in learning to use this flipbook media. from the results of the pre-test and final test, it concluded that using flipbook media is increasing students' writing skills. writing skills are an inseparable part of the entire learning process experienced by students while studying at school (indriyani & prasetyo, 2018). in improving students' writing skills, especially in simple past tense lessons, it must be explained and conveyed properly and clearly so that students' writing skills are more developed. the development result of flipbook learning media in the english simple past tense indicates that learning is feasible and effective in improving student learning outcomes. hence, the teaching and learning process that functions to explain the meaning of the message conveyed precisely and perfectly by using learning media (kustandi & darmawan 2020). the flipbook learning media developed by the researcher is an interactive learning media that contains english material, especially the simple past tense. the layout design of the flipbook is made simple yet attractive under the theory who argues that teaching materials must be attractive such as having attractive designs and layouts, so that students are interested in learning (herawati & muhtadi, 2018; sidiq & najuah, 2020). the flipbook display created by researcher consist of 21 pages with video, image, audio, and exercises related to the material. the use of video audio in flipbook is in line with the theory, which states that the material should help increase students' selfconfidence (rahmawati, irdamurni, & amini, 2019). visual image in flipbook play a pivotal role in supporting the effectiveness of teaching materials. visual image representations in textbooks are common in teaching and learning materials and are widely used in the literature in teaching english as a foreign language (efl) (elmiana, 2019). exercises on grammar is included when creating flipbook to deepen students’ understanding in rules of sentence structure. grammar as english language components are perfectly taught simultaneously with the writing context, and it is believe more effective than teaching grammar separately from four skills mufianti, susilo, gestanti & nimasari, 2019). learning materials must be contextual by the syllabus because they represent student achievement (hufri et al., 2021; nendasariruna, masjudin, & abidin, 2018; suastika & amaylyla, 2019). therefore, the learning materials in flipbook are specifically designed to reflect essential competencies, indicators, learning, and subject matter (dharmayanti, putra & paramartha, 2021). in addition, it can attract students' attention to learn english, and students' motivation will increase in participating in online english learning. this flipbook learning media is published with an output of html5 files are uploaded so it can be https://s.id/simplepastminibook indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 293 operated via a laptop or mobile phone and can be accessed anytime anywhere. learning using flipbook media developed by the researcher by using flipbook in learning activities improves student learning outcomes, motivation and attitudes (ruspitasari, munawaroh, royani & supeno 2020). the use of media in the learning process aims to arouse interest in learning, provide motivation, foster curiosity about what he sees, and provide stimulation to students to participate in the learning process in class (astutik, yuwana & hendratmo, 2021). the practicality of the use of learning media is seen from the comparison of the pre-test results and the final test of the field trial. comparison of student learning outcomes shows that there is a significant increase in student learning outcomes after using flipbook media. conclusion in brief, prototype design flipbook media arouse students’ attention in learning grammar simple past tense. moreover, the level of feasibility of flipbook learning media for english simple past tense seen from the results of a field trial validation questionnaire results obtained a value of 86.5% which means that they are at the level of valid qualification and are suitable for use as learning media because students feel interested in flipbookbased interactive learning media. furthermore, the practicality of using flipbook learning media is seen from the comparison of the results of the initial test and the final test of the field trial. indeed, the results of the initial and final tests that have been carried out by students proved that the flipbook media practically accepted by students. in addition, flipbook media has implications in increasing students' understanding and improve their writing skills on simple past tense material, students can also enrich their knowledge in the field of technology. references astutik,w. b.., yuwana, s., & hendratno. 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(2018. pengemabangan media flipbook maker pada pembelajaran ips untuk meningkatkan hasil belajar siswa kelas vii mts wahid hasyim 01 dau malang (unpublished thesis). malang. fakultas ilmu tarbiyah dan keguruan uin maulana malik ibrahim. utami, s., & nur, j. (2021). an analysis of students’ reading interest during learning from home amidst the covid-19 pandemic. ijee (indonesian journal of english education), 1(1), 140-155. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 73 an analysis phrase structure rules in anneth song lyrics rahmawati universitas prima indonesia, medan e-mail: rahmawati@unprimdn.ac.id sinta parulian lumban gaol universitas prima indonesia, medan e-mail: sintalumbangaol12@gmail.com novia damayanti br hutabarat universitas prima indonesia, medan e-mail: noviadamayanti800@gmail.com tina pandiangan universitas prima indonesia, medan e-mail: tinapandiangan316@gmail.com apa citation: rahmawati., gaol, s. p.l., hutabarat, n. d. b., & pandiangan, t. (2022). an analysis phrase structure rules in anneth song lyrics. indonesian efl journal, 8(1), pp. 73-82. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v8i1.5590 received: 26-09-2021 accepted: 27-11-2021 published: 30-01-2022 introduction linguistics is the study of language in all its forms and is thus of direct relevance to all users of language (rahmawati et al, 2019). in linguistics, the study about the sentence structures of language is syntax. syntax is the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in a particular language (chomsky, 2002:11). based on the definition above, it can be deduced that syntax is the study of the principle and arrangement of words, phrases, and clauses that form sentences based on grammatical rules. based on the big indonesian dictionary, a phrase is a combination of two or more words that are non-predictive or not related to a predicate. according to verspoor & sauter (2009:118), a phrase that contains more than a word usually has one main word that is the most important one as far as meaning is concerned. a phrase is not a sentence because the condition of a sentence must have a predicate. a phrase is formed by two or more syntactic units which are its elements in a certain form and category as well as a certain order or order. according to kim and sells (2008:22) phrases are projected from the lexical categories and divided into five types, as bellow: (1) noun phrase (np). (2) verb phrase (vp). (3) adjective phrase (ap). (4) adverb phrase (advp). (5) prepositional phrase (pp). abstract: the purpose of this study was to determine the types of phrases and the rules of phrase structure in anneth's song lyrics. researchers also want to know the extent to which students' ability to know about phrases. class ix students selected as participants consisted of 59 students at smp adventist 2 medan. the data was obtained by providing questionnaires about what phrases are, types of phrases, and what are sentences. the researcher introduced the types of phrases in the form of tables and tree diagrams. the table form is in the form of the first to the last lyrics, while the tree diagram is made by dividing the large categories into smaller levels, each word in the song lyrics is adjusted to the contents of the table so that it can form phrases and sentences. the types of phrases contained in the song are noun phrase (np), verb phrase (vp), adverb phrase (advp), adjective phrase (ap), and preposition phrase (pp). the basic phrase structure rules in the song are: s : np (aux) vp, np : {det (adj) n, pro, n (pp)}, vp : v (np) (pp) (adv), ap : a(pp), advp : aux (advp), pp : p (np). keywords: phrase; phrase structure rules; song lyrics. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i2.4564 rahmawati, sinta parulian lumban gaol, novia damayanti br hutabarat, & tina pandiangan an analysis phrase structure rules in anneth song lyrics 74 the unity between forms, categories, and the arrangement or sequence of these elements builds a structure of phrases in the language concerned. the structure that underlies a sentence or phrase is sometimes called the phrase structure or phrase marker. phrases are non-predictive word combinations. this means that the phrase consists of only one function, it can consist of a subject only, it can only consist of verbs or it can be started with a preposition. according to verspoor & sauter (2009:119), the head of a phrase is realized by a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, or preposition. in this study, the writer uses tree diagram theories to analyze sentences. tree diagrams are a sentence analysis by using the internal hierarchical structure of the sentence as generated by the set of rules (carnie, 2000:31). according to bornstein (1977:48), sentence is the principal unit of syntactic analysis which is easier to see the parts of (phrases) and subpart (part of speech) of the sentence in a tree diagram. a tree diagram of syntax can help to understand the structure of the sentence. various previous studies have been conducted regarding the utilization of phrase and phrase-structure rules. the first previous study was “syntactic analysis on sentence pattern in john denver’s song lyrics” written by christiano (2018). in result findings, the researcher used the theory of sentence patterns which was proposed by quirk and greenbaum to find out the types of sentence patterns in the song lyrics, and he used the theory of phrase structure rules from o’grady, dobrovolsky, and katamba to draw the tree diagram and represent the patterns. the second previous study was conducted by zulia fitroh (2019), entitled “a syntactical analysis of phrases used in westlife song lyrics”. the researcher used the tree diagram theory by bornstein to analyze sentence patterns and the type of phrase in westlife song lyrics. in the other previous study conducted by niswati (2018), the finding of this study show five idiomatic phrases and all of the idiomatic phrases had their own meaning that was different from their lexical meaning. more previous studies about the phrase writer’s discovered from heryana (2018) that analyze the sentence structures of rap song lyrics using tree diagram and ulfa muti’ah fuad (2021) entitled “a syntactic analysis of sentence pattern used in westlife’s song lyrics” that used tree diagram theory by bornstein to analysis the data. one way that can help readers understand phrases is by introducing song lyrics. many types of literary works have emerged in the arts, including through prose, poetry, song lyrics, and many others that were poured. however, one of these literary works attracted the writer to study the song lyrics. these days, music plays important role in human being life because every human being’s life is filled with tension. in that situation, people want to relax their minds, so in that movement to listen and sing a song to give relief to their minds. in this study, the writer selects anneth’s song lyrics as the object. anneth delliecia is the new singer under rans entertainment who has already released two songs. she is the winner of the indonesian idol junior in 2018. in this research, anneth’s second single “mungkin hari ini esok atau nanti” will be analyzed. currently, this song is a trend in indonesia. official music video “mungkin hari ini esok atau nanti”. has been 101 million viewers. this song also entered the top in platform music, such as top hits indonesia in spotify, top joox, etc. this song was also covered by many other youtubers. because this song is a trend now, the writer finds this song interesting to be researched. the lyrics of the song “maybe today, tomorrow or another day” by anneth delliecia were chosen because the lyrics in each of her songs contain phrases that can accelerate the swing of the eye from one phrase to the next and include greater use of perspective. so that readers are able to grasp a larger group of words in the form of phrases and able to follow groups of words in the form of sentences at one glance. actually, there are a lot of students outside who don't really understand the phrases. maybe many of you already know what a sentence is. but, what about phrases? so in this study, the writer aims to increase students' knowledge in understanding what phrases are and be able to analyze the structure of phrases. based on the above reasons, we intend to conduct a study on the anneth delliecia song entitled “an analysis phrase structure rules used in anneth song lyrics”. method this paper uses descriptive qualitative research. qualitative research is concerned with developing explanations of social phenomena, and it aims to help us to understand the world in which we live indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 75 and why things are the way they are (hancock, 2002). the qualitative study aims to understand something specifically, not always looking for the course and effect of something, and to deepen comprehension about something that is studied (moloeng, 2009:31). the form of description is the result of this qualitative study. in this study, the researcher analyzes a song lyric to find the phrase and the phrase structure rules that are used. afterward, the writer presents the factual result systematically, so it can be understood easily. according to ary et al., (2010:32), qualitative data generally take the form of words (descriptions, observations, impressions, recordings, and so on). arikunto (2010:3) argues that descriptive research is the study intended to investigate the situation, condition, circumstances, events, or other activities, and the result presented in the form of the research report. thus, in this study, the researcher also used a descriptive research approach so that readers understand more deeply about the phrase, be it the type of phrase, the structure of the phrase, etc. according to creswell (2007), there are three steps in analyzing the data. (1) the writer watches official music videos “ maybe today, tomorrow or another day ” from anneth who has been published by rans music on 20 october 2020 on youtube. (2) the writer then listened carefully and made a transcript of the song’s lyrics. (3) the writer translated the lyrics of the song into english. (4) after that, the writer analyzed the lyrics line by line, then coded the lyrics. after classifying the data, the next steps the writer made a table and type of phrases in anneth’s song lyrics. after that, the writer shows a tree diagram of the phrases that were used in the lyrics. and then, the writer found phrase-structure rules that were used in anneth’s song lyrics. for the last steps, researchers asked several questions through a questionnaire about phrases and sentences to the 9th-grade students in smp advent 2 medan. based on the problem statement in chapter i, the tree diagrams will prove the phrases that are used in anneth’s song lyrics. results and discussion the researcher presented the data of the phrase that were found in anneth’s song lyrics. this analysis includes the types of phrases there are used in the song lyrics and the phrase structure rules using tree diagram theory. as the guidance of this study, the researcher used the tree diagram theory by chomsky. the researchers describe the data based on the lyrics in the song “maybe today, tomorrow or another day”. the song lyrics the writer wrote down song lyrics “mungkin hari ini esok atau nanti” obtained by watching and listening to the official music video of the song on youtube rans music. while doing research, the authors found another video that relates to this song. the authors found cover video “mungkin hari ini esok atau nanti” in english version by emma heesters on her youtube account. thus the authors decided to use the cover video as a song lyrics in english. “mungkin hari ini esok atau nanti” kuhampiri, jalan yang kita lewati setiap har ikita di sini ku menanti, hadirmu 'tuk kembali, hanya kenangan yang tersisa di sini namun sekarang kau t'lahpergidan kuyakini kau takkan kembali mungkin hari ini hari esok atau nanti berjuta memori yang terpatri dalam hati ini mungkin hari ini hari esok atau nanti tak lagi saling menyapa meski kumasih harapkanmu. ku menanti, hadirmu 'tuk kembali hanya kenangan yang tersisa di sini (namun sekarang) namun sekarang kau t'lah pergi (pergi). dan kuyakini kau takkan kembali mungkin hari ini hari esok atau nanti berjuta memori yang terpatri dalam hati ini mungkin hari ini hari esok atau nanti, tak lagi saling menyapa meski kumasih harapkanmu sesungguhnya hatiku tak sanggup menerima dan lupakan s'galanya, meski ku masih harapkanmu, kurelakanmu. “maybe just today, tomorrow or another day” i’m almost on the road that we used to be on. our day is here i can’t believe it. i will always look forward to your return but till then i know the memories are all that’s left. but now you’re gone yes it’s a fact and for the first time, i know you won’t come back. rahmawati, sinta parulian lumban gaol, novia damayanti br hutabarat, & tina pandiangan an analysis phrase structure rules in anneth song lyrics 76 maybe just today tomorrow or another day. millions of memories are in my heart and always here to stay. maybe just today tomorrow or another day. even though we cannot say hi. i miss you and i’m still expecting you. honestly, my loyal heart, won’t be able to accept. and to forget everything, and always here to stay. type of phrase the researcher makes the type of phrases in mungkin hari ini esok atau nanti lyrics line by line as bellow: table 1. type of phrase no type of phrase 1 i’m almost on the road that we used to be on advp np vp s 2 our day is here i can’t believe it np vp vp s 3 i will always look forward to your return n vp s 4 but till then i know the memories are all that’s left advp np vp s 5 but now you’re gone yes it’s a fact n vp s 6 and for the first time, i know you won’t come back advp vp s 7 maybe just today tomorrow or another day advp 8 millions of memories are in my heart and always here to stay np pp advp vp s 9 even though we cannot say hi vp s 10 i miss you and i’m still expecting you n vp vp s 11 honestly my loyal heart won’t be able to accept adv np vp s 12 and to forget everything vp 13 and always here to stay vp 14 i have to let you go n vp s the analysis of phrases using tree diagram chomsky (1957) put simply, syntax studies is how to combine words into bigger linguistic units. in syntax, tree diagrams and labeled bracketing are widely used to characterize the hierarchical structure of phrases or sentences. a tree diagram could be a dimensional diagram used in generative grammar as a convenient suggest that of displaying indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 77 the internal hierarchical structure of a sentence as generated by a group or set of rules. line 1. i’m almost on the road that we used to be on. based on the tree diagram above, the sentence generally contains three types of phrases, that is adjective phrase (ap), noun phrase (np), and verb phrase (vp). ap consists of a pronoun (i) plus aux (am) plus adjective phrase (almost), np consists of the preposition (to) plus determiner (the) plus noun (road), and vp consists preposition (to) plus verb (be) plus preposition (on). the phrase structure rules of the sentence are: sap + s the pattern of the phrase structure rules above is: apnp + aux + ap, snp + np + pp + s, npp + det + n, ss + vp, snp + vp, vpp + v + p line 2: our day is here i can’t believe that based on the tree diagram above, the sentence generally contains three types of phrases, that is noun phrase (np), adverb phrase (advp), and verb phrase (vp). np consists of a noun (our day), advp consists of the auxiliary (is) plus adverb (here), and vp consists of a verb (can’t believe). the phrase structure rules of the sentence are: s  np + advp + s the pattern of the phrase structure rules above is: s  np + vp + c, advp  aux + advp line 3: i will always look forward to your return based on the tree diagram above, the sentence generally contains two types of phrases, that is noun phrase (np), and verb phrase (vp). np consists of a pronoun (i), and vp consists of verb phrase (look forward) plus verb phrase (to your return). the phrase structure rules of the sentence are: s  np + aux + vp the pattern of the phrase structure rules above is: vp  advp + vp, vp  p + n +v line 4: but till then i know the memories are all that’s left based on the tree diagram above, the sentence generally contains three types of phrases, that is adverb phrase (advp), noun phrase (np), and verb phrase (vp). advp consists of adverb (till rahmawati, sinta parulian lumban gaol, novia damayanti br hutabarat, & tina pandiangan an analysis phrase structure rules in anneth song lyrics 78 then), np consists of determiner (the) plus a noun (memories), and vp consists of auxiliary (are) plus adjective phrase (all that) plus verb phrase (is left). the phrase structure rules of the sentence are: s  c + advp + s. the pattern of the phrase structure rules above is: s s + vp, s  np + vp + np, vp  aux + ap + vp, ap  p + n +v, ap  a + det, vp  aux + v line 5: but now you’re gone yes it’s a fact based on the tree diagram above, the sentence generally contains one sentence and one type of phrase, that is sentence (s) and noun phrase. sentence consists of (you’re gone), np consists of a noun (it) plus aux (is) plus noun phrase (a fact). the phrase structure rules of the sentence are: s  c + advp + s the pattern of the phrase structure rules above is: s  s + np, s  np + aux + v, np  n + aux + np line 6: “and for the first time i know you won’t come back” based on the tree diagram above, the sentence generally contains three types of phrases, that is adverb phrase (advp), noun phrase (np), and verb phrase (vp). advp consists of a preposition (for) plus noun phrase (the first time). “for the first time” is actually a prepositional phrase, but when it is put in the sentence “and for the first time i know you won’t come back”, it acts as an adverb phrase. np consists of pronoun (i), and vp consists of the verb (know) plus sentence (you won’t come back). phrase structure rules of the sentence are:s  c + advp + np + vp. the pattern of the phrase structure rules above is: c  and, advp  pp (p + np), np  det + adj + n, np  pro, vp  v + s, s  np + aux + vp, np  pro, v  v +adv. line 7: “maybe just today, tomorrow or another day” based on the tree diagram above, the lyrics “maybe just today, tomorrow or another day” contain adverb phrase (advp). advp consists of adverb phrase (maybe just today) plus adverb (tomorrow) plus conjunction (or) plus adverb phrase (another day). the phrase structure rules of the sentence are: advp  advp + adv + c + advp. line 8: “millions of memories are in my heart and always here to stay” based on the tree diagram above, the sentence generally contains three types of phrases, that is indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 79 noun phrase (np), prepositional phrase (pp), and verb phrase (vp). np consists of a noun (millions) plus prepositional phrase (of memories), pp consists of the preposition (in) plus noun phrase (my heart), and vp consists of adverb phrase (always here) plus verb phrase (to stay). the phrase structure rules of the sentence is: s  np + aux + pp + c + vp. the pattern of the phrase structure rules above is: np  n + pp, pp  p + n, aux pp  p + np,np  det + n c  and + vp, vp  advp + vp  p + v line 9: “even though we cannot say hi” based on the tree diagram above, the sentence generally contains two types of phrases, that is noun phrase (np), and verb phrase (vp). np consists of pronoun (we), and vp consists of auxiliary (cannot) plus verb (say) plus interjection (hi). the phrase structure rules of the sentence are: s  c+np+vp the pattern of the phrase structure rules above is: c  even though, np  pro, vp  aux + v+ int. line10. “i miss you and i’m still expecting you” based on the tree diagram above, two sentences are formed consisting of each type of phrase. the first sentence is "i miss you" which consists of noun phrase (np) and verb phrase (vp). np consists of n (i) and vp consists of v (miss) plus np (you). the second sentence is "i'm still expecting you" which consists of noun phrase (np) and verb phrase (vp). np consists of n (i) and vp consists of adv (still), v (expecting), and np (you). the phrase structure rules of the sentence is: s  np + vp. the pattern of the phrase structure rules above is: s  np + vp (v+np), conj, s  np + vp (adv + v + np) line 11: “honestly my loyal heart won’t be able to accept” based on the tree diagram above, sentences are divided into adverb phrase (advp), and one sentence (s). advp consists of adverb (honestly) plus a sentence consisting of np (my loyal heart) plus vp (won’t be able to accept). the phrase structure rules of the sentence are: s  advp + s the pattern of the phrase structure rules above is: s  np (det + ap + np) + vp (vp + vp) vp  ap + vp, vp  pp + vp line 12: “and to forget everything” rahmawati, sinta parulian lumban gaol, novia damayanti br hutabarat, & tina pandiangan an analysis phrase structure rules in anneth song lyrics 80 based on the tree diagram above, the phrase contained is a verb phrase (vp). vp consists of conjunction (and) plus pp consists of preposition (to) plus vp consists of verb phrase plus adverb phrase (forget anything). the phrase structure rules of the sentence are: vp  conj + pp + vp the pattern of the phrase structure rules above is: vp  conj + pp + vp (vp + advp) line 13: “and always here to stay” based on the tree diagram above, the phrases contained are verb phrases (vp). vp consists of a conjunction (and) plus pp consists of a preposition (to) plus advp consists of an adverb (always here) plus a verb phrase consists of a verb (to stay). the phrase structure rules of the sentence are: vp  conj + advp + vp the pattern of the phrase structure rules above is: vp  conj + advp + vp (vp + advp) line 14: “i have to let you go” based on the tree diagram above, the sentence generally contains two types of phrases, that is noun phrase (np), and verb phrase (vp). np consists of pronoun (i) plus vp consists of verb phrase plus preposition phrase plus verb phrase (have to let you go). the phrase structure rules of the sentence are: s  np + vp the pattern of the phrase structure rules above is: s  np + vp (vp+pp+vp), vp  vp + np + vp discussion this research was about an analysis phrase structure rules used in anneth song lyrics. this research used a descriptive qualitative research design. actually, there are a lot of students outside who don’t really understand the phrase. maybe they know what is sentences, but they don’t know what is the phrase. as a sample, researchers asked several questions about what is phrases and what types of phrases, then what are sentences to the 9thgrade students in smp advent 2 medan. the researchers used a questionnaire as an instrument. through the questionnaires, from the 59 students, only 6 students know what is phrase. 53 other students state that they do not know the phrase, but know what the sentence is. so in this study, the writer aims to increase students' knowledge in understanding what phrases are and be able to analyze the structure of phrases. in transformational grammar (tg) phrase structure is illustrated using tree diagrams called phrasemakers, which show the hierarchical structure of sentences. phrase structure rules specify the grammatical structures of a sentence. a tree diagram should match the phrase structure rules to be grammatical. the basic or main phrase structure rules are: (1) s  np (aux) vp. (2) np {det (adj) n, pro, n (pp)}. (3) vp  v (np) (pp) (adv). (4) pp  p (np). (5) ap  a (pp). all the structure of the rules and the type of phrases used in the anneth song lyrics "mungkin hari ini esok atau nanti" have been set out in the result findings. the result of this research can be used to motivate the students to master some phrases. whether it analyzes the structure of the phrase or understands the type of phrase, and it can be used to comprehend the structure of phrases that are used in sentences. conclusion based on the analysis in the previous chapter, the writer would like to draw some conclusions from a study of the sentence structure of anneth's song indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 81 lyrics related to theory syntax based on transformational grammar theory using tree diagrams. there are various types of sentence patterns contained in the song, “maybe today, tomorrow or another day” the song found 18 sentence patterns. those are: table 2. the sentence patterns no patterns total 1. s  np + vp 9 2. s  np+pp+vp 1 3 s  cp + advp + np + vp 3 4 s  np+aux+ vp 1 5 s  np + aux + pp+ c + vp 1 6 s  cp + np + vp 1 7 s  cp + s 1 8 s  advp + s 1 given the importance of understanding sentence structure in particular in the syntax study, some suggestions are made. ready students conducting research on the same topic is expected to provide a clear understanding of analyzing pop music using syntactic studies. hopefully, there are other too students who will conduct studies on related topics from different angles, hope there are will be a new finding related to the study of syntax. finally, the researcher hopes that this research can be used as a reference for those who are interested in studying syntax. acknowledgment all praise and gratitude to god almighty for his blessings, as well as support and contributions to (1) dr. chrismis novalinda ginting., m.kes as rector of prima indonesia university medan. (2) dian syahfitri, s.s., m.hum., as dean of the teaching and education faculty of prima indonesia university medan. (3) yenita sembiring, s.s., m. hum., as head of the teaching and education study program of prima indonesia university medan. (4) madina, s.pd., ma., as secretary of english of faculty of prima indonesia university medan. (5) rahmawati, s.pd., m.si, as the supervisor. (6) all lecturers at the faculty of teacher training and education of prima indonesia university medan. (7) adelina ginting s.pd., as the principal of smp advent 2 medan. (8) our parents who help and support us in prayer and materials in completing the journal. (9) students of smp advent 2 medan as participants in our research. references arikunto, s. (2010). prosedur penelitian suatu pendekatan praktik (edisi revisi). jakarta: rineka cipta. ary, d., jacobs, l. c., sorensen, c., & razavieh, a. (2010). introduction to research in education (eight ed). canada: wadsworth. https://www.amazon.com bornstein, d. (1977). an introduction to transformational grammar. cambridge massachusetts: winthrop publishers. carnie, a. (2000). syntax. america: blackwell publishers, oxford. chomsky, n. (2002). syntactic structures (2nd ed). berlin: de gruyter mouton. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110218329 christianto, d. (2018). syntactic analysis on sentence patterns in john denver`s song lyrics [sanata dharma university]. http://repository.usd.ac.id/id/eprint/30041 creswell, j. w. (2007). qualitative inquiry and research design: choosing among five approaches (2nd ed). thousand oaks: sage publications, inc. fitroh, z. (2019). a syntactical analysis of phrases used in westlife song lyrics [state institute islamic studies (iain)]. http://erepository.perpus.iainsalatiga.ac.id/id/eprint/6303 fuad, u. m. (2021). a syntactic analysis of sentence pattern used in westlife’s song lyrics [usu]. https://repositori.usu.ac.id/handle/123456789/454 12 hancock, b. (2002). an introduction to qualitative research. trent focus group. http://www.trentrdsu.org.uk/cms/uploads/qualitati ve research.pdf heesters, e. (2021). anneth mungkin hari ini esok atau nanti [english version]. www.youtube.com. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phbfxnsaib w heryana, n. (2018). sentence structure of africanamerican vernacular english [usu]. http://repositori.usu.ac.id/handle/123456789/1025 6 kim, j-b., & sells, p. (2008). english syntax: an introduction (2nd ed). stanford: csli publications. moleong, l. j. (2009). metodologi penelitian kualitatif (22nd ed). bandung: pt. remaja rosdakarya. niswati, t. (2018). syntactic analysis of idiomatic phrases in michelle obama’s final speech as the first lady [iain salatiga]. http://erepository.perpus.iainsalatiga.ac.id/id/eprint/4208 rahmawati, sinta parulian lumban gaol, novia damayanti br hutabarat, & tina pandiangan an analysis phrase structure rules in anneth song lyrics 82 rahmawati., previna, s., sitohang, m. f., siagian, m. m., & bancin, o. b. (2019). an error analysis of english voiceless consonant [p], [t], [k] at sma swasta dharma pancasila medan. borneo journal, 1(volume 1 nomor 2 tahun 2019 issn: 2685-810x), 32–43. https://doi.org/10.35334/bjele.v1i2.1154 rans music. (2020). anneth mungkin hari ini esok atau nanti (official music video). www.youtube.com. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr4b5fdlnb a sekaran, u. (2011). research methods for business. jakarta: salemba empat. http://digilib.stiewidyagamalumajang.ac.id//index. php?p=show_detail&id=12647 verspoor, m., & sauter, k. (2009). english sentence analysis. amsterdam: john benjamins publishing company. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 269 the use of social media for learning english: students’ perspective muetia safitri department of english education, faculty of educational sciences, uin syarif hidayatullah jakarta, indonesia email: safitrimuetia@gmail.com atik yuliyani department of english education, faculty of educational sciences, uin syarif hidayatullah jakarta, indonesia email: atik@uinjkt.ac.id farida hamid department of english education, faculty of educational sciences, uin syarif hidayatullah jakarta, indonesia email: faridahamid@uinjkt.ac.id aminah suriaman english department, faculty of teacher training and education, tadulako university, palu, indonesia email: amisuriaman@gmail.com apa citation: safitri, m., yuliyani, a., hamid, f., & suriaman, a. (2022). the use of social media for learning english: students’ perspective. indonesian efl journal, 8(2), 269-276. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v8i2.6477 received: 09-03-2022 accepted: 16-05-2022 published: 31-07-2022 introduction nowadays, social media has become an essential part of our lives. many people at every age frequently use this technology. it is proven by the number of users of social media in indonesia which has been increased gradually. according to the latest data available on we are social (2020), in january 2020, 59% percent of the total population of indonesians use social media actively (simon, 2020). the average of social media users in indonesia is age 13 to 34, which means social media is viral among young people, especially students. it is also supported by the writer’s observation when she did teaching practice at a private high-school in depok, indonesia. the students are very familiar with social media. they abstract: social media has become the most influence media used by people. it changes the way people communicate and access information. although it is not directly created for educational purposes, it has drawn educators' attention, especially in the english language learning field. several studies have concluded that social media can be used as media in english classroom. however, to use social media effectively, it’s important to know student’s perception as reference for teacher in using social media. thus the present study was conducted to explore high-school students’ perception of social media use for english learning. 83 students of one private senior high school in depok, indonesia, were involved in this study. the study employed a qualitative approach with a case study design using questionnaires and semi-structured interview as data collection methods. basic statistical analysis was used to analyze data from the questionnaire, and the data from interviews were analyzed using the flow model by miles and huberman. the results showed that the students in this study use social media for improving their english. they choose youtube as the most used social media for learning english. further, they stated that social media provides english content sources to practice their english skills, enlarges their vocabulary and pronunciation knowledge. they also stated the challenges in using social media for learning, such as internet connection problems, privacy, and inappropriate content. keywords: english learning; social media; students’ perception. mailto:safitrimuetia@gmail.com mailto:atik@uinjkt.ac.id mailto:faridahamid@uinjkt.ac.id muetia safitri, atik yuliyani, farida hamid, & aminah suriaman the use of social media for learning english: students’ perspective 270 use social media for many purposes, such as accessing information, sharing ideas, and seeking entertainment. social media are web-based platforms where users create and share messages via virtual communities and social networks (chen, lin, & yuan, 2017). kaplan & haenlein (2010) stated the foundation of social media comes from the concept of web 2.0 and user generated content. web 2.0 is a new approach for web developers to start using the world wide web as a medium whereby material or information is no longer produced and released by individuals, but instead, it is constantly updated in a participatory and interactive style by all users. as web 2.0 represents the ideological and technological foundation of social media, user-generated content can be seen as the ways in which people make use of social media. it is usually described as a form of media that many users can access and create the content together. recently, many social media applications are launched with various features and purposes. twitter emerges as a micro-blogging platform to create a short message to be posted and shared with their audience online. social networking sites like facebook allows the user to connect with other people by inviting them, creating and sharing personal information. youtube is created to let users find and share content such as sharing videos and photos (dabbagh & kitsantas, 2012). even though social media is not directly created for educational purposes, it has drawn educators' attention, especially in the english language learning field. many studies were employed to see the use of social media in the english language teaching field. inayati (2015) stated that social media can be used as media to learn english since the nature of social media is in line with the implementation of education and language teaching theories such as constructivism and social-cultural theory. in constructivism, learning occurs when there is a meaningful social interaction that includes community sharing of different perspectives and experiences. this idea applies while using social media. another theoretical basis used in the implementation of social media in education is socio-cultural. in line with constructivism, this theory suggests that rich exposure and interaction with the target language is essential in language learning (hsu as cited in inayati, 2015). in addition, social media may utilize language skills. yunus, salehi, & chenzi (2012) expressed that social media such as facebook and blog will give students written language input so they will develop their writing skills. it also facilitates the students to learn new words and vocabulary which are suitable for them in writing (khan, ayaz, & faheem, 2016). social media also may enhance student speaking abilities through the conversations conducted with english native speakers (ehsan & nasri, 2019). furthermore, arumugam, wan, shanthi, & mello, (2019) described that social media like facebook and whatsapp permits students and teachers to create a learning group. then the activities in the group such as sharing reading material, reading aloud practice, and discussing a reading text allow students to be more involved in the reading exercise that helps to improve their reading skills. the use of social media for learning english is more convinced as the world now is facing covid-19 pandemic. schools and universities are closed for an indefinite time. it changes the learning process, which is generally held in the classroom, into online learning. teachers try to use social media in their teaching, although they did not know much about how their students use social media to improve their english. since students are the center of the learning process, their perception of the teaching practice is worth knowing in helping teachers create teaching activities that are close and relatable to their students. perception is a biological process that takes place in the human brain. it is a process that concerns the entry of messages or information through five senses, namely sense of sight, sense of hearing, sense of smell, sense of taste, and sense of touch (slameto, 2003). perception is obtained by summarizing the information from a person and interpreting the information so that the person can respond to either positively or negatively of the information. therefore, perception basically concerns the relationship between a person and his environment through the senses. after a person senses an object in its environment, then it is processed into the meaning of the object. based on the explanation above, a study on students’ perception of the use of social media for learning english is important to be investigated since teachers need to know their students’ preferences in terms of what social media indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 271 application they used and their ways of using social media for learning english. studies on exploring high school students’ views on social media for learning english in indonesia are relatively low. therefore, this study was conducted to provide valuable information about how high-school students use social media, the advantages and challenges students face while using social media to learn english. method this study applied a qualitative research method. based on creswell (2012), qualitative research explores the phenomenon by participants’ view. this study also used case study design, which is defined as research that explores a program, an event, an activity, a process, or one or more individuals genuinely to get a depth-knowledge about the action that we want to explore (mohajan, 2018). this study has a qualitative purpose of discovering the students’ perception of the use of social media in learning english, including the kinds of application they have been used, their behaviors using social media for learning english as well as the usefulness and challenges they faced on using social media. this study was conducted at one private senior high school in depok, indonesia. the participants were selected using purposive sampling. in purposive sampling, the researcher is deliberately subjective in choosing those respondents and how those may affect the research as a means for checking validity (harding, 2013). here, the writer asked a recommendation from the english teacher from the school in choosing participants of the study. the researcher then chose the eleventhgrades students consisting of 83 students (33 male and 50 female students). it is based on some considerations. firstly, the writer knew students well as she did teaching practice there. secondly, the students are social media users and have gadgets, so they ha a lot of experience in using social media for learning. thirdly, the teacher recommended the eleventh-grade regarding his belief that the students would participate in the researcher cooperatively. this study used questionnaires and interview to collect the data. an online questionnaire using google form was used due to the prohibition of travelling for people in response to covid 19’s outbreak in indonesia. the questionnaire contained closed-ended questions about students’ behavior and four-point likert-scales types (4 for strongly agree to 1 for strongly disagree) to find the students perception related to their feeling, language skills which utilized by social media. the statements are adapted from sharma (2019), altam (2020), and chueinta (2017), ngonidzashe (2013). the writer distributed the questionnaire to the participants and analyzed the result. in the analyzing stage, the data were put into a table consist of frequency and percentages and were interpreted by the writer. afterward, to get a deeper understanding of students’ perceptions, a semi-structured interview was conducted. it is a way of collecting data in which the researcher has prepared an interview guide before doing the interview but does not strictly follow it. this study employed call interview via whatsapp to ask 9 of 83 students their perception of social media. the interviewees answered seven open-ended questions related to their behaviors, reason, advantages and challenges of using social media for english learning. the data from the interview were analyzed by using the flow model by miles and huberman (1992). the components to analyze the data are data reduction, data display, and drawing conclusions (miles, huberman, & saldana, 2014). the writer examined multiple sources such as questionnaire response and interview response as many times as necessary to obtain a valid finding in this study. result and discussion the most frequently used social media to improve english the students choose social media that they often used to improve english language skills. in this part, the participants were allowed to choose more than one answer. the result of questionnaire indicated that 69 students or 83% of the total participant choose youtube as the most application they used for learning english, followed by instagram (65%) and whatsapp (42%). table 1. the most frequently used social media to improve english no. type of social media frequency percentage 1. facebook 5 6% 2. instagram 56 67% 3. youtube 69 83% 4. twitter 23 28% muetia safitri, atik yuliyani, farida hamid, & aminah suriaman the use of social media for learning english: students’ perspective 272 5. whatsapp 35 42% 6. telegram 2 2% 7. tik-tok 5 6% the data from the interview explained the reason they choose those applications. students choose youtube because it provides many english content videos for learning. while watching english video on youtube, besides practicing listening skill, students can also practice their speaking and pronunciation as a student stated: “in youtube, i can learn about english through the videos provided by it.” (student 8) “i usually search any english video then while watching it, i do some pauses and try to speak the sentence that has been said by the people.” (student 2) meanwhile, on instagram, the participants follow artist/influencer who speaks english and they take a look at his/her post and comment column to see how people express something in english. they also use instagram to practice their english skill by writing a caption or making a video in english and upload it to the application. “i follow many influencers or artists from other countries on instagram. when i see their posts, i look up to the comment section to see how people express their comment in english.” (student 5)” “instagram is a medium for practicing my english. for example, writing something or making english video” (student 8) the participants also use whatsapp since their teacher in school creates a group to communicate and share materials with students. the students also have a speaking class which is separated from general english subject. the teacher utilizes whatsapp as her platform to practice their speaking. students also practice communicating use english with their friends. “i also practice communicating with my friends via whatsapp for asking assignment or just want to chat in english.” (student 6) based on the data, students choose youtube, instagram, and whatsapp as the most social media applications used for learning english. those applications are chosen because their popularity also they afford an endless supply of english input to them. this perception is similar to what has been explained by some researchers (zam zam al arif, 2019; sharma, 2019; aloraini & cardoso, 2018) who expressed that social media provides them english exposure which enables students to keep practicing their english skills. the english exposure on social media comes in an environment where the students are interacting with native speakers, reading english news or lesson posted by someone, and watching english videos. the activities may positively affect their language development as they can practice their language meaningfully. according to kozhevnikova (2019), language exposure becomes one of the factors that determine successful language teaching and learning. in indonesia, english is recognized as a foreign language where students only use and learn in english at schools. consequently, they do not use english in their daily lives (lauder, 2008). therefore, the amount of the target language is so limited which makes their teacher the only source of spoken language. thus, with the spread of social media, students are making greater use of all possible ways and sources to acquire and learn the target language. students’ feeling on using social media for learning english based on the questionnaire, 72.3% of students agree that learning using social media is fun and pleasing, only 6% of them disagree. 66.3% of them agree that social media increases their confidence in learning english, and 14% of students disagree. 68.7% of participants think that social media reduces their anxiety towards efl classroom and 14.5% of them disagree. in addition, 63.9% of students agree that learning through social media reinforces selfindependent learning, only 15.7% expressed disagree. 60.2% of them think social media forms a more relaxed and stress-free language learning environment and 6% of them disagree. 55.4% of students strongly agree that social media provides various sources for learning english, while 3.6% express disagree. 60.2% of them think social media is easy to be used for learning english and 8.4% of them disagree. 54.2% of students can use social media anytime and anywhere while 6% are not. lastly, 51.8% of them are easy to communicate with other people through social media, while 10% are not. table 2. students’ feeling on using social media for learning english no item descriptions students’ result sa a d sd 1. learning using 21.7% 72.3% 6.0% 0% indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 273 social media is fun and pleasing. 2. social media increases my confidence toward efl learning. 16.9% 66.3% 14.5% 2.4% 3. social media reduces my anxiety towards efl learning. 15.7% 68.7% 14.5% 1.2% 4. learning through social media reinforces selfindependent learning. 19.3% 63.9% 15.7% 1.2% 5. social media forms a more relaxed and stressfree language learning environment. 33.7% 60.2% 6.0% 0% 6. social media provides various sources for learning english. 55.4% 41% 3.6% 0% 7. social media is easy to be used for learning english. 31.3% 60.2% 8.4% 0% 8. i can use social media anytime and anywhere. 54.2% 39.8 6.0% 0% 9. it is easy to communicate with other people through social media. 51.8% 37.3% 10.8% 0% meanwhile, based on the analysis from the interview result, most students think that learning english in social media is fun. they stated that social media provides various english content for learning. since students can access what they like, for instance, movies, songs, beauty or even gaming content in english. they can enjoy that content as entertainment and also a way to practice or learn english, as students said: “i do not feel like i am learning english while using social media because we can choose what we want, so we like to watch the topic at the same time we learn english too” (student 3).“it is fun because we can learn english from what we like. i like watching movies, so i watch english movie on social media, so the learning becomes fun.” (student 6) a student also said that he is more comfortable while learning english through social media as it reduces his nervousness while interact with others using english. “the benefit that i got is the comfortable feeling while using english to communicate with other people, because if i talk directly to other people, i become nervous. another thing is that learning with other people sometimes is limited in terms of time and place.” (student 8) in addition, students also think that social media is easy to use and very close to them, so they want to use it as a media to learn english. “because the development of technology is increased rapidly and we can update new ideas quickly within social media, so why do not we use it to learn english too.” (student 2) “we have been used social media in our daily life, so if we could not take advantage of it, then it is useless. therefore, while we access social media, we can search english content which can be studied…” (student 3) students’ responses to the questionnaire and interview above indicate that they are comfortable and relax while learning english on social media. social media allows students to access english content in various forms such as text, songs, films, and even games. these various contents can be easily accessed by using any gadgets. this makes social media very flexible to be used by different individuals with different needs, potency and desires (anwas, sugiarti, permatasari, warsihna, anas, alhapip, siswanto, & rivalina, 2020). moreover, as social media provides virtual interaction, it reduces students’ anxiety because of the enjoyable experiences provided by the media (makodamayanti, nirmala, & kepirianto, 2020). as a result, learners become confident to learn and practice their english anytime and anywhere. english language skills utilized in social media based on the questionnaire, 62.7% of students agree social media provides an opportunity to improve their listening skills; only 9.7% of them disagree. 65.1% of them agree social media provides an opportunity to improve their speaking skills and 15.7% of them disagree. 66.3% of students think social media provides an opportunity to improve their reading skill, while 2.4% of them disagree. 73.3% of them agree social media provides an opportunity to improve their writing skill and 13.3% of them disagree. 59% of them also think that social media gives an opportunity to enhance their vocabulary, while 6% of them disagree. 68.7% of students think social media gives an opportunity to enhance their grammar knowledge and 7.2% disagree. lastly, 57.8% of students agree gives an muetia safitri, atik yuliyani, farida hamid, & aminah suriaman the use of social media for learning english: students’ perspective 274 opportunity to enhance their pronunciation, while 7.2% of others disagree. table 3. english language skills utilized in social media no item descriptions students’ result sa a d sd 1. it gives me opportunity to improve english listening skill 27.7% 62.7% 9.6% 0% 2. it gives me opportunity to improve english speaking skill. 19.3% 65.1% 15.7% 0% 3. it gives me opportunity to improve reading skill. 31.3% 66.3% 2.4% 0% 4. it gives me opportunity to improve english writing skill. 13.3% 73.3% 13.3% 0% 5. it gives me opportunity to enhance my vocabulary. 33.7% 59% 6.0% 1.2% 6. it gives me opportunity to enhance grammar knowledge. 24.1% 68.7% 7.2% 0% 7. it gives me opportunity to enhance my pronunciation. 34.9% 57.8% 7.2% 0% moreover, based on the interview, social media helps interviewees in facilitating all of their english skills. however, the writer highlighted skills that most facilitated by social media mentioned by students. the skills are listening, vocabulary, and pronunciation. firstly, social media plays an important part in students’ vocabulary development. students said that social media facilitate them to learn new vocabulary from video, photo, or oven a comment from other people. as a student said: “my vocabulary is boosted from watching videos and accessing twitter.” (student 2) “sometimes, i find new words from caption written by someone on instagram and from videos on youtube.” (student 2) in addition, students seem interesting in knowing slang words that they did not find while learning english at school. by knowing many slang words, student can use them in their daily life, and become more experienced which led them to confident to use english. “in formal english course, we usually learn the formal language, however, in social media we can find many slang words from people who speak english.” (student 5) “we can understand many slang words and practice to use it in our life so we will have more experience.” (student 5) next is listening skill. students like to watch english videos on youtube and instagram. students can find thousands videos to practice their listening. those videos may stimulate the interest of students like beauty vlog, interview of celebrities, and others and make them be more motivated to practice their listening skill continuously as students said: “my listening and reading skill is enhanced because there are many english video that we can read and watch.” (student 8) “i like to watch music video or behind the scene of film, therefore indirectly i learn to understand what they are talking.” (student 1) an interesting finding is that feature of social media here specifically youtube helps him to improve his listening skill as he said: “my listening skill is improved because youtube has slow-motion feature which helps me to repeat or to make the video slower, so i can understand the part that i am missing.” (student 6) besides listening skill, students also think that from english content in the form of videos which they access on social media like youtube and instagram, twitter, and whatsapp they are also motivated to improve their pronunciation as a student said: “on social media i often look for video on how to pronounce word within some accent.” (student 5) based on the findings, students in this study agree that the features of social media motivate them to practice their english outside the classroom. the finding highlights the idea of using social media as informal language learning to supplement english learning process at school. informal learning is defined as the lifelong process by which every person acquires and accumulates knowledge and skills from daily experience and exposure to the environment (combs & ahmed, 1974; as cited in mohmed al-sabaawi & dahlan, 2018). social media can allow students to take charge of their learning process outside classroom. by doing so, the learners would be able to put into practice the concepts they learn in the classroom (ahmed, 2020). furthermore, mubarak (2016) argued that classroom atmosphere is still the most desirable for the learning of english language since social media does not offer an appropriate indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 275 atmosphere for formal language teaching and learning. therefore, he suggested teachers to use social media as additional learning tool in a classroom. as a result, using social media as a learning tool could benefit efl students in practicing english inside and outside the classroom (omar, embi, & md yunus, 2012). challenges of using social media based on the questionnaire, 49.4% of the participants agree that social media exposes them to inappropriate materials and content, while only 2.4% of them disagree. 41% of them disagree that they feel distracted while using social media for learning english and 39.8% of students agree with the statement. in statement three, 37.3% of the participant also disagree that social media affects their mental and health, while 27.7% of students agree. next, 45.8% of students strongly agree that they have problem including signal, gadget, internet connection, while only 14.5% disagree. last, 44.6% of them agree that personal data in social media are prone to be abuse, while 18.1% of them disagree. table 4. students’ perception on the challenges of using social media for learning english no item descriptions students’ result sa a d sd 1. social media exposes me to inappropriate materials or content. 34.9% 49.4% 13.3% 2.4% 2. i feel distracted while using social media for learning english 16.9% 39.8% 41.% 2.4% 3. social media affects my mental and health 21,7% 27.7% 37.3% 13.3% 4. i have a problem related to signal, gadget, and mobile data. 45.8% 33.7% 14.5% 6% 5. personal data are prone to be abuse. 33.7% 44.6% 18.1% 3.6% the writer asked her interviewee about their challenges in using social media for learning english. 6 of 9 interviewees mentioned that their phone signals sometimes go bad while they are watching english video or collecting their assignment on whatsapp, as stated by students: “challenge that i faced is bad wi-fi signal, so it takes more time to send my task or just to watch a video.” (student 4) social media also have challenges that students faced in this study. students have problems related to the internet connection and privacy concerns. jalal (2012) stated that privacy concerns have become the most concerning thing while students use social media because they still do not know what their individuals’ information is used for. hence, the teachers are expected to be wellinformed on how to share the data of students on social media. as students still believe that social media is promising to help them learning english, teachers may still use social media for their classroom, but they should keep an eye on the challenges and come up with strategies of minimizing them. as a result, the use of social media can support students to develop and improve their english. conclusion after conducting the research and getting information about how students perceived learning english using social media, it can be seen that social media has potential use as a media in english language teaching. the features and their familiarity with students can be beneficial for teachers to develop students’ english competence. therefore, the writer would like to suggest english teachers explore and combine social media applications, especially those mentioned by students (youtube, instagram, and whatsapp), as media in their classroom. however, before including social media in the classroom, the teacher must be equipped with knowledge about social media and spend much time preparing students to use social media for learning. the writer also wants to suggest students who are the user of social media to be more considered and wise to use social media not only for their pleasure but also for learning. last but not least, the researcher would like to suggest further research to explore more impact of social media on specific english skills and how to minimize potential challenges that arise from the use of social media for learning english. references ahmed, b. e. s. 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(2016). learning english as a second language through social media: saudi arabian tertiary context. international journal of linguistics, 8(6), 112. https://doi.org/10.5296/ijl.v8i6.10449 ngonidzashe, z. (2013). challenges and perceptions towards use of social media in higher education in zimbabwe: a learners’ perspective. international journal of scientific & engineering research, 4(5), 242–249. http://www.ijser.org omar, h., embi, m. a., & md yunus, m. (2012). esl learners’ interaction in an online discussion via facebook. asian social science, 8(11), 67–74. sharma, v. (2019). saudi students’ perspective on social media usage to promote efl learning. international journal of linguistics, literature and translation (ijllt), 2(1), 129–139. simon, k. (2020). digital 2020: indonesia. https://datareportal.com/reports/digital-2020indonesia slameto. (2003). belajar dan faktor-faktor yang mempengaruhinya. rineka cipta. yunus, m. m., salehi, h., & chenzi, c. (2012). integrating social networking tools into esl writing classroom: strengths and weaknesses. english language teaching, 5(8), 42–48. zam zam al arif, t. (2019). the use of social media for english language learning: an exploratory study of efl university students. metathesis: journal of english language, literature, and teaching, 3(2), 224–233. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 247 methods used by english department students in translating report text: a content analysis lina anisah english language education study program, teacher training and education faculty, universitas sembilanbelas november kolaka, indonesia email: lina.anisah@gmail.com apa citation: anisah, l. (2022). methods used by english department students in translating report text: a content analysis. indonesian efl journal, 8(2), 247-258. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v8i2.6475 received: 07-03-2022 accepted: 12-05-2022 published: 31-07-2022 introduction language is one of the important things in human life. it is a part of a culture and it can identify someone’s culture (andriyanie, firmawan, & tri, 2016). by using the language, we can communicate with others. in the world, there are many languages used (sari & gaho, 2020). the most language used is english. when we do not understand about english, the translation is one of the ways to solve it. translation, as the process of rewriting a text in another different language (rosa, 2019). one way of understanding languages in the world is through translation (swarniti, 2019). it will make the text good and easy to read. not just about the paragraphs, it is also about every sentence used in a paragraph (swarniti, 2021). english is the first foreign language in indonesia which is being considered important in transferring and developing science, technology, arts, and building the relationship among countries (fauzi, 2021). with the development of technology and the need for mastering foreign languages especially english has been recognized by many parties, including parents, schools, and government (hidayati, 2020). english education is one of the subjects at school and colleges. english is a difficult subject for some students. besides have to knowing about the tenses, vocabulary and grammar, the students also have to know translation (sinaga, 2018). one of all crucial problems in learning english is translating. translation is very useful, especially for people who can’t speak and understand foreign languages. in academic setting, translation is equally important. aiming to get a readable and understandable translation, a translator should be careful to identify the sl into the tl when converting the idea of the message. a translator must realize many different things from both languages. a translator provides the compatible words or sentences to convey the sl into tl, so that all people with different background knowledge of a particular language will easily absorb the information (xirera, muth’im, nasrullah, 2021). abstract: this research was conducted at 4th semester students of english language education study program of sembilanbelas november university kolaka. the objectives of this research were to find out the translation methods that used to translate a report text by 4th semester students and the most dominant translation method used to translate a report text by 4th semester students. kinds of translation method in this research were word for word translation, literal translation, and free translation. the most dominant method used to translate a report text in this research was literal translation. the design of this research was a qualitative content analysis. the subject was 4th semester students of english language education study program of sembilanbelas november university kolaka. the data collection was conducted through documentation. the data of this research were taken from the students’ translation work. the instrument of this research was translation test. the data of students’ translation work were analyzed using content analysis. the findings showed that there were 435 sentences of students’ translation work which divided into three kinds of translation methods according to newmark’s theory, namely word for word translation had 60 data with the percentage 14%. literal translation had 304 data with the percentage 70%. the last free translation had 71 data with the percentage 16%. it showed that the most dominant translation method which was used by the students was literal translation that there were 304 or 70% data from 435 data of students’ translation work. keywords: translation; translation method; and report text. lina anisah methods used by english department students in translating report text: a content analysis 248 translation is a general term that refers to the removal of refractions and ideas from the source language (sl) and the target language (tl). translation is the process of transferring message or meaning from one language (source language) to others (target language) (siregar, lubi, & gultom, 2020). another thought by larson in (syafrizal et al, 2018) stated that translation a change of form. translation helps students in making basic connections between the source language and the target language. it also helps the students to understand better the text of one language to other language. because of those benefits of translation in academic context, it is critical for students in the english language education study program who are learning a foreign language as the subject of this research to learn how to translate. as the next english teacher, they should master translation because they will be doing a lot of translations in the future, such as translating textbooks that will be utilized in their classes. even sometimes, english teachers find students difficult in the process of learning english because some students think that learning english is very difficult so that students cannot translate every word, sentence, or paragraph in a text (sianturi, marpaung, sipahutar, & rambe, 2021). in the case of translation itself, the translator may give more attention to the product of translation by which the translator translates by reading the overall text and transfer the source language into the target language (jefriyanto & samidi, 2018). there are some aspects which are important to know in translating. some of them are the message, the audience, source language and target language. the message refers to the topic of the text. it means a good translator should have more knowledge about the topic of the text. the audience refers to target of the readers and their education level. source language and target language refer to the circumstances in which the translation takes place or received. in translating, a translator should carefully keep attention for every word that is translated because it will influence the equivalence meaning between sl and tl on its translation. to translate a text from source language into target language, the translator should consider the process of translating. firstly, they must have many words; understand in using language structure. secondly, understand in using translation methods in translating. the translator needs to use some methods in translating, so that, they cannot get confuse in translating. using some affective methods can produce a good translation. that is the reason the translator should be able to translate each sentence or paragraph in writing using translation methods. translation method is very important thing that translators need to learn, because it can be affected to the quality of translation result. the quality of translation result can be judged from the three aspects: accuracy, acceptability, and readability. to form a translation method, translation experts provide several translation methods as described by (newmark, 1988), namely word of word translation, literal translation, faithful translation, free translation, semantic translation, idiomatic translation, adaptation translation, communicative translation. based on kbbi (kamus besar bahasa indonesia) (2008) method is an orderly way based on mature thinking to achieve the goal. in regarding with translation method means a systematic plan and way of doing a translation. translation typically has been used to transfer written source language text to equivalent written target language text. to transferring meaning from sl to tl is not easy anymore. there are some ways or methods that can translator applied when translate to get the best result, some expert mention it as translation methods. based on the limitations of the term translation method molina and albir in hartono (2017) stated that “translation method refers to the way of a particular translation process that is carried out in terms of the translator’s objective”. according to hartono (2017) stated that the result of the translation of a text are determined by the translation method adopted by the translator, because the intent, purpose, and desire of the translator will affect the results of the translation of the text as a whole. newmark (1988) categorized translation into two major groups, namely (1) methods that emphasize source language (sl) and (2) methods that emphasize target language (tl). sl emphasis tl emphasis word-for-word translation, adaptation literal translation, free translation, faithful translation, idiomatic translation, semantic translation, and communicative translation. those are eight methods in translation based on (newmark, 1988), those are: (1) word-for-word translation in this method the source language word order is preserved, and the words translated singly indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 249 by their most common meaning, usually text that translated using this method is out of context. (2) literal translation. as al-haj, jibreel, sharafuddin, & al-shameri (2021) from time immemorial, literature has been part and parcel of people's lives. it immortalizes ancient and modern civilizations and reflects people's way of life and culture. therefore, translators tend to translate literary works. however, in literary translation, translators have to take linguistic and extra-linguistic elements that affect a literary text into account to find an analogous form in the translation to create a corresponding impression in the target language. for jones (2019), literary translation depends on a group of strategies and techniques. some are shared across various literary and non-literary genres, and some others are genres specific. this viewpoint is also similar to that of jibreel, et al (2016), akan, (2018), and akan, karim & chowdhury (2019). faithful translation. this method tries to reproduce the precise contextual meaning of the original within the constraints of the target language grammatical structures. it transfers cultural words and preserves the degree of grammatical and lexical abnormality. semantic translation. this translation method is almost same with faithful translation that is tries to reproduce the precise contextual meaning of the original, the differs from faithful translation only in as it must take more account of the aesthetic value (the beautiful and sounds of the source language text). adaption translation. this method is the freest form of translation. it is used mainly for literature text and plays (comedies and poetry, the themes, characters, plots are usually preserved), the source language culture converted the target language culture and the text rewritten. free translation. this method reproduces the matter without the manner, or the content without constrains to the form of the original. usually, it is a paraphrase much longer than original, so it called intralingual translation, often prolix and pretentious, and not translation at all. idiomatic translation. idiomatic translation reproduces the message of the original but tends to change nuances of meaning by referring colloquialism and idioms where these do not exist in the original. communicative translation. this method tries to render the exact contextual meaning of the original in such a way that both content and language are readily acceptable and comprehensible to the readership. in translating, there are various kinds of text that are often encountered, one of which is report text. report text is a text that aims to provide a description or information about something by giving facts. sometimes report text and descriptive text are difficult to distinguish, because the two texts describe about something. report text describe something generally, it is as a result of systematic observation and analysis, whereas descriptive text describes something more specifically. based on understanding the meaning in the text from the translation process the two texts can be distinguished. previous related studies to this research have been carried out by some researcher. however, there are some limitations in their research, such as, (wijaksono et al, 2022) was conducted the research about translation method and quality of idiomatic expression. the data was collected through documentation because the data were taken from of the transcript in my sister’s keeper movie. the result of that research showed that there were 109 data which contain types of translation methods applied in idiomatic expressions. it indicated the result of the translation quality assessment showed that 12 data were scored less accurate and 4 less acceptable. another data showed a high-level accuracy, acceptability, and readability. the most frequently types of translation method were idiomatic translation because idiomatic translation more commonly used in idiomatic expression which to distorted nuances of meaning by preferring colloquialisms. in addition, nugraha, nugroho, & rahman (2017) also conducted a similar study about translation method used in the short story “a bundler” by anton checkhov. in this research, the researcher used newmark theory in translation method. moreover, to find equivalence in the translation, this research used baker theory. the researcher used qualitative descriptive method, observation and document analysis are as the instrument of the research. as the result, the researcher found six methods used by the participants to render the short story “a blunder” into the target language (tl). also, the researcher found two types of translation equivalence in the translations. lina anisah methods used by english department students in translating report text: a content analysis 250 moreover, sianturi et al. (2021) had a study about kinds of translation method used in translating descriptive text. in this research, the researcher used two instruments. they are, the first is test is about translating the english text into bahasa indonesia and the second is interview. in data analysis technique, the researchers used newmark theory. the result of this research showed that there were only four methods used by the students in translating the text. they are literal translation, faithful translation, word-for-word translation and free translation. and the most dominant method used was literal translation and faithful translation method. the second dominant was word-for-word translation and free translation method. another research has been conducted by shabitah and hartono (2020) with the title the use of newmark’s translation method in the novel i was here. there are 1629 communicate sentences records taken from the novel. the findings of the studies display that there are seven out of 8 translation strategies proposed by way of newmark used. the result was free translation has high score. prastyo (2018), also conducted a study in the title translation method in literary work: a descriptive analysis of indonesian’s translator. this study is aimed to investigating the techniques used in translating expression of emotion and the frequency of approach used in translating them. the remaining one is to investigate translations techniques in tomats novel. this study uses of descriptive design. meanwhile, not many studies are talking about translating method used by the english students and using report text as their text. also, researcher believes that no many related studies use a content analysis as their methodology of research while most of them using descriptive qualitative. this study addresses a gap in the translation method used by english students in report text and contents analysis as its methodology of the research. the researcher formulates the following questions, namely: 1). what are translation methods used to translate a report text by students of english study program?. 2). what is the most dominant translation method used to translate a report text by students of english departement?. by conducting this research, english department students will not find the difficulties to translate report texts. it will be also useful for the english students if they find the problems when they translate a report text. moreover, for the translators, they need to use some methods in translating, so that, they cannot get confuse in translating. using some affective methods can produce a good translation. that is the reason the translator should be able to translate each sentence or paragraph in writing using translation methods. translation method is very important thing that translators need to learn, because it can be affected to the quality of translation result method this research was qualitative since it describes the student’s translation method of report text. it was reinforced by cresswell (2018) stated that “qualitative research relies on text and image data, have unique steps in data analysis, and draw on diverse designs”. this was relevant to creswell in emzir (2012) stated that one of the reasons why someone does qualitative research is because of the nature of the research question. in qualitative research, the research questions often begin with ‘how’ or ‘what’. thus, the initiation forces its way into the topic that describes what is going on. in this research content analysis is chosen to facilitate the researcher in analyzing the data from the document. according to krippendroff in emzir (2012) stated that “content analysis is research technique for making replicable and valid inferences from texts (or other meaningful matter) in addition, according to weber in sidiq & choiri (2019) stated that content analysis is a research method using a set of procedures for making valid inferences from text. the document in this research that would be analyzed were students’ translation work. mayring (2014) stated that document analysis as research design can deal with a broad range of texts: newspaper or other mass media products, files, protocols, documentations in web pages, and so on. the researcher analyzed the students’ translation sheet sentence by sentence to know the translation method that used by students in translating report text. then the researcher gave a code to classifying the translation method. the research was conducted at english teacher education faculty of sembilanbelas november university kolaka, which is located at jl. pemuda, tahoa, kolaka, kolaka regency, southeast sulawesi. the subject of this research was the 4th semester students of english language education indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 251 faculty of sembilanbelas november university kolaka. the researcher took a class that has 29 students consisting of 3 males and 26 females. the instrument of the research is needed to answer the research question of this research. in regarding to this research, the researcher used translation test as an instrument. the translation test consists of a text. the text is report text. in this research the students will be asked to translate the report text with the title ‘coronavirus’ from english into indonesian in fourth semester students at english language education study program of sembilanbelas november university kolaka. the test is also aimed to find out and analyze what kinds of translation methods that used to translate by the students. the technique of data collection is how the way the researcher collects the data. in this research, the researcher used documentation as data collecting technique. as explained before that this research attempt to find out the student’s translation method of report text. to collect the data the researcher needed student’s translation text to see the method applied in their translation work. during process of creating the research, the researcher collected the documents. to collect the documents or student’s translation work, the researcher did some steps as follow: (1) choosing a classroom as place of data collection, (2) telling the rule of the translation activity, (3) distributing the translation text, (4) starting the translation activity, and (5) collecting the sheets or student’s translation work. according to mayring (2014) when finished the process of data collection, as possible material for answering the research question, there are two classes of results: numerical data or texts. in this research the data that would be analyze were the students’ translation work which is document in form of translation text. in this research, the researcher used content analysis as a technique of data analysis. according to weber in sidiq & choiri (2019) stated that content analysis is a research method using a set of procedures for making valid inferences from text. according to mayring (2014) the general description of a structuring content analysis as follows: step 1: research question, theoretical background. in this step researcher formulates the question research and the related theories. in this research, the researcher emphasizes the translation methods that students applied when translating english into indonesian especially in translating report text. by using newmark’s theory which is translation method. in the end the researcher wanted to know the most dominant translation method used to translate a report text by students. step 2: definition of the category system (main categories and subcategories) from theory. based on newmark theory in hartono (2017), the translation method has eight subcategories; word for word translation, literal translation, faithful translation, semantic translation, adaptation translation, free translation, idiomatic translation, and communicative translation, but in this research will analyze three subcategories: 1). word for word translation, 2) literal translation, and 3) free translation. step 3: definition of the coding guideline (definitions, anchor examples and coding rules). this coding guideline consists of: main category, subcategories, category definition, anchor example, and coding rules. step 4: material run-through, preliminary coding, adding anchor examples and coding rules. in this step, start coding the material from the beginning. if the material fulfilling the category definition, mark the text passage and note the category label (or category number). if it is a prototypical text passage, add it to the coding guideline as anchor example. the coding example as follows below: table 1. coding example case points of discovery code reason for code word for word translation sn-1/p-1/s1 k1 the target language immediately below the source language (adapted from: mayring, 2014) notes: sn: student number p : paragraph number in student’s translation s : sentence number in student’s translation step 5: revision of the categories and coding guideline after 10-50% of the material. if the coding guideline seems to be completed (at least with anchor examples) and the coding process seems to be smooth (usually after 10-15% of the material) or if severe problems arise, a revision of categories and coding scheme is necessary. in this step, the lina anisah methods used by english department students in translating report text: a content analysis 252 researcher checks all category definition and coding rules in respect to the research question. if changes are necessary, use theoretical considerations. step 6: final working through the material. if the changes of the coding guideline make prior category assignments false, the researcher have to rework the material from the beginning step 7: analysis, category frequencies and contingencies interpretation. in this step, the researcher analyzed the percentage of categories. according to (mayring, 2014) stated that the frequencies of assigned categories over all recording units or comparisons of frequencies in different groups of recording units can be analyzed statistically. as for the statistical technique used in drawing conclusions is the calculation of percentage. sugiyono (2014) stated that the analysis is looking percentage. the percentage used the formula: notes: p = percentage f = frequency of the occur of each translation method n = total number sentence translation method results and discussion in research findings explained what the researcher got after doing the research. the researcher did the research and got the complete data from collecting students’ translation work. in this session, the researcher explained the process of collecting data and findings specifically. to collect the data, the researcher documented the students’ translation work. there are 29 students of fourth semester students at english teacher education faculty of sembilanbelas november university kolaka. the distribution of each translation method applied by the students is illustrated in table 2, as follows: table 2. the findings of the students’ translation method in translating report text no translation method number of occurrence percentage 1 word for word translation 60 14% 2 literal translation 304 70% 3 free translation 71 16% the researcher found three types of translation method used by the students in translating report text., because the researcher only took two examples from each translation method to analyzed. the findings could be explained in the following data: word for word translation in this translation method is very tied to the word level, so the word order is very well preserved. the words translated singly by their most common meaning and the target language immediately below the source language. it revealed in the following extract: extract 1 sn-ay/ p-2/ s-4: sl: some also experience aches, sore throat, diarrhea, conjunctivitis, headache, and loss of taste or smell. tl: beberapa juga mengalami sakit, sakit tenggorokan, diare, konjungtivitis, sakit kepala, dan kehilangan rasa atau bau. if analyzed, the sentence on the first extract was word-for-word, as described as follow: (1) the word ‘some’ was translated as ‘beberapa’. (2) the word ‘also’ was translated as ‘juga’. (3) the word ‘experience’ was translated as ‘mengalami’. (4) the word ‘aches’ was transated as ‘sakit’. (5) the ‘sore throat’ was translated as ‘sakit tenggorokan’. (6) the word ‘diarrhea’ was translated as ‘diare’. (7) the word conjunctivitis’ was translated as ‘konjungtivitis’. (8) the word headache’ was translated as ‘sakit kepala’. (9) and the last ‘and loss of taste or smell’ was translated as ‘dan kehilangan rasa atau bau’. the conclusion was the first extract was wordfor-word translation. all words were translated inter-linearly and the results of the translation could be understood well. the sentence structure was right in accordance with the structure of the target language. extract 2 sn-yb /p-2 /s-6: sl: covid-19 takes about 5-6 days to the symptoms to show. tl: covid-19 memerlukan sekitar 5-6 hari hingga gejalanya terlihat. if analyzed, the sentence on the second extract was word-for-word, as described as follow: (1) the indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 253 word ‘covid-19’ was translated as ‘covid-19’. (2) the word ‘takes’ was translated as ‘memerlukan’. (3) the word ‘about 5-6’ was translated as ‘sekitar 5-6’. (4) the word ‘days’ was translated as ‘hari’. (5) the word ‘to’ was translated as ‘hingga’. (6) the word ‘the symptoms’ was translated as ‘gejalanya’. (7) the word ‘show’ was translated as ‘terlihat’ the conclusion was the second extract was word-for-word translation. all words were translated interlinearly and the word order is very well preserved. the sentence was translated as ‘covid-19 memerlukan sekitar 5-6 hari hingga gejalanya terlihat’. the sentence structure was right in accordance with the structure of the target language. literal translation in this method the source language grammatical constructions are changed to their nearest target language equivalents meaning using lexical word, as word for word translation in this method the words are translated singly. translator usually first translate the source language text like how to translate word for word method, and then adjust the wording according to the grammatical constructions of the target language. it revealed in the following extract: extract 3 sn-i/ p-1/ s-1: sl: covid-19 or coronavirus disease-19 is an infectious disease caused by a new virus called sars-cov-2. tl: covid-19 atau coronavirus disease-19 adalah sebuah penyakit menular disebabkan oleh sebuah virus baru disebut sars-cov-2 if analyzed, the sentence on the third extract was literal translation, as described as follow: (1) the phrase ‘infectious disease’ was translated according to the structure of the target language as ‘penyakit menular. (2) the phrase ‘a new virus’ was translated according to the structure of the target language as ‘sebuah virus baru’. (3) the conclusion was the third extract was literal translation. even though the word ‘yang’ could be inserted between words ‘disease’ and ‘caused’, and also between words ‘virus’ and ‘called’. therefore, the result of the translation becomes ‘covid-19 atau penyakit virus corona-19 adalah sebuah penyakit menular yang disebabkan oleh sebuah virus baru yang disebut sars-cov-2. extract 4 sn-ra /p-4 /s-1: sl: the virus spreads through the droplets when the infected people sneeze or cough. tl: virus menyebar melalui tetesan ketika orang yang terinfeksi bersin atau batuk. if analyzed, the sentence on the fourth extract was literal translation, as described as follow: (1) the phrase ‘infected people’ was translated according to the structure of the target language as ‘orang yang terinfeksi’ the conclusion was the fourth extract was literal translation. the word ‘yang’ was inserted between words ‘infected’ and ‘people’ so the translation becomes ‘orang yang terinfeksi’ which literally corresponds to the phrase structure in the target language. free translation in this translation method reproduce the matter without the manner, or the content without constrains to the form of original. usually, it is a paraphrase much longer than original. it revealed in the following extract: extract 5 sn-ya / p-3/ s-3 sl: people who has mild to moderate illness usually can recover without hospitalization. tl: orang yang memiliki penyakit ringan atau sedang dapat pulih tanpa harus pergi ke rumah sakit. if analyzed, the sentence on the fifth extract was free translation, as described as follow: (1) ‘without hospitalization’ was translated as ‘tanpa harus pergi ke rumah sakit’ the conclusion was the fifth extract was free translation. the translator inserted or added another sentence element in the target language. therefore, the translation becomes ‘tanpa harus pegi ke rumah sakit’. in this case, the translator inserted part of the sentence ‘harus pergi ke rumah sakit’ which explicitly did not exist in the source language. extract 6 sn-ma /p-2 /s-3: sl: the common symptoms are fever, dry cough, and tiredness. tl: beberapa gejala umum diantaranya demam, batuk kering, dan kelelahan. if analyzed, the sentence on the sixth extract lina anisah methods used by english department students in translating report text: a content analysis 254 was free translation, as described as follow: (1) ‘the common symptoms’ was translated as ‘beberapa gejala umum’ the conclusion was the sixth extract was free translation. the translator inserted or added another word element in the target language. therefore, the translation becomes ‘beberapa gejala umum’. in this case the translator inserted part of the word ‘beberapa’ which explicitly did not exist in the source language. translation method of each sentence in this section, the researcher analyzed the sentence one by one to know the translation method used to translate a report text by 4th semester students. the researcher analyzed the target language from the first sentence until the fifteen sentences. the text that translated is called the source text and the language to be translated is called the source language (sl). meanwhile the text composed by the translator is called the target text, and the language is called the target language (tl). the source language in this research is english and the target language is indonesian. the finding was explained in the following data: the first sentence in the first paragraph the first sentence in the first paragraph shown that there were 25 students used literal translation and 4 students used free translation to translate this sentence. as the result, the researcher took one sentence of each translation method as the analysis example that would be shown as follow: literal translation sn-i /p-1 /s-1: sl: covid-19 or coronavirus disease-2019 is an infectious disease caused by a new virus called sars-cov-2. tl: covid-19 atau coronavirus disease-2019 adalah sebuah penyakit menular disebabkan oleh sebuah virus baru disebut sars-cov-2. if analyzed the sentence above was literal translation. focus on the source language above, it has the meaning ‘covid-19 atau coronavirus disease-2019 adalah sebuah menular penyakit disebabkan oleh sebuah baru virus disebut sarscov-2’, but the sn-i used literal translation so that source language was translated as ‘covid-19 atau coronavirus disease-2019 adalah sebuah penyakit menular disebabkan oleh sebuah virus baru disebut sars-cov-2’. in this case, the word was translated singly, but the student changed the grammatical structure of the source language to the grammatical structure of the target language. it proved by newmark in hartono (2017) stated that in literal translation method, the word is translated single, but the source language grammatical constructions are changed to the grammatical constructions of the target language. free translation sn-yb /p-1 /s-1: sl: covid-19 or coronavirus disease-2019 is an infectious disease caused by a new virus called sars-cov-2. tl: covid-19 atau coronavirus disease-2019 adalah sebuah penyakit yang bersifat menginfeksi disebabkan oleh virus baru disebut sars if analyzed the sentence above was free translation focus on the source language above, it has the meaning ‘covid-19 atau coronavirus disease-2019 adalah sebuah menular penyakit disebabkan oleh sebuah baru virus disebut sarscov-2’, but the sn-i used free translation so that source language was translated as ‘covid-19 atau coronavirus disease2019 adalah sebuah penyakit yang bersifat menginfeksi disebabkan oleh virus baru disebut sars-cov-2’. in this case the student inserted or added another sentence element in the target language ‘yang bersifat’ which explicitly the word did not exist in the source language, so that the student’s translation was ‘penyakit yang bersifat menginfeksi’. the paraphrase of the target language much longer than original. it proved by newmark in hartono (2017) stated that free translation method reproduces the matter without the manner, or the content without the form of the original. usually, it is a paraphrase much longer than the original. the second sentence in the first paragraph the second sentence in the first paragraph shown that there were 29 students used the literal translation to translate this sentence. as the result the researcher took one sentence of each translation method as the analysis example that would be shown as follow: literal translation sn-lw /p-1 /s-2: sl: this disease first identified in wuhan, china, indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 255 in the end of 2019. tl: penyakit ini pertama kali diidentifikasi di wuhan, china, pada akhir 2019. if analyzed the sentence above was literal translation. focus on the source language above, it has the meaning ‘ini penyakit pertamakali diidentifikasi di wuhan, china, di akhir 2019’, but the sn-lw used literal translation so that source language was translated as ‘penyakit ini pertama kali diidentifikasi di wuhan, china, pada akhir 2019. in this case, the word was translated singly, but the student changed the grammatical structure of the source language to the grammatical structure of the target language. it proved by newmark in hartono (2017) stated that in literal translation method, the word is translated singly, but the source language grammatical constructrions are changed to the grammatical constructions of the target language. the third sentence in the first paragraph the third sentence in the first paragraph shown that there were 29 students used the literal translation to translate this sentence. as the result the researcher took one sentence of translation method as the analysis example that would be shown as follow: literal translation sn-i /p-1 /s-3: sl: the virus spread widely to many countries and then in march 2020, who (world health organization) declared covid-19 as a pandemic. tl: virus menyebar secara luas ke bayak negara dan kemudian pada maret 2020, who (organisasi kesehatan dunia) mengumumkan covid-19 sebagai sebuah pandemi. if analyzed the sentence above was literal translation. focus on the source language above, if translated singly it has the meaning ‘virus menyebar secara luas ke bayak negara dan kemudian pada maret 2020, who (dunia kesehatan organisasai., but the sn-i used literal translation so it was translated as ‘virus menyebar secara luas ke bayak negara dan kemudian pada maret 2020, who (organisasi kesehatan dunia) mengumumkan covid-19 sebagai sebuah pandemi. in this case, the word was translated singly, but the student changed the grammatical structure of the source language to the grammatical structure of the target language. it proved by newmark in hartono (2017) stated that in literal translation method, the word is translated singly, but the source language grammatical construction is changed to the grammatical constructions of the target language. referring back to research questions which were tried to seek out. the former one was “what are translation methods used to translate a report text by 4th students?” and “what is the most dominant translation method used to translate a report text by 4th students?”. there were 435 sentences analyzed and the researcher found three kinds of translation method that used by the students in translating report text. first was word for word translation, in this research the researcher found that there were 60 sentences with percentage 14%. for instance, the sentence by sn-sj /p-3 /s1 “covid-19 takes about 5-6 days to the symptoms to show” translated as “covid-19 memakan waktu sekitar 5-6 hari hingga gejalanya muncul” was included in word for word translation. in that sentence the source language words were translated singly and the target language word order remains the same as the source language. this line with to hartono (2017) who said that “the word order in the translated sentence is exactly the same as the word order in the source language sentence”. the second was literal translation, in this research the researcher found that from 435 sentences there were 304 sentences with percentage 70%. this one was the most dominant translation method that used by the students in translating report text. for instance, the sentence by sn-s /p2/s-1 “this disease attacks respiratory system” translated as “penyakit ini menyerang sistem pernapasan” was included in literal translation. in that sentence the words were translated singly, but the source laguage grammatical constructions are changed to their nearest target language equivalents meaning. for instance, “...this disease...” translated as “...penyakit ini...” and “... respiratory system” translated as “sistem pernapasan”. this line with to newmark in nugraha et al (2017) who stated that “in literal translation, the source language grammatical constructions are converted to their nearest target language equivalents but the lexical words are again translated singly”. the last was free translation, in this research the researcher found that there were 71 sentences with percentage 16%. for instance, the sentence by sn rf /p-3 /s-4 “meanwhile those who experience lina anisah methods used by english department students in translating report text: a content analysis 256 serious symptoms have to seek medical help” translated as “sementara itu mereka yang mengalami gejala serius harus dirawat di rumah sakit” was included in free translation. as it can see the technique of data analysis that the researcher used is content analysis which is very rarely used by another researcher. by using content analysis, we can get a deep and details information about the result that we have. while other researchers usually use descriptive qualitative. content analysis offers the details. as the result, the findings that researcher gets in this research is comprehend and detail. it affects the goal this research which helps the translators produces a great translating, conclusion some suggestions would be directed toward the english lecturer, english students and the other researchers. first, for english lecturers. this research is expected to give english lecturers an insight about language teaching especially on the translation related to translation method that used to translate. the translation method is so important in the translation process, because it can affect to the quality of translation result. the appropriate implementation of translation method in translating process will produce an accurate translation. second, for students. the students are expected to learn and explore more about translation especially on the study of translation method. by understanding about translation method, the students will increasingly be able to produce a good translator. third, for others researchers. the objective of this research is limited only to identify the kinds of translation method and the most dominant translation method of newmark’s theory that used by the students with focus on translating report text. therefore, it is expected that limitation of this research will encourage other researchers who wish to carry out similar study to investigate more about others aspects of translation such as translation technique, translation strategy, etc. references al-haj, n., jibreel, i., sharafuddin, m. & al-shameri. h. (2021). translation of twenty yemeni short stories: evaluation of the problems and the strategies employed. international journal of english language & translation studies. 9(2), 19-30. akan, m. f., karim, m. r., & chowdhury, a. m. k. (2019). an analysis of arabicenglish translation: problems and prospects. advances in language and literary studies. 10(1), 58-65. akan, m. f. (2018). transliteration and translation from bangla into english: a problem solving approach. british journal of english linguistics, 6(6), 1-21. andriyanie, r., firmawan, h& tri wahyu r. (2016). analysis of translation technique in translating cultural words into indonesian in the novel “eat, pray, love” by elizabeth gilbert. ilmiah sastra, 4(1), 33-43. creswell, j. w & creswell, j. d. (2018). research design qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. los angeles: sage emzir. ( 2012). metodologi penelitian kualitatif analisis data. jakarta: rajawali press. fauzi, a. (2021). the use of grammar-translation method to teach reading to the tenth class students at smk ypm 12 tuban academic year 2020/2021. tadris: jurnal penelitian dan pemikiran pendidikan islam, 15(1), 24-35. hartono, r. ( 2017). pengantar ilmu menerjemah. jawa tengah: cipta prima nusantara. hidayati, n, n. (2020). analysis of translation technique, methods, and ideology on children’s bilingual stiry books. alsuna: journal of arabic and english language, 3(2), 96-114. jefriyanto, s., & samidi, l, z. (2018). an analysis of translation techniques in translating narrative text. lingua jurnal pendidikan bahasa, 2(1), 11-31. jibreel, i., al-abbasi, a. & al-maqaleh, a. (2016). towards a proposed refined classification of translation strategies with reference to written discourse. international journal of english language, literature & translation studies. 3, (3), 437-443. jones, f. r. (2019). literary translation. in routledge encyclopedia of translation studies. london: routledge. mayring, p. (2014). qualitative content analysis. austria: gesis. newmark, p. (1988). a textbook of translation. new york: prentice hall international. nugraha, a., nugroho, m. a. b., & rahman, y. (2017). english-indonesian translation methods in the short story a blunder by anton chekhov. indonesian efl journal, 3(1), 79-86. pusat bahasa. (2008). kamus bahasa indonesia. jakarta: departemen pendidikan nasional. prastyo, h. (2018). translation method in literary work: a descriptive analysis of indonesian’s tranlstor. tazkir: jurnal ilmu-ilmu sosial dan keislaman. 4(1), 21-40. rosa, r. n. (2019). thematic progression shifts in the translation of student translation advances in indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 257 social science. education and humanities research. 276, 241-247. sari, r. p., & gaho, r. (2020). indonesian interference in the students’ writing of recount text at sma negeri 1 toma. retorika: jurnal ilmu bahasa, 6(2), 94-108. shabitah, w., & hartono, r. (2020). the use of newmark’s translation methods in translating formanance novel ’i was here’ from english into indonesian. rainbow: journal of literature, linguistics and culture studies, 9(1), 63-75. sianturi, e. r., marpaung, e. m., sipahutar, s. r., rambe, k. r. (2021). kinds of translation method used by students’ in translating descriptive text from english to indonesian. jurnal bahasa dan sastra inggris. 8(1), 95-108. sidiq, u & choiri, m. m. ( 2019). metode penelitian kualitatif di bidang pendidikan. ponorogo: cv. nata karya. sinaga, l, r, e. (2018). the effect of idiomatic translation method in the student’s ability on translating desscriptive text. jurnal curere, 2(2), siregar, r, c., lubi, k, f., gultom, e, f. (2020). the translation methods used in an indonesian folktale ‘putri lopian’. linguistica, 9(2), 287298. swarniti, n. w. (2019). the translation procedures of bible translation. retorika: jurnal ilmu bahasa, 5(2), 187-196. swarniti, n. w. (2021). a corpus based approach to the analysis of stuctures in prepositional phrase. yavana bhasa: journal of english language education, 4(1), 18-22. swarniti, n. w. (2021). translation methods found in new testament bible of mark’s gospel. retorika: jurnal ilmu bahasa, 7(2), 172-179. syafrizal & rohmawati, c. (2018). translation methods in a walk to remember novel translated into kan kunang selalu. journal of english language studies, 3(2), 139-154. wijaksono, r. n., hilman, e. h., mustolih, a. (2022). translation methods and quality of idiomatic expression in my sister’s keeper movie. jurnal bahasa dan sastra inggris, 9(1), 73-84. xirera, h., muth’im, a., nasrullah. (2021). englishindonesian translation method of book’s glossary. new language dimension: journalof literature, linguistics, and language teaching. 2(2), 106116. lina anisah methods used by english department students in translating report text: a content analysis 258 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 2, july 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 121 rhetorical moves and genre development in soft science research article abstracts isti tri wahyuni english language education, faculty of language and literature education. indonesia university of education, bandung, indonesia. email: istitriwahyuni10@upi.edu wawan gunawan english language education, faculty of language and literature education. indonesia university of education, bandung, indonesia. email: wagoen@upi.edu r. dian dia-an muniroh english language education, faculty of language and literature education. indonesia university of education, bandung, indonesia. email: ddmuniroh@upi.edu eri kurniawan english language education, faculty of language and literature education. indonesia university of education, bandung, indonesia. email: eri_kurniawan@upi.edu apa citation: wahyuni, i. t., gunawan, w., muniroh, r. d. d., & kurniawan, e. (2021). rhetorical moves and genre development in soft science research article abstracts. indonesian efl journal, 7(2), pp.121-130. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i2.4565 received: 13-03-2020 accepted: 14-05-2021 published:15-07-2021 abstract: abstracts in journal articles serve to present brief and clear information regarding research which generally covers the issue raised, the objectives, the methodology used and findings of the research. consequently, an abstract holds a notable function and is considered as the face of the journal because most readers read the abstract first before going on to read the full paper. the objective of this study was to qualitatively analyse and compare the rhetorical moves and genre development of abstracts in soft science research articles before and after training. forty abstracts—20 abstracts before receiving an intervention and 20 abstracts after receiving an intervention—written by indonesian scholars in the soft science field were employed as data. hyland’s (2000) five-rhetorical move model was used to analyse the data. the findings reveal that there are differences and developments in the use of rhetorical moves in journal article abstracts after receiving an intervention. this study can be used as an overview or as a reference for future research in the discourse analysis field, especially the analysis of abstract. keywords: abstract writing; moves analysis; genre development; discourse analysis. introduction in the realm of the academic community, academicians and researchers considered that research holds a significant role to broaden knowledge in various fields. as beeman (2018) stated that one of the most important things about conducting research is to create new knowledge and to verify that it is truly an advance in understanding. not much different from beeman’s statement, mehra (2018) conveyed that we have to do research for it helps in making a better living environment for the entire organism. most researchers write their research into scientific papers in the form of research articles. research articles are a type of structured writing which functions to present the results of research that has been carried out by the researcher. after conducting a research, the researchers tend to publish their study either on a national or international scale. however, publishing a research in an international journal scale has a better advantage for it can be the first step to make the study known by the global community. publishing research in an international journal can be used as a mailto:istitriwahyuni10@upi.edu mailto:ddmuniroh@upi.edu mailto:eri_kurniawan@upi.edu https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i1.4565 isti tri wahyuni, wawan gunawan, r. dian dia-an muniroh, eri kurniawan rhetorical moves and genre development in soft science research article abstracts 122 means for researchers to convey their findings or ideas to a wider audience and may contribute to developing knowledge that can be used as a reference that can give benefits to many people across the globe. yet, writing an international journal article is not an easy thing. in order to be published globally, the authors have to comprehend the format and pay attention to the structure of the main points of the format. other than that, the journal articles must be written in international languages, one of them is in english. it can be an obstacle for people who find english as a second or third language for them. also, there is a possibility that the non-native speakers have less information or may not know that there are several rules that must be followed in writing a standardized and acceptable form. to publish an international research article, the common standard of its form includes several parts, among them are title, abstract, introduction, literature review, methodology, findings and discussion and ends with a conclusion section. each part has its own function that explains the research as a whole. nevertheless, compared to other parts, abstract is the one that received most attention due to its function. the function of abstract is to serve brief and clear information regarding the research that has been done. lores (2004) considered an abstract as a doorway to persuade the readers to view an article, as a consideration for contributors to select a journal to be published and either the submitted journal is accepted or rejected by conferences. based on lores statement, writing a standardized and structured abstract is a priority for authors. the ability to write research article abstracts effectively (hereinafter referred to as ra) is increasingly crucial when it is intended to be published in an international and reputable journal (kurniawan, gunawan, & muniroh, 2019). by writing an abstract that has been adjusted to the acceptable standard, it is hoped the possibility of the journal to stride in global community is wide open reckoning that abstract serves as the first consideration for the editorial team to decide whether a manuscript can pass the initial screening and proceed to a further review process (saeeaw & tangkiengsirisin, 2014). in writing an abstract, authors have to comprehend and pay attention to two features, they are the genre and model or pattern of an abstract. genre is used as a tool to classify, sort and organize kind of text (othman, 2011). swales and feak (2009) described genre as a type of text or discourse that is designed to get a set of communicative goals. the communicative purposes are realized through rhetorical moves or move pattern which also a framework firstly developed by swales in his study named aspects of article introduction which is hereinafter well known as cars (create a research space) model. swales (2004, p. 228) defined a move as a “discourse or rhetorical unit that performs a coherent communicative function in a written or spoken discourse”. the study regarding rhetorical moves and genre analysis of research article abstracts have been conducted by researchers in various fields. for instance, the prior study has been conducted by bhatti, mustafa, & azher (2019). they held a cross disciplinary study, where they research is investigated the genre of research article abstracts in linguistics and literature field. the result of their research showed that there is no significance difference in the used of genre between the linguistics and literature research article abstracts. besides bhatti et al. (2016), darabad (2016) has also conducted a research in the same scope. his research is focused on move analysis of research article abstract of applied linguistics, applied mathematics, and applied chemistry. based on his research, it was found that the result showed main similarity among the three study disciplines located in the introduction step. the least used move is introduction while the most frequent moves are purpose, methods, research findings, and conclusion or pmrc. a number of other previous studies have also been carried out by kurniawan et al., (2019), al-khasawneh (2017), hardjanto (2017), andika, safnil, and harahap (2018). however, in the prior research mentioned above, the researchers only focused on analysing the genre or the move structure of the research article abstract. also, to the best of author’s knowledge, research in the field of soft science is still not widely explored. hence, the novelty of this research has an objective to fill the gap by analysing the rhetorical moves and the genre development in the soft science fields. specifically, to analyse the comparison of change between the rhetorical move and genre development before and after receiving an intervention. the intervention itself refers to individual coaching activity in a workshop held by the researcher and team. candarh (2012) argued indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 2, july 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 123 that most of non-native of english speaker, especially novice researchers, they tend to be unaware of the academic writing standard conventions used by native english speaker. thus, the workshop was held as a need to spread apprehension concerning standardized international journal abstract writing. by employing the hyland’s (2000) five rhetorical move model, three research questions are addressed in this paper: (1) what are the rhetorical moves used in the abstracts written by the soft science authors before and after intervention? (2) what are the linguistic features that are realized to support the rhetorical moves before and after the intervention? (3) how is the development of the move structure before and after the intervention? method respondents in order to obtain the data needed, the authors and team held a workshop on how to write an acceptable and standardized abstract for international publication. one of the requirements for people who wanted to be a participant in this workshop was they were required to attach an abstract that was written by themselves in the registration form. after attending the workshop, they were asked to check their abstract and revise them in case there were errors or not in accordance with the recommended abstract structure for international publication based on the feedback given by the speakers. then, the participants were asked to submit their revised abstract through google form provided by the committee. the first submitted and revised abstracts were used as the data to be analysed in this research. in total, forty abstracts: twenty abstracts before receiving the intervention and twenty after the intervention, were taken as the main data. the participants of this workshop were from different levels of education background, based on the twenty participants’ data taken, as many as thirteen people are students or master degree graduates while the rest are doctoral graduates from various majors. instrument for the purpose of this study, an instrument in the form of interview was designed to find out the author’s comprehension concerning the english language and their cognitive of abstract structure. some of the questions asked during the interview are about how broad is their understanding of english, how they write the abstract, and weather they already know about this abstract structure before joining the workshop or not. data analysis procedure this paper used hyland’s (2000) five rhetorical move model as the main guideline in analysing the data. in this schema, hyland proposed five moves and thirteen steps. the first step taken by the author in analysing the data is read the abstracts then break them into sentences to determine each sentence is categorized to which move and which step. a table is used to simplify the analysis which consist of number, sentence, move, step, voice, tense, verb. after that, the researchers coded each sentence in the abstracts using the five moves scheme. to identify the linguistic features, each sentence was labelled by what tense is used in the sentence, does the sentence use active or passive voice, and what are the verbs used to signal linguistic features. the author bolds the verbs of each sentence. eventually, the researchers examined the data and described the findings of the data into words. table 1. hyland (2000) model move step 1 introduction step 1: arguing for topic significance. step 2: making topic generalization step 3: defining key term(s). step 4: identifying gap 2 purpose n/a 3 method step 1: describing participants / data sources. step 2: describing instrument(s). step 3: describing procedure and context . 4 findings n/a 5 conclusion step 1: deducing conclusion. step 2: evaluating the significance of the research. step 3: stating limitation. step 4: presenting recommendation or implication. results and discussion isti tri wahyuni, wawan gunawan, r. dian dia-an muniroh, eri kurniawan rhetorical moves and genre development in soft science research article abstracts 124 the aim of this sub-section is to set out the rhetorical organization of research article abstract in soft science field. the linguistic realizations of the moves and the genre development were described afterwards. the rhetorical moves of abstracts table 2. findings on moves salience before the intervention after the intervention move and step salience move and step salience move 1 85% move 1 90% step 1 25% step 1 40% step 2 80% step 2 80% step 3 15% step 3 10% step 4 20% step 4 45% move 2 90% move 2 95% move 3 95% move 3 100% step 1 60% step 1 70% step 2 60% step 2 55% step 3 75% step 3 85% move 4 85% move 4 100% move 5 50% move 5 75% step 1 35% step 1 50% step 2 0% step 2 5% step 3 5% step 3 5% step 4 15% step 4 50% move 1 – introduction: to establish the context of the study and motivate the----researcher or discussion there was a slight increase in the percentage of occurrence of move 1. before receiving the intervention, the move occurred for 85%, after gaining the intervention, the use of move 1 increased by 5% to 90%. even though it showed an increase, the status of move 1 before and after intervention is conventional since its occurrence did not reach 100%. according to the data, the most preferred step by the author is step 2 which its function is to state the topic generalization. the occurrence of step 2 before and after the intervention remains the same for 80%, while the step that is rarely used is step 3: defining key terms. even the occurrence of the step decreased from 15% to 10% after the intervention. the number of religious tourism travel efforts to the middle east and the indonesian tourism market with tourists from arabic is increasing, the presence of arabic is not just a religious language, now arabic is the language of support for the tourism sector. (soft science, move 1, step 2). thirty-five efl graduate students of three public universities in west and central java participated in this study. (soft science, move 1, step 3). move 2 – purpose: indicated and outlines the intention behind the paper before the intervention, move 2 is considered as a conventional move for its occurrence is 90%. after getting the intervention, the level of the move changed from intervention to obligatory move since it reached 100% occurrence. as the name implies, the communicative purpose of move 2 is to present what is the aim or the objective of a study. different from the other moves, it has no step. based on the data, almost all of the authors conveyed their research objectives in one sentence. this study aims to analyse the critical thinking skills between students who get the guided inquiry learning method and students who get the lecture method and analyse the increase in critical thinking skills between students who get the inquiry learning method and students who get the lecture method. (soft science, move 2). the result of this move is different from the previous research entitled “move analysis of the english bachelor thesis abstracts written by indonesians” that has been done by suryani and rismiyanto (2019), where the occurrence of move 2 is only 60% or considered as optional move. move 3 – methodology: provides information on design, procedures, assumption, approach, and data. similar to move 1, move 3 also showed an increase for 5% in terms of occurrence. however, if move 1 remains the same as conventional move, the increase of the occurrence made the move level changed from conventional to obligatory or from 95% to 100% after receiving the intervention. whereas in terms of step, the step that commonly found is step 3 which serves to describe the procedure and context of a research. after the intervention, the occurrence of this step is increased for 10%, yet step 2 did not experience the same indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 2, july 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 125 thing as step 3 where it has a decrease in occurrence. the method used in this study is a descriptive analysis with library study techniques. (soft science, move 3, step 3). the main instrument of this research is a written test (28 items) and lesson plans as an additional instrument. (soft science, move 3, step 2). move 4 – findings: states the main findings and the arguments. compared to the other moves, move 4 performed a significant increase in occurrence. before the intervention, the level of the move is 85% thus it is considered a conventional move. after the workshop was held, its occurrence grew for 15% which made the move become an obligatory move. same as move 2, move 4 has no step to express its other communicative purpose. move 4 is intended to briefly inform the readers regarding the main results of the research. the results showed that the academic service process using an information technology-based system starting from logging in, selecting academic services as needed to logging out on the system made the student academic service process easier, faster and more accurate. (soft science, move 4). not much different from the research done by andika, safnil, and harahap (2018) where their research concern was on analysing the rhetorical moves and linguistics features of journal article abstract in applied linguistics, the result for move 4 was 95%. move 5 – conclusion: interprets results, draw inferences, point to applications or broader implications different from the rest of the moves, only move 5 was categorized as an optional move before accepting the intervention. yet afterwards, move 5 performed the most significant increase after the intervention since it increased for 25% and changed the level from optional to conventional or from 50% to 75%. besides that, only move 5 which in one of its steps has 0% or in other words, there was no author employed the step before the intervention. the step is step 2: evaluating the significance of the research. while for the widely used step before the intervention is step 1: deducing conclusion, then after the intervention, step 4: presenting recommendation or implication matches the percentage of move 1 for 50%. the move is used by the authors to affirm their statement drawn from the results of their research. therefore, this reading learning model was successful increase students reading ability. (soft science, move 5, step 1). further research focusing on the issue of efl graduate students’ digital reading is highly recommended. (soft science, move 5, step 4). this study found that the majority of salience categories in the abstract data before the intervention are conventional. however, after the intervention, all of the moves’ percentage is increase. the increase affects the salience category of m3 method and m4– product. before the intervention, they identified as conventional moves then changed to obligatory for the two moves reached 100% of occurrence. while m1 – introduction and m2 – purpose is still classified as conventional and m5 – conclusion is optional. the finding is similar to recent prior research conducted by ramadhini, wahyuni, ramadhani, kurniawan, gunawan, & muniroh (2020). it focuses on analysing the rhetorical moves of research article abstracts in the hard science field. the research reveals that m3 method and m4 – purpose are considered as obligatory moves. however, the difference finding lies in m1 introduction and m5 – conclusion. this paper found that m1 – introduction is identified as conventional move while m5 – conclusion is optional. while in ramadhini et al. (2020) is vice versa, the m1introduction salience is 60% which is identified as optional while m5 – conclusion falls to conventional move for its salience is 80%. the linguistic features this second section addresses the realization of linguistic features in the collected abstracts, which consist of 40 abstracts. the linguistic features that were examined in this research are tense and voice. after all the data is analysed, the appearance of each tense and voice is added up and calculated to form of percentage. further findings of tense and isti tri wahyuni, wawan gunawan, r. dian dia-an muniroh, eri kurniawan rhetorical moves and genre development in soft science research article abstracts 126 voice are presented in the following two subsections. tense regarding the tense applied in all sentences of the abstracts, this present research reveals six types of tense found in the data. the tenses are simple present, simple past, simple future, present continuous, present perfect and past perfect. the use of tense in sentences in abstracts before and after receiving the intervention is dominated by the present simple and past simple tense. the following table displays the percentage of each tense. table 3. tense realization before the intervention after the intervention tense % tense % simple present 63% simple present 48% simple past 28% simple past 37% simple future 5% simple future 5% present continuous 2% present continuous 3% present perfect 2% present perfect 5% past perfect 2% in the abstracts before the intervention, there are five sentences found. yet, after the intervention, past perfect tense emerged. the tense is applied in three sentences of an abstracts. even though the percentage of present simple tense decreased in abstracts after the intervention, it is still dominated the used of tenses followed by past tense. while the competitors of present tense, past tense increased by 9%, but the increased has not been able to shift the present tense from number 1 position of the most used tense in abstracts. the table below shows the distribution of tenses in each move. table 4. the realization of tense in each move before after move tense % move tense % m1 simple present 83% m1 simple present 70% simple past 7% simple past 6% simple future 2% simple future 2% present continous 4% present continous 6% present perfect 2% present perfect 16% m2 simple present 85% m2 simple present 78% simple past 10% simple past 16% simple future 5% simple future 6% m3 simple present 31% m3 simple present 19% simple past 49% simple past 67% simple future 18% simple future 8% present continous 2% present continous 4% past perfect 2% m4 simple present 60% m4 simple present 38% simple past 38% simple past 50% present perfecr 2% simple future 8% present continuous 2% past perfect 2% m5 simple present 83% simple present 67% simple past 17% simple past 25% present continuous 4% past perfect 4% in terms of tense type, m1 introduction and m2 – purpose showed stagnant position. in the abstracts before and after the intervention, m1 introduction consist of four types of tenses and m2 purpose used three types with present tense dominated the occurrence. after the intervention, the tense variations on m3 method, m4 product, and m5 conclusion became more varied. the moves with the most tenses variations are m3 method and m4 product where 5 tenses were found in each move. in the abstracts before receiving the intervention, four out five moves are dominated by present tense. based on the results, there is a fairly large gap indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 2, july 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 127 between the present tense and other tenses. for instance, in m1 – introduction, in total there are 53 tense, the present tense occurred for 44 times (83%) while the other tense appeared below 10 times. only m3 – method that is dominated by past tense. after the intervention, there is a slightly changed occurred. m4 – product which initially used a lot of present tense, changed to past tense. tense with the least appearance in the abstracts is past perfect for it showed 3 times each on m3 – method, m4 – product, and m5 conclusion. the following excerpts are the example of the realization of each tense found in sentences. [4.1] contrastive analysis is an activity that compare the structure of b1 with b2 to identify differences between the two languages. (abstract 12, before the intervention). [4.2] digital dictionary, esl/efl websites, and social media were utilized for leveraging their english proficiency while academic social networking sites, journal webpages, journal indexers, grammar checkers and plagiarism checkers were employed for enhancing research skills. (abstract 7, before the intervention). [4.3] the researcher will select the participants based on some criteria: the same grades and the same curriculum that teachers teach, all teachers are teaching english in private secondary school in palangkaraya, and the same accessibility for using the zoom platform that already provided by the school management. (abstract 20, after the intervention). [4.4] data collection techniques is using questionnaires, tests, interviews, field notes, and image recording devices. (abstract 15, after the intervention). [4.5] from the results of the analysis that has been obtained that the level of conformity of the description of the material with kikd that includes (1) the completeness of the material, (2) the breadth of the material and (3) the depth of the material is good because it corresponds to the theme of each kd and has a conformity level of 84% which means good. (abstract 16, before the intervention). [4.6] the previous study had shown that evaluation of curriculum 2013 has been carried out in several regions. however, it is rarely that the researchers use cipp evaluation model in elementary school, especially in central java kebumen. (abstract 17, after the intervention). voice there are two types of voice, active and passive voice. based on the findings on abstracts before and after receiving the intervention, active voice surpassed passive voice. based on all the data, the total number of sentences is 380, 302 (79.5%) of them is active voice and the rest, 78 (20.5%) is passive voice. table 4. the realization of voice in each move move before after av pv av pv m1 81% 19% 82% 18% m2 100% 0% 100% 0% m3 71% 29% 69% 31% m4 89% 11% 84% 16% m5 62% 38% 57% 43% as can be seen from table 4, from m1 introduction to m5 – conclusion, active voice is out-numbered passive voice. in this present paper, the research article abstracts written by soft science authors tend to prefer to use active voice in the realization of each move. the use of passive voice in m2 – purpose in abstract before or after the intervention is not found at all. all of the participants stated their research objectives in active voice. compare to the other moves, the percentage gap between the use of active and passive voice that is not as huge as in other moves is showed by m5 of abstracts after the intervention. it is 57% and 43%. the excerpts below are examples of sentences occupied by active and passive voice. [4.7] thus, this study aims to determine the effectiveness of the implementation of curriculum 2013 in elementary schools, especially at sdn 1 pejagoan located in kebumen regency, central java province. (abstract 17, before the intervention). [4.8] quasi-experiment method was used with a one-group pre-test post-test design in this type of research. (abstract 14, after the intervention). when comparing only in terms of passive voice, the highest occurrence occupied by m3method and m5 – conclusion in both abstracts before and after the intervention. it indicated that the two moves can also be realized by this type of voice. isti tri wahyuni, wawan gunawan, r. dian dia-an muniroh, eri kurniawan rhetorical moves and genre development in soft science research article abstracts 128 genre development this section aims to describe the genre development of one of the abstracts that performed prominent development. before receiving the intervention, the abstract consists of two moves: m1 and m3. the move then developed to five moves after receiving the intervention and the move pattern 1(n)-2-3-4-5. the discussion of the genre development clarifies through following tables: table 5. move 1 (before and after) move 1 before after learning to write is an effort made by the teacher for students to master writing skills since it is considered as a complex skill. learning to write is an effort made by the teacher for students to master writing skills it is considered a complex skill. in terms of tense or sentence voice, there is no change at all in the abstract before and after the intervention. the change only happened at the number of the words. at first there are twenty-four words, but then after the intervention, the author omitted the word “since” and “as” hence the number of the words after the intervention decrease into twenty-two words. the type of the step is also the same, the author used step 2 to express the communicative purpose of making topic generalization. table 6. move 2 (before and after) move 2 before after n/a this study aims to explain learning to write with a constructivism approach from various related articles. important development happened in move 2. at first, the author did not include the move 2 to state the aim or the purpose of the research article. after receiving the intervention, the author added the sentence “this study aims to explain learning to write . . .” which indicated as move 2. by stating the m2, readers can get information related to what is the purpose of this research. table 7. move 3 (before and after) move 3 before after based on this concern, this research employs a systematic literature review of 17 international journal articles out of the nine databases requested for writing skills in elementary schools using constructivism approach. based on this concern, a systematic literature review was employed as a method that analyses 17 international journal articles out of the nine databases requested for writing skills in elementary schools using a constructivism approach. similar to move 1, there is no change in terms of the type of the step. yet, the tense and the sentence voice are changed. before the intervention, the author delivered the methodology in present simple tense and active voice, then after the intervention, they are changed into past simple tense and passive voice. the author stated “. . . this research employs/a systematic literature review was employed. . .” which indicated that step is included to step 3: describing procedure and context. besides that, the author also stated the number of the international journal articles to be analysed as the main data “. . . 17 international journal articles out of the nine databases. . .” it signalling that the step is included to step 1: describing participants/data sources. hence the step is considered as embedded step. table 8. move 4 (before and after) move 4 before after n/a the results of the literature review, there are 17 articles with a 2010-2020 timeframe identified and the majority are discussing learning to write in primary schools (47%), learning to write with constructivism approaches (40%), and media that can be developed in the constructivism approach to learning to write (13%). crucial change also occurred in move 4: findings. before receiving the intervention, the author did not state what are the main results obtained from the research or stated arguments. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 2, july 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 129 however, after receiving the intervention, the author mentioned “the results of . . .” which indicated that the sentence is considered as move 4 since the author described the main finding. by reading the m4, readers can find out the findings of this study in brief way. table 9. move 5 (before and after) move 5 before after n/a the conclusion of this research is writing learning media with constructivism approaches presented in this literature review are multimodal learning in the form of games, and collaborative writing learning that can make students able to find problems and then help them solve and find steps to solve these problems. same as move 2 and 4, move 5 performed prominent change after receiving the intervention. there are 4 steps in move 5, however, before getting the intervention, the author did not assert any steps of move 5 which serves to declare the deducing conclusion, evaluating the significance of the research, stating limitation, and presenting recommendation or implication of the research. after gaining an intervention, the author involved step 1: deducing conclusion, where it clearly stated “the conclusion of this research is . . .”. conclusion the objective of this study is to answer the research questions addressed to this paper. the first aim is to find out the realization of rhetorical moves in abstracts before and after receiving the intervention. by referencing the type of moves proposed by hyland (2000), this study found that the realization of rhetorical moves in abstracts before and after the intervention showed almost similar results. in the abstracts before the intervention, it is dominated by m1 introduction and m4 – product. from 189 sentences found in the data before the intervention, both moves were used in 53 sentences. followed by m3 – method that was realized in 51 sentences. while m5 is the least used of moves. after the intervention, m3 emerged as the dominant move which was employed in 51 sentences only different for 1 sentence from m4 with 50 sentences. while m1 with 48 sentences, which made it in third position. while the move with the least use changed from m3 to m2. the second aim addressed in this study is to find out the linguistic features realized in the abstracts. the highlighted linguistic features are tense and voice. there are six types of tenses found in the data: simple present, simple, past, simple future, present continuous, present perfect and past perfect. in abstracts before and after the intervention, the percentage of present tense is out-numbered by the other tenses that appeared in the abstracts. present tenses were found in 211 sentences. in contrast with past tense which occupied 124 sentences. same as the findings in rhetorical move, a slight change in terms of domination occurred. in abstracts before the intervention, past tense only excels in m3. after receiving the intervention, m3 is accompanied by m4 as a move that is dominated by past tense. in regard to voice, both in abstracts before and after the intervention, the realization of active voice is the most voice employed by the authors. even outnumbered by active voice, the use of passive itself is mostly found in m3 and m5. the last purpose is the genre development. based on the taken sample to be discussed further. the abstracts showed prominent development. at first, the abstract only consisted of 2 moves: m1 and m3, hence after the author attended the workshop and got an intervention, the realization of rhetorical moves developed in the abstract by adding another type of move, they are m2, m4 and m5. it is a proof that there was a genre development in the abstract after the intervention which answers the third research question. references al-khasawneh, f. (2017). a genre analysis of research article abstracts written by native and non-native speakers of english. journal of applied linguistics and language research, 4(1), pp. 113. andika, r. p., safnil, & harahap, a. (2018). rhetorical moves and linguistic features of journal article abstracts by postgraduate students, national and international authors in applied linguistics. joall (journal of applied linguistics & literature), 3(1), 129-142. https://doi.org/10.33369/joall.v3i1.6539 https://doi.org/10.33369/joall.v3i1.6539 isti tri wahyuni, wawan gunawan, r. dian dia-an muniroh, eri kurniawan rhetorical moves and genre development in soft science research article abstracts 130 bhatti, i., mustafa, s., & azher, m. (2019). genre analysis of research article abstracts in linguistics and literature: a cross disciplinary study. international journal of english linguistics; 9(4). doi:10.5539/ijel.v9n4p42 beeman, w. (2018). what is the importance of research. retrieved from https://www.quora.com/whatis-the-importance-of-research. candarh, d. (2012). a cross-cultural investigation of english and turkish research article abstracts in educational sciences. studies about language, 2, 12-17. darabad, a. 2016. “move analysis of research article abstracts: a cross-disciplinary study”. international journal of linguistics, vol. 8, no. 2. doi:10.5296/ijl.v8i2.9379. hardjanto, t. d. (2017). common discourse patterns of cross-diciplinary research article abstracts in english. jurnal humaniora, 29(1), 72. https://doi.org/10.22146/jh.v29i1.22567 hyland, k. (2000). disciplinary discourses: social interactions in academic writing (pdf file). michigan, usa: the university of michigan press. kurniawan, e., lubis, a. h., suherdi, d., & danuwijaya, a. a. 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(2014). rhetorical variation across research article abstracts in environmental science and applied linguistics. english language teaching. 7(8), 81-93. suryani, f., rismiyanto. (2019). move analysis of the english bachelor thesis abstracts written by indonesians. prominent journal; vol. 2, no. 2 swales, j. m. (2004). research genres: explorations and applications. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. swales, j., feak, c. (2009). abstracts and the writing of abstracts (pdf file). michigan, usa: the university of michigan press. https://www.quora.com/what-is-the-importance-of-research https://www.quora.com/what-is-the-importance-of-research https://doi.org/10.17576/gema-2019-1904-10 https://doi.org/10.17576/gema-2019-1904-10 https://www.quora.com/what-is-the-importance-of-research https://www.quora.com/what-is-the-importance-of-research teaching critical listening indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427 teaching critical listening to young learners in indonesian efl context fetty poerwita sarytelkom university, indonesiaemail: f.poerwitasary@gmail.comapa citation: sari, f. p. (2015). teaching critical listening to young learners in indonesian efl context. indonesian efl journal, 1(1), 41-47received: 01-02-2014 accepted: 11-03-2014 published: 01-01-2015 abstract: the teaching of english in indonesia includes four skills—listening, speaking, reading, andwriting, and two language components—vocabulary and grammar. listening is one of the fourlanguage skills that have an important role in teaching of english in our country. in the context of earlychildhood education—including the teaching of english in elementary school—there has been apersistent misconception about how children learn—including learning a foreign language. to ensuresuccess in learning a foreign language, children should have a great deal of exposure to, engagement in,and support for the language they are learning. therefore, the aims of the study are to know theresponse of the young learners in learning listening skill through storytelling and whether they canapply the critical listening into the other language skills—speaking, reading, and writing. the subjectsin this study are students of level 3 in one of english course in bandung-indonesia. their ages arearound 9 -12 years old. the data are gathered from activities in the classroom, observation, andinterviews. this reseach provides steps of critical listening activities. the results shows 1) theactivities are sucessfully help the students to sharpen their listening skill and 2) most of the studentscan apply the listening skills to the other skills. in the end of this study, the pedagogical implicationswere provided. keywords: critical listening, young learners, indonesian eflcontext. introductionthe teaching of english in indonesiaincludes four skills—listening, speaking,reading, and writing, and two languagecomponents—vocabulary and grammar.listening is one of the four language skillsthat have an important role in teaching ofenglish in our country. what is listening?according to howat and dakin (1974),listening is the ability to identify andunderstand what others are saying. thisinvolves understanding a speaker’s accent orpronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, andgrasping the meaning. call (1985) refers tolistening as one of the four skills that plays avery important role at the beginning stage oflanguage acquisition.the basic idea why we teach listening isthat it is impossible the people to be able tospeak without listening first. as peoplelearning their mother tongue, children listento other people around them. for example,their mother and father, before they begin to speak. they begin to speak after a period oftime called “silent period” (krashen, 1983).meanwhile, barker et al. (1980) asquoted by bozik (1986) shows that 70percent of our life waking day communicating;14 percent of that time is spent writing, 17percent reading, 16 percent speaking, and 53percent listening. but actually, until now,listening has attracted the least attentionamong the four skills. this neglect may comefrom the fact that listening is considered apassive skill and from the belief that merelyexposing students to the spoken language isadequate in developing the skill (call, 1985).another reason is that a teaching learningprocess often gives the impression thatteachers are teaching listening when in factthey are teaching other skills, e.g. speaking(persulessi: 1988). that is why, listeningshould be taught proportionally and have aplace in the teaching of english in our country.in actuality, as we have learned fromresearch, children have their own world, 41 mailto:f.poerwitasary@gmail.com fetty poerwita sary teaching critical listening toyoung learners in indonesian eflcontext which is far different that of adults. morespecifically, children have their own cultureand learning preferences. that is, accordingto musthafa (2002), children learn by way ofphysical activities (i.e. hands on experiences)in the context of doing things embedded intheir daily lives, both individually and socially.children have a relatively short attentionspan, and they learn with the motive ofmeeting goals. this uniquely child-like waysof doing things call for a certainmethodological style, which emphasizesconcrete activities, social interaction andseries of little bits of action-based learningsessions packaged in various models ofdelivery.to ensure success in learning a foreignlanguage, children should have a great deal ofexposure to, engagement in, and support forthe language they are learning. this meansthat children should have ampleopportunities to hear and see the englishlanguage being used for communicativepurposes in their social environment.additionally, children themselves must haveopportunities to use english—especially inthe context of learning the language—forsome communicative purposes. to enhancetheir learning, children should also be giventhe necessary support so that they feel thatwhat they are learning is useful andinteresting.basically, listening has different meaningfrom hearing. the former needs to make aneffort to hear somebody or something whilethe later perceives sounds with ears. “welisten carefully but heard nothing.” from thesentence, it seems that listening is always anactive process, while hearing can be thoughtas passive condition (underwood, 1989).listening is an active process in whichthe listener tries to identify the sound,decodes them, and understands the meaningof the words by means of context. listening isnot a passive skill since it requires fullparticipation and the undivided attention ofthe listener (morley, 1984). therefore, whenthe nature of the skill is understood, theprocess becomes existing. in other words,listening involves an active participation onthe part of the listener. the listener cannotunderstand well what is said to him unless he first of all recognizes the sound, words,phrases, and the structure of the foreignlanguage, and then selects the main points ofthe message. moreover, listening is a creativeskill. in order to comprehend the soundsfalling on someone’s ears, he takes the rawmaterial of words, arrangement of words, andthe rise and fall of the voice, and from thismaterial, he creates a significant. thesignificant which comes from the listener’sside is dependent on three factors. they are(1) linguistic factors, (2) situational context,and (3) intentions of the speaker (rivers,1981)in the strategy of teaching listening, it isnecessary for the teachers to consider somespecific questions about listening in order tomake the process of teaching listening runswell. those questions are: what factors affectgood listening? what are the characteristicsof “real-life” listening? what are the manythings listeners listen for? what are someprinciples of designing listening techniques?how can listening techniques be interactive?what are some common techniques forteaching listening?language learning is largely process ofdeveloping automatic cognitive processes, oflearning procedural knowledge, and this alsooccurs in listening process. the success inlanguage learning is to get students toactivate the process and skills they usedealing with the complex world around them.what this all means is that there is a need fortwo different types of listening practice: (1)pre-communicative listening practice and (2)real communicative listening practice(littlewood, 1981)in the pre-communicative listeningpractice, there are some pre-listeningactivities that can be done. these pre-listening activities are intended to facilitatestudents with the background knowledge thatmay help them to comprehend the spokentext such as discussing the topic, brain-storming ideas, asking general ideas aboutthe topic, or anything else to orient andprepare them for what they will hear, so theywill be able to use their inference and predictskills to understand the spoken texts.in communicative listening practice,students are engaged in communicative 42 indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427 practice. it is the most important listeningactivity. it is believed that learning languageis learning to use it for meaningfulcommunication, and this applies to alllanguage skills, not just listening.communication takes place wheninformation is conveyed from one personwho has it, to another person who doesn’t.this means that communicative languagepractice, the emphasis is not on the language,but on the content of communication.learners must listen carefully because theywant to know what is being said.in teaching listening, a teacher must becareful not to go to extremes, either by beingconcerned too exclusively with theorieswithout thinking about their application toteaching, or by obstinately following frozenroutines—opening text-book and explainingnew words, playing the tape recorder, andasking/answering questions. it is essential fora teacher to have an overall understanding ofwhat listening is, why it is difficult to foreign-language learners, and what some solutionsmay be (yagang, 1993). the vital question ishow to bridge the gap between an analysis oflistening and actual classroom teaching.some teachers think that listening is theeasiest skill to teach, whereas most studentsthink it is the most difficult to improve. thiscontradiction tells that there are somethingabout teaching listening that need to beexplored. perhaps those who say it is “theeasiest to teach” means that it does notrequire much painstaking lesson preparationand all they need to do is play the tapes andtest the students. but is there nothing more toteaching listening than testing? teachersmust find out all they can about how listeningcan be improved and what activities areuseful to this end and then use thisknowledge and these activities in their ownclassroom.the importance of listening in languagelearning should by now be quite apparent. inthe process of teaching and learning listening,teachers play an important role for theirstudents’ success. the success of teachinglistening much depends on the teachers.teachers are able to play a role as managersthat organize the process of teaching. if the goal of communicative languageteaching (clt) is to have students becomecommunicative competence (larsen-freeman,1986), then what role should the teacher playin enabling their students to becomecommunicative competence in listening? inthis case, rubin (1990) acknowledges that ateacher may have a role of a mediator for thestudents in the classroom activities that helpstudents grasp the understanding of thespoken text they hear. if the teacher fulfillsthis role in the listening class, students willbecome more efficient and critical listeners.there are many activities that we can useto teach listening to young learners such asthrough stories, song, rhymes, finger plays etc.but in this research i only apply one of themthat is by using stories. stories for childrenexist in every country and every culture.stories entertain children, educate them, andgive them their cultural ability.in the current literature, argumentabound which encourage us to exploit thechildren’s natural abilities for learning ratherthan to impose our own adult approach tolearning. the thinking is based on thefollowing assumptions: children’s ability tograsp meaning; children’s creative use oflimited language resources; children’scapacity for indirect learning; children’sinstinct for fun and play; the role ofimagination. all these five elements arecombined in the use of stories. andrewwright as quoted by musthafa (2002), anexpert on children’s literature, oncecommented on children’s ‘hunger’ for storiesthat “we allneedstories forourmindsaswe need food forourbodies…storiesare particularly important in the livesof our children: storieshelpchildren tounderstand theirworld andshare it withothers. children’s hunger for stories is constant.every time they enter theclassroomtheyenterwithaneed for stories.”additionally, in the context of earlychildhood education—including the teachingof english in elementary school—there hasbeen a persistent misconception about howchildren learn—including learning a foreignlanguage. that is, according to musthafa(2002), there has been widely-held wrongassumption that children learn things 43 fetty poerwita sary teaching critical listening toyoung learners in indonesian eflcontext (including english) exactly the same wayadult do. this misconception has resulted in afar-reaching set of problems. that is, teacherstend to approach the teaching-learningprocess and employ teaching methods andtechniques for the teaching of english foryoung learners in an exactly the same way asthey would teach adult learners. thismismatch can surely lead to failure.the research questions then areformulated as follows:1. do children feel more comfortable inlearning listening through stories thanonly listen to the tape-recorder and thenanswer the question?2. can they apply the critical listening intothe other language skills—speaking,reading, and writing? method subject ofresearchthe subjects in this study are elementarystudents who take english course in one ofenglish course for children in bandungindonesia. there are 6 levels in the englishcourse, but i took student samples from level3. i will take seven students (4 females and 3males). their ages are around 9 -12 years old.there are several reason for choosing thisparticular subjects. first, their priorknowledge of english is still average (theirability is not too fluent but they have learnedand known english at their school). second,because i expected to make a communicativeclassroom in teaching learning. the studywill utilize a set of methods to get the data,relying on activities in the classroom,observation, and interviews. procedureusually, the listening activity in the classis 1) only playing the cassette, asking thestudents to listen to it carefully and at the endthe students will be asked several question ofwhat they have heard from the cassette; 2)teachers play the cassette, ask the students topronounce the words that they heard from it,memorize the written form of the words, andthe last they are given a test. it happens allthe time.for this research, i got the opportunity tosubstitute one of the teachers to teach in her class for a month (4 meetings). i read a shortstories for two meetings and longer storiesfor the next two meetings. of course i have tobe very expressive when i became astoryteller. the pictures in the storybook andmy expression help the students tounderstand the vocabulary and the story.they can see and hear the english they havelearned come alive through storybookcharacters. i reread the story often and eachtime i reread the story, i stop on a differentpage, talk about the picture, ask questionsand encourage them to answer in their ownwords.when i did these activities, i follow somesuggestions: before, during, and after i readthe story as proposed by musthafa (2002) asfollows: before thestory i practiced reading the story before iread it to students i thought of a different voice that i coulduse for each character i practiced the intonation; for example: ifthe child in the story is sad, i make myvoice sound sad. i used the cover of the storybook to helpchildren learn to predict what the storywould be about. as i read the title and run my fingerunder it, i asked them to think what thestory would be about, i also asked theirpredictions and wrote their predictionon the board. during thestory i held the book so they can see thepictures on the pages. i read the story to them in a fun way,using different voices and showing that iwas enjoying it. then, i went back tocheck children’s predictions. i talked about the pictures and showedthem how looking at the pictures couldhelp them understand what washappening. when i got to a part that said “he said”or “she said”, i wanted the understoodwho was talking. 44 indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427 after thestory i quickly reviewed what had happened inthe story. then i asked them questionsabout things that happened in the storyto check their understanding. after i read the story the first time, iwent back to check children’spredictions. i invited children to show theirunderstanding through drawing, actingout the story, or doing an art project. i gave them time to talk about theirprojects or drawing. i asked them if theyever did anything that was likesomething that happened in the story. observationthe observation process was carriedbefore i started my research. i observed howthe teacher taught the students, the facilitiesto support the students in learning english,the students’ response to the teachingmethod conveyed by the teachers. interviewsstudents will also be interviewed abouthow they feel in doing the activities, as thesemay be their first experience in learning efl.do they feel more comfortable in learninglistening through stories than only listen tothe tape-recorder and then answer thequestion? which situation is more facilitatingthrough stories or cassettes? and thestrategies they use to apply the criticallistening into the other language skills—speaking, reading, and writing. findings and discussionbased on my observation about theregular teaching-learning activity at theenglish course, i made 4 categories: conduciveclassroomenvironmentwhy i put this into one of the categories?according to harmer (2001), young learnershave very special characteristics, goodteachers at this level need to provide a richdiet of learning experiences whichencourages their students to get informationfrom a variety of sources. they need to workwith their students individually and in groupsdeveloping good relationships. they need to plan a range of activities for a given timeperiod, and be flexible enough to move on tothe next exercise when they see theirstudents getting bored.actually, what is an ideal and conduciveclassroom for young learners? first of all theclassroom are supposed to be bright andcolorful, with windows the children can seeout of, and with enough room for differentactivities to be taking place. teachers mightexpect them to be working in groups indifferent parts of the classroom, changingtheir activity every ten minutes or so.halliwell (1992) as quoted by harmer (2001)write, ‘not talking about classrooms wherechildren spend all their time sitting still inrows or talking only to the teacher’.even though, the explanation aboveshows an ideal and conducive classroom, itdoes not mean that every course can fulfillthat because it needs extra budget to makethe class like that. unfortunately, i could notfind a description of a conducive classroom inthis english course. the class is sometimestoo small to accommodate students. inseveral classes, there are no window, do nothave enough ventilation, and lack of sunlight. interactionbetween teacher andstudentsaccording to brown (2001), interactionis the collaborative exchange of thoughts,feelings, or ideas between two or morepeople, resulting in reciprocal effect on eachother. theories of communicativecompetence emphasize the importance ofinteraction as human beings use language invarious context to “negotiate” meaning, orsimply stated, to get an idea out of oneperson’s head and into the head of anotherperson and vice versa.from the very beginning of languagestudy, classroom should be interactive. rivers(1987) as quoted by brown (2001) puts itthis way: through interaction, students can increase their language storeas they listen to or read authentic linguistic material, or even theoutput of their fellow students in discussions, skits, joint problem-solving tasks, or dialogue journals. in interaction, students can use all they possess of the language—all they have learned or casually absorbed—in real-life 45 fetty poerwita sary teaching critical listening toyoung learners in indonesian eflcontext exchanges. …even at an elementary stage, they learn in this way to exploit theelasticity of language.to make an interaction happens in theclassroom, teacher should play as a controller,director, manager, facilitator, and resource.because the learners still felt unsatisfactorywhen they learned english especially learninglistening, i concluded that the teachers in theenglish course were still unable to play roleof interactive teacher. students’ strategies in learning listeninglearning strategies are steps taken bystudents to enhance their own learning(oxford, 1990), while wenden (1987) definesthat learning strategies are specific mentalsteps or operations learners implement tolearn. strategies are especially important forlanguage learning because they are tools foractive, self-directed involvement, which isessential for developing communicativecompetence. appropriate language learningstrategies result in improved proficiency andgreater self-confidence. it is also happenedwhen students use the strategies in listening.from my observation, i concluded thatwith an attractive way of teaching, studentscould get their self-confidence when theylearn efl. in fact, they admitted that they feelbored when they learned listening. they justlistened to the cassette and then answeredthe question but they felt interested whenthey were given another activities. students’ response to thestorya response-based view of the role ofchildren’s literature in the elementaryclassroom has recently been brought to theattention of educators (galda, 1988 as quotedby hancock, 1992). rosenblatt (1991) hasintroduced us to an aesthetic and an efferentreading. when our students’ emotion isinvolved in appreciating literature and thenthey enjoy it, it means that they have anaesthetic response.in my observation, when they weregiven a story the students were veryresponsive and could cooperate in makinginteraction through the activities. in myopinion, this activity can be applied in theclassroom by the teachers at the english course. the research activity that i conductedthere is just to give other option of teaching inthe classroom.through the using story activity,students were successful in following theinstruction. i conclude that: they understandwhat was the story about. when i asked themfor feedback, they always gave a positiveresponse. they were also able to retell thestory with their own words. it shows theirability in speaking. they can recognize thecharacters in the story. they enjoy theexcitement in the story. they can memorizethe vocabularies on the story easily. they canrecords and the words and able to write themin a written text. it shows their ability towrite. they can absorb the moral messagesfrom the story. it shows their ability to givean aesthetic response. in discussing the story,they can make an interaction with me as afacilitator in the class conclusionfrom my observation and findings ifound in the classroom, i can conclude thatlistening activity through story improve andhelp the students to learn english in fun way.the students can apply what they havelistened into other skills such as reading,writing, and speaking. there are severalsuggestions that i can share based on myobservation and findings: it is important toprovide the students with many storybooks,songs, and games for students. i thinkthrough these activities, efl learning inindonesia will be successful; english teachersshould be provided with training, seminar orworkshop in order to improve their teachingmethod especially for teaching children. referencesbozik, m. (1986). teaching critical listening. in golub, j. activities topromote critical thinking: classroompractices in teaching english (pp. 55-59). illinois: ncte.brown, h. d. (2001). teaching by principles: an interactive approach to language pedagogy (2nd ed.). n.y.: longmancall, m.e. (1985). auditory short-term memory,listening comprehension and input hypothesis. tesolquarterly, 19(4), 765-781hancock, marjorie r. (1992). literature responsejournals: insight beyond the printed page. language arts, 69, 36-42. 46 indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427 harmer, j. (2001). the practice ofenglish language teaching. new york: longmanhowat, a. and dakin, j. (1974). language laboratory materials. journal ed. j.p.b. allen, s.p.b. allenand s.p. corder.krashen, s. and terrel, t. 1983. the natural approach language acquisition in theclassroom. sanfrancisco: pergamon.littlewood, w. (1981). communicative language teaching: an introduction. cambridge:cambridge university press.morley, j. (1984). listening and language learning in esl: developing listening comprehension. new york:brace jovanovich.musthafa, b. (2002). efl for young learners. bandung:crestnunan, d. (1989). understanding language classroom: a guide for teacher initiated action. new york:prentice hall. oxford, r. l. (1990). language learning strategies.boston: heinle & heinle publishers.persulessi, g. h. (1998). listening improvement for students of english as a second language. jakarta:dirjen dikti depdikbud ri.rivers, w. m. (1987). interactive language teaching.cambridge: cambridge university press.rosenblatt, l. m. (1991). literature—s.o.s.!. language arts, 68, 444-448.rubin, j. (1990). improving foreign language listening comprehension. washington d.c.: georgetownuniversity press.underwood, m. (1989). teaching listening. london:longman.wenden, a. l. (1987). a conceptual background andutility. in wenden a. & rubins, j. (eds). learners strategies in language learning.yagang, f. (1993). listening problemsand solutions.forum. xxxi, 1 (january) 47 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 277 a critical review on the discussion of developing speaking skills through task based materials ika handayani english education department, faculty of teachers training and education, universitas sultan ageng tirtayasa, banten, indonesia email: ika.handayani@untirta.ac.id eri rahmawati english education department, faculty of teachers training and education, universitas sultan ageng tirtayasa, banten, indonesia email: erirahmawati@untirta.ac.id ledy nurlely english education department, faculty of teachers training and education, universitas sultan ageng tirtayasa, banten, indonesia email: ledynurlely@untirta.ac.id apa citation: handayani, i., rahmawati, e., & nurlely, l. (2022). a critical review on the discussion of developing speaking skills through task based materials. indonesian efl journal, 8(2), 277286. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v8i2.6489 received: 17-03-2022 accepted: 19-05-2022 published: 31-07-2022 introduction mastering speaking skill is still challenging issue for students who learn either english in efl or esl classes. since it is one of productive skills, so in implementing it the learners should consider the language they produce both in conveying ideas, feelings or thoughts and responding toward ones’ utterances and expressions directly. in speaking, consideration of being interactive and responsive are dominated when speakers have their taking in turn. moreover for the students who major in english at their study program are highly motivated to speak english fluently and accurately (tao & gao, 2022). however, the learners of english get problems in producing their ideas, feelings, and thoughts orally, especially when they struggle in speaking performances. those problems are (1) affected related problems: self-problems and anxiety; (2) socially related problems: difficulties to find the opportunities to learn and to perform in spoken english; (3) linguistically related problems: vocabulary, grammar, fluency and pronunciation (jaya, petrus, & pitaloka, 2022). speaking english fluently is the main goal to be able to speak to abstract: this is a critical review elaborated on the strengths and the weaknesses of the article content. the purpose of the study. it is aimed to review critically on the discussion of developing speaking skills through task based materials by relating those findings with the theories, books and articles in reputated journal. research method. this study used systemic literature review to identify, study, evaluate, and interpret the research about interesting phenomenon with certain relevant research. every data is linked to studies which have the same discussion either from theories, books and relevant articles published in reputated journal. the data is analyzed using content analysis to analyze the content of the article as the main data. the source of data were taken from the whole content of the article that discussed about processing action on improving speaking through the implementation of task based material. main findings. the findings showed that there were some unclear discussions about abstract information; moves organization in introduction; lack of current and relevant studies and theories; unsystematic findings related to the proposed research questions; and the terms used in the article. as the conclusion, this critical review has given informative and suggested references to support the ideas and views of the articles from reputated and current journals and recent books started from 2003 (telling the story of task based language teaching implementation and theories) to 2021 (suggesting the steps in developing materials through task based materials). keywords: speaking skills; task based materials; critical review. ika handayani, eri rahmawati, & ledy nurlely a critical review on the discussion of developing speaking skills through task based materials 278 friends even foreigners and understand the spoken language without any missed perception (handayani & rahmawati, 2017). in the context of the teaching and learning english, many students have focus on reaching the goal, it is being success in mastering oral proficiency (dincer, 2017). in short, speaking is urgent to be learned and interesting to be discussed in the context of teaching and learning english. this review has a basic purpose to promote creative and innovative way in teaching english speaking skill, so that the readers either as teachers, students or researchers are also asked to be more critical in finding current and relevant studies to support literature review and findings of the research or study about english speaking skills. hopefully, what have been discussed in this article could be insightful knowledge and references to the academic world. the technique of analyzing data was content analysis that focused on whole content of the article. then the result of the critical review is discussed in the findings and implication. each findings are supported by relevant theories and articles from the books and reputated journals that elaborated current issue in the teaching and learning english speaking. task based language teaching is not a new approach in the teaching language methodology. this following issues show that the study about task based materials, task based teaching and learning started from previous years to the recent year. as the research conducted in 2003 by carless under the title factors in the implementation of task-based teaching in primary schools (carless, 2003) reviews on how teachers approached on using communicative task during the implementation of task based teaching and learning. another research had also been conducted regarding to the implementation of task based language teaching during the learning process of grammar in intermediate efl learners. this issue seems to focus in the context of meaning focus instruction to do and complete the task during the implementation on task based materials in teaching and learning english. the result showed that if the materials in the task contain meaningful instruction it will guide the learners to complete the task during learning grammar (marzban & mokhberi, 2012). an article published in 2020 conducted by bystrom and kumpulainen discussed on providing conceptual framework of information needed either vertically or horizontally in the implementation of task based learning and teaching. they emphasized that information is needed in the task vertically (general and specific context) and horizontally (the conceptual understanding and the information in the task) will guide the learners to complete the task (byström & kumpulainen, 2020). there was a study focused on doing the assessment based on task based approach which discussed about certain system to assess task difficulty and to rate the performances, spoken or written. there should be difficulty scale and interrater agreement for the performance between elt professionals and novices (skehan & luo, 2020). those researches were about teacher’s beliefs, teacher’s understanding, the syllabus time available, the textbook and the topics, preparation and the available resources, and the language proficiency of the students (ellis, skehan, li, shintani, & lambert, 2021). since it was introduced to the educational field, teachers and lecturers as the educational practitioners have implemented this approach either focus on the teaching, learning and the material development and it is still interesting to be discussed about (snowden, martin, mathers, & donnell, 2014). there are also some researchers who have talked and shared their findings of the researches both exploring theoretically and practically. researches that focused on theories, findings and discussions on task based materials: harper and widodo (2020); suhandoko (2019); wijayatiningsih, lestariningsih, and agustina (2020); yundayani and sri ardiasih (2021); and yundayani, kardijan, and herawan (2019). some books also can be insightful inputs to develop the ideas and supporting arguments for further research: nunan (2010) and hawkes (2019). thus, this critical review focused on the strengths and weaknesses of its whole content and discussion and the link to relevant studies/issues. all articles are published in reputable journals (sinta and scopus) published by sage, elsevier, taylor and francis, routledge, cambridge, and wiley. theoretical speaking is one of english skills that must be learned and mastered by efl learners. teaching speaking to efl learners means helping the students develop specific sets of interactional and communication skills, because spoken communication take in a real time (hinkel, 2018, and roever & kasper, 2018). speaking requires the indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 279 development of speech processing and oral production skills which almost always include accurate pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary as well as information sequencing and discourse organization (halimah, lustyantie, & ali, 2018); (menggo, suastra, budiarsa, & padmadewi,, 2019); in recent years, teaching english speaking to higher educational students, university students, the main role is leading the students to construct the learning assumptions that seek to improve students autonomy, motivations and achievement. teacher/lecturer form the students have self determined learning by putting learners in control of their own learning, moving beyond the development of knowledge and skill, and instead of focusing on the capability, that is the ability to integrate and effectively apply a new knowledge and skills in unanticipated situations (stoszkowski & mccarthy, 2019); (ekoç, 2020); (lumettu & runtuwene, 2018). dincer added that speaking english fluently can bring forward people in their career because it can make them speak clearly while delivering information and materials (bustari, samad, and achmad, 2017); . therefore, people will not have any misunderstanding in communication while working on their jobs (dincer, 2017); discussion on teaching speaking, hopefully the learners of speaking skill will earn much knowledge, have many experiences, decide smart steps in solving the problems, having mutual collaboration, skillful in communicating the feeling, thoughts and argument/ ideas by exploring and empowering information and technology as digital or printed sources (lestari, 2019); (bustari, samad, & achmad, 2017b); (noviyenty, 2018). since the 1980s, task-based language instruction has gotten increased attention in the field of foreign language education. it examines leaner as a communicative tool since it is a learner-centered approach. the task-based approach strives to provide chances for learners to speak and write in natural, practical, and functional ways through learning activities that engage learners in the natural, practical, and functional use of language for meaningful objectives (hismanoglu and hismanoglu, 2011). the characteristics of task based language teaching based on swan (2005) emphasizes on: (1) instructed language learning should mainly contain natural language use and the activities are related to meaning rather than knowledge. (2) instruction should support students’ centered learning that teacher centered leaning. (3) promoting the internationalization of formal linguistic elements while keeping the perceived benefits of natural approach. (4) focus on the form that will attract students’ attention to linguistic components and emerge it to the main focus on meaning or communication ((marzban and mokhberi, 2012). (5) providing communicative tasks in certain device. (6) there is pre task and post task of language study to internalize the formal communication (hawkes, 2019). (7) requiring passive formal instruction and practice isolated from communicative works (swan in hismanoglu and hismanoglu, 2011); (najjari, 2014). language learning is a developmental process that enhances communication and social interaction rather than a product internalized by practicing language items, and learners master the target language more powerfully when exposed to meaningful task based activities in a natural way. in short, task is the core unit of instructional materials in language teaching (richard and rodgers, 2001). the task based language teaching is a teaching approach that employing tasks as its main pedagogical tools to structure language teaching (nunan, 2010); (skehan & luo, 2020) regarding to the task based language teaching materials, tasks are the key word in developing materials. ellis in harper and widodo (2018) stated that the material development consist of: (1) the primary focus should be on the meaning; (2) there should be kind of gap to express the opinion or to infer the meaning); (3) complete activity between linguistic and non-linguistic ones; (4) clearly define to the outcomes rather than the use of language; (5) focus on the comprehension of the task (hismanoglu and hismanoglu, 2011); (wijayatiningsih et al., 2020). while long and crookes (1993) in sundari proposed how to design and develop task based design: a comprehensive needs analysis, diagnosis of leaner’ needs, identification of target tasks learners, the classification of the task types, selection of pedagogical tasks for the classroom, sequencing of pedagogical tasks (sundari, febriyanti, and saragih, 2018; and suhandoko, 2019). reviewing the article is challenging choice to do as the researcher. furthermore, it needs deep reading and empiric supporting data in terms of relevant studies as references. in writing critique, the researcher or writer will analyze, examine, or ika handayani, eri rahmawati, & ledy nurlely a critical review on the discussion of developing speaking skills through task based materials 280 investigate with the underlying assumption by exploring critical thinking, creative thinking and critical eyes (swales & feak, 2008). they also provided eight questions to be considered in criticizing the journal articles while reading and writing the articles. those are (1) who is the audience; (2) what is the purpose of the article; (3) what research questions are being addressed kin the article; (4) what conclusion does the author draw from the research; (5) what kind of evidence is offered in support of the conclusion, how good is the evidence; (6) are the conclusion valid based on the evidence and why; (7) are there any important assumption underlying the article; (8) does the research make an original contribution to the field? why? therefore, this article is aimed to have critical review on certain discussion in the teaching and learning speaking including the strengths (things that could enrich the teaching and learning of english speaking skill and develop knowledge and references academically) and the weaknesses (things that have not discussed further and explored well) of the discussion in the article entitled: developing speaking skills through task based materials (masuram and sripada, 2020). method this critical review article used qualitative method by implementing systemic literature review to have deep and further discussion on this topic. systematic literature review is a term used to refer to a particular research methodology or research and development carried out to collect and evaluate research related to the focus of a particular topic. purpose of slr research is carried out for various purposes, including identifying, reviewing, evaluating, and interpreting all available research with topic areas of interest to phenomena, with certain relevant research questions (triandini, jayanatha, indrawan, putra, & iswara, 2019). slr is used to elaborate the discussion on the article “developing speaking skills through task based materials” (masuram and sripada, 2020). the data analyzed through content analysis which focused on the main data the content of the research article. the finding data then elaborated and confirmed them to theories in the books, previous relevant studies discussed in the articles published in scopus (sage, elsevier, routledge, tailor and francis, cambridge) and sinta. results and discussion results researcher found that there were three points to be discussed and elaborated deeply. the researcher explored the strengths and weaknesses started from the abstract, introduction moves (by swalles), theories, findings and conclusion. abstract language of the abstract the first sentence in the abstract is generalization of english as global language which is used to communicate internationally. it is statement attracted readers to find the reason that speaking english is urgent to be learned if ones want to communicate globally. however, it will be more enlightening if the word or the term communication skills in the four opening sentences in abstract, specified whether the communication skill in the discussion is an oral communication skill or speaking skills as it is stated by swalles and feak that some terms in certain field has different meaning in other fields depending on the field of study (swales & feak, 2008). so, the writer of academic or scientific paper should significantly focus on the rightt term based on the education field, speaking skills refers to oral communication skills and writing skills refers to written communication skills. the writer of that article keep using the term/ diction communication skill rather than using speaking skill. content of the abstract the abstract has successfully informed the reasons why this study should be conducted by stating “spoken english is a gateway to improve and achieve success in career of the students and it is taught as compulsary subject in india as well as countries”. things that are not clear yet: telling the participant of the research whether secondary schools, high schools or university students. it was only stated the place of the research was in india. the method was not stated clearly. instead of stating certain method like whether it was action research or case study or experimental study, the researcher’s wrote design of the research which was separated into two phases: “ pre intervention stage and intervention stage. if it an action research, so the data could be collected through test, questionaire, observation, interview and documentation sin action research is one of mix indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 281 method (aristy, hadiansyah, & apsari, 2019). the researcher only mentioned instrument to collect the data (questionnaire for teachers and students) but has not stated the data analysis used in this research. if it is an action research , so it use miles and hubbermen design of anlysis: data reduction, data display and data verification (miles, 2014). the resaerch objectives and the finding at the closing statement of the abstract is different. it informed the objectives of the research: “ students should use correct pronunciation and intonation, speaking coherently on certain topic”. in the closing statement the objective of research was students were able to communicate confidently and fluently. those goals were different from the first statement of the research objectives: there was inconsintence terms used by the researchers. introduction moves and literature review in the introduction, the researchers wrote speaking in second language, speaking as productive skills. the researchers go directly to put all theories related to the resaech such as : speaking (sub skills of speaking; essensial elements of speaking; function of speaking); task based language teaching ( input and material used for task; framework for task based instruction, role of task in developing speaking; principles of task based materials development, roles of materials); and approaches addapted for the materials design. it would have been batter if the researcher inform their introduction with these points:introduction explores the general purpose of the study, exposes significant study either practically or theoretically, has well and clear organization, establishes territory and niche, and whether it occupies ther niche (swales & feak, 2008); (mcmillan & wergin, 2010). introduction move by swales and feak, rhetorical pattern in the create research space model, cars model (swales & feak, 2008) . the moves are: move 1: establishing a research teritory (showing general research and problematic discussion; reeviewing items of previous research). move 2: establishing a niche (indicating gap in the previous research by extending previous knowledge. move 3: occupying the niche (outlining purposes, listing research questions, announcing principal findings, stating value of present research, indicating the structure of research paper). the literature review commonly becomes scaffolding to the findings of the research , whether the finding would give insightful, inspiring and current information, knowledge and experience for education field. the hot finding would be beneficial significantly either theoretically and practically. the literature reviews: theories and relevant studies written to support the findings were not yet taken currently. the latest year to support the ideas was in the year: 2010 and the oldest one was 1987. the concept eitheir basic theories or relevant studies would have been somewhat more relevant if the researcher has more recent literature to support his views (swales & feak, 2008). here are the recent relevant studies to support intetesting and inspiring idea and theories in this article.. the first concept was speaking: sub skills of speaking; essensial elements of speaking; function of speaking (leonard & shea, 2017); (roever & kasper, 2018); (menggo et al., 2019); (noviyenty, 2018); (bangun, 2018); (bustari et al., 2017b); (lestari, 2019); (saeed al-sobhi & preece, 2018); (lumettu & runtuwene, 2018); (syarifudin, 2019); and (ekoç, 2020). the second concept was task based language teaching: input and material used for task; framework for task based instruction, role of task in developing speaking; principles of task based materials development, roles of materials cold be more deeply explored by reading these relevant articles about those points (hawkes, 2019); (hismanoglu & hismanoglu, 2011); (najjari, 2014) (marzban & mokhberi, 2012). the third concept was approaches addapted for the materials design coul be elaborated by reading all the concept in these discussions of articles (harper & widodo, 2020); (dempsey & mathiassen, 2006); (carless, 2003); (suhandoko, 2019); (wijayatiningsih et al., 2020); (yundayani et al., 2019). in the literature review, there was a theory from nunan, however it was still the old, one published in 2004, whereas there is the current one that published in 2010. things to be concidered well is the phenomenon of this article which was published in 2020, but the references have not quoted from the latest ones yet. so , this critical review has given informative and suggested references to support the ideas and views of the articles from reputated and current journals and recent books started from 2003 (telling the story of task based language teaching implementation and ika handayani, eri rahmawati, & ledy nurlely a critical review on the discussion of developing speaking skills through task based materials 282 thories) to 2021 (suggesting the steps in developing materials through task based materials findings in the finding session, the writer only informed that there was improvement on the students’ quality in communication skill. it surface meaning, it was in line with the aims of the research. however, not all supporting data collecting techniques were explored and elaborated toward the result of the research either in description data qualitatively or quantitatively. there was not information briefly of how significant is the students’ speaking skill (in the data it was stated “students’ communication skill”). there was neither displaying the result of the intervention through tables nor statistic data that proven there was improvement or development after treatment by calculating the pretest or posttest. it was reported that improvement could be proven on the quality of the students’ communication skill community. however, it was not briefly explained what kind of quality and how that quality was measured. the interpretation of how was the data from observation, interview, questioner, learner’s diary were not available discussed in the findings. in short, the data which were collected through qualitative and quantitative (test) technique were not displayed and elaborated. it will be better if there is information about how is data collected and analyzed. then the researcher also has to inform the descriptive of the result through displayed diagram or tables (cresswell, 2018). things that should be more critical is the research objective related to this findings. it was informed the objectives of the research: “students should use correct pronunciation and intonation, speaking coherently on certain topic”. the research forgot to make intonation as one of skills in mastering pronunciation intonation is one of prosodic features in pronunciation (van maastricht et al., 2020); (yangklang, 2013). another goal of this study was students could “speak coherently” rather than “speaking communicatively” as they started their statement in the early abstract, to speak communicatively and interactively (demir, yurtsever, & çimenli, 2015) and to focus on fluency, accuracy and complexity however the abstract was closed by informing the findings: students’ development after having those two phases: having communicate confidently and friendly: students were able to communicate confidently and fluently. those goals were different from the first statement of the research objectives: students could speak in correct pronunciation, intonation and to speak coherently. there was inconsistence terms used by the researchers. those findings would have been more inspiring and reasonable if all supporting theories, concept and findings written by the elaboration of the current literature since knowledge and science keeps developing every year even in minutes counting. conclusion another finding of this critical review, was in conclusion statement. the researcher concluded that by implementing task based material students have developed their speaking skills in terms of effective communication, being fluent and being accurate in pronunciation. while the primary concern of this article was making the students have correct pronunciation, and intonation, and speak coherently (abstract) and another different terms of research goal was the students can communicate confidently and fluently (in the findings). perhaps the researchers could be more consistence in adjusting the research objectives and the terms used in their articles (leonard & shea, 2017). this critical review has got the points to be suggested based on the findings: the abstract content, introduction moves which was blended and integrated to the discussion of literature review and the findings, the conclusion that showed different terms in showing the result related to the research objectives. the finding also was not elaborated well in displaying the data from qualitative and quantitative instruments. the data will be meaningful result if those data was explained in detail through tables or diagram to show significant improvement/ development. the references in the literature review was in discussion of relevant theories and concepts taken from the year of 1989 to 2007, whereas this article published in 2020. so this critical review has given informative and suggested references to support the ideas and views of the articles from reputable and current journals and recent books started from 2003 (telling the story of task based language teaching implementation and thories) to 2021 (suggesting the steps in developing materials through task based materials). hopefully it will be more insightful for the next researcher to make this article for their indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 283 supporting ideas and views as one of relevant references. conclusion this critical review has got the points to be suggested based on the findings: the abstract content, introduction moves which was blended and integrated to the discussion of literature review and the findings, the conclusion that showed different terms in showing the result related to the research objectives. the finding also was not elaborated well in displaying the data from qualitative and quantitative instruments. the data will be meaningful result if those data was explained in detail through tables or diagram to show significant improvement/ development. the references in the literature review was in discussion of relevant theories and concepts taken from the year of 1989 to 2007, whereas this article published in 2020. so this critical review has given informative and suggested references to support the ideas and views of the articles from reputated and current journals and recent books started from 2003 (telling the story of task based language teaching implementation and thories) to 2021 (suggesting the steps in developing materials through task based materials). hopefully it will be more insightful for the next researcher to make this article for their supporting ideas and views as one of relevant references. acknowledgment all praises and thanks to allah swt who has given great blessing, guidance, therefore the researchers are able to finish this study. the writers would like to deliver the deepest gratitude and appreciation to the rector of untirta, the dean of fkip untirta, the head of english education department of fkip untirta, for kind support and valuable suggestions to this article. thank you to the editorial teams and reviewers of indonesian efl journal of uniku who kindly give constructive criticism, comments and suggestions to enlighten the writers toward their article. the last but not least, great loves given to our colleagues in university of sultan ageng tirtayasa who have given motivation in accomplishing this study. suggestions and valuable inputs are pleased to be given to us to make this research better and become one of references for the next researcher who will enrich the topic of this article. references aristy, i., hadiansyah, r., & apsari, y. 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(2021). task-based material design for academic purposes: learners’ english writing skill improvement. studies in english language and education, 8(1). https://doi.org/ 10.24815/siele.v8i1.18169 ika handayani, eri rahmawati, & ledy nurlely a critical review on the discussion of developing speaking skills through task based materials 286 indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(1) january 2015 issn 2252-7427 117 presupposition in the jakarta post’s political articles: a pragmatics approach fahrus zaman fadhly department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia e-mail: fahruszf@gmail.com ayu putri kurnia department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia e-mail: ayuputri031@gmail.com apa citation: fadhly, f. z. & kurnia, a. p. (2015). presupposition in the jakarta post’s political articles: a pragmatics approach, 1(1), 117-124 received: 10-09-2014 accepted: 13-10-2014 published: 01-01-2015 abstract: this study is aimed to investigate presupposition in the jakarta post daily newspaper’s articles in political column. it covers two problems: types of presupposition and triggers of presupposition. those problems were identified by applying presupposition theory. the data were interpreted by using descriptive qualitative method since it intended to describe a large number of sentences, clauses and phrases rather than numbers. the result of the study showed that the most frequent was existential presupposition with 202 occurences (78.59%), followed by factive presupposition with 2 occurences (0.79%), lexical presupposition with 36 occurences (14%), structural presupposition with 11 occurences (4.28%), non-factive presupposition with 2 occurences (0.79%) and counterfactual presupposition with 4 occurrences (1.56%). besides, the study also showed the existence of 691 presupposition triggers which consisted of 631 definite descriptions (90.92%), 2 factive items (0.28%) which was similar to the existence of change of state verbs, 6 implicative verbs (0.86%), 6 itteratives (0.86%), 21 temporal (3.02%), 13 comparisons and contrast (1.87%), 8 questions (1.15%) and 3 counterfactual conditionals (0.43%). finally, the findings showed that both types and triggers of presuppositions were related each other. keywords: presupposition, types of presupposition, triggers of presupposition, political column, the jakarta post. introduction this study investigates types of presupposition and their triggers in the jakarta post’s political articles online edition. the reason for choosing the topic because the role of presupposition is important in the society especially in the area of advertising. it creates a point that the use of presupposition can be a basic theory in making some advertisements to become more interesting. yingfang (2007, p. 55) mentions presupposition “as a very important in linguistics, especially in pragmatics, presupposition is frequently employed in order to enhance the effects of persuasion in advertisements because of its own special properties.” it means that the presupposition has a unique thing to explore that aims to get people’s interest toward the product which is promoted by some advertising company. besides, people are going to have attention to the product since there is the relationship between presupposition and advertising language. according to yingfang (2007, p. 55), “there exist some relations between presupposition and advertising language.” in brief, the advertising language can be captured well using presupposition in order to make a good mailto:ayuputri031@gmail.com indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(1) january 2015 issn 2252-7427 118 advertisement which aims to persuade consumers. meanwhile, yule (1996, p. 25) defines that “presupposition is something the speaker assumes to be the case prior to making an utterance”. he argues that the speaker has assumption when s/he speaks about something, and the assumption is known by the hearers. it can be understood that the speaker and the hearer are sharing knowledge each other in a conversation. yule (1996, p. 26) also mentions that “in many discussion of the concept, presupposition is treated as a relationship between two propositions”. so, that means presupposition can occur when there exist two propositions which related each other. presupposition which is one of the pragmatics terms has the distinction. the distinction between presupposition and another pragmatics’ theory is that presupposition will remain constant if the statement is negated, this situation is called constancy under negation (yule, 1996, p. 26). as found in the example ‘everybody doesn’t know that john is a gay,’ even the statement is negated, the presupposition is still true and same, john is a gay. investigating types of presupposition in the jakarta post’s articles online edition is inspired by several previous studies, i.e.: ‘an analysis of presupposition triggers in english journalistic texts’ by khaleel (2010) and ‘presupposition triggers: a comparative analysis of broadcast news discourse’ by zare (2007). the phenomenon of presupposition is identified by khaleel (2010) by investigating the main presupposition triggers in six selected english newspapers, i.e.: the independent, the guardian, the daily mirror, liverpool echo, the belfast telegraph and the northern echo. khaleel (2010, p. 523) mentions that “the analysis of the data has shown that english journalistic texts rely heavily on existential presupposition (definite descriptions) whose ratio has constituted 57.7% of the studied sample.” so, the point is that the result of the study showed that existential presupposition which is triggered by definite description is mostly appeared in the texts since the occurance is the highest percentage of all. the role of presupposition has been proven also by zare (2012). according to zare (2012, p. 734), “presuppositon has been used as a property of language to mold the audience’s ideology.” it means that the importance of presupposition cannot be denied as a part of communication whose function is to catch the readers’ interests and the hearers as well. he believes that applying theory of presupposition can make the utterances more interesting to be read or listened. zare (2012) identified triggers of presupposition in presstv and cnn’s transcript. he stated that both in presstv and cnn’s transcript, the number of existential triggers stand in the highest rank of all. he also noted that the frequency of existential trigger means entities and it is the simple one to making utterances to be more meaningful and understandable in giving information to the readers and listeners. on the basis of the background to the studies above mentioned, this study investigates types of presupposition in articles of the jakarta post online edition. this study investigates the main presupposition and the triggers as well in the jakarta post’ political articles online edition which are focused on political column. the jakarta post has been choosen as an object of the study since the jakarta indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(1) january 2015 issn 2252-7427 119 post is the daily english newspaper in indonesia which has won several awards and been described as being “the indonesia’s leading englishlanguage daily newspaper.” method the present study is largely using qualitative research design. in qualitative research method, the data taken from many texts are explored and analyzed using descriptive qualitative method since it intends to identify clauses, sentence and will be interpreted into the form of words rather than numbers (frankel & wallen, 1990; lincoln & guba, 1985; meriam, 1988 in creswell, 2009, p. 195). similarly, alwasilah (2000) states that in the process of interpreting the data, it can be collected and interpreted specifically and contextually. thus, this study uses descriptive qualitative method in interpreting the data since it mainly focuses on identifying the types and triggers of presuppositions. so that, the data should be shown in the form of word rather than numbers. the main data sources in this study are the articles taken from the jakarta post online edition downloaded on february and june 2014. while the supporting data are taken from some books and references. the articles are selected from the jakarta post’s online edition using purposive sampling. sugiyono (2012) defines that sampling purposive is the data selected can be setted up into the needs of study. this study applies 7 articles about political issues which put on the most viewed and most commented column in the jakarta post online edition. the selected articles are identified and classified into types of presupposition which consist of existential, factive, lexical, structural, non-factive and counter factual presupposition (yule, 1996). there are some stages in identifying the 7 selected articles in the jakarta post online edition. first, identifying the data into types of presupposition using the theory as proposed by yule (996). second, classifying and analyzing the selected data. third, counting the number of presupposition for each type. fourth, interpreting the data based on the findings. results and discussion the result study shows that the most frequent presupposition is existential with 202 occurrences (78.59%), followed by factive presupposition with 2 occurrences (0.79%), lexical presupposition with 36 occurrences (14%), structural presupposition with 11 occurences (4.28%), non-factive presupposition with 2 occurrences (0.79%) and counterfactual presupposition with 4 occurences (1.56%). example of existential presupposition: [#001] our election campaign theme is “real work”. (the jakarta post, 2014, february 24) in the example above, the existential presupposition is indicated in the use of possesive construction ‘our’ and noun phrase‘election campaign theme.’ those definite descriptions indicated the existence of a group of people which was represented by the speaker. besides, it also presupposed that a group of people had the theme for their campaign which was named ‘real work’. thus, the example [4a] contained more than one presupposition. factive presupposition occurs 2 times (0.79%). factive presupposition can be triggered by using verb like ‘know’ and it must be treated as a fact indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(1) january 2015 issn 2252-7427 120 (yule, 1996, p. 27). this following statement is the example of factive presupposition: [#002] so we don’t know why the kpi has issues with our ads. (the jakarta post, 2014, february 27) the data above is presented in negative form which is triggered by word ‘know’. as a matter of fact, it presupposed that the kpi has issues with our ads. although the data change into ‘so we know why the kpi has issues with our ads’, it does not affect the presupposition. it will remain constant that the kpi has issues with our ads. lexical presupposition occurs 36 times (14%) in the jakarta post articles. levinson (1997) explained that lexical presupposition could be symbolized by word like ‘manage’. the word ‘manage’ indicates someone tries to do something. thus, lexical presupposition exist since it aims to presuppose someone is succesfully in doing something.the lexical presupposition are exemplified in the followingg statement below: [#003] we can no longer provide fuel subsidies in the form of price adjustments (the jakarta post, 2014, february 27) as found in the explanation before about lexical presupposition, is that lexical presupposition contains the meaning which is implicitly communicated but not said. the data above is involved into lexical presupposition since the word ‘no longer’ presupposes that we provide fuel subsidies in the form of price adjustments before. other type of presuppositions which are found in jakarta post is structural presupposition. this type is indicated by the use of wh-word in generating the information and it should be accepted ‘true’ by the hearers (yule, 1996:28). look at the examples below: [#004] what is pan’s view on the current education system? (the jakarta post, 2014, february 24) the use of wh-word ‘what’ is used by speaker. when the speaker asked to the representative of the pan party, s/he already had assumption about the information that they were going to talk about, that was about pan’s view on the current education system. it presupposes that pan party has view relating to the education in indonesia. non-factive presupposition occurs 2 times (0.79%). yule (1996) explained that non factive presupposition can be triggered by the words ‘dream’, ‘imagine’ and ‘pretend’. as found in the example below: [#005] presidential candidate prabowo subianto told his supporters on wednesday not cast their votes for a leader who pretended to be a populist and who tended to break promises. (the jakarta post, 2014, june 12) based on the data [4i], the triggers on the statement indicates that the statement is not true with the condition in reality but it is communicated indirectly. in the data above mentioned, the word ‘pretended’ presupposes that a leader whom is told by presidential candidate prabowo was not be a populist in fact. in the jakarta post, the counterfactual presupposition occurs 4 times (1.56%). it can be implied by the word ‘if’ that presupposes the meaning. in counterfactual, what the speakers say presupposes not only untrue condition indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(1) january 2015 issn 2252-7427 121 but also the opposite (contrary), as shown in the example below: [#006] [it] would be regarded as campaigning, and therefore must be banned if aired outside the campaign period. (the jakarta post, 2014, june 12) the triggers ‘if’ presupposes that the information is contrary with the reality. it presupposes that the campaign is not doing in the outside campaign period. so that the campaign is allowed. besides, the study also shows the existence of 694 presupposition triggers which consist of 631 definite descriptions (90.92%), 2 factive item (0.28%) which is similar to existence of change of state verbs, 6 implicative verbs (0.86%), 6 itteratives (0.86%), 21 temporal (3.02%), 13 comparison and contrast (1.87%), 8 questions (1.15%) and 3 counterfactual conditionals (0.43%). examples of definite description are presented below: [#007] in his remarks at the party’s call for readliness at the bung karno stadiumin senayan, central jakarta, on sunday, surya said corruption was rampant in indonesia and was widespread in every sector. (the jakarta post, 2014, february 24) yule (1996) explained that the presupposition can be triggered not only in a possesive constructions but also in the definite noun phrases. there might be more than one noun phrase in a sentence or utterance. the underlined words above are the examples of noun phrases which were found in selected data. the use of definite descriptions indicated the entities; the existence of remarks, party’s call, the bung karno stadium, senayan, central jakarta and surya. the factive items can be treated as a fact, it can be words such as regret, aware, realize, know, be sorry that, be proud that, be different that, and be sad that (kiparasky & kiparsky, 1997 in levinson, 1983). the factive item which was found in the jakarta post’s articles was exemplified as follow: [#008] so we don’t know why the kpi has issues with our ads, he said. (the jakarta post, 2014, february 27) concerning the theory of presupposition, even the statement above was negated, the word ‘know’still indicated the fact that the kpi has issues with the advertisements. other type of trigger is implicative verbs. yule (1996) stated the word which was involved into types of implicative verb such as ‘stop’, ‘start’, ‘again’. meanwhile, (kartuneen, 1971b in levinson, 1983, p. 181) mentioned that ‘forget’, ‘happened’ and ‘avoid’ are the example of implicative verbs. based on the theories, the implicative verbs that were found in articles such as avoid, start, again, manage. this statement below is one of the data in articles which containt an implicative verb: [#009] weeks before the presidential campaign was due to kick off on june 5the supporters of both candidates started to question the opposing candidate’s “level of islam” (the jakarta post, 2014, june 12). the word ‘before’ and ‘started’ on the statement above were the example of implicative verbs in article which presupposed that the supporters of both candidate did not ask about the indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(1) january 2015 issn 2252-7427 122 opposing candidate’s level of islam before that weeks. in the jakarta post articles, there is found change of state verbs also. the words ‘stop’, ‘begin’, continue, start, finish, carry on, cease, take, leave, enter, come, go and arrive are the example of change of state verbs which are stated by khaleel (2010:513). for example: [#010] to anticipate potential clashes between political parties, he said the kpu would continue coordinating with local elections commissions (kpuds) and local branches of political parties to find the most suitable locations for outdoor gatherings of party supporters (the jakarta post, 2014, february 27). the word ‘continue’ as a change of state verb on the statement above presupposed that the kpu had been coordinating with local election commissions (kpuds) and local branches of political parties to find the most suitable locations for outdoor gatherings of party supporters. the other triggers which are found in the jakarta post’s articles online edition are repeatedly, repeat, again, another. those words are categorized into itteratives which is treated that something is being repeated. this following statement is containing itterative: [#011] in ogan komering ulu (oku) regency, south sumatra, a joint team comprising the local elections supervisory committee (panwaslu), the police and the public order agency (satpol pp), has repeatedly taken down campaign billboards and banners violating election regulations. (the jakarta post, 2014, february 27) the trigger ‘repeatedly’ on the statement above presupposed that campaign billboards and violating election regulations had been taken down by a joint team comprising the local elections supervisory committee (panwaslu) and the police and the public order agency (satpol pp) more than one time. verbs like judging was exemplified in the statement of agatha accused/didn’t accused ian of plagiarism (wilson, 1975 in levinson 1983, p. 182). the trigger ‘accuse’ on that statement presupposed that agatha thinks plagiarism is bad. meanwhile, the example of verbs like judging which was found in article as follow: [#012] bawaslu commissioner endang w., who filed the report on last august, accused the two of violating the article 276 of the 2012 legislative election law, carrying a maximum penalty of one year in jail and a rp 12 million (us$ 1,032) fine. (the jakarta post, 2014, february 27) the use of verb ‘accused’indicated bawaslu comissioner endang thinks that carrying a maximum penalty of one year in jail and a rp 12 million (us$ 1,032) fine is bad. there are several words are involved into temporal clause such as before, while, since, after, during, whenever (frege, 1982 in levinson 1983, p. 182). similarly, in the jakarta post’s articles are found the numbers of temporal clauses as found in the example below: [#013] during the campaign, anis matta told the audience to vote for indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(1) january 2015 issn 2252-7427 123 prabowo because of the latter’s handsome appearance (the jakarta post, 2014, june 12). the trigger ‘during the campaign’ on the statement above presupposed that anis matta told the audience to vote for prabowo. another temporal clauses which were found in the jakarta post article were since, before, after, and while. other presupposition trigger which is found in the jakarta post is comparisons and contrasts. there exist comparative constructions such as most important, more than, fewer, smaller. [#014] the most important thing now is to ensure that human rights violations do not take place in the future by establishing a tolerant and moderate society (the jakarta post, 2014, february 24). the underlined words above is considered as a trigger comparative construction which was implied by the word ‘most’ which presupposed that ensuring human rights violations do not take place in the future is the most important thing. the trigger questions also occur in jakarta post articles which are implied by the word wh-questions (who, what, why, when or how. this statement below is the example of trigger question: [#015] how will pan handle foreign statements? (the jakarta post, 2014, february 24). the presupposition of the statement above was pan handle foreign investments since it was containing the trigger ‘how’ in the statement. it means that the speaker on the statement was already known that pan handle foreign investments. they (speaker and hearers) were sharing knowledge each other. the last trigger is counterfactual presupposition which is triggered by the word ‘if’. it presupposes the contrary or it’s not true condition. here is the example: [#016] if they fail to fulfill this requirement, then we will not pay them (the jakarta post, 2014, february 24). concerning the word if on the statement above, it presupposed that they actually did not fail to fulfill the requirement. conclusion this study examines the types and triggers of presupposition in the jakarta post’s articles online edition in political column. the result study shows that the most frequent presupposition is existential with 202 occurrences (78.59%), followed by factive presupposition with 2 occurrences (0.79%), lexical presupposition with 36 occurrences (14%), structural presupposition with 11 occurences (4.28%), non-factive presupposition with 2 occurrences (0.79%) and counterfactual presupposition with 4 occurences (1.56%). besides, the study also shows the existence of 694 presupposition triggers which consist of 631 definite descriptions (90.92%), 2 factive item (0.28%) which is similar to the existence of change of state verbs, 6 implicative verbs (0.86%), 6 itteratives (0.86%), 21 temporal (3.02%), 13 comparison and contrast (1.87%), 8 questions (1.15%) and 3 counterfactual conditionals (0.43%). based on the findings mentioned earlier, it can be concluded that types of presupposition were indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(1) january 2015 issn 2252-7427 124 influenced by the presupposition triggers. both the types and the presupposition triggers are related each other for instances, the existential presuppositions triggered by the definite descriptions; they are standing in the highest percentage of all. it means that the writer of the jakarta post’s political column used the entities of person, something, problems, things in conveying the information about politics to the readers. as been stated in the previous chapter, it might be showed in the noun of phrases, possesive constructions and some other definite descriptions. references alwasilah, a. c. 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(2018). language learning strategy and students’ writing skill achievement: a correlational research. indonesian efl journal, 4(2), 23-31. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v4i2.1372. received: 16-03-2018 accepted: 21-05-2018 published: 01-07-2018 abstract: since writing is fundamental in learning to think and express one’s thoughts in ways that reach others, the ability to use language coherently and powerfully and to wrtite in ways that connect with others across cultural boundaries and within communities is essential to active citizenship and to success in almost any profession. the problem of the study was to know whether or not there was a significant correlation between students’ learning strategy and their writing skill achievement of the second semester students at ikip pgri bojonegoro. this research was a correlational research. the instruments used in this research were writing test and learning strategy questionnnaire. then, the correlation of the data was calculated by using pearson product moment formula. the result showed that there is a correlation between students’ learning strategy and their writing skill achievement of the second semester students at english education department of ikip pgri bojonegoro in academic year 2016/2017. keywords: learning strategy; writing skill; achievement; correlational research. introduction writing is about expressing our ideas into sentence or paragraph. it needs ability to express those ideas. writing is one of the important and productive skills. harmer (2007, p. 112) says that writing gives the students more thinking time than they get when they attempt spontaneous conversation. writing becomes important because of some reasons. raimes (1983, p. 3) states that writing helps the students to learn since it reinforces grammatical structures, idioms, and vocabulary that the teachers have been teaching. besides, when the students write, they also have a chance to be adventurous with the language, to go beyond what they have just learned to say, to take risks. the next is that when they write, they necessarily become very involved with the new language, the effort to express ideas and the constant use of eye, hand and brain is a unique way to reinforce learning. writing needs specialized skills that include the ability to express the writer’s opinions or thoughts clearly and efficiently. these abilities can be achieved only if a learner masters some techniques of writing such as how to obtain ideas about what s/he will write, how to express them in a sequence of sentences, how to organize them chronologically and coherently, and how to review and then to revise the composition untuil the writing is well-built (ratnasari, 2004). writing is considered as a demanding skill especially for learners of a second or foreign language (daud & kasim, 2007). it is a demanding skill because the learners have to think in their language then translate their thought or ideas into english. writing is an important component of both academic and professional success (powell, 2009). meanwhile, the process of becoming a successful writer is a complex, long and arduous undertaking (naep, 2011) taht requires writers to coordinate a number of cognitive and knowledge skills. these skills include discourse awareness, linguistic https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v4i2.1370 fitri nurdianingsih language learning strategy and students’ writing skill achievement: a correlational research 24 abilities, goal setting, sociocultural knowledge, and memory management strategies (kellog & whiteford, 2009). in developing writing as a communicative skill, students should constantly be made aware that particular topics in writing fit particular situations and conform to particular conventions. conventionally, legal writings use long sentences, formal language and precise definitions to avoid ambiguity and misinterpretations. in the context of physical sciences, writing is characterized by short sentences and short forms or symbolic signs. the role of the language teacher, therefore, is to teach his students to master not only the language skills but also to master the standard language which is free from grammatical errors. the term standard means the language which is standardized and accepted for use in formal communication. troyka (1987, p. 2) argues the significances of having writing. first, writing is a way of thinking and learning. writing gives us unique opportunities to explore ideas and information. by writing, we care to subjects well and make them our own. thus writing helps us learn and gain authority over knowledge. second, writing is a way of discovering. the act of writing allows us to make unexpected connection among ideas and language. as we write, thoughts emerge and interconnect in ways unavailable until the physical act of writing began. third, writing creates reading, visible record of our ideas for other people to read and think over. writing is a powerful means of communication due to the fact that readings inform and shape human thought. fourth, writing ability is needed by educated people, our skill of writing is often considered to reflect our level of education, and college work demands that we write many different types of assignments. most jobs in todays, technological society require writing skill for preparing documents ranging from letters and memos to formal reports. indeed, throughout our life, our writing will reveal our ability to think clearly and use language to express ideas. according to nation (2009, p. 113), writing is an activity that can usefully be prepared for by work in the other skills of listening, speaking and reading. it also significant to make sure that writing can reflect the students’ perform in their daily lives. writing is a complex process of an activity that allows one in transforming thoughts, constructing ideas, discovering meaning and organizing them into sentences and paragraphs which focuses on content firts using the appropriate language. writing as a skill involves a number of complex rhetorical and linguistic operations which must be taught.the act of writing is deprived of an immediate context of communication. thus, for effective writing, the writer has to use a large number of formal features in order to help his or her readers infer the intended meaning. failure to use these features correctly causes vagueness, ellipsis and ambiguity in some writings. furthermore, writing is the use of graphic symbols arranged according to a certain conventions to form words and sentences (byrne, 1997, p. 1). he also clarifies that writing is not merelythe act of arranging graphyc symbols. writing is transforming thought into language, it means that the writer needs to think about the content of writing first and then construct the ideas using appropriate language. writing involves spelling correctly, forming letter correctly, punctuating correctly and using paragraphs correctly. writing skill can be defined as a skill to communicate all ideas or imaginations into form of structured pattern, so that the readers may understand what writers mean in their writing. the successful of writing involves some criteria, they are mastering the mechanics of letter formation, using grammatical system to convey one’s intended meaning, organizing content at the level of the paragraph, obeying conventions of spelling and punctuation, and selecting an appropriate style for one’s audience. there ara five aspect of writing from hughes (1996, p. 91), namely: a. grammar, that is an element of writing which deals with a set of rules to construct sentences that make sense and acceptable in english b. vocabulary, it deals with a list of words and their meanings indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 25 c. mechanics, that is convention in writing, which is related to punctuation, spelling, and capitalization d. fluency, which refers to the ease and the style of the composition e. form or organization that is the logical sequence and cohesion or the flow of the ideas being put into written language to make unified contribution to the whole paragraph. it is commonly called as generic structure. writing in efl classes is difficult for both teachers and students because there are many aspects to deal with. raimes (1983) mentions those aspects are syntax, content, the writer’s process, audience, purpose, word choice, organization, mechanics and grammar. byrne (1993) mentions three aspects which make writing difficult. the first is the phychological problem. writing is a solitary activity. the teachers cannot get direct feedback like in speaking activity. the second is linguistic problem. the writers have to ensure that the choice of words, sentence structure, and other cohesive devices are correct for conveying their message. the last is the cognitive problem. writing is learned through a process of instruction. it is not a natural process like speaking. both raimes and byrne basically have the same idea, but raimes does nt classify the problem. audience and purpose of writing is included in byrne’s psychological problem. byrne’s linguistic problem covered syntax, word choice, mechanics and grammar. meanwhile, raime’s writer process, organization and content are covered in byrne cognitive problem. learning is a process indicated by people’s change. the change is the result of the learning process which can be seen in the gained of knowledge, comprehension, attitude, behavior, skill, habt, and other aspects stated in the individuals who want to learn. learning begins at birth and ends at death. people learn under a wide range of conditions and circumstances. we learn more and less continuously everywhere. there are some kinds of learning, such as language learning. language learning is an integrated and long process. sometimes, mistakes appear in language learning process and it is normal for language learners. besides, language learners must be active in teaching learning process so the goal of learning can be achieved. learning writing is the most avoided subject among other skill subjects in english. in fact, learning writing has been proven to give advantages to the students in the terms of enhancing their languagr learning strategies which has currently become a great concern of many experts propose that by interconnecting reading and writing, students will develop a great deal in their literacy skill. some researchers, as reported by the major english language arts professional organization (yale, 2010), have found that when students read extensively, they become better writers. at the same time, as yale (2010) says, practice in writing helps students build their reading skills, in the sense that practice in the process of writing their own texts helps them analyze the pieces that they read. as a result, they can apply their knowledge about the ways to use particular language (word choice, combining words into logical and grammatical sentence structures, appropriate registers, etc) to better understand a professinal author’s construction of texts. it will also help students strengthen their vocabulary and language use which can also be applied in speaking. foong (1999) claims that learning to write is important and useful for language and rhetorical practice for communication, and as a discovery as well as cognitive process. learning is not separated from learning strategies. it is used to achieve the goals of learning. learning strategies are the behaviors and thoughts that a learner engages in during learning that are intended to influence the learner’s encoding process (weinstein & mayer, 1990). they have learning facilitation as a goal and are intentional on the part of learner. the goal of strategy is to affect the learners’ motivational or affective state, or the way, in which the learner selects, acquires, organizes, or integrates new knowledge. the learning strategies are used to make learning easier so the learner can understand the subject easily. a learning strategy in language learning has been defined as conscious mental activity that containing a goal or intention, an action to fitri nurdianingsih language learning strategy and students’ writing skill achievement: a correlational research 26 reach this goal, and a learning activity (cohen, 2007). cohen also notes contention among academics over this definition, in that not all learning strategies necessarily reflect these three factors. self-regulation in language learning refers to the processes the learner uses to exercise control over learning. this term has also caused contention in the field, and some researchers use the term synonymously with autonomy ad self-management (cohen, 2007). there are obvious connection that link both learning strategies and self-regulation to self-access learning, and tha raising of awareness and knowledge necessary for a learner to exercise responsibility for their learning (white, 2008). learning strategies are specific actions taken by the learner to make learning easier, faster, more enjoyable, more self-directed, more effective and more transferable to new situations. in dealing with learning materials and demands during language use, learners will engage in systematic mental steps to process the language in order to entrance production, comprehension, learning or retention (o’malley & chamot, 1990). strategies also include the tools for the selfdirected involvement of students in their learning which is viewed as necessary for developing their communication skills. learning strategies are often considered to be the outer layer of the onion, implying that they are most influenced by the environtment and a variety of constructs such as instructional preferences, learning style and cognitive style (curry, 2002). a strategy is useful if the following conditions are present: (1) the strategy relates well to the l2 task at hand, (2) the strategy fits the particular student’s learning style preferences to one degree or another, and (3) the student employs the strategy effectively and links it with other relevant strategies. strategies that fulfill these conditions make learning easier, faster, more enjoyable, more self-directed, more effective, and more transferable to new situations (oxford, 1990). learning strategies are different from learning style. learning styles according to brown (2000) are general characteristics that differentiate one individual from another; strategies are those specific attacks that we make on a given problem. they are the moment by moment techniqus that we employ to solve the problems posed by second language input and output. learning strategies are divided into three categories, they are cognitive, metacognitive, and socioaffective strategies. metacognitive strategies are about planning and evaluating learning, cognitive strategies are about the ability of brain to learn something, and socioaffective strategies are about students’ interaction with others. learning foreign language is difficult, especially in learning english. sometimes, students have problems in learning english. because of it, students use some strategies in learning english. they use these strategies to solve their learning problem. on the other hand, some students also use it to increase their english achievement test scores. from their scores, the students will know ehether they have been successful learners. observations and research studies led researchers (rubin, 1975; stern, 1975; rubin and thompson, 1994) to describe good language learners in terms of personal characteristics, styles and strategies. they believe that good language learners: a. find their own way, taking responsibility for their own learning b. organize information about language c. are creative and try to feel the language by experimenting its grammar and words d. create opportunities for practice in suing the language inside and outside the classroom e. learn to live with uncertainty by not getting confused and by continuing to talk or listen without understanding every word f. use memory strategies to bring back what has been learned g. make errors work for them and not against them h. use linguistic knowledge, including knowledge of the first language, in learning a second language i. use contextual cues to help them in comprehension j. learn to make intelligent guesses indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 27 k. learn chunks of language as wholes and formalized routines to help them perform ‘beyond their competence’ l. learn to use certain tricks to keep conversations going m. learn certain production strategies to fill in gaps in their own competence n. learn different styles of speech and writing and learn to vary their language regarding the formality of the situation in this study, the writer chooses this topic to know whether there is a correlation between students’ learning strategies and their scores in english writing achievement test. then, from the result of the correlation analysis, it will be known whether or not learning strategies are related to their achievement test scores and whether or not learning strategies are important in learning english. method this study is called a correlational study, because this study seeks to identify the possible relationship between two variables that is learning strategy and students’ writing skill achievement. correlational research refers to studies in which the purpose is to discover the relationship between variables through the use of correlational statistics. a positive correlation indicates that the variables vary together in the same direction, so increases in one variable are equivalent with the other. this study has two variables. there were 30 students of second semester english education department taken as participants. the instruments used in this research were learning strategy questionnaire and students’ writing acheievement test. this research has two variables, dependent and independent variable. the independent variable is students learning strategies and the dependent variable is students’ writing achievement test scores. for the independent variable, the data was obtained from the result of the learning strategies questionnaires. meanwhile, for the dependent variable, the data was obtained from the result of writing achievement test. the data for this study were collected using two instruments. they are learning strategies questionnaire and writing skill achievement test. as the data were in the form of interval scale and because there was always a possibility that the result of the study will show no relationship between the both variables, the pearson product moment formula was used. the formula is as follows: rxy = results and discussion the scores of the questionnaire were obtained by summing up the item credits of the students’ answer. each item had four response options, always credited 3, often credited 2, sometimes credited 1, and never credited 0. from the questionnaire, it shows that the highest score was 46, the lowest score was 30. meanwhile, the mean score was 38.83, the median was 39, the mode was 38, and the standard deviation was 3.71. the frequency distribution of the score is presented in table 1. table 1. the frequency distribution of students’ learning strategy score class limits frequency (fi) percentage (%) 29-31 2 6,67 32-34 2 6,67 35-37 5 16,67 38-40 11 36,67 41-43 8 26,67 44-46 2 6,67 total 30 100 the data of writing ability are collected by using writing test, it shows that the highest score was 85, the lowest score was 75. meanwhile, the mean score was 78.47, the median was 77.50, the mode was 76, and the standard deviation was 2.65. the frequency distribution of the score is presented in table 2. table 2. the frequency distribution of students’ writing ability score class limits frequency (fi) percentage (%) 74-75 1 3,33 76-77 14 46,67 78-79 4 13,33 80-81 6 20,00 82-83 3 10,00 84-85 2 6,67 total 30 100 fitri nurdianingsih language learning strategy and students’ writing skill achievement: a correlational research 28 before testing the hypothesis, the writer computed the normality of writing test and learning strategy score. after being computed the writing score, it is known that the value of lo (lobtained) was 0.1429. then, the value of lt (ltable) for n = 30 at the level significance α = 0,05 was 0.1618. because the lo (0.1429 ) is lower than lt ( 0.1618), it can be concluded that the data are in normal distribution. meanwhile, in learning strategy score, it is known that the value of lo (lobtained) was 0.1497. then, the value of lt (ltable) for n = 30 at the level significance α = 0,05 was 0.1618. because the lo (0.1497) is lower than lt (0.1618), it can be concluded that the data are in normal distribution. the writer continue the computation to test the hypothesis of this correlational study by using pearson product moment formula. the correlation analysis shows that the correlation of coefficient (rxy) between students’ writing ability (x) and learning strategy (y) was 0.700. then, it is being calculated to the tvalue, the value of to (tobtained) was 7.272. the value of tt (ttable) at the level of significance α = 0,05 was 1.701. because to (7.272) is higher than tt (1.701) or to>tt, it can be said that the coefficient of correlation (r) is significant. in other words, it means that the null hypothesis (ho) is rejected. therefore, it can be concluded that there is a positive correlation between students’ writing ability and learning strategy. the positive correlation between the students’ writing will increase or decrease following the students’ learning strategy. after computed the correlation analysis, it was got that there is a positive correlation between learning strategies and writing achievement test score of the second semester students of english education department. it is logical to say that learning strategies has a contribution to writing ability. students who have high score in learning strategy, they will have better writing ability than others. it indicates that learning strategies can influence their achievement test score. the students who got good score cognitive and metacognitive strategies, they also got good score in achievement test. it indicates that cognitive and metacognitive strategies can influence their achievement test score. this is in line with the study of learning strategies in foreign language instruction which has conducted by chamot (1987). his study is the description of identification of the range and characteristics of learning strategies used in studying foreign language. the result of this study is that the students at all levels of instructions use predominantly cognitive strategies supported by metacognitive strategies. learning strategies are used to make learning easier so the learner can understand the subject easily. o’malley and chamot (1990) state that learning strategies are specific actions taken by the learner to make learning easier, faster, more enjoyable, more self-directed, more effective and more transferable to new situations. in dealing with learning materials and demands during language use, learners will engage in systematic mental steps to process the language in order to entrance production, comprehension, learning or retention. learning strategies also used by learners when they face some problems in learning. according to ellis (2003), learning strategies are the particular approaches or techniques that learners employ to try to learn a second language. they can be behavioral or they can be mental. they are faced with some problems; such as how to remember new word learners are generally aware of the strategies they use and when asked can explain what they did to try to learn something. it means that students use strategies when they face many problems. for example, when they have many difficulties in remembering new words, they use a strategy to make it easier for them. l2 learning strategies are specific behaviors or thought processes that students use to enhance their own l2 meaning. a given strategy is neither good nor bad, it is essentially neutral until the context of its use is thoroughly considered. learning strategies can also enable students to become more independent, autonomous, lifelong learners (allwright, 1990; little, 1991). strategy training in the classroom could be used to enhance students’ awareness of effective english language learning strategies and their optimal methods of implementation; as a result, students’ proficiency levels in english indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 29 could be improved on the whole. students acquire a better understanding of how to learn when language content is integrated with strategies for learning. as a result, teaching and learning materials will be more retrievable, memorable, and comprehensible for learners. the finding in the area of language learning strategies have repeatedly demonstrated that the use of language learning strategies leads to better proficiency or achievement in mastering the target language (lee, 2003; o’malley & chamot, 1990; rahimi et al., 2008; griffiths, 2003; hong, 2006; oxford, 1993). o’malley et al., (1985) clearly highlighted the importance of learning strategies by defining them as ‘ any set of operations or steps used by a learner that will facillitate the acquisition, storage, retrieval or use of information”. in a study (o’malley et al., 1985) it has been found that successful language learners have reported to use more and wider range of learning strategies than less-successful students. the same conclusion has been reached in another study (green & oxford, 1995) in which language learning strategies of all kinds were used more frequently by more proficient students. in different study (griffiths, 2003), a strong positive correlation between learning strategy use and language proficiency has been discovered. the findings revealed that advanced language learners have reported to employ learning strategies more frequently than elementary students. dreyer and oxford (1996) found a very high correlation between language proficiency and strategy use among afrikans. proficient learners used the cognitive strategy of using mental processes, the comparison strategy of compensating for missing knowledge, and the metacognitive strategy of organizing and evaluating learning significantly more than less proficient learners. the use of social strategies was more common among the less proficient learners. park (1997) explored the relationship between strategy use and proficiency in a korean context and found a significant linear relationship between the two. besides, phillips (1991) argues that intermediate learners used more strategies than advanced and low proficiency students indicating a curvilinear relationship between these two variables. there was no clear indication of level of proficiency and individual strategies. the environtment in which the learner learns does influence how the learner learns a language. learners desire to learn a language is related to the value attached to learning that language in society by conducting numerous studies, researchers have discoverd that there is an association between the use and choice of learning strategies and different variables like learning contexts, learner charecteristics and learner experiences, language proficiency, or cultural and educational backgrounds (oxford, 2003; khamkhien, 2010; hong, 2006; deneme, 2008; fuping, 2006). zare (2012) states that the employement of language learning strategies facilitate and improve language learning and assist language learner in different ways. it is also found that a direct correlation exists between language proficiency and language learning achievement (griffiths, 2003; yang, 2007; yaling, 2008). oxford (1990), learning strategies are oriented towards the main goal of communicative competence, allow learners to get more self-directed, and support learning. students can learn to use language learning strategies to improve their writing skill achievement. conclusion from the result of this study, the mean or average score of students’ writing ability score was 78.47. it was good. it means that the students got good scores. there were 15 students got scores that were under the average and the rest of students got scores that were above the average. then, the coefficient correlation of the students’ learning strategy and their writing achievement test score was 0.700. it meant that there is a positive correlation between students’ learning strategies and their writing achievement test scores because the value of to (7.272) is higher than tt (1.701). therefore, it is recommended that : (1) the teacher should give the direction to improve fitri nurdianingsih language learning strategy and students’ writing skill achievement: a correlational research 30 the students’ writing ability; (2) the students should increase their english ability not only learning in school but also practicing english everywhere, and enriching their knowledge related to english; and (3) the result of this study can be a reference for other researchers who would like to conduct further research at the same subject. references allwright, d. 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(2003). second language acquisition. oxford: oxford university press. foong, k. p. (1999). teaching writing: a look at purposes, writing tasks, and implication. the english teacher, 28, 2-5. fuping, x. (2006). the impact of strategy training on reading comprehension. celea journal, 29(4), 36-42. green, j. m., & oxford, r. l. (1995). a closer look at learning strategies, l2 proficiency, and gender. tesol quarterly, 29(2), 261-297. griffiths, c. (2003). patterns of langugae learning strategy use. system, 31, 367-383. harmer, j. (2004). how to teach writing. london: pearson education limited. harmer, j. (2007). the practice of english language teaching (4th ed.). united states of america: longman. hong, k. (2006). beliefs about language learning and language learning strategy use in an efl: a comparison study of monolingual korean and bilingual korean-chinese university students. unpublished doctoral dissertation, university of north texas. kellog, r., & whiteford, a. 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(1975). what the ‘good language learner’ can teach us. tesol quarterly, 9(1), 41-51. rubin, j., & thompson, i. (1994). how to be a more successful language learner (2nd ed.). boston: heinle & heinle. stern, h. h. (1975). what can we learn from the good language learner? canadian modern language review, 31, 304-318. weinstein, c. e., & mayer, r. e. (1990). the teaching learning strategies. new york: macmillan. white, c. (2008). language learning strategies in independent language learning: an overiew. in s. hud, & t. lewis (eds.), language learning strategies in independent settings (pp. 3-24). bristol, uk: multilingual matters. yale, j. b. (2010). the relationship between reading and writing. retrieved from http://www.k12reader.com/the-relationshipbetween-reading-and-writing. indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(2) july 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 31 ya-ling, w. (2008). language learning strategies used by students at different proficiency levels. the asian efl journal quarterly, 10(2), 75-95. yang, m. n. (2007). language learning strategies for junior college students n taiwan: investigating ethnicity and proficiency. the asian efl journal, 9(2), 35-57. zare, p. (2012). language learning strategies among efl/esl learners: a review of literature. international journal of humanities and social science, 2(5), 162-169. the implementation of critical discourse analysis in an english classroom moh. fuadul matin ikip pgri bojonegoro, indonesia email: fuadulmatin@gmail.com apa citation: matin, m. f. (2017). the implementation of critical discourse analysis in an english classroom. indonesian efl journal, 3(1), 11-20 received: 15-11-2016 accepted: 22-12-2016 published: 01-01-2017 abstract: this research reports on the implementation of a teaching program on an english classroom which incorporated the principles of critical discourse analysis (cda). this study can be regarded as part of critical language awareness (cla), a pedagogical wing of cda, since it implemented cda into a classroom practice. in this respect, this study examines the implementation of the principles of cda in an english classroom, the effects it brings towards students’ critical reading, and students’ responses towards the teaching program. the study employed a qualitative case study which involved eighth grade of junior high school students at smp al-maliki bojonegoro in odd semester 2016-2017. it used several data collection techniques including a phase of teaching in which the researcher acted as the participant observer, as well as students’ reflective journals, and questionnaire. data from all sources revealed that the implementation of cda’s principles develops students’ critical reading in general. it also demonstrated students’ positive responses towards the teaching program that it gave plenty of new insights for them and improved their critical reading as well. all these results indicate that the infusion of cda into the teaching of reading is considerably effective in enhancing students’ critical reading. keywords: critical discourse analysis, critical language awareness, students’ critical reading introduction critical thinking ability is very essential to live life in a more meaningful way because it helps people make good decisions which are well thought of. this includes the ability to analyze issues, to make good decision, and to solve problems (chaffee, 2000, p. 2). consequently, critical thinking is important to be taught in formal educational institution, especially in higher education. one best circumstance to foster critical capacity is in the classroom, as an answer to burke’s (2010) criticism, that the prevailing curriculum, mainly in the context of education, does not prepare students with cognitive skills demanded by the workplace (in nathan, 2010, p. 6). in this sense, language lesson can be regarded as one appropriate background since it focuses on studying language with all of its attributes. critical discourse analysis (cda) is defined as “a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance and inequality are enacted, reproduced and resisted by text, and talk in the social and political context” (van dijk, 2001, p. 352). this definition suggests that cda concerns on social and political issue that through language the social imbalance is potentially maintained. likewise, cda is also considered to focus on “gender issues, issues of racism, media discourses, political discourses, organizational discourses or dimensions of identity research” (wodak & weiss, 2003, p. 13). from the definition above, it can be seen that language, both in spoken and written discourse, is never value-free and it strengthens the view of ‘language as a social practice’ (fairclough, 1995; wodak, 2002). the issue of abuse, dominance, and inequality are potentially manifested in it. it seems that there is still space for other researchers to develop reading activities from other critical perspectives. in this respect, critical discourse analysis is another critical indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 11 approach which has a possibility to be infused in a reading classroom. under its pedagogical wing, namely critical language awareness (cla) (fairclough, 1992c) as cited in (pennycook, 2001; wallace, 2003), many researchers have developed cda in their teaching. farias’ study (2005) in an efl class in chile reveals that cla can contribute to the teaching and learning of english as a global language. meanwhile, smith (2004) outlines some practical aspects of cla in an informal context of english teaching. cla’s aim to build students’ awareness on the use of language is the interest of the current investigation which believes that cda generates a lot of benefits to the practice of language pedagogy, primarily in reading subject. regarding this, the present study undertaken a research on a critical reading teaching in indonesia’s efl classroom whose major goal is to demonstrate the implementation critical discourse analysis (cda) in the reading subject of tertiary level of education. the main distinctive feature of the present investigation from the previous ones is on the material of cda to be implemented which is not taken from one framework but rather generally taken from the principles of cda itself. the result of this investigation is expected to contribute to the pedagogical practice mainly to the reading teaching in indonesia’s efl context. method the present study employed a qualitative research by applying a case study as the specific research design (alwasilah, 2002; silverman, 2005). by qualitative research, the data gained are analyzed in a descriptive way to explore their attitudes, behavior, and experience (dawson, 2009) which emerged along the teaching program. the research had been undertaken at 26 eighth grader of smp plus al maliki bojonegoro, east java in odd semester academic year 2016-2017. the data in this study were obtained by means of some techniques comprising a phase of teaching, included in it participant observation, student’s reflective journals, and questionnaire. the use of these multiple techniques aims to establish validity as the realization of triangulation (maxwell, 1996). the phase of teaching also involved several techniques of collecting data; participant observation and students’ reflective journals which are undertaken throughout the teaching. observation involved note taking to record students’ activities as well as the teacher’s questions or stimuli during the interaction and instruction (allwright, 1988), particularly in the process of discussion assessing texts by means of cda’s principles. however, the activities in the first and last sessions are less observed since the agenda in the first is still on course introduction and the latter on progress test. more detailed notes were then jotted down immediately after the completion of each session including to record some methodological issues, students’ thoughts, and preliminary analyses in a form of field notes (dawson, 2009, p. 112). here, the students were asked to write a journal immediately after the end of each session. this technique is applied as the complementary data mainly as feedback from students towards the teaching processes in order to construct validity (maxwell, 1996). it is also done in order to gain information regarding students’ understanding on the overall process, their feeling, opinion, and suggestion for the upcoming sessions as well as to record their learning process of what they got from the teacher as well as from their peers. as to gain comprehensive information of the students’ critical reading capacity, a questionnaire is utilized twice. first is preprogram questionnaire designed as preliminary input to indicate the participants’ engagement with reading in general and reading english texts in particular, their understanding on the content of text, their criticality on reading, and their expectation towards the teaching program. meanwhile, the second is post-program questionnaire containing questions to explore students’ interest on the teaching, their opinion about the need of being critical reader including their criticality improvement, their understanding on the nature of text, the term moh. fuadul matin the implementation of critical discourse analysis in an english classroom 12 cda, and their opinion and suggestion for further teaching program. results and discussion students as the participants were involved in the decision making of topics for the overall reading activities. this stage is in fact a sudden decision which was unplanned before in the lesson plan along with the thought of the importance of carrying out this activity as a good starting point. deciding the topics for reading at the beginning of the teaching and learning process, the students were offered ten topics to choose. they were mobile phones more dangerous than smoking, cigarette advertisement should be banned from sport event, vocational high school should be banned, using motorcycle for student should be forbidden, national examination should be abolished, using internet is very useful for education, naughty student are most parent responsibility, wearing uniform for student is not necessary, homeschooling is not good, and students should join defend the country. these topics represent several genres, such as article, news item, speech, letter, and cover story. the selection of the texts was based on several considerations. first, the texts were taken authentically as it is suggested that critical reading will best utilize authentic materials in a sense that they could be problematized in ways relating to the students’ own realities (wallace, 1999). authentic texts itself are defined as “real-life texts, not written for pedagogic purposes” (wallace, 1992, p. 145); designed for the native speakers which are real and not initially designed for language learners (harmer, 1991); and produced not for teaching purposes but for a real communicative purpose (lee, 1995). this texts’ category is interrelated with the second aspect that the texts selected were the ‘community’ ones, “which circulate in everyday life” (wallace, 2003, p. 104) as to meet “the critical reading principle of ‘reading against the grain’” and “influential in the wider cultural climate” (wallace, 2003, p. 105). third, the texts were also varied in genre as to provide students with rich references and to give them access to different representation of linguistic choices (wallace, 2003). fourth, in line with the principle of cda itself that it addresses social problem (fairclough & wodak, 2010), the offered texts also contained social and political issue that opened to lively discussion. distributing pre-program questionnaire the next activity in the preliminary phase was the distribution of the preprogram questionnaire which was designed as preliminary input before carrying out the course. the information to be collected consisted of the students’ engagement with reading in general and reading english texts in particular, their understanding on the content of text, their criticality on reading, and their expectation towards the program which were spread out within eleven questions. the result reveals that all students except one confessed that they like reading, for the reasons which were varied from one to another. most of them read for pleasure, and for getting information and adding knowledge. one different response said that reading for him was a prerequisite for fulfilling his hobby in writing, which is line with one of grabe’s purposes of reading, reading to write (2002, p. 13). it indicates his awareness of the inseparable relationship between reading and writing that develops an educated mind will always require the ability to read closely, write substantively, and think critically (elder & paul, 2009). additionally, in critical reading point of view, one can only write critically when he/she is able to read critically as well (knott, 2008). the next topic required students’ answers to indicate their understanding on the content of the text, triggered by the questions about the clarity of the information. the result showed that 18 out of 26 respondents said that it was not always clear; six responded sometimes the information was clear and sometimes not, while only two answered yes but without reasoning. however, these responses do not perfectly answer the question, since some of them misunderstood the question and referred to it indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 13 as the problem of grammatical and vocabulary deficiency. in terms of their own assessment towards their criticality in reading, most students said that they were not critical or in a modest way not really critical. the general findings suggest that students have heterogeneous ability and levels of understanding that requires precise direction in the process of reading activities. students’ linguistic recognition also needs to take into account as it often becomes drawbacks in second language reading (grabe, 2002). in this study, the test was also pursued to identify students’ initial critical reading ability before the teaching program. it was firstly scheduled at the first meeting as an integrated part of activities in the preliminary phase. however, one additional session should be taken to perform the test because of the limitation of time in the first meeting. the test itself lasted for approximately 90 minutes as the students asked for extra time to complete it. undertaking diagnostic test diagnostic test question sheet, which is also used for progress test, contained nine questions synthesized from the experts on critical literacy and critical reading’s question set. these questions identified the topic, the writer/producer of the text, the intended reader, the stance of the writer, the gap and silence, the intention of the writer, and the stance/opinion of the reader. the text administered for the test was entitled mobile phones more dangerous than smoking, the genre was article. students’ performance on the test was varied from one to another indicating their raw understanding towards the subject matter and considerably limited capacity of critical reading. most of them were successful in identifying the topic and only six responses deviated from its correct answer. critical reading also involves the identification of the writer, his/her identity as well as his/her stance (hood et al., 1996, p. 90) which was realized in the second and third question. they asked who the writer is and to whom the text is directed, and where the position of the writer towards the subject matter is. most students responded to the question regarding the writer simply by mentioning the writer’s name. the expected answer was actually not merely the name but the social identity or possible occupation of the writer that led him to write the article. in this case, the test takers needed to identify the tendency of the writer as a clue to answer the question. meanwhile, the position of the writer towards the topic he was discussing was figured out by, once again, looking at the tendency of the writer reflected on the whole text. some participants said that the writer was in a neutral position. this answer was regarded less accurate since the text shown strong tendency towards one side and neutrality in a text is something impossible even in the so called neutral newspapers. in this part, all participants failed in understanding the question resulting in not only wrong but also misdirection answers. it was not surprising since students were not used to deal with such a questioning and their previous reading subjects did not situate them in such engagement with text. the last question which was scored asked students’ agreement on the claim made by the writer. although students were free to answer yes or no, they should provide relevant reason for their answer. it was this reasoning that was being assessed. the overall result of the diagnostic test, however, does not solely indicate the students’ capacity in critical reading since it was often found inconsistence in their responses. the participants who were accurate in answering some particular items were not automatically said to be critical as they were not successful on the other items. some answers were even grammatically poor so the idea could not be captured. some answers also demonstrated students’ misunderstanding towards the text indicated by their deviated answers from what was being questioned. the teaching of critical reading pre-reading stage this section will describe the implementation of critical discourse analysis to promote students’ critical reading. as moh. fuadul matin the implementation of critical discourse analysis in an english classroom 14 described before, the strategies used during the teaching followed the conventional stages of reading activity which is practiced from a critical point of view as developed by wallace (1992, pp. 114-120; 1992, pp. 72-74). within these activities, the principles of cda, realized in a form of guiding critical questions consist of three levels of analysis: textual, discourse, and contextual levels, were infused step by step as to see the students’ gradual comprehension on the concept. the use of critical questions at the first text was focused on textual and discourse levels. in the next reading, the discussion was tried to cover all levels but was still focused on particular triggering questions. it is commenced from the third reading of text entitled vocational high school should be banned that students were trained to examine text by means of all levels of the guiding critical questions. this initial phase is signified by the exposure of several questions adopted from wallace (1992) which comprises questions such as what ways are there in which we might write about the topic; why do you think the text was written; and what the text is about. another important activity is to let the students to provide their own questions, statements, or hypothesis regarding the text (wallace, 1992). the discussion of the first text mobile phones more dangerous than smoking was started by probing the question why the text was written. “the text was written because there are a lot of bad effect of mobile phones. however, people needs mobile phones to communicate.” since the respondents were still dominated by the same students, the teacher then appointed some students to put forward their opinion. the appointment is not only to elicit the students’ opinion, but more importantly to encourage them to speak up. as it is observed in the second meeting of explicit teaching, students had insight in fact but they feel reluctant to speak up and chose to be passive participants (johnson, 2001). the strategies applied in pre-reading stage in the subsequent sessions make use of other questions proposed by wallace (1992) “why the topic has been selected in the first place?” as a guidance in the discussion of texts mobile phones more dangerous than smoking. when this question was raised, all students could not grasp the meaning. the teacher assumed that their confusion was caused by the phrase in the first place whose meaning is similar to to begin with (spears, 2005, p. 342) or simply firstly. thus, in the discussion of mobile phones more dangerous than smoking, the question was explained by firstly removing the phrase in order to simplify the explanation before eventually telling them the meaning. it was said that what they need to consider was the point of why the topic has been selected, why the writer chose to write this topic. the last strategy applied in the prereading stage is by letting the students to provide their own questions, statements, or hypothesis regarding the text (wallace, 1992, p. 114). this strategy was used in the texts using motorcycle for student should be forbidden, national examination should be abolished, and using internet is very useful for education. it might be their first experience to start a lesson by stating their own opinion or hypothesis, not by being asked questions as they used to get it previously. it was signified by their surprise and question, “what is the question, mam?” in the reading of the text using motorcycle for student should be forbidden. the opinion above indicates students’ thinking to relate the matter to the context of social world taking place in indonesia which is of the concern of cda (wodak, 2002). it means that they have background knowledge which is activated at the time they read text. this point has, to some extent, met the first principle of critical discourse analysis that makes social problem as one of its concern. while-reading stage while-reading stage is the core phase of the implementation of critical discourse analysis in the reading lesson. in this phase, students were usually asked to make group of five in which the grouping can be based on either the students’ list or their seats or once they might choose their own partners. the grouping was intended “to argue through cases for one interpretation or point of view” (wallace, 2003, p. 186) that enable them to discuss as well as share ideas. most indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 15 importantly, a research proves that discussion can promote and advance comprehension of reading and higher-order thinking skills. within groups, students were given time to read the text for approximately fifteen minutes. while reading, students were also asked to observe the text by means of the guiding critical questions provided earlier. while reading the first text on mobile phones more dangerous than smoking, students were asked to focus on two levels of questions to maintain the focus on this first reading. during group discussion, the teacher was walking around to observe the dynamic in the groups, to ensure that students “engaged in effective dialog” (fisher, 2011), to assist opinion of the less outstanding students, or in short, to encourage “good discussion” that fisher point out that good discussions give students opportunities to identify specific text material that supports their position and to listen as other students do the same. in the course of an effective discussion, students are presented with multiple examples of how meaning can be constructed from text (nathan, 2010, p. 7). it can be seen from the visit to group two consisting of students #2, #4, #14, #23, and #25. since some members of the group were already active in the class, the discussion went lively as everyone contribute to the discussion. however, it seems that there was less opportunity for those of silent students (#23 and #25) to join the discussion since it was dominated by the outstanding ones. thus, the role of the teacher is encourage the less active students to put forward their opinion and participate in the discussion as suggested by fisher (2011). the same cases occurred on other groups in which it was the active students who seemed more involved in the discussion. similar strategy was used to assist students to take part. these pictures took place at least until the third reading of text that most students eventually spoke up although not all of their ideas were relevant. one important point is that some students later could break the ice and feel more freedom to put forward opinion. students also asked questions during group discussion as raised by students #24 and #15 who asked about attribution of adjective or other words to the subject matter and metaphor. although these items had been explained in the previous meeting, it seems not enough as they got difficulties when they were faced with text to analyze. the answers to these questions were not directed to these groups only but to the whole class in order to anticipate the same confusion among students. moreover, all students were invited to raise questions and clarify their misunderstanding of the guiding questions given. reading the text using internet is very useful for education, the students worked on the same procedures. they firstly read the text individually but still sat in group. in the group discussion stage, students were asked to evaluate text by means of all levels of questions but were focused on particular triggering questions. the first aspect assessed in the group one’s analysis of text is the textual aspect which refers to the attribution of the issue. in the same way, what was mentioned by group three regarding the address of education reference is also part of this attribution. it means that both groups started their evaluation from the narrowest range to the wider level of analysis. group three present more complete analysis by involving genre analysis in the discourse level to see the possible coverage of the source of information that for them were balance, two from the state public officers and other two from the so-called liberal sides. both groups highlighted the identification of the writer or its organization to figure out the tendency of his writing. they came to the same finding that the attribute of the writer or the producer’s identity as a western was reflected from his writing, higher tendency on liberal one and on a slight criticism on the law which is upheld by islamic community. to critical reading perspective, their ways of thinking has shown judgment about how a text is argued as well as the ability to figure out the writer’s ways of thinking about the topic (knott, 2008) by means of cda’s principles in this respect. the reading of other texts in the subsequent sessions made use of all the levels moh. fuadul matin the implementation of critical discourse analysis in an english classroom 16 in the guiding critical questions whose discussion was not restricted to the sequence of the questions but on particular intriguing issues. reading the text students should join defend the country for instance, the first session of the lesson was as usual reading and discussing in groups followed by group presentation and classroom discussion. since it was the fourth text, the students were already familiar with the questions that their group discussion looked lively. during all sessions of discussion, the researcher paid a special attention to the less-active students by checking their involvement in the discussion and letting them to put forward their opinion as a response to a particular question. it was done to foster all students to be good readers who are actively involved in the text; they constantly able to interrogate and interact with it, and predict what is coming (gibbons, 2002). the overall teacher student interaction was also done to encourage “dialogic teaching” that refers to “the kinds of verbal interaction that stimulates thinking, facilitates learning, and expands awareness of self, task and environment” (fisher, 2011, p. 92). post-reading stage this stage signifies the end of reading activity in every session. taking the reference from wallace (1992), students’ activity was asking question to predict to whom the text is addressed. in the reading of the first text on mobile phones more dangerous than smoking, the students responded simultaneously as similar question appeared in the diagnostic test. regarding this, the lecturer directed the students to see another aspect of the writing of the text. it was questioned in what kind of media the text was published. if it was published in the internet, what consequence it will bring and more specifically, in what site it is displayed, whether in public media or in private website like blog or facebook. here, students were provided with many options for them to think of the possible targeted readers. since the same question was applied to all post-reading activities, it can be identified that students’ answers were typical, considerably correct though. in the reading of the rest texts, students predicted that the texts were directed to the parties who contradicted with the argument presented by the writer. in the text using internet is very useful for education for instance, student #17 was the first to respond saying that the targeted readers might be those who agreed with the internet upholding in the school. likewise, reading the text cigarette advertisement should be banned from sport event, student #6 said that the text was directed to smokers. meanwhile, in reading homeschooling is not good, the lecturer asked student #18 to answer the question. her answer was similar, the readers targeted were the proponent of homeschooling which in fact was irrelevant since this speech was delivered by the artist that must have homeschooling. the effect of the teaching program towards students’ critical reading in order to gain a clear picture of how the teaching program contribute to the students’ critical reading, the following section will initially discuss the positive effect of the teaching followed by its negative side on the students reading. the positive effect the major positive effect of the teaching program is the enhancement of students’ critical reading when it ended. this progress is indicated in the students’ initial ability prior to the teaching program and after the program. it can be identified from data taken from several sources including observation, students’ reflective journals, as well as the results of students’ performance in the diagnostic and progress tests. in the reading of subsequent texts in the following sessions, students demonstrated better critical ability indicated by their better understanding on the guiding questions as their answers to it were getting more accurate. additionally, the discussion was no longer dominated by those of outstanding students but some students who were previously relatively silent also started to take part. the progress of students’ critical ability cannot merely assessed from everyday activities, but it should be based on their own indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 17 confession whether or not they get new insight and enjoy the teaching whose answers can be disclosed through two sources of data, students’ reflective journal and post-program questionnaire. the reflective journals provide fruitful information of students’ day to day understanding of the material but it is hard to be extracted. the negative effect a critical reader is expected not to take things for granted mainly regarding any kinds of information one get from his/her reading, but at the same time not fall to another kind of harsh criticism towards the subject matter. it is in line with one criticism to cla that instead of enhancing students’ critical capacity, it leads to ‘instruction in ideological partiality’ (wallace, 2003), in which the criticality towards a text is realized by being judgmental on it. what is expected from a critical reading teaching program is that both teacher and students are not only able to criticize the texts but also obtain higher awareness of their own observation (wallace, 2003). however, the expected outcomes cannot fully achieved as teaching critical reading, or other kinds of criticality in literacy, is not an instant process. it takes time as some say it requires a lifetime instruction (beyer, 1997) and the teaching of critical literacy itself in some developed country, such as australia, is undertaken from the early (look at hancock, 1997). conclusion the cda-based reading teaching program incorporated in this study has resulted in students’ critical reading improvement in general. this conclusion is mainly drawn by looking at the implementation which includes two phases. the first is preliminary phase comprising several stages. they are the introduction of the teaching program, the joint decision of the topics for reading, the distribution of diagnostic test and the performance of preliminary questionnaire. the second phase is the teaching program covering stages of explicit teaching of cda-based guiding critical questions and sfl-related framework for critical reading and the teaching of critical reading itself. the teaching of critical reading is divided into three activities: pre, while, and post-reading activities. cla’s aim to build students’ awareness on the use of language is the interest of the current investigation which believes that cda generates a lot of benefits to the practice of language pedagogy, primarily in the reading subject. the success of the teaching can also be identified from some sources of data, mainly classroom observation and progress test. students’ discussion based on the guiding questions went lively both in the group and classroom discussion. most of them were also able to provide relevant responses to the questions. additionally, students’ improvement was also signified by the active participation of those who were considered as passive students before the teaching program was carried out. in line with the above conclusion, the teaching program has a greater positive influence towards the promotion of students’ critical reading. not only from the researcher’s observation and the result of test, the complementary data from students’ reflective journals as well as post-program questionnaire also reveal their confession that the course had improved their reading habit and more importantly their critical reading. they also realize that being critical in reading is of paramount importance in the current era since there are wide range of information nowadays that should be wellselected. nevertheless, there is a negative effect the program has on the students that some of them tend to be judgmental in evaluating the texts. regarding students’ responses towards the teaching program, data from students’ reflective journals as well as postprogram questionnaire reveal students’ enjoyment during the teaching though there was time they felt bored and tired since the situation was not really supportive. some students also confessed that the techniques applied by the researcher were new for them and regarded better than the previous reading lessons they have taken. it indicates that the way cda’s principles implemented in moh. fuadul matin the implementation of critical discourse analysis in an english classroom 18 the teaching is significant to promote students’ critical reading. finally, students’ positive responses are also completed by their suggestion to the teacher to give grammatically easier texts and include indonesian texts and literary texts. references allwright, d. 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(2003). critical discourse analysis: theory and interdiciplinary. ny: palgrave macmillan. indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 19 monkey a guy walks into a bar with his pet monkey. he orders a drink and while he's drinking, the monkey jumps all around the place. the monkey grabs some olives off the bar and eats them. then grabs some sliced limes and eats them. then jumps onto the pool table, grabs one of the billiard balls, sticks it in his mouth, and to everyone's amazement, somehow swallows it whole. the bartender screams at the guy "did you see what your monkey just did?". the guy says "no, what?" "he just ate the cue ball off my pool table-whole!". "yeah, that doesn't surprise me," replied the guy. "he eats everything in sight, the little bastard. sorry. i'll pay for the cue ball and stuff." he finishes his drink, pays his bill, pays for the stuff the monkey ate, then leaves. two weeks later he's in the bar again, and has his monkey with him. he orders a drink and the monkey starts running around the bar again. while the man is finishing his drink, the monkey finds a maraschino cherry on the bar. he grabs it, sticks it up his butt, pulls it out, and eats it. the bartender is disgusted. "did you see what your monkey did now?" he asks. "no, what?" replies the guy. "well, he stuck a maraschino cherry up his butt, pulled it out, and ate it!" said the bartender. "yeah, that doesn't surprise me," replied the guy. " he still eats everything in sight, but ever since he swallowed that cue ball, he measures everything first..." (source: http://www.study-express.ru/humour/funny-stories.shtml, picture: www.google.co.id) moh. fuadul matin the implementation of critical discourse analysis in an english classroom 20 draft 1 indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 11 creativity vis-à-vis speaking among extrovert and introvert efl learners hamid marashi islamic azad university, central tehran, iran e-mail: hamid.marashi@iauctb.ac.ir asal amin-ranjbar islamic azad university, central tehran, iran e-mail: ranjbar6464@yahoo.com apa citation: marashi, h., & amin-ranjbar, a. (2018). creativity vis-à-vis speaking among extrovert and introvert efl learners. indonesian efl journal, 4(1), 11-22. received: 08-11-2017 accepted: 24-12-2017 published: 01-01-2018 abstract: the study attempts to investigate the relationship between extrovert and introvert efl learners’ speaking skill and their creativity. for this purpose, 40 male introverts, 40 male extroverts, 40 female introverts, and 40 female extroverts were selected among a total number of 180 through their performance on the eysenck’s personality inventory. subsequently, the abedi-schumaker creativity test and a sample pet speaking test were administered to all 160 participants of the study. the pearson correlation coefficient was subsequently used to check the correlation between speaking and creativity of each group of extrovert and introvert efl learners. the results indicated that there was a significant correlation between each group’s speaking and creativity. furthermor e, a linear regression was also run to check any predictability pattern. the findings demonstrated that each group’s speaking predicted significantly their creativity. keywords: creativity, extrovert, introvert, speaking skill introduction speaking speech is arguably the most basic part of human communication. this is perhaps why for most people, speaking a language is synonymous with knowing that language. despite the speed and excellence with which any given young child acquires this skill in his/her l1, speaking in a second/foreign language is indeed the most demanding of the four skills (hedge, 2008) with its assessment being also highly challenging (winke, gass, & myford, 2012, as cited in bijani & khabiri, 2017). no wonder then that the elt literature is overwhelmed by studies on how to enhance the process of learning to speak in various contexts (e.g. chuang, 2009; cope, 2008; dewaelea & furnham, 2000; kim, 2009; koosha, ketabi, & kassaian, 2011; marashi & dolatdoost, 2016; tuan & neomy, 2007; vercellotti, 2015). there exists a multitude of definitions for speaking; one such is provided by chaney and burk (1998, p. 13) where he states that speaking is “the process of building and sharing meaning through the use of verbal and non-verbal symbols, in a variety of contexts.” the difference between speaking and other skills is not simply one attributable to the final product as indeed “some of the processing skills needed in speaking differ from those involved in reading and writing” (ellis, 1994, p. 35). thornbury (2005, p. 1), states that, “speaking is speech production that becomes a part of our daily life”. bringing more detail, brown (2001) elaborates that there are two basic language functions which students who are trained to speak should recognize: “the first one is transactional function, which means exchange and conveying specific information. and the other is interpersonal function, which is the main purpose to keep social relationships” (p. 273). hamid marashi & asal amin ranjbar creativity vis-à-vis speaking among extrovert and introvert efl learners 12 speaking is incontrovertibly beyond mere linguistic competence as there is perhaps consensus ever since hymes’ (1972) conceptualization of communicative competence that speaking involves the application of many other constructs and composites including strategic competence, discoursal competence, and sociocultural competence (canale & swain, 1980). speaking is of course a multifaceted construct which is interrelated with different abilities and skills, one such being creativity (kellogg, 1994). creativity creativity is a human resource employed mainly to address the challenges of psychological and social adaptation and is broken down as a personal attribute, a process, a product, and as the context which enables it (baer, 2010). as demonstrated empirically through research, creativity does not depend on stable characteristics (averill, 2004); rather, it is the corollary of individual, behavioral, cognitive, and contextual processes (amabile, & khaire, 2008; sternberg & lubart, 1996). creativity and intelligence are at times confused with one another, whereas the two constructs are not necessarily coterminous (gardner, 2010). indeed, there are two aspects that define creativity: first is novelty which means that creative work has to be different from previous works and second is quality which – in practical terms – connotes that new products must be suitable and useful for the reference group according to the situation or the problem (sternberg & kaufman, 2010). as agars, kaufman, and locke (2008, p. 62) put it, “most early definitions of creativity implied that creativity was a singular entity…these initial conceptualizations, although meaningful, were somewhat limited in their application”. accordingly, sarsani (2006) transgresses this restriction where he defines creativity as, “the ability or the capacity of a person to discover and explore new areas to create or produce new idea, or theory or object including the arrangement or reshaping of what already exists” (p. 105). there are factors that can serve as barriers to creativity; according to davis (1999), these barriers are indeed external or internal blocks “that either inhibit creative thinking and inspiration or else prevent innovative ideas from being accepted and implemented. most barriers result from learning. they may originate with one’s family, peers, community, or educational environment, or from others in the culture (p. 165). albeit a rather recent concept of interest in elt, quite a sizeable number of research studies have been conducted on the stance of creativity in language learning (e.g. cropley, 2007; daemi & moghimi, 2004; john & meera, 2014; jeffery & craft, 2001; marashi & dadari, 2012; marashi & khatami, 2017; runco, 2004; sarsani, 2006; silvia, 2008). introversion/extroversion another aspect which cannot be neglected in exploring into the skill of speaking is personality among which the dichotomy of introversion/extroversion is quite significant. extroversion and introversion are probably the most researched aspect of personality (burger, 1993). when comparing introverts and extroverts, “extroverts are harder to condition and the consistency of their conditioned responses are less likely to be seen. extroverts are more impulsive and when they are learning, punishment does not prove to have any effect on them” (zuckerman, 2005, p. 208). according to lucas (2007, p. 335), “extroversion is a trait which is in comprehensive models of personality, one’s interest in social interaction, and it engages excitement-seeking behaviors”. morronestrupinsky and lane (2007, p. 1267) also assert that, “extroversion consists of agentic and affiliative components, which are typified by distinct positive emotional states of positive activation and warmth-affection, accordingly”. introverts, on the other hand, are considerate people by nature but lack the ability to express their feelings. instead of just blurting out the word, they think before expressing any idea or any feeling they have (sharp, 1987). dimler, goldstein, kohlberger, and kim-prieto (2007) declare that introversion is a personality which is stable indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 13 and heritable and it has a quiet setting. according to richards and schmidt (2002, p. 195), “a person who tends to avoid social contact with others and is often preoccupied with his feelings, thoughts, and experience” is considered to be an introvert. “introverts should be taught how to acquire social skills. they should not be changed in order to match them with other personality types. introverts enjoy giving lectures and they take advantage of the deductive form of instruction” (burruss & lisa kaenzig, 1999, p. 21). ever since the pioneering works of the german psychologists hans and sybil eysenck in the early 1970s, many studies have been conducted on the language behavior and specifically speaking of extrovert and introvert efl learners (e.g. aragon, johnson, & shaik, 2002; downing, 2010; ehrman & oxford, 1990; khany & ghoreyshi, 2013; marashi & dibah, 2013; marashi & fotoohi, 2017; thompson, 2012; zafar & meenakshi, 2012). purpose of the study inspired by the studies conducted on speaking and creativity and also being interested in seeing whether the different personality traits of learners would serve as a moderator variable in the relationship of the aforesaid two constructs, the researchers aimed at responding to the following research questions: 1. is there any significant relationship between extrovert efl learners’ speaking and creativity? 2. is there any significant relationship between introvert efl learners’ speaking and creativity? 3. is extrovert efl learners’ creativity a significant predictor of their speaking? 4. is introvert efl learners’ creativity a significant predictor of their speaking? method participants a total of 160 efl learners aged between 2025 years took part in this study. this sample comprised of 40 male introverts, 40 male extroverts, 40 female introverts, and 40 female extroverts. the selection was not random and through convenient sampling. these 160 participants were selected from a group of 180 students based on their performance on the eysenck personality inventory. furthermore, the two researchers participated in the study as the raters of the speaking tests; they enjoyed inter-rater consistency (r = 0.718, p = 0.0001 < 0.05). instruments there are three instruments used in this research, namely speaking test, eysenck personality inventory (epi), and abedischumacher creativity test (act). a sample speaking paper of the preliminary english test was used in this study. the test lasts from 10 to 12 minutes. two candidates sit for the test simultaneously and the test is assessed by two examiners: one, the interlocutor, talks to the candidates, and the other, the assessor, just listens. the test has four parts. in first part, candidates interact with an examiner. in parts two and four, they interact with another candidate and in part three, they have an extended individual long turn. the test focus on assessing candidates’ ability to express themselves in order to carry out functions as threshold level, to ask and to understand questions, to make appropriate responses, and to talk freely on matters of personal interest. candidates are assessed on their performance throughout the test. there are a total of 25 marks in this paper. the epi (eysenck, eysenck, & barrett, 1985) is a questionnaire to assess the personality traits of a person. it is a validated test consisting of 57 yes/no items which conceptualize personality as two biologicallybased categories of temperament which include: extroversion/introversion and neuroticism/stability. the test provides the testees with three different scores: the e score which is related to how much extrovert a person in, the n score measuring the neuroticism, and the lie score which tries to measure how socially desirable a person has wanted to prove to be. the e score is computed out of 24 since it consists of 24 items, the n score is out of 24, and the lie score is out of nine. the yes/no answers hamid marashi & asal amin ranjbar creativity vis-à-vis speaking among extrovert and introvert efl learners 14 should be given based on the usual way of acting or thinking of an individual. this is a standardized psychological test, the reported reliability and concurrent validity indices of which are 0.89 and 0.79, respectively (shackleton & fletcher, 1984). the act was designed by o’neil, abedi, and spielberger in 1992 and consists of 60 multiple-choice items used for establishing the scores of the four traits underlying creative thinking. accordingly, the test is divided into the four subscales of: fluency (22 items), flexibility (11 items), originality (16 items), and elaboration (11 items). each item has three options ranging from least to most creative response with a range of scores between 0-2. therefore, the ultimate score is estimated in the possible range of 0 to 120 and participants are supposed to answer the items in 30 minutes. procedure to begin with, the researchers administered the epi to 180 efl learners to find 160 participants (as detailed in the participants section). the researchers explained in farsi the purpose of the study and asked the participants to take part only if they are willing and thus refrain from responding to the items precariously. once the participants were selected, the researchers gave them the pet speaking section followed by the act. naturally, it was not possible to conduct the speaking test for 160 participants on the same day; hence, the test was administered on several days with different number of participants on each day with respect to availability. both the speaking and the creativity tests, however, were administered subsequently on each day in order to prevent the risk of subject mortality. results descriptive statistics speaking test once the 80 extrovert and 80 introvert learners were selected, the researchers administered the speaking test. table 1 below displays the descriptive statistics of the speaking test. table 1. descriptive statistics of the scores of the participants on the speaking test n minimum maximum mean std. deviation skewness statistic std. error speaking 160 12 25 19.84 3.635 -.354 .192 valid n (listwise) 160 as is seen in the above table, the mean and the standard deviation were 19.84 and 3.63, respectively. the scores represented normalcy with the skewness ratio falling within the ±1.96 ratio (-0.354 / 0.192 = -1.84). table 2 below shows the descriptive statistics of the above scores disaggregated by introverts and extroverts. as is seen in the table below, the mean and the standard deviation of the extroverts’ speaking scores were 19.74 and 3.64, respectively, while those of the introverts were 19.94 and 3.65, respectively. furthermore, the scores represented normalcy (-0.389 / 0.269 = -1.446 and -0.328 / 0.269 = -1.219). table 2. descriptive statistics of the introverts and extroverts on the speaking test n min max mean std. deviation skewness statistic std. error extroverts’ speaking 80 12 25 19.74 3.640 -.389 .269 introverts’ speaking 80 12 25 19.94 3.649 -.328 .269 valid n (listwise) 80 indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 15 creativity test following the speaking test, the researchers administered the creativity test. table 3 below displays the data. as is seen in the above below, the mean and the standard deviation were 75.65 and 28.92, respectively. the scores represented normalcy (0.267 / 0.192 = 1.39). table 3. descriptive statistics of the participants’ scores on the creativity test n minimum maximum mean std. deviation skewness statistic std. error creativity 160 21 181 75.65 28.923 .267 .192 valid n (listwise) 160 table 4 below shows the descriptive statistics of the above scores disaggregated by introverts and extroverts. as is seen in the table below, the mean and the standard deviation of the extroverts’ creativity scores were 72.99 and 27.90, respectively, while those of the introverts were 75.15 and 26.68, respectively. furthermore, the scores represented normalcy (0.054 / 0.269 = 0.200 and 0.465 / 0.269 = 1.728). table 4. descriptive statistics of the introverts and extroverts on the creativity test n min max mean std. deviation skewness statistic std. error extroverts’ creativity 80 21 178 72.99 27.902 .054 .269 introverts’ creativity 80 25 181 75.15 26.680 .465 .269 valid n (listwise) 80 responding to the research questions first research question to respond to the first question, i.e. whether a significant relationship existed between extrovert learners’ speaking and creativity, the pearson correlation coefficient were run. prior to this, the assumptions for running this parametric test had to be checked, i.e. normality, linearity, and homoscedasticity of the two distributions of scores. normality of all sets of scores had already been established (see above). to inspect the second parameter (linearity), the researchers used a scatterplot of the two variables of the study (figure 1). figure 1. scatterplot of extroverts’ scores on the speaking and creativity tests as shown in this scatterplot, there was no kind of nonlinear relationship between the scores on the two batteries. hence, the relationship between the two variables was assumed linear. as for homoscedasticity, the researchers examined the residuals plot (figure 2). hamid marashi & asal amin ranjbar creativity vis-à-vis speaking among extrovert and introvert efl learners 16 figure 2. plot of studentized residuals for extroverts’ creativity as demonstrated in figure 2, the cloud of data scattered shows evenness at both ends and thus the variance is homogeneous and the principle of homoscedasticty is met (pallant, 2007). subsequently, the researchers could run the correlation (table 5). table 5. correlation of the extrovert participants’ scores on the speaking and creativity tests extroverts’ speaking extroverts’ creativity extroverts’ speaking pearson correlation sig. (2-tailed) n 1 . 80 .599** .000 80 extroverts’ creativity pearson correlation sig. (2-tailed) n .599** .000 80 1 . 80 **correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed) as demonstrated by table 5 above, the correlation came out to be significant at the 0.01 level (r = 0.599, p = 0.0001 < 0.05). thus the r2 (or common variance) which is the effect size for correlation came out to be 0.358. this is a moderate effect size (cohen, 1992; larson-hall, 2010). accordingly, there is a significant relationship between extrovert efl learners’ speaking and creativity. second research question next, to respond to the second research question, i.e. whether a significant relationship existed between introverts learners’ speaking and creativity, again the pearson correlation coefficient had to be run. a scatterplot was used to inspect the linearity of the two variables of the study (figure 3) showing there was no kind of nonlinear relationship between the scores on the two batteries. then, figure 4 demonstrates homoscedasticity. indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 17 figure 3. scatterplot of introverts’ scores on the speaking and creativity tests figure 4. plot of studentized residuals for introverts’ creativity table 6. correlation of introverts’ scores on the speaking and creativity introverts’ speaking introverts’ creativity introverts’ speaking pearson correlation sig. (2-tailed) n 1 . 80 .517** .000 80 introverts’ creativity pearson correlation sig. (2-tailed) n .517** .000 80 1 . 80 **correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed) as demonstrated by table 6 above, the correlation came out to be significant at the 0.01 level (r = 0.517, p = 0.0001 < 0.05) and r2 came out to be 0.267. this too is a moderate effect size (cohen, 1992; larsonhall, 2010). therefore, there is a significant relationship between introvert learners’ speaking and creativity. third research question then, to answer the third question, i.e. whether extrovert learners’ creativity was a significant predictor of their speaking or not, a linear regression was run (table 7). hamid marashi & asal amin ranjbar creativity vis-à-vis speaking among extrovert and introvert efl learners 18 table 7. regression output: anova table model sum of squares df mean square f sig. 1 regression 22058.493 1 22058.493 43.618 .000b residual 39446.495 78 505.724 total 61504.987 79 a. predictors: (constant), extroverts’ speaking b. dependent variable: extroverts’ creativity table 8 demonstrates the standardized beta coefficient (b = 0.599, t = 6.604, p = 0.0001<0.05) which reveals that the model was significant meaning that extrovert learners’ creativity could predict significantly their speaking. table 8. regression output: coefficients model unstandardized coefficients standardized coefficients t sig. b beta 1 (constant) -17.637 13.950 -1.264 .210 extroverts’ creativity 4.590 .695 .599 6.604 .000 a. dependent variable: extroverts’ creativity although normality of the distributions were checked for correlation in the previous sections, the residuals table (as demonstrated in table 9 below) also verified the absence of outstanding outliers as the cook’s distance values did not exceed 1 and mahalanobis distance values did not exceed 15. hence, extrovert learners’ creativity could predict significantly their speaking. table 9. regression output: residuals statistics minimum maximum mean std. deviation n predicted value 5.0978 7.5172 6.1927 .41371 80 std. predicted value -2.646 3.202 .000 1.000 80 standard error of predicted value .100 .337 .135 .044 80 adjusted predicted value 4.9794 7.4890 6.1938 .41557 80 residual -3.37662 3.22706 .00000 1.43011 80 std. residual -2.355 2.251 .000 .998 80 stud. residual -2.362 2.257 .000 1.003 80 deleted residual -3.39648 3.24348 -.00112 1.44712 80 stud. deleted residual -2.389 2.280 .000 1.007 80 mahalanobis distance .001 10.250 .995 1.570 80 cook’s distance .000 .099 .006 .013 80 centered leverage value .000 .050 .005 .008 80 a. dependent variable: extroverts’ creativity fourth research question lastly, to respond to the fourth question, i.e. whether introvert learners’ creativity was a significant predictor of their speaking or not, a linear regression was run. table 10 reports the results of the anova (f1,78 = 28.507, p = 0.0001 < 0.05) which proved significant. indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 19 table 10. regression output: anova table model sum of squares df mean square f sig. 1 regression 15051.217 1 15051.217 28.507 .000b residual 41182.983 78 527.987 total 56234.200 79 a. predictors: (constant), introverts’ speaking b. dependent variable: introverts’ creativity table 11 demonstrates the standardized beta coefficient (b = 0.517, t = 5.339, p = 0.0001<0.05) which reveals that the model was significant meaning that introvert learners’ creativity could predict significantly their speaking. then, table 12 below also verified the absence of outstanding outliers as the cook’s distance values did not exceed 1 and mahalanobis distance values did not exceed 15. table 11. regression output: coefficients model unstandardized coefficients standardized coefficients t sig. b beta 1 (constant) -.287 14.361 -.020 .984 introverts’ aq 3.782 .708 .517 5.339 .000 table 12. regression output: residuals statistics minimum maximum mean std. deviation n predicted value 45.10 94.28 75.15 13.803 80 std. predicted value -2.177 1.386 .000 1.000 80 standard error of predicted value 2.569 6.186 3.520 .906 80 adjusted predicted value 46.20 95.43 75.12 13.806 80 residual -39.037 86.725 .000 22.832 80 std. residual -1.699 3.774 .000 .994 80 stud. residual -1.712 3.846 .001 1.007 80 deleted residual -39.623 90.038 .035 23.445 80 stud. deleted residual -1.733 4.244 .010 1.043 80 mahalanobis distance .000 4.739 .987 1.068 80 cook’s distance .000 .283 .013 .035 80 centered leverage value .000 .060 .013 .014 80 a. dependent variable: introverts’ creativity discussion the findings of the present study are in line with those of baghaei and bagheri (2012) who found a significantly positive relationship between creativity and speaking skill among iranian ielts candidates. this study also revealed that there was a significant relationship between introvert efl learners’ speaking and creativity; that is, the higher the level of introvert efl learners’ speaking, the higher their creativity and vice versa. a possible explanation for the above finding might be the fact that instead of just blurting out the word, introverts think before expressing any idea or any feeling they have (sharp, 1987) and due to this reflection process, which reoccurs on a daily basis, their creativity and speaking ability are related. in other words, it can be stated that since introverts reflect upon their utterances several times, they have the ability to produce original, novel ideas which as pointed out by shomoossi and majidi fard (2013), moderately influence how learners perform orally. hamid marashi & asal amin ranjbar creativity vis-à-vis speaking among extrovert and introvert efl learners 20 one possible justification for the findings of the present study in this respect, as rightly pointed out by khany and ghoreyshi (2013), is that “extroverted learners prefer to engage more in social activities and tasks in the classroom; thus this preference helps them improve their level of speaking confidence” (p. 606). moreover, extroverts are carefree, energetic, and friendly and they are constantly looking for change and new ideas in their lives, and consequently invent or make use of different strategies to communicate orally with other individuals. for instance, ehrman and oxford (1990) state that extroverts prefer functional practice strategies such as looking for practice opportunities outside of class and social strategies such as asking for clarification. conclusion teachers may benefit from being creative in teaching. if teachers are not creative themselves, it would be difficult to develop this feature among their students. another point is that teachers perhaps need to pay attention to learners’ personality attributes when it comes to attempting to boost their creativity. so, it seems necessary to do research on the creativity of extrovert and introvert learners. accordingly, the present study can help learners learn about their intellectual strengths and weaknesses. it might be able to help learners develop themselves. in the process of conducting this study, the researchers came across certain points that can be further investigated. first of all, this study can be replicated with different age groups. secondly, demographic features such as socioeconomic background and ethnicity were not controlled in this study; 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(2015). the development of complexity, accuracy, and fluency in second language performance: a longitudinal study. applied linguistics, 36(2), 1-25. zafar, s., & meenakshi, k. (2012). a study on the relationship between extroversion-introversion and risk-taking in the context of second language acquisition. international journal of research studies in language learning, 1(1), 33-40. zuckerman, m. (2005). psychology of personality. cambridge: cambridge university press. hamid marashi islamic azad university, central tehran, iran e-mail: hamid.marashi@iauctb.ac.ir asal amin-ranjbar islamic azad university, central tehran, iran (1) e-mail: ranjbar6464@yahoo.com abstract: the study attempts to investigate the relationship between extrovert and introvert efl learners’ speaking skill and their creativity. for this purpose, 40 male introverts, 40 male extroverts, 40 female introverts, and 40 female extroverts we... introduction speaking purpose of the study method results figure 2. plot of studentized residuals for extroverts’ creativity figure 4. plot of studentized residuals for introverts’ creativity table 8. regression output: coefficients table 9. regression output: residuals statistics table 10. regression output: anova table table 11. regression output: coefficients table 12. regression output: residuals statistics an investigation of chinese middle school in-service english teachers’ assessment literacy indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(1) january 2015issn 2252-7427 an investigation of chinese middle school in-service english teachers’ assessment literacy lin dunlai school of foreign languages and literature; national innovation center for assessment of basic education quality, beijing normal universitye-mail: lindunlai@bnu.edu.cn su you school of humanities, beijing university of posts and telecommunicationse-mail: suyou@bupt.edu.cnapa citation: lin, d. & su, y. (2015). an investigation of chinese middle school in-service english teachers’assessment literacy. indonesian efl journal 1(1), 1-10received: 04-08-2014 accepted: 10-10-2014 published: 01-01-2015 abstract: this paper reports an investigation into the status quo of assessment literacy of chinesemiddle school in-service english teachers. using tasks designed by coombe et al. (2007), the studyfinds out that chinese secondary english teachers have low levels of assessment literacy. they are notaware of such principles as authenticity, sensitivity issues about test content and self-assessment.especially, they are extremely incompetent in understanding statistics about item analysis anddistractor efficiency analysis. no significant difference was detected about teachers’ assessmentliteracy in terms of teaching experience and whether they have taken assessment training courses inany forms. the authors call for a study into language assessment courses offered for secondary englishteachers and enough attention paid to the relevance of language assessment training courses toclassroom assessment. keywords: assessment literacy, middle school in-service english teachers. china. introductionteachers spend up to one third or evenhalf of their career life in dealing withassessment (stiggins, 1991a; 1999). it is nodoubt that teachers play a pivotal part inclassroom assessment. besides, research hasfound that if assessment is appliedappropriately, it would boost student learning(black & wiliam, 1998). the current beliefsabout the prominent role of assessment infostering learning, referred to as “assessment for learning” (gipps, 1994; broadfoot & black,2004), call for the knowledge required forconducting assessment activities, known as“assessment literacy”.the term “assessment literacy” was firstcoined by rick stiggins (1991b). he firstdescribed what assessment illiterates cannotdo in stiggins (1991b) and was morestraightforward in delineating whatassessment literate teachers can do instiggins (1995). popham (2011) definesassessment literacy as “(it) consists of anindividual’s understandings of the fundamental assessment concepts and procedures deemed likely to influence educational decisions” (italics in original text).language testing arena didn’t take up theterm until 2009 when taylor (2009) called forthe sharing of the language testing knowledge,skills and understanding in wider circles. sheargues that “training for assessment literacyentails an appropriate balance of technicalknow-how, and understanding of principles,but all firmly contextualized within a soundunderstanding of the role and function ofassessment within education and society”(ibid: 27). inbar-lourie (2008) also perceivedlanguage assessment literacy asencompassing layers of assessment literacyand language specific elements. in this article,the authors take a classroom-oriented layer ofassessment literacy, which suggests that “inorder to become literate in languageassessment, one needs to attain knowledge informative and summative testing andassessment methods, in interpreting studentscores, in understanding the complexities of 1 lin dunlai & su you an investigation of chinese middle school in-service english teachers’ assessment literacyvalidity and reliability including currenttensions which question the application oftraditional psychometric measures to teacher-based assessment” (inbar-laurie, 2013;teasdale & leung, 2000).as a matter of fact, the knowledge basefor assessment has been offered by officialdocuments. the american federation ofteachers (aft), national council onmeasurement in education (ncme) andnational education association (nea)identified seven components that formed thebase required for performing assessmenttasks. the seven components are (1) teachersshould be skilled in choosing assessmentmethods appropriate for instructionaldecisions; (2) teachers should be skilled indeveloping assessment methods appropriatefor instructional decisions; (3) teachersshould be skilled in administering, scoring,and interpreting the results of both externallyproduced and teacher-produced assessmentmethods; (4) teachers should be skilled inusing assessment results when makingdecisions about individual students, planningteaching, developing curriculum, and schoolimprovement; (5) teachers should be skilledin developing valid pupil grading proceduresthat use pupil assessments; (6) teachersshould be skilled in communicatingassessment results to students, parents, otherlay audiences, and other educators; (7)teachers should be skilled in recognizingunethical, illegal, and otherwise inappropriateassessment methods and uses of assessmentinformation (aft, ncme, & nea, 1990).but the real situation seems to lag toomuch behind. many researchers haveconsistently found that teachers lackassessment literacy (arter, 2001; mertler,2004; mertle & campbell, 2005; popham,2006; wang, wang & huang, 2008; lin, 2014),which makes it simply impossible to build upassessment culture. the methods that wereadopted in the existing literature were mostlysurvey, which often includes the instrumentdeveloped by plake, impara & fager (1993),which is a 35-multiple-choice test developedfrom the seven standards (aft, ncme, & nea,1990), mentioned above. plake and impara(1997) carried out a national survey over 555american teachers, and found “woefully” lowlevels of assessment competence. campbell, murphy and holt (2002) applied theinstrument on pre-service teachers and foundincompetence in assessment. mertler (2004)investigated 61 in-service and 101 pre-servicesecondary teachers in the us, and foundincompetency in grading and interpreting testresults. zhang and burry-stock (1997) usedthe assessment inventory to find out 7 factorsof assessment literacy. they comparedteachers with different teaching experienceand assessment training courses and foundsignificant difference of assessment literacyperception both in terms of teachingexperience and assessment training courses.empirical research into languageassessment literacy is still rare (lin & wu,2014). existent research focuses on theknowledge base of language assessmentliteracy (e.g. bailey & brown, 1996; brown &bailey, 2008; tsagari, 2011; fulcher, 2012;jeong, 2013). in chinese context, jin (2010)investigated 86 language testing courses forteacher preparation programs for universitiesacross china and found a heavy focus ontesting and measurement perspective ratherthan assessment perspective. as forsecondary english teachers’ assessmentliteracy, lin (2014) found low levels ofassessment literacy of the teachers with botha quantitative and qualitative design. in thisstudy, the authors want to report a study onthe secondary english teachers’ assessmentliteracy based on a test. the researchquestions for the study are: (1) what is thestatus quo of assessment literacy of chinesemiddle-school in-service english teachers? (2)does teaching experience make a difference?(3) does assessment training course make adifference? method the samplethis study took the conveniencesampling method due to the lack of resources.39 middle school in-service english teachers(n=39) took part in the test. these teacherswere attending a language assessment courseas part of their master of education program.33 (n=33) were female, and 6 (n=6) weremale. they were from 14 provinces (ormunicipalities) (there are 34 provincialadministrative zones in china). in terms ofage, 22 were below 30 years old, 11 were at 2 indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427the age of 31-35, and 6 were above 36 yearsold. as regards the teaching experience, 18 ofthem had been teaching for 2-5 years, 12 ofthem 6-10 years and 9 of them more than 11years. 35 of them graduated from a teachertraining program. as for language proficiency,26 passed test for english majors band 8(tem 8), which suggests very high englishlanguage proficiency. 14 of them were juniorhigh school teachers and 25 taught seniorhigh. as to class size, 6 of them taught classeswith fewer than 30 students, 7 of them with30-40 students, 10 of them with 41-50students, and 16 of them with more than 50students. as for these teachers’ professionaldevelopment in assessment, 20 of them nevertook language assessment courses in anyform, 12 of them took a complete languageassessment course, 7 of them got to knowlanguage assessment through lectures orlanguage teaching methods course. as fortheir perception about the importance ofknowledge about language testing, 34 of themthought knowledge about languageassessment very important for an englishteacher. the instrumentthe instrument for this study wasadapted from a book written by coombe,folse and hubley (2007). altogether theinstrument includes ten tasks. the first tasktests the participants’ knowledge aboutlanguage assessment. it required theparticipants to select one best answer. anexample is as follows: it’s the beginning of the semester, and you have a mixed-level class. you want to get an idea of the class’s strengths and weaknesses before you plan your lessons. which kind of test would give you the information you need? a. placement. b. diagnostic. c. proficiency. d. aptitude. (key: b)the second and third tasks present twoscenarios of an english teacher conductinglanguage testing in a semester. theparticipants were required to underlinewhere there are some inappropriate languagetesting practices and briefly explain why.the fourth task is about techniquesfor multiple choice questioning. theparticipants were to name the defects in themultiple choice question setting. an exampleis as follows: an architect is a person who does not _________. a. design automobiles b. design buildings c. design houses d. design offices (suggested answer: 1. “design” should be provided in the stem to avoid repetition. 2. we normally do not define something as “not”— authenticity issue)the fifth to eighth tasks provide a shortreading, writing, listening and speaking testrespectively. participants were required topoint out where a violation turns upregarding testing techniques.the ninth task is a scenario about anenglish teacher’s test preparation practice forstudents. participants were required tounderline where inappropriate and give somecomments.the tenth task is for participant to readan item analysis and distractor analysis reportand interpret the results and suggest someimprovements. table 1 indicates the tasks andits contents. table 1. ten tasks, its contents and question types1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10knowledge scenario scenario mc reading writing listening speaking test preparation statisticsmc open open open open open open open open open the data collection processthe test was administered at the verybeginning of the above-mentioned languageassessment course to avoid any learning. inother words, the participants should rely ontheir prior knowledge to finish the test. thetasks were printed as booklets to avoiding misplacing of the test paper. space was morethan enough for the participants, so they cancome up with ideas and write freely.participants were notified that the test wasonly for research purpose so they should nothesitate to write down their response exactlyas what they thought about the issues. the 3 lin dunlai & su you an investigation of chinese middle school in-service english teachers’ assessment literacytest lasted for 2 hours. to avoid fatigue, a ten-minute break was called in. all the test paperswere collected, coded and kept safely by theresearchers. the data processing methodthe scoring of the test was done by theauthors collaboratively. the marking schemewas developed based on coombe et at.(2007)’s reference answers to the tasks andthe participants’ real performance. theauthors worked out the indicators to serve asthe basis for marking. the numbers ofindicators for each task was shown in table 2. altogether 123 indicators were worked out.each indicator was marked as 0, 1, excepttask 2 and task 4, where partial credit wasnecessary and the indicators were marked as0, 0.5, 1. as task 2 and task 4 involve morejudgment to be made, the researchers useddouble marking. the pearson correlation wascalculated, and the results were 0.945 and0.943, respectively, which suggest very highagreement between the two researchers. thescores from the two researchers wereaveraged out to reach the final markings fortask 2 and task 4. table 2. ten tasks and number of indicators for each task1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10knowledge scenario scenario mc reading writing listening speaking test preparation statistics10 16 15 13 20 10 15 10 8 6 findings and discussion research question 1: the status quo of assessment literacythe reliability check of the test showsthat the cronbach α=0.828, showing very highlevel of internal consistency. as indicated in figure 1, out of 123, the highest score is 65.25,the lowest is 15.5, the average score is 33.22,and the standard deviation is 9.397. thefacility index of the test is 0.27, showing thatthe test is very difficult for these secondaryteachers. table 3 shows if of each task. table 3 ten tasks and if of each task1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10knowledge scenario scenario mc reading writing listening speaking test preparation statistics0.36 0.29 0.56 0.24 0.17 0.26 0.12 0.36 0.35 0.06as we can see in table 3, six tasks (if<0.3)are extremely difficult for the participants,with the final task—interpreting statistics—as the most difficult one. the techniques formaking multiple choice questions are notmastered by the teachers, despite the ubiquityof mc questions in almost every kind of test.compared with testing productive skills(writing and speaking), testing receptive skills(reading and listening) is more difficult forthe teachers. teachers are totally statisticallyilliterate for item analysis. a comparison study was done betweenteachers with different length of teachingexperience by anova. the result shows that f-value is 0.262 (p=0.771), suggesting nosignificant difference between teachers ofdifferent length of teaching experience.another comparison study was donebetween teachers with different levels ofassessment training by anova. the resultshows that f-value is 0.865 (p=0.468),suggesting no significant difference betweenteachers with different levels of assessmenttraining experience. 4 indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427 figure 1 total score distribution of the test research questions 2 & 3: the role of teaching experience and assessment training course low levels of assessment literacyusing mostly open-ended questions, thisstudy resonates with other existent research(e.g. arter, 2001; mertler, 2004; mertler &campbell, 2005; popham, 2006; wang, wang& huang, 2008; lin, 2014) that secondaryenglish teachers lack a desirable level of assessment literacy. pill and harding (2013)conceptualized different levels of assessmentliteracy as illiteracy, nominal literacy,functional literacy, procedural and conceptualliteracy and multidimensional literacy. table 5shows the meaning of the five levels of literacy. table 5. five levels of assessment literacy (adapted from pill & harding, 2013: 383) illiteracy ignorance of language assessment conceptsnominal literacy understanding that a specific term relates to assessment, but may indicate amisconceptionfunctional literacy sound understanding of basic terms and conceptsprocedural and conceptualliteracy understanding central concepts of the field and using knowledge in practicemultidimensional literacy knowledge extending beyond ordinary concepts including philosophical, historicaland social dimensions of assessmentjudging from teachers’ responses to theten tasks and the above scale, the assessmentliteracy of chinese middle school englishteachers can be rated as somewhere betweenilliteracy to nominal literacy. the latest national english curriculum standards forcompulsory education (ministry of education,or moe, 2012) stipulates that teachers shouldmake use of various kinds of assessment toevaluate students’ development, including formative assessment and summativeassessment. it includes exemplary assessmenttasks and comments for teachers’ reference,covering as many as 45 pages. obviously,teachers lacking assessment literacy willhinder the sound implementation of the standards. as alderson (2011) argues,“testing is too important to be left to testers”.here, the authors want to point out someprominent issues in testing that the 5 lin dunlai & su you an investigation of chinese middle school in-service english teachers’ assessment literacyparticipants were not aware of. the first issueis authenticity in language assessment.authenticity is defined as “the degree ofcorrespondence of the characteristics of agiven language test task to the features of atlu (target language use) task” (bachman &palmer, 1996:23). in task 2, the scenariodescribes a novice teacher asking students towrite an essay about the use of modal verbs:“write a 300-word essay on the meanings ofmodal verbs and their stylistic uses. giveexamples and be specific.” in task 6, studentsare asked to describe a petrol pump. in task 7,the listening material is about an introductionto a made-up place. all these tasks violate theprinciple of authenticity. but none of theparticipants in this study commented on thisprinciple in this test. the second issue isabout fairness review. mcnamara and roever(2006: 129) points out that to avoid or reducedifferential item functioning (dif), testmakers use “sensitivity review” at the earlystages of test creation. this should also berelevant in classroom context. in task 5, thereading passage is about alligators attackingand claiming people’s life. only oneparticipant pointed out that this text mayarouse negative feeling in students and shouldbe avoided in classroom test. another issuethe authors want to point out is that teachersdo not attach importance to students’ self-assessment. in task 9, a teacher says “iusually don’t like students to mark their ownpapers”, only 3 teachers thought that studentsshould be given opportunities to self-assesstheir performances and make appropriateadjustment of their study. anxiety for statisticsin this study, we found that statistics foritem analysis is extremely difficult for thosein-service secondary english teachers. 7 of theparticipants didn’t write any answer in thispart, while 16 of them indicated clearly thatthey didn’t know the answer. the otherparticipants gave wild guessing. typicalanswers were “the if is 0.77. it’s too hard”;“the discrimination index is 0.61. it’s too lowand needs to be dropped”. we know from ebeland frisbie (1991: 232) that as regards indexof discrimination, “0.4 and up suggests verygood items; 0.30-0.39 suggests reasonablygood but possibly subject to improvement; 0.20-0.29 suggests marginal items, usuallyneeding and being subject to improvement;and below 0.19 suggests poor items to berejected or improved by revision”. theparticipants were not able to pinpoint thedistractive power of different options andmake suggestions for improvements.as so many participants (23 out of 39)claimed ignorance in statistics, we find iturgent to look into the issue of statisticsanxiety, which is defined by brown (2013:353)as “ a complex of behaviors, includinguneasiness, trepidation, nervousness, andeven debilitating fear, that may occur in somestudents when they are confronted withstudying or using statistics”. despite statisticsanxiety, brown (2012) believes that thoughclassical test theory has its disadvantages, itis still “sufficiently accurate, easy-to-learn,and practical to continue in use for years tocome in real (especially local) testingsituations” (p.334). he further points out thatclassical item analysis and distractorefficiency analysis will continue to provideuseful feedback to item writers and testdevelopers about their items and their testspecifications.so it is crucial and practical to equipenglish teachers with classical test theory. inthis regard, brown’s (2013) proposal of needto-know approach is appropriate fordeveloping teachers, i.e., teacher trainersshould analyze what needs to be acquired forclassroom teachers, and make statisticalinstruction accessible and manageable for thesecondary teachers. teaching experience and assessment trainingin this study, no significant difference wasdetected about teachers’ assessment literacyas regards to teaching experience andwhether they have taken any form ofassessment training course. this is incontradiction to the study carried out byzhang and burry-stock (1997). but theproblem is zhang and burry-stock’s researchused teachers’ self-perception rather than atest like the current study, which may beinfluenced by teachers’ over-confidence intheir own assessment literacy (cf. wise &lukin, 1993).here it is very important to examine thenature of assessment literacy. wang et al. 6 indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427(2008) takes assessment literacy as a part ofthe package of pedagogical contentknowledge (pck), which has been introducedas an element of the knowledge base forteaching (schulman, 1986). based on cochran,deruiter and king (1993), who thoughtschulman’s concept of pck did not accountfor teachers’ initiative in developing their ownpck and put forward pedagogical contentknowing (pckg) instead, lin (2014)conceptualizes assessment literacy as a partof pckg. it both emphasizes pre-servicedevelopment on language assessment and in-service development. what’s more important,it calls for teachers’ reflection on the sceneand take into consideration the local social-cultural environment. assessment literacyshould be acquired by doing assessment.to make sure teachers develop desirableassessment competence, teacher preparationprograms and teacher certifying institutionsshould pay more attention to developingteachers’ assessment literacy. early studyshowed that assessment training was largelyneglected in teacher preparation programs(noll, 1955; schafer & lissitz, 1987;gullickson,1984; stiggins & conklin,1988,1989; wise & lukin,1993). thesestudies were carried out in american contextand in an early time, but the situation seemsto have not improved too much in chinabased on the authors’ preliminary research onpre-service language assessment courses.there is no published research in chinesecontext except jin (2010). but jin’s researchwas about teacher preparation programs foruniversity english teachers. a study isurgently needed about language assessmentcourses of teacher preparation programs forsecondary teachers.another issue that should have people’sattention is the relevance of languageassessment course for secondary teachers.jin’s (2010) study found a heavy focus ontesting rather than classroom assessment. asearly as 1991, stiggins (1991a) called people’sattention to the mismatch betweenassessment training and classroom uses ofassessment. he put forward a 30-contact-hour assessment training framework. as it isstill relevant today, we quote it here withsome amendments to suit languageassessment. session 1 is to make teachers aware of the meaning of quality assessmentand why it is so critical to students’ well-being.session 2 is to show the importance ofdesigning assessments with a clear vision ofthe achievement targets. session 3 offersinstruction in the design and use of paper andpencil assessment instruments. session 4addresses the assessment of the four differentskills. session 5 illustrates the use ofobservation and professional judgment asclassroom assessments. session 6 takes thewriting assessment example and shows howit can be expanded to provide a methodologythat can be applied to the observation andjudgment of any achievement-relatedbehavior or product. session 7 deals with theassessment of affect. session 8 is to developsound grading practices. session 9 addressesthe norm-referenced standardizedachievement tests. session 10 is to come backto quality of assessment and common pitfalls. conclusionthis study shows that in chinese context,middle school in-service english teachers lacklanguage assessment literacy that isimplicated by the national english curriculum standards (moe, 2012). there is no significantdifference of level of assessment literacybetween teachers with different length ofteaching experience and teachers withdifferent levels of assessment training, whichshows that language assessment literacy doesnot grow with more teaching, neither will itgrow with simply taking a short assessmenttraining course. a combination of pre-serviceand in-service teacher development ofassessment literacy is expected. assessmenttraining materials and methods should bealigned to teachers’ classroom practice torender for beneficial harvests. referencesalderson, j. c. 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(2011). investigating the ‘assessmentliteracy’ of efl state school teachers. in d. tsagari &i. csepes, (eds.), classroom-based language assessment (169-190). frankfurt am main: peterlang.wang, t. h., wang, k. h., & huang, s. c. (2008). designinga web-based assessment environment forimproving pre-service teacher assessment literacy. computers & education, 51, 448-462. wise, s. l., & lukin, l. e. (1993). measurement trainingin nebraska teacher education programs. in s. l.wise (ed.), teacher training in measurement and assessment skills (pp.187-202). lincoln, ne: burosinstitute of mental measurements.zhang, z., & burry-stock, j. (1997). assessment practicesinventory: a multivariate analysis of teachers’perceived assessment competence. paper presented at the annual meeting of the national council on measurement in education, march 1997, chicago, il. 9 lin dunlai & su you an investigation of chinese middle school in-service english teachers’ assessment literacy berapa harga dalam celana?an australian man visited a supermarket in indonesia. he had just started learning bahasa indonesia, so he could notspeak very fluently. he wanted to buy some underwear so asked the shop-assistant in indonesian, "berapa harga dalam celana? (how much for underneath the pants?). this guy thought that the indonesian language had the samestructure as english! of course the shop-assistant laughed and the australian man had to ask him for clarification. nowhe understands about the structure of indonesian! (alfons arsai, source: http://www.ialf.edu/dpdf/april05page1.html) 10 berapahargadalamcelana? the wonders of mobile phone technology in teaching and learning english agelyia a/p murugan aimst university, malaysia email: agelyia@aimst.edu.my george teoh boon sai universiti sains malaysia, malaysia email: georgeteoh@usm.my apa citation: murugan, a., & sai, g. t. b. (2017). the wonders of technology in teaching and learning english. indonesian efl journal, 3(1), 57-68 received: 18-11-2016 accepted: 19-12-2016 published: 01-01-2017 abstract: using digital tools such as mobile phones in learning environment is beneficial as the device which is capable to present learning content and provide a wireless two-ways communication between the educator and learners. a review of researches done in malaysia shows that studies are still focusing on the readiness of the educators and learners in using mobile learning technology in teaching and learning. this paper advocates the use of mobile phones in teaching and learning english. theories relating to mobile learning highlight the importance of control, context, and communication elements in mobile learning. these three elements are important in knowledge building and support the positive behavioural change of the learners. apart from that, mobile phones enable the learners to strengthen their language skills as it promotes an environment that motivates the learners to be explorative. in order to meet the students’ needs, there are many types of mobile phone applications that assist learning such as discussion forum, text-based activities, audio-based learning, and interactive game-based language learning. the paper significantly highlights the importance of mobile phones and mobile phone applications which allow language learners to learn and enrich their language anytime and anywhere because the learning process can happen while on the move. keywords: mobile learning technology, mobile phone, english language skills introduction the emergence of technology is among the most consequential thing that happened to humanity; affecting the size of the world population, life expectancy, education, living standards, the workforce, communication, health, war, and also the ecosystem (bostrom, 2006). apart from that, technology has also affected many things including the governance of the countries, entertainment industries, relationships, moral development, and also knowledge development of human beings. in line with bostrom’s statement, collins and halverson (2009) stated that the world of education is also currently going through a massive transformation due to the digital revolution to cater to the current needs of the learners in allowing them to decide on what to learn, when to learn, where to learn, and how to learn. this rapid development has introduced a new phase of learning known as ‘virtual learning’ where new learning and teaching opportunities contradict with the traditional way of teaching and learning in schools.  uniform learning versus customization. in schools, all knowledge is taught equally at the same time whereas knowledge can be customized according to the individuals’ interest and difficulty levels in using technology.  teacher versus knowledge sources. teachers are the dominant people who are seen as the expert of their field and their job is to disseminate the knowledge indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 57 equally to the students. but with technology, knowledge can surpass teachers’ expertise since diverse knowledge sources are now being offered unlimitedly through online.  standardized assessment versus specialization. assessments in schools are limited to the subject matters that have been taught, but through technology, assessments can be specially designed based on the individuals’ differences and this provides flexibility of learning according to the learners’ own directions.  coverage versus knowledge explosion. knowledge is taught as a coverage in schools where everything is being planned and set in different ways of delivery such as lectures, textbooks, and modules whereas the current technology has allowed learners to learn and find limitless knowledge independently. collins and halverson (2009) believed that schools will become less important as a venue for education in the near future. they suggested that since technology is becoming central to human life, virtual learning where knowledge is being taught and shared despite the distance between the educators and the learners will become more popular. home schooling is becoming popular in foreign countries among busy parents who travel frequently as their children are obliged to follow their parents as well. this type of education is beneficial because the bond between the students and their parents becomes closer, the students can be monitored easily and tutored privately, there is a reduction in peer pressure, and the learners gain a sense of responsibility in governing their own learning. technology gives more freedom in learning than didactic classroom teaching as the content learnt varies according to the individuals (collins & halverson, 2009). the diversity of knowledge explosion may broaden the horizons in education world. the learners will have opportunities to choose their own educational goals and they will be exposed to complicated and different kinds of views and issues which later develop them to become more matured individuals. there will be also less competition in the learning environment because learning in school is more competitive and pressured and the sense of failures and passes overwhelms the students’ emotions and it can bring negative effects on them. the internet generally contains thousands of sources for learners to learn from, ranging from authentic materials, ebooks, podcasts, downloadable tasks, songs, movies and many more. thus, the internet has provided more opportunities for teachers and learners to fully utilize it. collins and halverson (2009 p. 8) stressed that “to be effective in this changing environment requires the builders of the new education system understand the imperatives of the technology such as customization, interaction, and control that drive the changes in education.” these three imperatives are important for students’ ownership of learning because the delivery of the knowledge is being guided through feedbacks and engagement of the students towards learning. mobile learning technology is a dynamic tool in facilitating the teaching, learning, and research efforts among the educators and the students in this 21st century (mohamed & norazah, 2013). mohamed and norazah (2013) stated that mobile learning can be championed by different learning theories namely behaviourist learning, constructivist learning, collaborative learning, situated learning, and informal lifelong learning. mobile digital tools can enhance one’s skills such as in the area of language, communication, motivation, and thinking skills. a number of researches remarked that mobile learning can contribute to the rapid development of education in malaysia (mohamed & norazah, 2013; mariam & balakrishnan, 2014; maryam & marlia, 2012; supyan, mohd radzi, zaini, & pramela, 2012; wollard, 2012). the researchers further posit that insights from the findings of the research done on the readiness of the educators in using mobile technology in teaching and learning should be implemented in a real classroom practice (mohamed & norazah, 2013) in order to promote the effective use of mobile phone technology in education. agelyia murugan & george teoh boon sai the wonders of mobile phone technology in teaching and learning english 58 one of the mobile learning technology devices that can be used in the classroom is mobile phones. this paper highlights the importance of mobile phones and discusses the theories relating to mobile learning and the use of mobile phone applications to enable language learners to learn and enrich their language anytime and anywhere. mobile technology and the importance of mobile phones in education mobile technology plays an important role in education. tan and wah (2014) define mobile learning as e-learning through mobile computational devices and is aided by a connection system called wireless local area network or wi-fi. mobile learning is seen as a new way to guide and support learners and it also complements the existing learning structure (maccallum, 2010). maccallum’s research also shows that mobile technology affects students’ extrinsic and intrinsic motivation to enhance their knowledge and competencies. in this new learning era, mobile phones are popularly used in the developing world (valk, ahmed, & elder, 2010). mobile phones facilitate mobile learning by improving access to education, promoting new learning, and providing new instructional methods (valk, ahmed, & elder, 2010). mobile phones create opportunities for the learners to participate actively in the learning process and in their knowledge construction. valk, ahmed, and elder (2010) proposed that mobile phones are capable of making the students learn independently and customize their knowledge learning while meeting specific educational goals. apart from that, learning through mobile technology has the potential to decrease cost and increase flexibility while enhancing the efficiency and effectiveness of the educational pedagogy. valk, ahmed, and elder (2010, p. 7) also stated that “the new learning through mobile technology is increasingly personal, usercentered, networked, ubiquitous and durable……and benefits afforded by this convergence should exert a positive impact on educational outcomes”. using mobile learning technologies in these 21st centuries’ classrooms offers teachers and students a more flexible approach to learning. prensky (2001) in wylie’s ‘mobile learning technologies for 21st century classrooms’ posits that students nowadays have changed radically. these types of students are seen as ‘digital natives’ who are extremely being exposed to more gadgets and technology. he also found that mobile technology has profound effects on how the students being engaged in learning when using the technological gadgets because it is what they are most used to interact with. some of the educators see that ‘cell phones’ are distractions in the classroom. they need to be forward thinking in integrating mobile learning devices into the curriculum/ syllabus/course content as this could be a productive way in motivating and engaging the students in learning. marwan, madar, and fuad (2013) found that students’ previous knowledge and experience with ict have positively influenced the students to perceive mobile phone technology as a positive introduction to learning and that they would adopt it readily. viewing mobile learning from a sociocultural perspective kearney, schuck, burden, and aubusson (2012) advocate viewing mobile learning as ‘a potentially useful lens for researchers’ to analyze the pedagogical approaches. this will help teachers to critique and reflect on their teaching activities and offers critical insights into the design of m-learning materials. the researchers’ focus was on building a framework on communication in context in evaluating mobile learning and has included three important distinctive features: personalization, authenticity and collaboration. the important elements in ‘personalization’ are the learners’ choice, agency and self-regulation. personalization is an important aspect in motivating the mobile users because the users may have control on the devices and also the time and space of learning while enjoying the autonomy over the learning content. another feature that provides the real world relevance and personal meaning to the learner is ‘authenticity’. it is suggested that authenticity in mobile learning has the indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 59 potential to influence the learners to participate in rich, contextual tasks, and real life practices. meanwhile, ‘collaboration’ refers to the learning interactions among the learners and the pedagogical aspect involved in collaboration is through scaffolding. according to vygotskian theory, collaboration in mobile learning is important because ‘shared conversational spaces mediated by mobile devices are conducive to timely, personally tailored feedback from instructors as well as rich peer interactions.’ through collaboration, the learners can communicate with many peers and experts in their own field and also exchange information across time and place. mobile technology in learning english mobile learning has taken the learning of english, either in or outside the classroom hours, to a different level (rivoltella, 2008). there are a variety of new android applications for learning english via smartphones and tablet. these applications promote independent learning, realistic language practice, interactive learning, learner control, and fun in learning since the students learn using the devices or gadgets that are familiar to them. wagner (2005, p. 52) stated that ““the success of mobile learning will ultimately revolve around a mosaic of rich converged experiences. these experiences will rest, in turn, on a foundation of converged network and device technologies, wireless services, rights management, content management, search management, and transactional processing power”. this shows that the use of mobile learning will facilitate communication, collaboration, and creativity among learners in authentic and appropriate contexts of use. this will become more of a personalized learning. the use of mobile learning in the english language classroom has a lot of benefits and guidance for learners to use and apply it in their everyday live. the full utilization of this wonderful technology will take learners to higher thinking order skills where they get to understand, develop, and treat technology as not something which they have to use but a tool which they can apply and learn from. this will further develop their technological skills towards achieving a sense of satisfaction in their learning process. using mobile devices in the teaching and learning scenario can be regarded as ‘catching up learning quickly.’ this is because the mobile language learning applications can be accessed anytime and anywhere. it is believed that mobile technology can enrich the learning process for students due to its versatility, encourage a high motivation and active participation in the classroom. related studies on the use of mobile technology in education title: emerging technology has positive impact in classroom in the study conducted at the bullis school (bullis school, 2011) in the united states, a private school teacher found it difficult to keep her students engaged in the difficult mathematics curriculum. she often found that many students always leave the class with more questions than answers. after a while, she decided to transform the method of teaching by uploading her lectures in the itunes and assigned them as homework. according to roshan (2011), ‘instead of lecturing in class, i lecture to them when they are at home, and we work problems together in the classroom, i liken it to an english classroom where the kids go home and do the reading and they come into class and have this lively, engaging discussion.’ apparently, this method could give some space for the teacher and the students to have more time for the questions and answers in enhancing the students’ understanding on a particular subject or issues. the study, ‘it opportunities in the education market’ (2011) revealed that 78 percent of k-12 teachers and administrators believe that technology has positively impacted the classroom and the productivity of the students. it seems that technology provides more freedom and flexibility for the educators, but budget for the technology equipment and tools are always the issue. house, a former instructor at belmont university posits that technology is only as good as the teachers who are using it and the use of smart phones and tablets has helped students to do research and communicate. agelyia murugan & george teoh boon sai the wonders of mobile phone technology in teaching and learning english 60 she further posits that ‘i don’t think that your material ever gets old if you are delivering it effectively’. according to her, traditional teaching method may bring a tremendous disconnected feeling among the students and teachers need to optimize the available technological tools so that the students can be motivated in the learning process. title: a new face of education; bringing technology into the classroom in the developing world this article found that mobilinkunesco had established a program in 2012 to increase literacy skills among girls in pakistan. this program focuses on the girls in pakistan who lives in villages and has limited exposure of education. for example, the girls are given mobile phones to send sms to their teachers and receive the responses via sms too. after that, the girls are required to write the responses in their notebook in order to practise writing skills. this program is done from the safety of their home and also during their school break. smith and winthrop (2012) this program managed to unveil positive outcomes after four months because it is stated that ‘the percentage of girls who achieved a level on literacy examinations increased from 27 percent to 54 percent. likewise, the percentage of girls who achieved a c level on examinations decreased from 52 percent to 15 percent’ (2012, p. 3). thus, it clearly shows that modern technology can be harnessed to improve the education status of some of the world’s poorest countries. title: mobile technology can enhance student learning and workforce training. according to heiphetz (2011), there are variety reasons to support the adoption of mobile learning (or known as mlearning) for educating and training students. the advantages are: 1. makes content universally accessibleanytime, anywhere. 2. adapts to students and employee’ needs. 3. increases knowledge retention and saves time. 4. encourages knowledge sharing and gathering. 5. adapts to the needs of the organization 6. creates best practices. heiphetz (2011) stresses that the use of mobile technology allows the learners to have free access to the contents and freedom in learning in which it can be customized to their own learning schedule. it can also keep the students updated their learning process, no matter in or out of lecture hours. heiphetz also quoted from kenny’s paper entitled ‘using mobile learning to enhance the quality of nursing practice education’ to support his statement about the necessity of the usage of mobile learning in education. it is found that the nursing students can access their mobile devices for immediate references during their nursing practice. it seems that it has been the most useful features during the nursing practice because it enables them to email or query their instructors immediately. the students view the help of this mobile technology as a necessary thing nowadays to support them at the critical moments. title: students using their own technological device in the classroom: can ‘byod’ increase motivation and learning by marc vanwelsenaers (2012) byod means bring your own device in the classroom to enhance and improve students’ learning (vanwelsenaers, 2012). this research was done to compare the students’ achievement before and after the implementation of the bod program. his research questions focused on how mobile learning technologies influenced the students’ learning experience, whether or not it can improve students’ learning in the classroom, and also how these devices motivate them to learn. vanwelsenaers (2012) found that the technology created a positive learning atmosphere for most of the students. the use of mobile touch screen technology improved students’ engagement in the subject matter, communication and interaction with peers as it extended the place and time of learning by not restricting learning time to the classroom. vanwelsenaers (2012) advised that teachers should promote cultivate a sharing attitude among the students during learning indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 61 time because technologies may not be available to all students. he further explained that teachers need to adjust their instruction methods and lessons in their classroom teaching to promote mobile learning. westera (2012, p. 8) concurred with vanwelsenaers’s (2012) positive findings on the usage of the mobile technology in the classroom. he stated that ‘technology combined with social media for educational purposes will be important for today’s students to enhance knowledge, creativity, collaboration and innovation in the classroom and to take these skills when they join the workforce.’ vanwelsenaers (2012) suggested that further studies should concentrate on how these technologies can impact the students’ learning and students from various grades. he suggested that the research should be conducted for at least a year to allow students to learn and improve sufficiently and to enable significant data collection in this area. related studies on the use of mobile technology in the malaysian education system title: an overview of mobile application in learning for student of kolej poly-tech mara (kptm) by using mobile phone marwan, madar and fuad (2013) emphasis that mobile phones have the potential and ability to facilitate the learning process without a learner being tied up in a physical location of the learning process. these researchers stated that the use of mobile phones in the teaching and learning process is still at the infancy stage in malaysia and many research done are basically on the readiness and acceptance of mobile technology in education. with the advancement of technology and the affordability of mobile phones; there is for educators not to integrate the use of mobile phones at higher learning institutions. the researchers also strongly posit that “in malaysia, we should grab the opportunities available in the m-learning technology to produce students who are competitive and able to master the generic skills that should be available in the students” (2013, p. 535). title: teaching via mobile phone: a case study on malaysian teachers’ technology acceptance and readiness another study in relation to the acceptance and readiness of mobile technology by the teachers was done by a group of researchers from the school of distance education, universiti sains malaysia in 2013, issham, siti, siti, and nizuwan. this study investigated whether the teachers in school are ready to accept technology for the pedagogical use of mobile phone technology if it was implemented in the school. finally, it was found that although the teachers were highly motivated to accept mobile technology in the learning process, the data revealed that they were still not ready for the use of mobile technology in the classroom. the researchers explained that this may be due to some factors such as lack of confidence, lack of competence, and lack of access to the available resources. this study mobile learning still has a long way to go before it can implemented in malaysian schools. the researchers argued that if students were allowed to bring their own phones to school and teachers were equipped with the knowledge and skills to optimise the promising mobile phone in the teaching and learning process, mobile phones would be a wonderful tool to facilitate education. framework of mobile technology learning resources in the following section, a framework and theories regarding the use of mobile technology as learning resource are presented. sharples, taylor and vavoula (2007) proposed a theory of learning for the mobile age as they believe that learning can take place from a new angle that can enhance the learners’ understandings of the knowledge and skills. through mobile learning, learners can engage in an impromptu learning environment anytime and anywhere. sharples, taylor and vavoula (2007) also suggested that this theory of mobile learning must be tested against a few criteria such as whether it is significantly different from current theories in the classroom, formal and informal learning, the agelyia murugan & george teoh boon sai the wonders of mobile phone technology in teaching and learning english 62 impact of constructive and social process in this learning theory and also whether it can be used to analyse learning as a personal and situated activity by using the technology. the framework as shown in figure 1 explains how mobile phone technology can be used as a learning resource where human and technology can collaborate to create and share meaning of the knowledge and skills. the interaction process directs to the subject (learners) and the object (content knowledge and skills) where both are needed in the control, context and communication factors that could influence and enhance learning in this new world of global digital communication. taylor, sharples, o’malley, vavoula and waycott (2006) stated that when the learners are in the control of their learning by incorporating technology, there will many benefits gained through the delivery of the knowledge. to support this, it has been said that ‘if the learners can access materials as and when convenient, they can work through the materials at their own speed, revising and re-checking as they wish.’ apart from that, the learners’ attitude and their social circle also can influence on how people perceive the use of technology by the learners. sharples, taylor and vavoula (2007, p. 13) stated that “context embraces the multiple communities of actors (both people and interactive technology) who interact around shared objectives, mutual knowledge, orientations to study, styles and strategies of learning.” the relationship between technology and the learners are built through communication. when the learners are communicating, they will become familiar with technology and will be explorative in terms of interacting by using emails, messengers, instant messaging, and also online chatting. on a broader scale, communicating through technology enables the learners to create rules and exclusive communities for the new ways of learning and practices (sharples, taylor & vavoula, 2007). figure 1: framework for analyzing mobile learning (adapted from maccallum, 2010) below are some of theories involved in using mobile phone as a learning resource by integrating the significant factors such as control, context and communication. these three factors are important in the unique interaction between human and technology where knowledge is embodied through valuable experience. without these theories, indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 63 learning across the context cannot be achieved because learning has to be conceptualised in order to construct knowledge within the constraints of the education curriculum. as what supported by sharples, taylor and vavoula (2007), learning needs to be conceptualised in terms of interactions between individuals, human or non-human, which take place in order to achieve evolving tastes of knowing as they are shaped by mutually and continuously negotiated goals. theory of learning using mobile technology social constructivism this theory is largely influenced by vygotsky’s cognitive theory (sharples, taylor, & vavoula, 2011) which stresses that mobile learning through mobile devices expose the learners to simulations and visualizations. this theory is important in building the knowledge of the learners where learners will be an active player in the learning experience and also connect with their previous assimilated knowledge to construct a new knowledge (tan & wah, 2014). tan & wah (2014) added that constructivism creates capable learners who reproduce a series of facts and it does not dismiss the active role of the teacher or the value of expert knowledge as the knowledge is constructed through interaction with the environment after a series of mental structures. this theory also leads us to ‘computer supported collaborative learning (cscl)’ where knowledge is constructed by the learners through the assistance of technology. computer supported collaborative learning (cscl) this pedagogical approach consists of various disciplines; including sociology, educational psychology, cognitive development, and instructional technology. this collaborative learning is supported by using computers for the primary means of communication and is believed to increase the quantity and quality of the learning capacity. berge (2006, p. 49) stressed that “collaboration theory proposes that technology in support of cscl should provide new types of media that foster the building of collaborative knowing; facilitate the comparison of knowledge built by different types and sizes of groups; and help collaborative groups with the act of negotiating the knowledge they are building.” this instructional technology is an integral part of society today and fulfills the needs of the digital generations. experiential learning theory experiential learning theory is closely related to content-based and theme-based instruction in teaching and learning. morries, keeton and pamela in brown (2001) stated that learners are directly in touch with the realities being studied and the techniques tend to be learner-centred by nature. through experience, learners are expected to discover the principles of the language and connect to the content of the knowledge. this model is initiated by david kolb, based on learning through reflections. kolb's (1984) learning theory sets out four distinct learning styles (or preferences), which are based on a four-stage learning cycle. kolb's model offers both a way to understand individual learning styles, and also an explanation of a cycle of experiential learning that applies to all learners. in this stage of the learning cycle, people understand ideas and situations from different points of view. in a learning situation, the learners would rely on patience, objectivity, and careful judgement but would not necessarily take any action. the learner would rely on their own thoughts and feelings in forming opinions. experiential activities are among the most powerful teaching and learning tools available. experiential learning requires self-initiative, an "intention to learn" and an "active phase of learning." this process of learning can result in "changes in judgment, feeling or skills" for the individual and can provide direction for the "making of judgments as a guide to choice and action." according to kolb, boyatzis and mainemelis (1999), most educators understand the important role experience agelyia murugan & george teoh boon sai the wonders of mobile phone technology in teaching and learning english 64 plays in the learning process. the role of emotion and feelings in learning from experience has been recognised as an important part of experiential learning. while those factors may improve the likelihood of experiential learning occurring, it can occur without them. rather, what is vital in experiential learning is that the individual is encouraged to directly involve themselves in the experience, and then to reflect on their experiences using analytic skills, in order to gain a better understanding of the new knowledge and retain the information for a longer time. below is the chart of experiential learning model. figure 2. the experiential learning cycle facilitator guide communicative language teaching according to freeman (2000), communicative language teaching was developed through the communicative approach (widdowson, 1990). its main aim is to introduce the interdependence of language and communication, more than mastering the linguistic structures of the language learning. the teacher teaches the language by using it in a real context so that the students can actively engaged in communicating and negotiating meaning without fear. in contrast, language teachers are no longer viewed as the authority of the knowledge who plays a dominant role. rather, they share different roles such as communication facilitator, independent participant, needs analyst, counsellor, and group process manager (richards & rodgers, 2001, p. 167) to create more fascinating experiences for the learners. besides, richards and rodgers (2001) describe other significant characteristics of this approach including its efforts to make tasks and language relevant to a target group of learners through an analysis of genuine, realistic situations, its emphasis on the use of authentic, from-life materials, and its attempt to create a secure, nonthreatening atmosphere. all these attempts also follow the major principles of the communicative view of language teaching and learning; helping learners learn a language through authentic and meaningful communication, which involves a process of creative construction, to achieve fluency. in this vein, in terms of classroom activity, it includes indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 65 group work, task-work, information-gap activities, and projects. co-operative & collaborative learning co-operative and collaborative learning approach focuses on learnercentred characteristics where it omits the competitive characteristics in the learning scenario. “research has shown an advantage for cooperative learning (as opposed to individual learning) on such factors as ‘ sociocultural theory vygotsky (1978) in taylor, et al. (2006) stated that this theory is important in the learning process which is mediated by tools. he further explains that the tools include both physical artefacts and semiotic constructs including language and society….the focus is on the activity itself, including the processes by which social, cultural and historical factors shape human functioning. apart from that, vygotsky (1978) in taylor, et al. (2006) proposed zone of proximal development (zpd) as a guideline to understand the learners and also the external opportunities given by the teachers and peers to the learners. zpd is one of the ways to assess learners’ knowledge and skills and simultaneously increase the learners’ repertoire of skills and understanding effectively. bloom’s taxonomy of learning domains for the physical context of mobile phone technology as a learning resource, the three domains; cognitive, affective and psychomotor in bloom’s taxonomy are important to promote higher order thinking skills in education. the contexts available in the mobile phone learning should cover all these three domains as it involves knowledge, attitude and skills of the learners. cognitive domain focuses on the development of intellectual skills which has three levels; factual, conceptual, and procedural. on the other hand, affective domain focuses on the manner of how we deal things emotionally, appreciation, enthusiasm, motivations, and attitudes whereas psychomotor domain includes physical movement, coordination, and the use of motor skill area. motivation and language learning the first theory of motivation was proposed by gardner and lambert in 1972 in which nitta (2006) asserted that motivation and attitude is related to an individual to learn a second language. from the behaviorists’ perspective, biehler and snowman (1993) stated that motivation relies on skinner’s learning theories which emphasized on the giving of extrinsic reward, and thus explained why students prefer certain subjects to the others. chen (2008) also pointed out motivation is important to succeed in the second language learning. hsu and chan (2005) as reported in chen (2008) stated that an individual who has higher motivation will achieve better in second language performance than individual who has low motivation. thus, it is interesting to find out if the learners’ motivation to succeed in the second language is significant to his or her achievement. instrumental motivation involves learning the second language to succeed in a job or to excel in academic. thus, one can assume that an individual is instrumentally motivated to learn a language if this helps him or her to perform tasks efficiently in academics or find a job in the future. norris-holt (2001) also supported this view when she claimed that learning a language with instrumental motivation is more practical when one is trying to fulfill the graduating requirements, job applications, education, and high salary. unlike instrumental motivation, integrative motivation is defined as “to identify with another ethnolinguistic group’ (ellis, 1994, p. 173). thus, one can assume that an individual is integrative motivated to learn a language if this gives him or her opportunity to live with the people, understand the culture, and interact with the second language speakers. this is because the learners also value the foreign group and intend to engage with the communities’ lives and culture (norris-holt, 2001).” furthermore, cooper and fishman (1977) as cited in shimizu (2002) also included a third type of motivation called "developmental” in addition to gardner and lambert’s instrumental and integrative agelyia murugan & george teoh boon sai the wonders of mobile phone technology in teaching and learning english 66 construct. shimizu (2002) later explained that developmental motivation is much related to personal satisfaction such as watching films and reading books. thus, identifying learners’ personal motivation to learn english is significant in order to find out its relationship with english language achievement. attitude and language learning according to gardner (1990) as cited in nitta (2006, p. 10), “attitude refers to the ‘et al. (2007) reported that wenden (1999) believed that attitude is cognitive since it explains the perceptions and beliefs about certain object. she further argued that attitude is also affective since it induces a feeling of preference, agreement or approval towards certain issues, and it is also behaviourist since it composes actions towards the object. sunnarborg (2001) also supported this view and believed that cognitive, affective, and behaviorists are interrelated. based on this concept, one can assume that learner’s perception, feelings and preference and actions are important in learning a second language. moreover, the study on attitude is essential for second language learning because attitude together with motivation are connected with acquiring a second language (bidin et al., 2009; altamimi & shuaib, 2009). conclusion this paper highlights the wonders of using mobile phones to teach english. it is argued that mobile learning is a unique kind of learning which allows learning that can be customised to the learner’s need. mobile learning has emerged to be the new learning technique which can cater to the younger generation as they are learners who prefer to interact and engage themselves as they roam around in their respective environments, picking up and using devices as they go. to prevent educators from viewing mobile learning as a distraction in teaching, teachers need to be made aware of the benefits of using this mobile technology. educators really need to understand the characteristics, possibilities and peculiarities of mobile learning so that they can successfully conduct mobile learning. knowing the vital elements of mobile learning will make the teachers appreciate the use of mobile phones in aiding their teaching and more importantly in their students’ development, satisfaction, and motivation to enhance their knowledge and skills in learning english. viewed from the perspective of vygotsky’s sociocultural theory, mobile learning is a wonderful opportunity that can support the learners through a lifetime of learning, provide them with tools to capture and organise their everyday experiences, create and share images of the world, and probe and explore their surroundings. references al-tamimi, a. & shuaib, m. 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(2013). mobile learning technologies for 21st century classrooms. scholastic. retrieved on 2nd november 2013 at http://www.scholastic.com agelyia murugan & george teoh boon sai the wonders of mobile phone technology in teaching and learning english 68 indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427 explicit back-channel strategy training and improvement of speaking skill: case of iranian efl learners malihehyazdfazelienglish department, islamic azad university, torbat-e heydarieh branch, iranemail:maliheh.yazdfazeli66@gmail.com khalil motallebzadeh english department, islamic azad university, torbat-e-heydarieh branch, iranemail: k.motalleb@iautorbat.ac.ir; kmotallebz@gmail.com mohammad ali fatemi english department, islamic azad university, torbat-e-heydarieh branch, iranemail: fatemi35@gmail.comapa citation: yazdfazeli, m. motallebzadeh, k., fatemi, m. a. (2015). explicit back-channel strategy trainingand improvement of speaking skill: case of iranian efl learners. indonesian efl journal 1(1), 17-26received: 13-7-2014 accepted: 22-09-2014 published: 01-01-2015 abstract: this study explores the effect of explicit back-channel strategy training on iranian efl languagelearners’ success in speaking skill. back-channels are turn taking responses uttered by the listeners. fortyhomogenous learners (20 male, 20 female) were randomly assigned to four groups (2 experimental, 2 control).they were at intermediate level in terms of general english proficiency based on the results of oxford placementtest (opt) and pre-test oral proficiency interview. after 18 sessions of treatment of back-channels forexperimental groups, that were based on the methodological theory of english language teaching suggested bydoff (1990) and harmer (1991), posttest oral proficiency test was administered for experimental and controlgroups. the findings of pretest and posttest oral exams revealed that efl language learners’ oral performance(speaking) in experimental groups improved. the result revealed that females employed back-channels moreoften than males when they were participating in a conversation. the type of back-channel both gendersemployed the most was short utterances, such as ‘yes’, and the most used function of back-channel was requestfor clarification. the results of this thesis will provide language teachers, efl language learners, researchers,material developers, and readers, useful information about the types and functions of back channels that areneeded to develop speaking ability appropriately through explicit teaching. keywords: back channel strategy, communication strategy, explicit training introductionusually we believe that speakers arecontrolling each conversation and they playan active role, but actually their partners-listeners do not listen to speakers' wordspassively; on the contrary, they have to digestthose words within the context using theircognitive knowledge, and to think about whatthey must answer next. thus, we may say in acollaborative conversation, listeners also playa big role tao & thompson (1991).tao & thompson (1991) believed thatlisteners have to show that they are listening,they ask questions about the content of thespeaker's talk, and they make contributionsthat are relevant to the content of thespeaker's talk. eye contact, head nods, smiles,and body alignment all help to tell us whether or not the recipienthas answered oursummons and is attending to our message.among them, back channeling (bc) is one ofthe well-used communication strategies.based on sharifi and azadmanesh (2012),participants of a conversation give and takeback channels as a way of transforminginformation about the state of communication,for instance to show attention, understanding,misunderstanding, acceptance or non-acceptance, in order to make communicationmore efficient.according to wannarak (1997), thephenomenon of bc was first studied by friesin 1952. he identified bc as conversationalsignals of attention to continue discourse. heanalyzed a corpus of telephone conversationsand recognized them as series of ‘listener 17 malihehyazdfazeli, khalil motallebzadeh & mohammad ali fatemi explicit back-channel strategy training and improvement of speaking skill: case of iranian efl learners response’. about two decades after fries,yngve (1970) was the first person who coinedthe term back channel to describe thisphenomenon. as a result of these findings,particular attention was paid to the scientificexamination of these back channel responsesor short utterances.according to petchrat (2009),researchers defined bc variously. forexample, duncan (1972, p.14) defined it as“short expressions, such as uh-huh or mm-hm,uttered by listeners to convey that they arepaying attention, and to encourage thespeaker to continue”. however, yule (1996)believe that back channel refers to thosevocalizations in a conversation, short wordsand phrases such asyeah, no, right, and sure(yule, 1996). among these several definitions,the essential shared characteristic of a backchannel is that it originates from the personwho is playing the role of a listener.tao & thompson (1991) expressed thatin all language communities, listeners areexpected to provide appropriate back-channeling signals for interlocutors toindicate that they are listening. in face-to-facecommunications, listeners' back channeling isvirtually continuous in verbal, non-verbal,and semi-verbal ways. without appropriateback channeling, a conversation is likely tobreak down or simply stop, since the speakeris unsure that the listener is activelyattending to and interpreting the discourse.as a result of reviewing these, we canconsider the lack of a study on bc in iranianefl classes. thereby, the researchers try toinvestigate the effect of employing bcstrategy on iranian efl intermediatelearners’ success in speaking skill byexplicitly teaching them this strategy. thegoal is to provide qualitative data for thespeaking skill improvement of efl learnerswho employed bc strategy. this research alsoaims at providing quantitative datacomparing the use of back channeling withsuccess in speaking skill by male and femalelearners.in human communication behavior,back channel responses are pervasivephenomena. participants of a conversationgive and take back channels as a way oftransforming information about the state of communication. the study of back channel isa new investigation of spoken language. fries(1952) is the first author who has noticed anddescribed some of the communicativebehaviors that nowadays we call them "backchannels". he analyzed a corpus of telephoneconversations and recognized as series of"listener response". yngve (1970) was thefirst person who coined the term backchannel to describe these tokens. as a resultof these findings, particular attention waspaid to the scientific examination of theseback channel responses or short utterances.researchers have identified that thereare differences in the frequency, type, usage,and placement of back channels acrosslanguages. tao & thompson (1991) in theirstudy found that english speakers had ahigher frequency of back channel responsesthan chinese speakers. white (1997)examines the effects of japanese versusamerican culture on the production of back-channel responses. white (1997) finds thatfundamental cultural differences between theunited states and japan, regarding politenessand face concerns, are responsible for thedifferences he finds among the usage andfunctions of back-channel responses by themembers of the two cultures. thesedifferences are not confined to unrelatedlanguages, even in languages with similarcultures and histories, these differences areobvious.inversely li (2006) studied chinese andcanadian speech and reported that listenermade more back channel responses, whetherthe chinese talked with another chinese orwith a canadian. he found that chinese/chinese group exhibited the highestfrequency of back channel responses, thecanadian/ canadian group the lowest, withthe two inter-cultural groups in between. kim(2009) discussed the importance ofcomparative studies of korean and japaneselinguistics behavior and examined the usageof back channel responses and pause fillers inthese groups. he concluded that while koreanspeakers used pause fillers more frequentlythan back channels, the japanese speakerused back channels more frequently thanpause fillers. he concluded that the role of thelistener is more important in japanese while 18 indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427 the role of the speaker is more emphasized inkorean.li et al. (2010) extended his previousstudies and examined the types of backchannel responses and their relationship withspeaker presentation, listener recall, andparticipants' perceived enjoyment of theinter-cultural conversations. they found anegative correlation between the frequencyof back channel responses and enjoyment ofthe conversation.according to sharifi &azadmanesh(2012) scholars addressed the transfer ofback channel behaviors in bilingual speakerswithin the accommodation theory framework. accommodation theory offers a soundframework for the study of conversationalstrategies in interpersonal encounters.therefore, the balanced bilingual speakertends to converge with other native speakersof their first language when they are engagedin a friendly conversation.heinz (2003) examined the differencesof back channel behavior in interactionsbetween monolingual and bilingual germans.he found significant differences in thefrequency and placement of back channelresponses among monolingual germanspeakers and monolingual american englishspeakers. the author also reported thatnative germans, who have become proficientin american english, use more back channelresponses and more often in overlappingpositions than monolingual germans do.these results show a contradiction ofaccommodation theory, but the findings of li(2006) study provided a support foraccommodation theory, which stated thatchinese and canadian speakers had atendency to converge their linguistics codesin conversation. also, tao & thompson (1991)earlier had reported that native chinese whowere fluent in english had a tendency toswitch codes, using english back channelresponses.numerous linguistic researchers, suchas mott (1995), have examined the effects ofgender on the production of back-channelresponses. forbes and cordella (1999: 282)define back-channeling in the following way:"...a participant communicates agreementwith the speaker without interrupting their turn. these short utterances reflectappreciation of what is being said."bilous (1988: 186) defines back-channelresponses as follows: "...brief vocal responses('uh-huh', 'yes', 'i see', etc.) by the nominallistener, which do not constitute an attemptto take the conversational floor."(p.186) inhis study, bilous (1988) finds that femaleundergraduate students at columbiauniversity have a higher frequency of back-channel responses than do maleundergraduate students at columbiauniversity (p.188).coates (2003), in summing previousresearch works states that women are said tobe more polite, more cooperative and madeuse of more back channels in conversationthan men. men, on the other hand, are said tofollow strategies of non-cooperative,including interruption and less back channels.previous studies of gender differences werein disagreement with the claims of coates(2003). dixon & foster (1998) reported thatmen use more supporting back channelsignals than women do when addressing afemale audience in south africa.besides the effects of language, cultureand gender, different communicative contextor different styles of speech had an influenceon the back channel behavior. accordinglykok&heylen (2010) compared the listeners'behaviors elicited by procedural andnarrative tasks. the results of this studyshowed that long procedural tasks elicitedmore responses than the short tasks, due tothe cognitive load of the interlocutors.furthermore, angles et al. (2000) referred tothe influence of the level of formality andasserted that japanese tokens hai ,ee , and unare used in different context, hai , and ee areused in informal context, while un is usedwith casual speech style.therefore, back channel responses are apervasive feature of conversations and as alistener; we must have the ability to produceback channels timely and appropriately. it hasbeen long assumed that there are some placesin the dialog where back channels arewelcomed. for example, ward &tesukahara(2000) have truly claimed that speakers' cuesaccounted for about half of the occurrences ofback channels, suggesting that back channel 19 malihehyazdfazeli, khalil motallebzadeh & mohammad ali fatemi explicit back-channel strategy training and improvement of speaking skill: case of iranian efl learners responses are not elicited whenever thelistener liked them, but are encouraged by thecurrent speaker. ward (1996) believed that alow pitch region is an important cue for backchanneling production in japanese.accordingly, he suggested a well-madesystem, which produces a back channel itemafter a low pitch region of a certain frequency.ward & al bayyari (2007) have alsointroduced various prosodic features in thespeakers' speech signaling the appropriatetimes of back channeling in egyptian arabic,including a pitch upturn at the phrasal end,low flat pitch associated with a lengthenedvowel at dis-fluency points, and a sharp pitchdownslope.there are a large number of studies ofback channeling focusing on back channels incross-cultural conversations, in the samecultural context but different situations, indifferent cultural contexts, genders andchannels. we can consider the lack of a studyon bc in iranian efl classes. thus, this studyattempts to investigate the effect ofemploying bc strategy on iranian eflintermediate learners’ success in speakingskill by explicitly teaching them this strategy.the goal is to provide qualitative data aboutthe speaking skill improvement of efllearners who employed bc strategy. thisresearch also aims to provide quantitativedata and finding salient differences in backchannel behavior and success in speakingskill by male and female learners.to find answers for the above mentionedproblems, the following research questionswere posed:q1: does explicit teaching of back-channelstrategy have any significant effect on iranianefl intermediate learners’ success inspeaking skill?q2: are there any significant differences betweenmale and female iranian efl intermediatelearners’ success in speaking skill when theyreceive explicit teaching of back-channelstrategy and employ it?q3: are there any significant differences in back-channel behavior between male and femaleiranian efl intermediate learners before andafter treatment?to come up with reasonable results onthe basis of the aforementioned research questions, the following null hypothesizewere proposed:h01: explicit teaching of back channel strategydoes not have any significant effect on iranianefl intermediate learners’ success inspeaking skill.h02: there are no significant differences betweenmale and female iranian efl intermediatelearners’ success in speaking skill when theyreceive explicit teaching of backchannelstrategy and employ it?h03: there are no significant differences in backchannel behavior between male and femaleiranian efl intermediate learners before andafter treatment. methodin this study, the researchers selected 40intermediate efl learners (20 male, 20female) from dar alelm language center inmashhad, iran. then both male and femaleparticipants were divided into four groups. asa result of this division, the researchers had 2experimental groups which included 20learners (10 male, 10 female). and the otherparticipants (10 male, 10 female) were in twocontrol groups.before the selection based oxfordplacement test (opt), the numbers ofparticipants were 80. all of them took the testwhich was administered by the institution inorder to place them at the stage of theeducational program most appropriate totheir abilities but 40 proved to be proficientenough to be included in the study. therefore,researchers were sure of the homogeneity ofthe participants. as a result, all of theparticipants who took part in this researchwere at the same level of proficiency(intermediate level).since opt just consists of listening,vocabulary, reading and grammar sections, itwas necessary to run interviews to ensure thelearners’ homogeneity with regard to oralperformance. therefore, all of the studentswere interviewed to make sure that theywere in real homogeneity of speaking skill.the d.l.c supervisor interviewed all of theparticipants, which was done face to face inten minutes for each individual. she used thequestions which were made by tavakoli(2011) for intermediate efl language 20 indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427 learners. the questions had high frequency ineveryday conversations, such as family, freetime, hobbies, field of study, etc. theevaluation process of students’ speakingability was based on d.l.c guidelines.then, with regard to the methodologicaltheory of english language teachingsuggested by doff (1990) and harmer (1991),back channel strategy was taught accordingto the following procedures:in presentation stage students wereintroduced with clear instruction about thebc strategy that they were going to study,including its meaning, its forms, and its use.information handouts that contained phrasesand samples for the employment of thestrategies studied were given to the students.in this phase, based on richards (1990) anddornyei and thurrell (1994), (as cited inahmad and tarannum, 2011), theresearchers planed a conversation programaround this strategy, and processes that wereinvolved in fluent conversation to teach andemploy back channel strategies as aconversational strategies directly andexplicitly. therefore, they tried to foster thestudents’ awareness of conversation and toincrease their sensitivity to the underlyingprocesses. in this way, the students are likelyto make much faster progress towardsbecoming relaxed and polishedconversationalists.practice stage was the next step thatstudents were asked to do some tasks topractice using the strategy either in isolationor in given contexts. first of all, theresearchers asked students to watch farsimovies or listen to their family conversationsand transcribe and highlight its back channels.in this way, they became completely aware ofthis strategy in their native language andcasual conversations. then the researcherscreated situations for efl learners ofexperimental groups to repeatedly listen toaudio files and also watch english nativelanguage movies to observe and also discoverthe patterns of back channeling. they alsoasked the students to transcribe and highlightthe back channels as their homework. theyalso created opportunities for learners inexperimental groups to practice both roles:active listening by producing back channels appropriately, and engaging talk by providingclear opportunities for the listener to backchannel. in other words, they let the studentsthat they themselves choose a topic based ontheir interest for their class discussion andconversations. most of the speaking taskswhich the students undertook were thoserelevant to every day situation such asintroducing oneself to other people, shopping,talking on the phone, talking about last nightparty, technology, and living abroad. as aresult of this part, the participants becamerelax and could practice and take both roles.in this phase, the students could use theinformation handouts for reference.in production stage, the students wererequired to manage the tasks either throughinteracting with fellow candidate or throughdiscussion by themselves without any helpfrom the teacher or the handouts. in thisstage, the students were encouraged to dotheir best to use the language as individuals.as for the participants in the controlgroup, no special material was designed forhandling the class and the teachers, who werethe researchers themselves, went through thenormal routine procedure of teaching thematerials available for the course in theinstitute.after 18 sessions of treatment (eachsession one hour) oral proficiency test wasadministered by another teacher forexperimental and control groups. it was inconversational form with fellow candidates inorder to elicit language that is moreappropriate. according to hughes (2003), anadvantage of having candidates interact witheach other is that it should elicit language thatis appropriate to exchange between equals.as he adds, it may elicit better performance inas much as the candidates may feel moreconfident than when dealing with a dominant,seemingly omniscient interviewer. theaverage time for oral proficiency interviewwhich was administered at the end of theresearch was about 10 minutes. the teacherused topics which were in relation withtextbook materials.finally, the researchers recorded all ofthe conversations and transcribed them inorder to achieve her goals. the researcherscompared the scores which were obtained 21 malihehyazdfazeli, khalil motallebzadeh & mohammad ali fatemi explicit back-channel strategy training and improvement of speaking skill: case of iranian efl learners through dlc guidelines for evaluatingstudents in order to find out whetheremploying back channel strategies have anysignificant effects on success in speaking skillof language learners or if there is anysignificant differences between success inspeaking skill of male and female eflintermediate learners when they employ backchannel strategies, and whether employingback channel strategies among male and female language learners are different basedon their types, functions, and frequency of use. findings and discussionin order to answer the researchquestions the spss software was run to carryout the analyses. results obtained from theanalyses are demonstrated as follows, and theresearchers have tried to address researchquestions and research hypotheses. table 1. group statistics for male control and experimental groups group n mean std. deviation std. error meancontrolexprimental 1010 71.0080.00 5.6766.782 1.7952.145 table 2. independent samples test for male control and experimental groupslevene's test forequality ofvariances t-test for equality of meansf sig. t df sig.(2-tailed) meandifference std. errordifference 95% confidenceinterval of thedifference .000 1.000 -3.218 -3.218 18 17.458 .005 .005 -9.000 -9.000 2.797 2.797 lower-14.876 -14.889 upper-3.124 -3.111 equalvariancesassumedequalvariancesnot assumed as table 1 and 2 reveal, using an alphalevel of .05, an independent-samples t testwas conducted to evaluate whether malecontrol and experimental groups differedsignificantly or no. the test was significant, t(17.458) = 3.21, p = .05. the 95% confidenceinterval of the difference ranged from -14.889to -3.111. an examination of the groupsmeans indicate that experimental group (m = 80.00, sd = 6.782) performed significantlybetter than did control group (m = 71.00, sd =5.676). as the results show, research questionnumber 1 was accepted because training backchannel strategy explicitly could improveiranian male efl intermediate learners’speaking skill and it had significant effect ontheir success. and therefore, null hypothesis 1was rejected. table 3. group statistics for female control and experimental groups group n mean std. deviation std. error meancontrolexperimental 1010 75.7083.20 7.5437.997 2.3852.529 22 indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427 table 4. independent samples test for female control and experimental groupslevene's testfor equality ofvariances t-test for equality of meansf sig. t df sig. (2-tailed) meandifference std. errordifference 95% confidenceinterval of thedifference .200 .660 -2.157 18 17.939 .045 .045 -7.500 -7.500 3.476 3.476 lower-14.804 -14.805 upper-.196 -.195equal variancesassumedequal variances notassumed -2.157 as shown in table 3 and 4, the testwas significant, t (17.939) = 2.157, p = 0.045.the 95% confidence interval of the differenceranged from -14.805 to -.195. an examinationof the groups means indicate thatexperimental group (m = 83.20, sd = 7.997)performed significantly better than didcontrol group (m = 75.70, sd = 7.543).because of this, the researchers concludedthat there were statistically significant differences between the two groups. thismeans that the differences were due to thechanges. as result shows, research questionnumber 1 was accepted because training backchannel strategy explicitly could improveiranian female efl intermediate learners’speaking skill and it had significant effect ontheir success. and therefore, null hypothesis 1was rejected. table 5. group statistics among male and female experimental groups (oral proficiency score)score n mean std. deviation std. error meanoral proficiencyscore malefemale 1010 80.00083.200 6.78237.9972 2.14482.5289 table 6 independent samples test among male and female experimental groupslevene'stest forequality ofvariances t-test for equality of meansf sig. t df sig. (2-tailed) meandifference std. errordifference 95% confidenceinterval of thedifference.708 .411 -.965 -.965 18 17.532 .347 .348 -3.2000 -3.2000 3.3160 3.3160 lower upperequalvariancesassumedequalvariancesnotassumed -10.1666 3.7666 -10.1799 3.7799 as shown in table 5 and 6, the testwas significant, t (17.532) = .965, p <.348. the95% confidence interval of the differenceranged from -10.1799 to 3.7799. anexamination of the groups means indicatethat female (m = 83.200, sd = 7.997)performed significantly better than did male (m = 80.000, sd = 6.7823). because of this, theresearchers concluded that there werestatistically significant differences betweenthe two groups. this means that thedifferences were due to the changes. as resultshows, research question number 2 wasaccepted because training back channel 23 malihehyazdfazeli, khalil motallebzadeh & mohammad ali fatemi explicit back-channel strategy training and improvement of speaking skill: case of iranian efl learners strategy explicitly could improve iranianfemale efl intermediate learners’ speakingskill and it had significant effect on their success. and therefore, null hypothesis 2 wasrejected. table 7. significance of differences among total categories of types of back channelstype male and female expected frequency df sig. χ2short utterancessentence completionshort questionsbrief restatementlaughing and sighing total 83378810 182 36.4 4 .000 179.154 as can be seen in table 7, there weresignificant differences between totalcategories of types of back channels used bymale and female efl language learners (χ²=179.154, sig= .000, p ‹ .05). the tableindicated that short utterances and shortquestions (n= 83, 78) were used more thanexpected (n= 36.4). the finding revealed thatwhile short utterances and short questionswere used more frequently; laughing andsighing, brief restatement and sentence completion (n= 10, 8, 3) were used with fewfrequency. sentence completion was the leastused types of back channels by both male andfemale language learners.short utterances ˃ short questions ˃laughing and sighing ˃ brief restatement ˃sentence completion. therefore, based on thisaspect of back channel behavior, researchquestion number 3 was accepted. and thethird null hypothesis was rejected. table 8. significance of differences among total categories of functions of back channelscategory male and female expectedfrequency df sig. χ2continuerdisplay understanding the contentrequest for clarificationagreementdisplay emotional response total 225843453 198 39.6 4 .000 93.162 according to table 8, there weresignificant differences among total categoriesof functions of back channels used by maleand female efl language learners (χ²=93.162,sig= .000, p ‹ .05). the table revealed thatdisplay understanding the content, continuer,and agreement functions of back channels(n= 5, 22, 34) were used fewer than theexpected frequency (n= 39.6). but displayemotional response and request forclarification (n= 53, 84) were used more thanexpected (n= 39.6). in other words, they wereused more frequently. while request forclarification (n=84) was used with highestfrequency, display understanding the content(n=5) was the least used function of backchannels. in this way, research questionnumber 3 was accepted. the null hypothesis3 was rejected. conclusionthe present investigation has shown thatback channels represent integral part of theenglish speaking. back channels are of varioustypes which indicate the listener’s attentionperforming several functions. focusing on anyaccessible source of information mentioningback channels such as petchrat (2009), theresearchers have found a few indexes in themprofoundly dealing with back channelsthemselves. several books mention them onlymarginally, mostly presenting a definition ofback channels, usually categorized in turn-taking system articles, and various authorsdiscussing some issues connected with backchannels such as dörnyei and thurrell (1994)and richards and schmidt (2002). it has beendiscovered that there is no comprehensiveinsight on teaching back channels. in other 24 indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427 words, the researchers do not found indexes inbooks and internet articles in relation to theexplicitly teaching back channels whichinvolve directing student’s attention towardlearning back channel strategy in a highlystructured environment. it is teaching that isfocused on learning outcomes (improvementin speaking skill).the present work analyzes the effect ofexplicit teaching of back channels fromvarious viewpoints. different aspects havebeen taken into account during theexamination, namely the effect of explicitteaching of back channels on efl languagelearners’ success in speaking skill, differencesbetween male and female iranian eflintermediate learners’ success in speakingskill when they employ back channel strategy,and differences in back channel behavior (interm of types, functions and frequency of use)between male and female iranian eflintermediate learners.concerning to the teaching of backchannels explicitly and its effect on the efllanguage learners’ success in speaking skill,the analysis of the collected data showed thatit had significant effect on iranian eflintermediate learners’ speaking skill andimprovement of this ability. this finding is inline with that of dornyei (1995), faerch andkasper (1983). according to dornyei (1995),making learners more conscious of strategiesthat already exist in their repertoire could bevery helpful for them when they are lackspecific vocabulary items. faerch and kasper(1986) also stress the need to increaselearners' "meta-communicative awareness"concerning strategy use.with regard to the second aspect of thisexamination, the results of the analysis of thedata indicated that there was no significantdifference between male and femaleexperimental groups when they employedback channel strategy. the finding of thisstudy revealed that both male and femaleparticipants in experimental groupsimproved in speaking skill after explicitlytreatment of back channel strategy.the classification of types and functionsof back channels in the present work werebased on hopper (1992) (as cited in petchrat,2009), maynard (1986) and ohira (1994). concerning the frequency of types of backchannels, the present study showed that themost frequently used back channels wereshort utterances (male=37, female=46),followed by short questions (male=42,female=36), while less frequently used backchannels were sentence completion (male=2,female=1), laughing and sighing (male=3,female=7), and brief restatement (male=4,female=4). the investigation showed thatthere was almost no difference in the choiceof types of back channel devices usedconcerning the gender of the efl languagelearners. on the other hand, concerningdifferences between total categories of backchannels types used by male and female efllanguage learners, there were significantdifferences between them.in the case of back channels functions,the present study indicated that the mostfrequently used back channels were requestfor clarification, followed by emotionalresponse, while less frequently used backchannels were such as understanding thecontent, continuer, and agreement. therewere no significant differences between maleand female in term of frequently usedfunction except for continuer and agreementrespectively. therefore, male efl languagelearners used this function of back channelmore than females.based on the results, it can be stated thatback channels mainly serve as request forclarification. back channels, serving as displayemotional response, play an important role inenglish speaking as well. back channels asagreement represent the third mostfrequently used function of all back channels.according to the results, continuer functionsof back channels were used fewer than theexpected frequency. and finally, displayunderstanding of the content was least usedfunction of back channels. but, in the case ofdifferences among total categories offunctions of back channels used by male andfemale efl language learners, there weresignificant differences between them. referencesangles j. et al. (2000). japanese responses hai, eeandun:yes, no, and beyond. language of communication,20, 55-86. 25 malihehyazdfazeli, khalil motallebzadeh & mohammad ali fatemi explicit back-channel strategy training and improvement of speaking skill: case of iranian efl learners bilous, f. r. (1988). dominance and accommodation inthe conversational behaviors of same and mixed-gender dyads. language and communication 8(3-4), 183-194.chowdhury, s. a. & tarannum, s. (2011). speaking skill: teaching and learning. retrieved from:htttp//www.pdffactory.comcoates, j. (2003). women, men and languages, a sociolinguistics account of gender differences in languages. harlow: pearson education limited.dixon j.a. & foster d. h. (1998). gender, social context,and back-channel responses. journal of social psychology, 138: 134-136.doff, a. (1990). teach english: a training course for teachers. teacher's handbook. cambridge: cup.dornyei, z. (1995). on the teachability ofcommunication strategies. tesol quarterly, 29(7),55-85.dornyei, z., & thurrell, s. (1994). teachingconversational skills intensively: course contentand rationale. elt journal, 48, 40.duncan, d. (1977). face-to-face interaction: research, methods, and theory. hillsdale, n.j.: erlbaum.duncan, s, jr. (1973). some signals and rules for takingspeaking turns in conversations. journal of personality and social psychology, 23, 283-292.faerch, c., & kasper, g. (1983). strategies in interlanguage communication. harlow, england:longman.forbes, k & cordella, m. (1999). the role of gender inchilean argumentative discourse. iral, 37(4).277-289.harmer, j. (1991).the practice of english language teaching. london: longman.heinz, b. (2003). back-channel responses as strategicresponses in bilingual speakers’ conversations. journal of pragmatics, 35, 1113-1142hopper, r. (1992). telephone conversation. indiana:indiana university press.hughes, a. (2003).testing for language teachers.cambridge university press.kim, t-y. (2009). the sociocultural interface between ideal self and ought-to self: a case study of two korean students’ esl motivation. in z. dörnyei & e.ushioda (eds.), motivation, language identities and the l2 self (pp. 274-294). bristol, england:multilingual matters.kok i. & heylen d. (2010). differences in listenerresponses between procedural and narrativetasks, proceedings of the 2nd international workshop on social signal processing, italy: 5-10.li h.z. et al. (2010). back channel responses andenjoyment of the conversation: the more does notnecessarily mean the better. international journal of psychological studies, 2 : 25-35.li, h. z. (2006). back-channel responses as misleadingfeedback in intercultural discourse. journal of intercultural communication research, 35(2), 99-116. maynard, s. k. (1986). on back-channel behavior injapanese and english casual conversation. linguistics, 24(6), 1079–1108mott, h. (1995). workplace interactions: women'slinguistic behavior. journal of language and social psychology, 14(3), 324-336.ohira, k. (1998). have you changed? pragmatic transfer of back-channel behavior by japanese bilingual speakers (thesis doctoral). urbana-champaign,illinois: university of illinois.petchrat, p. (2009). a study of back channel behavior of clienteles in insurance telesales conversation(master thesis). national institute of developmentadministration.richards, j. c. (1990). conversationally speaking:approaches to the teaching of conversation. in j. c.richards (ed.), the language teaching matrix.new york: cambridge university press, 67–85.richards, j.c., & schmidt, r. (2002). longman dictionary of language teaching and applied linguistics.pearson education.sharifi, sh., & azadmanesh, m. (2012). persian backchannel responses in formal versus informalcontexts. linguistic discovery 10(2), 109-118thao, l. (2005). communicative strategies in interlanguage. tasmania: university of tasmaniatao, h., & thompson, s.a. (1991). english back-channelsin mandarin conversations: a case study ofsuperstratum pragmatic ‘interference’. journal of pragmatics 16, 209-223.tavakoli, m., & vahid d. h., &esteki, m. (2011). theeffect of explicit strategy instruction on l2 oralproduction of iranian intermediate efl learners:focusing on accuracy, fluency and complexity. journal of language teaching and research, 2(5),989-997.wannarak, a. (1997). back-channel behavior in thai and american casual telephone conversations. ph.d.dissertation, university of illinois at urbana-champaign, urbana, usa.ward, n. (2007). the challenge of noun lexical speech sound. tokyo: university of tokyo.ward, n., & tsukahara, w. (2000). prosodic featureswhich cue back-channel responses in english andjapanese. journal of pragmatics 32, 1177-1207.ward, n. (1999). low-pitch regions as dialog signals? evidence from dialog-act and lexical correlates in natural conversation. in: m. swerts and j. terken,eds., esca workshop on dialog and prosody,83-88. eindhoven: tue-ipo.white, r. (1997). back channelling, repair, pausing, andprivate speech. applied linguistics 18(3), 314-344.yngve, v. (1970). on getting a word in edgewise. inpapers from the sixth regional meeting of the chicago linguistic society, pp. 567-577.yule, g. (1996). pragmatics. oxford: oxford universitypress 26 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 2, july 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 143 the effect of intrapersonal differences among different factors of metacognitive awareness of l2 listening on the undergraduate efl bangladeshi learners azran azmee kafia assistant professor, islamic university, kushtia-7003, bangladesh & research scholar of ele, the efl university, hyderabad, india email: azranazmee80@gmail.com apa citation: kafia, a. a. (2021). the effect of intrapersonal differences among different factors of metacognitive awareness of l2 listening on the undergraduate efl bangladeshi. indonesian efl journal, 7(2), pp. 143-148. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i2.4947 received: 16-03-2020 accepted: 20-05-2021 published:15-07-2021 introduction listening, in the curriculum of undergraduate level in bangladesh where english is learned as the foreign language (efl), plays a critical role, since learners spent on basic skills during daily communication process is 35 percent for speaking, 16 percent for reading, 9 percent for writing, and 40 percent for listening (flowerdew, 2005). it is also considered as the main channel for instruction and interaction and the most used skill both in the classroom and beyond. but, learners’ listening skills are not getting the amount of attention they merit because most of the l2 listening classes are ‘the product of listening’ (goh, 2008) and there is hardly any attention paid towards the process of learners’ comprehension or ‘how learners arrive at comprehension’ (fahim, 2014). it started to gain attention after the communicative language teaching (clt) focusing on the need for teaching listening or effective oral communication. though the taskbased approach to developing listening help learners to become ‘active’ listeners (brown, 1987) by performing tasks that bring a ‘learning outcome’ (kumaravadievelu, 1990) in ‘authentic’ situation, learners need to use holistic inferential strategies that assist learners become ‘autonomous leaners’ (flowerdew, 2005). an autonomous learner ‘initiates the planning and implementation of (his/her) own learning program’ (gardner, 1997). therefore, raising learners’ awareness about their own person knowledge, task knowledge, strategy knowledge come to action. in other words, metacognitive instruction, which embodies both strategy-based instruction and metacognitive awareness development, takes the lead in the investigation of this study. the former refers to a abstract: drawing on flavell’s (1979) conception of metacognition, vandergrift and goh (2012) proposed a metacognitive framework for l2 listening to facilitate listening comprehension and help learners cope with listening difficulties by influencing their operations through processes of planning, monitoring, problem-solving, and evaluation. this study was executed to find if there is any intrapersonal difference among five factors of metacognitive awareness of l2 listening, and which factors are the most used by the high achievers and low achievers for their successful listening comprehension. the overall purpose of the study was to investigate i) what factors did play the role among high achievers and low achievers, and ii) what are the interpersonal differences among the factors; planning and evaluation, person knowledge, problem-solving, directed attention and mental translation, for l2 listening comprehension. to apprehend the research objectives, twelve bangladeshi undergraduate efl learners in the experimental group (06) and control group (06) received metacognitive instruction and traditional instruction based on product approach respectively for 5 weeks using five transactional listening texts. to gauge the changes, a pre-test, a post-test and two metacognitive awareness listening questionnaires (malq) were administrated. the quantitative method research embodied the notion of triangulation for this study. using a one-way within-subjects anova, the result revealed that there was a significant effect of metacognitive awareness factors on l2 listening comprehension accounted for over 65% of the total variance in the data. keywords: metacognitive instruction; malq; metacognitive awareness azran azmee kafia the effect of intrapersonal differences among different factors of metacognitive awareness of l2 listening on the undergraduate efl bangladeshi learners 144 set of classroom procedures that explicitly train learners to employ relevant strategies to improve their performance (cohen, 1998), while the latter focuses on learners’ self-discovery in developing knowledge, belief and awareness about the learning process with appropriate scaffolding and facilitating from the teachers (wenden, 1998). based on flavell’s (1979) model of metacognitive knowledge vandergrift, goh, mareschal and tafaghodtari (2006) designed the malq encompassing an individual’s stored knowledge on cognitive processes to comprehend the listening texts, complete tasks, setting goals to accomplish their comprehension through various actions and experiences. flavell (1979) identifies three types of metacognitive knowledge, person knowledge, task knowledge and strategy knowledge. person knowledge stands for learner’s own self and ‘various factors that affect individual’s learning’ (vandergrift and goh, 2012) including learning beliefs and concepts. task knowledge stands for the knowledge related to tasks and its purpose, demands and nature of learning (vandergrift and goh, 2012) including a variety of features of spoken texts and other meaning building and decoding aspects. strategy knowledge stands for knowing the strategies ‘to accomplish a specific goal’, and ‘achieving comprehension’ and ‘improving one’s listening ability’ (vandergrift and goh, 2012). therefore, metacognition enables learners to understand the processes involved in reaching a learning goal (bandura, 2001), and helps them develop a positive self-concept (hacker, dunlosky, & graesser, 2009) of self-reflection and self-direction. according to ehrich and henderson (2018), ‘self-reflection is the ability to think about one’s efficacy during language learning, while selfdirection is the adoption of more effective and appropriate ways and behaviours to improve language learning.’ these two distinct processes constitute metacognitive awareness. on a six-point likert scale ranging from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree, vandergrift et.al (2006) designed the metacognitive awareness listening questionnaire (malq) which had five factors; planning and evaluation, directed attention, problem-solving, person knowledge, and mental translation. based on this malq they collected data and analyzed via an exploratory factor analysis (efa) and a confirmatory factor analysis (cfa). after studies of vandergrift and goh, there were two major studies on metacognitive awareness, rahimi and katal (2012) and vhaid aryadoust (2015). rahimi and katal (2012) confirmed the five factors of the malq designed by vandergrift (2006) by applying a principal components analysis (pca) and a confirmatory factor analysis (cfa). but vahid aryadoust (2015) adopting a modern measurement approach to scale validation investigated the measurement invariance within l2 listening tests, and found that the rasch model has a reasonable fit with no misfitting items but two factors, planning and evaluation and problemsolving with poor reliability. enrich and henderson (2018) studied the metacognitive awareness adopting vahid’s (2015) measurement method for analysis to attain further evidence of the psychometric properties of malq and found the result mostly consistent with vahid’s study. however, this study adopted the model of goh and hu (2014) in a different setting to attain evidence of the psychometric properties of malq and their interpersonal relationship and the role of factors that influenced their learning. therefore, this study investigated the metacognitive awareness through a validated instrument for eliciting learners’ self-reports, malq, to draw on the strength of statistical inferences to see the insights into patterns of metacognitive awareness for the high and low achievers and the interpersonal relationship among various factors of the metacognitive awareness after metacognitive instruction. the study sought to provide insights on the metacognitive awareness and listening comprehension among bangladeshi efl undergraduate learners through the two research questions: (1) what factors of malq did play a major role in successful listening comprehension among high achievers and low achievers? (2) what were the interpersonal differences among the factors; planning and evaluation, person knowledge, problem-solving, directed attention and mental translation, for l2 listening comprehension? method the participants of this study comprised of 12 participants, both male and female, of first-semester first year of bachelor of arts in english at a private university in bangladesh. they were randomly assigned to a control group (n=6) and an experimental group (n=6). these banglaspeaking indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 2, july 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 145 learners were ranging in age from 17 to 22 years and were exposed to english academically for 12 years where their self-listening hours after the class were approximately 8.92 (μ) hours per week. they also used self-learning materials (75%) which is mostly out of the syllabus (66.7%). among the out of syllabus materials, they mostly applied to the ‘listening to the news in english’ (41.7%) and ‘watching movies in english’ (41.7%) which are in british accents (50%). the malq contains 21 statements with five distinct factors related to learners’ metacognitive awareness and regulation of listening comprehension strategies; planning and evaluation, person knowledge, problem-solving, directed attention, and mental translation. table 1. five factor wise statement numbers of the malq five distinct factors of the malq. statements on the malq (item numbers) planning and evaluation 1, 10, 14, 20, 21 person knowledge 3, 8, 15 problemsolving 5, 7, 9, 13, 17, 19 directed attention 2, 6, 12, 16 mental translation 4, 11, 18 this questionnaire was graded on a 6 grades likert scale from strongly disagree (1) to strongly agree (6) without a neutral point so that respondents could not hedge. it was not a test with right or wrong answers, rather their forthright and honest responses were important. this questionnaire had been administrated after pre-test and post-test that were administrated the beginning and the end of the intervention respectively of the seven-week intervention. a pre-test at the beginning of the intervention and a post-test at the end of the intervention were conducted to understand the effect of the intervention. participants, both in the experimental and control group, attended the forty-minute tests each time. the tests were designed to gauge the effects of metacognitive instructions on l2 listening comprehension using five texts; four texts to test the top-down processing and one text on the bottom-up processing having thirty-five multiple-choice questions (mcq). all the texts had the flow of natural speech, real-world conversation, british accent and contemporary subject matters. this study was conducted in three phases. in phase-i, learners were asked to complete the background questionnaire and attended the pre-test followed by the malq. in phase-ii, learners attended a five-week intervention, where the treatment group attended rigorous metacognitive instruction on l2 listening on five texts followed by performance sheets designed on the metacognitive pedagogical sequence and the control group performed on a traditional approach followed by performance sheets designed on the traditional question and answer based on the same texts. in phase-iii, learners attended the post-test followed by the malq again and data (quantitative) received from the intervention were analysed using spss version 26. results and discussion research question 1: what factors of malq did play a major role in successful listening comprehension among high achievers and low achievers? among the five factors of the malq, it is evident that the participants of this study applied all of them from a descriptive analysis, but directed attention mean score (5.21) on a six-point scale scored the highest, which is an evident of the most used strategy in their successful comprehension. the person knowledge mean score (2.89) showed the least use strategy. among the rest three factors, planning and evaluation played (4.67) more frequently than problem-solving (4.39) and mental translation (4.33). table 2. descriptive analysis scores of five factors of malq mean sd min max planning and evaluation 4.67 0.6 3.8 5.6 directed attention 5.21 0.4 4.8 6.0 person knowledge 2.89 1.0 1.0 3.7 problem-solving 4.39 0.5 3.7 5.0 mental translation 4.33 0.7 3.3 5.0 azran azmee kafia the effect of intrapersonal differences among different factors of metacognitive awareness of l2 listening on the undergraduate efl bangladeshi learners 146 from the scores of the malq, it is evident that high achievers applied all the metacognitive strategies (pe, da, pk, ps, and mt) to achieve successful comprehension. they also solicit those strategies according to the demands to comprehend for both decoding and meaning building. but, the most frequently used strategies by the high achievers in this study are planning and evaluation, problem-solving, and mental translation along with directed attention. on other hand, the low achievers applied less metacognitive strategies to comprehend. they used directed attention mostly, planning and evaluation moderately. research questions 2: what were the interpersonal differences among the factors; planning and evaluation, person knowledge, problem-solving, directed attention and mental translation, for l2 listening comprehension? table 3. scores multiple regression analysis of malq mauchly's test of sphericity a within subjects effect mauchly's w approx. chisquare df sig. epsilon b greenhousegeisser huynh-feldt lowerbound awareness .026 12.493 9 .235 .532 .938 .250 tests the null hypothesis that the error covariance matrix of the orthonormalized transformed dependent variables is proportional to an identity matrix. a. design: intercept within subjects design: awareness b. may be used to adjust the degrees of freedom for the averaged tests of significance. corrected tests are displayed in the tests of within-subjects effects table. from mauchly’s test statistic, it is evident that the assumption of sphericity was not met, χ2 (9) = 12.49, p = 0.235. so, the amount of sphericity was estimated by epsilon (ε), and the greenhousegeisser correction was considered to adjust the degrees of freedom (ε = 0.532) for this study since among epsilon scores, it is lower than 0.75. therefore, the significant effect for the test withinsubjects variable is f(4, 20)= 9.45, p < 0.001, ηp 2 = 0.654. table 4. scores multiple regression analysis of malq’s five factors’ within relation tests of within-subjects effects source type iii sum of squares df mean square f sig. partial eta squared awareness sphericity assumed 17.758 4 4.440 9.453 .000 .654 greenhousegeisser 17.758 2.129 8.343 9.453 .004 .654 huynh-feldt 17.758 3.751 4.734 9.453 .000 .654 lower-bound 17.758 1.000 17.758 9.453 .028 .654 error(awareness) sphericity assumed 9.393 20 .470 greenhousegeisser 9.393 10.643 .883 huynh-feldt 9.393 18.755 .501 lower-bound 9.393 5.000 1.879 according to the benchmarks suggested by cohen (1988) the effect size of this study exceeded the medium value and was almost near to the large value (d= 0.8). this score indicated that the withinsubjects variable, the five factors of the metacognitive awareness of l2 listening, accounted for over 65% of the total variance in the data. since the main effect was not significant, the standardized post hoc test pairwise comparison with bonferroni correction was calculated and analysed. the difference between group means, the standard error, the significance value and a confidence interval for the difference between means showed that there were significant differences between indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 2, july 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 147 directed attention and person knowledge (p= 0.0082), planning and evaluation and person knowledge (0.0117) and person knowledge and problem-solving (0.0114) statistically. but, there was not a statistically significant difference between planning and evaluation and directed attention (0.072), planning and evaluation and problemsolving (1.00), planning and evaluation and mental translation (1.00), directed attention and problemsolving (0.21), directed attention and mental translation (0.514), person knowledge and mental translation (0.258) and problem-solving and mental translation (1.00). considering the reports of the analysis, it could be said that there was substantial interpersonal relation among five factors of metacognitive awareness of l2 listening. conclusion this study was evidence of learners’ listening processes and various metacognitive strategies use for better comprehension. these findings might positively help learners develop better orchestration of metacognitive strategies while l2 listening. the interpersonal relationship among five factors paved the way for a better understanding of learners’ strategy use that marked as a signpost for their development. this total portfolio of their strategy use would lead to being autonomous learners. on the other hand, teachers could keep the record of learners’ metacognition and guide them to better application to have successful comprehension. material developers might also be benefited from this study to develop or revised the existing materials for learners based on their level. references aryadoust, v. (2015). fitting a mixture rasch model to english as a foreign language listening tests: the role of cognitive and background variables in explaining latent differential item functioning. international journal of testing, 15(3), 216-238. bandura, a. (2001). social cognitive theory: an agentic perspective. annual review of psychology, 52, 1– 26. brown, a. l. (1987). metacognition, executive control, self-regulation and other more mysterious mechanisms. in i. f. (eds.), metacognition, motivation, and understanding (pp. 65–116). hillsdale, new jersey: lawrence erlbaum associates. cohen, a. d. (1998). strategies in learning and using a second language. london: longman. ehrich, j. f. (2018). rasch analysis of the metacognitive awareness listening questionnaire (malq). international journal of listening, 1-13. fahim, m. a. (2014 special issue). exploring the effect of the model of metacognitive instruction on the listening performance of efl learners. international journal of research studies in language learning, 3(6), 3-20. flavell, j. h. (1979). metacognition and cognitive monitoring: a new area of cognitivedevelopmental inquiry. american psychologist, 34(10), 906-911. flowerdew, j. &. (2005). second language listening: theory and practice. cambridge: cup. gardner, d. a. (1997). a study of tertiary level selfaccess facilities in hong kong. in d. a. gardner, evaluation of the student experience project. hong kong: city university of hong kong. goh, c. (2008). metacognitive instruction for second language listening development: theory, practice and research implications. relc journal, 39(2), 188-213. goh, c. a. (2013). exploring the relationship between metacognitive awareness and listening performance with questionnaire data. language awareness, 23(3), 255-274. hacker, d. j. (2009). handbook of metacognition in education. new york: routledge. kumaravadivelu, b. (1990). ethnic variation in classroom interaction: myth or reality. relc journal, 21(2), 45-54. rahimi, m. a. (2012). the role of metacognitive listening strategies awareness and podcast-use readiness in using podcasts for learning english as a foreign language. computers in human behaviour, 28, 1153-1161. vandergrift, l. a. (2012). teaching and learning second language listening: metacognition in action. new york: routledge taylor and francis group. vandergrift, l. g. (2006). the metacognitive awareness listening questionnaire: development and validation. language learning, 56, 431-462. wenden, a. (1998). metacognitive knowledge and language learning. applied linguistics, 19, 515537. azran azmee kafia the effect of intrapersonal differences among different factors of metacognitive awareness of l2 listening on the undergraduate efl bangladeshi learners 148 the millennial generation and popular culture farhanazrabbani the millennial generation and popular culture in efl classroom themillennialgenerationandpopularculture ineflclassroom farhanazrabbani department of english, university of dhaka, bangladeshe-mail: fnazrs@yahoo.comapa citation: rabbani, f. (2015). the millennial generation and popular culturein efl classroom. indonesian efl journal, 1(1). 88-97 received: 10-09-2014 accepted: 13-10-2014 published: 01-01-2015 abstract: writing instructors all over the world are facing new challenges in teaching writing tostudents who belong to the rapidly evolving digital age. these multitasking youngsters are popularlyreferred to as generation y or the millennial generation and are the most connected generation of thecentury. with the dissemination of digital communication, popular culture and online networkinghave become an integral part of generation y. teachers need to address this connectedness and focuson a curriculum based on communicative language teaching (clt) where interactive activities arehighlighted. the financially and technologically savvy generation y-ers want to use a discourse theyare familiar with and work with materials on popular culture. this paper shows the necessity ofpopular culture in teaching literature and academic writing courses to the generation y studentsbecause popular culture is the new global culture. teachers need to use classroom materials andresources for formal, informal discourse and computer mediated discourse (cmd). keywords: millennial generation, communicative language teaching, computer mediated discourse . introductionteaching writing has been a challenge toinstructors throughout the ages. it has gonethrough stages of evolution andexperimentation over the past few decades.but the most interesting developments inlanguage research happened in the latenineteenth century when berlitz proposedthe direct method which placed moreimportance to oral lessons and spontaneousparticipation of the students in their targetlanguage. in the 1950s, the audio-lingualmethod used the basic tenets of berlitz’smethod and added the use of tapes and visualaids in lessons. these changes eventually ledto the emergence of the communicativelanguage teaching (clt) which advocatesthat learning is an intuitive process thatneeds the proper conditions to flourish(howatt, 2004, p.192). throughout thesetrials in teaching methods, teachers andinstructors overlooked critics and skepticsbecause they had only one goal: to determinethe best way to teach english effectively to atarget group or students (howatt, 1984,p.298). teachers have a natural inclination to protect academic discourse from outsideinfluences (brought in by students). but,today, the process of enforcing students tolearn knowledge in the traditional mannercollides with the discourse they use at homeand on the internet, thereby creating anineffective learning environment. thisrealization prompts a teacher to remediatehimself in order to understand newdisciplines and understand the psychologicalorientation of students (shaughnessy, 1999,p.94). therefore, along with remediatingthemselves, teachers also have to redesignlearning environment, lesson plans andmaterials.when latin was taught in the 16thcentury, it was accompanied by anglo saxontranslations and classroom exercises basedon the more familiar aspects (for example,farming, hunting) of the students (howatt,1984, p.5). much later, when clt gainedmomentum, teachers began to providesimulated learning situations both in and outof classrooms (mukalei, 1998, p.97). in orderto create these learning situations, it isessential to know which discourse the 88 indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427 students are more comfortable with.students today, especially those belonging togeneration y, use and encounter severaltypes of discourses. generation y refers topeople who were born between 1981 to 1999.rhetorical theories have repeatedlyaddressed the problems of familiarizingstudents with academic discourse or formalenglish, as opposed to home discourse orinformal english. but, in the 21st century, it isnot only home discourse that acts as aresistance to academic discourse. studentstoday are overwhelmingly immersed in thedigital media where popular culturedominates their thoughts, their attitudes andtheir actions. these students belong togeneration y and share some common traitslike obsession with popular from the culturalpoint of view, based on gramsci’s ‘hegemony’,it is necessary to create an “educativealliance” between high culture and popularculture so that one establishes “an organicunity between theory and practice, betweenintellectual strata and popular masses,between rulers and ruled which constitutedemocratic centralism” (forgacs, 1999: 218).therefore, the classroom must haveinterpersonal communication betweenteachers and students, based on socio-cultural attitudes (breen and candlin, 2002:90-91). in recent years, studies have beenconducted on using elements of popularculture in efl and esl classrooms both insecondary and tertiary levels. domoney andharris (1993) conducted workshops inmexico on the use of pop music, especiallyrap music, in english language classrooms.they state that instead of treating rap musicas ‘discreet’ or ‘marginal items’, it shouldoccupy a more ‘central’ role in classrooms.cheung (2001) suggests the use of popularmovies like armageddon and terminator 2 toteach concepts of self sacrifice both inhumans and robots in english classrooms ofhong kong. but, so far the focus of thesestudies was only on popular culture, but notspecifically on the impact of popular cultureon generation y. i believe that it is necessaryto reinforce the significance of stimulationfound in popular and digital culture and itsrole in the generation y writing classroom because it has completely changed themotivational nature of students. the paperfocuses, firstly, on the need for writingteachers to analyze the social andpsychological orientation of the generation ystudents and secondly, proposes effectiveways of using popular culture specificallythrough the print media, non-print media andonline networking. socio-politicalorientationof generationygeneration y refers to those bornapproximately between 1975 to the late1990s. reilly (2012: 3) cites lancaster andstillman’s survey and classifies thegenerations as: the baby boomer generation(1946–1964), generation x (1965–1980), generation y (1981–1999), generation z(2000–present). generation y are thegrandchildren of the baby boomers. childrenof generation x are also known as echoboomers, millenium generation, igeneration,google generation etc. the term wasoriginally coined as generation ‘why’because they always question the ‘commandand control’ attitudes of parents andauthoritarian institutions like thegovernment (sheahan, 2011).the oldest generation y students havewitnessed the fall of the soviet union (1991),first gulf war (1991), return of hong kongto china (1997), the death of princess diana(1997) and the dot com bubble burst (2000).they have seen the end of the cold war andthe emergence of the anti terrorist campaignin iraq. the younger generation y-ers haveexperienced y2k, 9/11 terrorist attacks(2001), anthrax scare (2001), the formationof the european union (2002), thecatastrophic tsunami of 2004, and swine flu(2009). these youngsters grew upmonitoring the rapid boom in globalcommunication and technology andconsequently suffered through the suddencrash of the dot com businesses and thelayoffs prompted by mergers of bigcompanies. therefore, they are more restlessand skeptical of established norms. they arefinancially more cunning than their parentsin their professions, usually triggering them 89 farhanazrabbani the millennial generation and popular culture in efl classroom to change jobs frequently. according to asurvey by the diversified investmentadvisors (2005), 37 percent of generation ymembers start saving for retirement beforethey reach the age of twenty five. since theywere raised by more protective parents,generation y students exhibit a heightenedsense of narcissism. twenge (2006) labelsthem as ‘generation me’ and specifies thatthey prefer to socialize through the digitalworld. with both parents working outsidethe home, this multi-tasking generation reliesheavily on the internet and loves to work athome (reilly, 2012).after arab spring, it is evident thatyoungsters rely heavily on digital media toraise their voice against political and socialinstitutional control. along with digitaldictionaries and thesaurus, students haveaccess to a wide range of information online.online social networking is used to share andadapt to the new popular culture. writingclassrooms should integrate these devices inthe lectures and lessons provided by teachers.hornby suggests a similar practice in thesituational approach where the best methodof teaching the meaning of language patternsis achieved by embedding them in simplesituations and by enabling students to act outin class (howatt, 1984).apart from the internet, a heavydependence on other forms of digital medialike tv has changed behavioral patterns ofgeneration y members as well. due to theintense competition between network tv andcable tv, generation y-ers have plenty ofoptions to investigate. instead ofconcentrating on one or two channels, theyclick on their remote controllers and ‘surf’the channels just as they surf on the internet.therefore, there is less ‘sense ofhomogeneity’ among these youngsters (salt,2007). the popular shows are often ladenwith excitement and suspense, exposing thebrain to “constant bombardment of change”(yan, 2006). generation y students havebrains which are accustomed to rapid story-telling and stimulating scenes. but thecontinual exposure to external stimuliprovided by new technologies sometimes results in a drastic change in human behavior(saffo, 2007). writingandcreativitysheahan (2011) points out: “gen y arethe most connected people on the planet, andthey want to work in places that reflect thatlevel of connectivity”. a classroom is also awork place to these students. since thesestudents can connect with the whole world ina fraction of a second, they regard the actionof writing essays tenaciously in classroomsredundant. although this change is a cause ofconcern for many teachers, gee and hayes(2011: 1) view these changes from ahistorical perspective. they state that “digitalmedia ‘power up’ or enhance the powers oflanguage, oral and written, just as writtenlanguage ‘powered up’ or enhanced thepowers of oral language”. whenever a newsoftware is developed, generation y adoptsand adapts it to their needs, paving the wayto create and distribute in the media withoutany cost. creativity does not mean hours ofplanning, organizing and drafting a writtenpiece.according to saffo (2007), generation yis always engaged in acts of micro-creationwhenever they leave a comment onamazon.com, on different blogs, or postinghome-made videos on youtube. a blog is aweblog dedicated to various issues orpersonalities. anyone can type in a commenton a blog and share their ideas with othersonline. youtube is the free video sharingwhere users can share or upload videos. thusthe whole concept of creativity has shiftedfrom the traditional, pre-conceived definitionto a new digital definition. from thebehaviorist perspective, generation ystudents engage in metadiscursivity becausethey are accustomed to navigate throughvarious discoursesformal, informal anddigital at the same time (moje et al., 2008).as a result common national cultures arefraying (anderson, 2007). for example,youtube shows how, in anderson’s words, a“massivelyparallel culture” is taking theplace of common culture. as bhabha relates:“youth in the millennial world of high speedinformation transfer lie in the in between of 90 indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427 global and local spaces” (moje, 2002).generation y youngsters are more globalizedthan any other generation so far and popularculture is the sole platform that unites themtogether. popularculturethe word ‘popular’ is derived from aterm used in the late roman republic-‘populares’ which means ‘favouring thepeople’. it was a political term used to reflectdemocratic ideologies of political parties.today, popular refers to the quality of beingwell liked, well received and easy tounderstand. therefore, popular cultureimplies the social and political practiceswhich are widely liked by the masses or theordinary people. it is a culture made by thepeople for themselves (williams, 1999). inthe history of english language teaching,much emphasis was given on formal andclassical texts to facilitate students to acquirethe necessary skills to communicate in astrictly formal environment. but with theintroduction of clt, the use of tape recorders,compact discs (cds), television programs,and music began to be crucial parts ofclassroom activities. gradually,contemporary music, movies and the digitalmedia made their way into writingclassrooms all over the world. therefore,social interaction and conversation playdominant roles when popular culture isintegrated into the language classroom. popular culture and literacyteaching youths in the 21st centuryrequires a deeper perception of youthliteracy from the socio-cultural perspective.as moje (2002: 108) asserts, literacy cannever be well understood “unless one attendsto people’s literary practices-the values, thebeliefs, and actions that people bring toreading and writing and to the multiplesymbol systems and signs with which readingand writing of print are articulated”. anabsence of representations of the symbolic,visual and oral codes makes reading andwriting very limited in scope (moje et al.,2008). when the youngsters of generation yuse popular culture in the classroom, they read or watch to create and comment on newtexts in different ways. according toalvermann young people utilize popularcultural texts in “unpredictable ways” tomake a sensible connection between theclassroom and their own worlds. they alsoutilize popular culture to assert theiridentities in their communities (moje, 2002:116). how to use popular culture in the classroomfor the convenience of the readers, ihave divided the illustrations in threesegments: print media, non print media andonline networking. popular culture is foundin all of these three spheres. the print mediaincludes newspapers, magazines, comics andbest seller books. non print media includesthe whole gamut of digital entertainment, forexample, television, movies, music (youtube).online networking includes social networkslike facebook, twitter and blogs. print media: newspapersapart from the prescribed texts,newspapers and magazines have beenhabitually used in writing and literatureclassrooms. teachers can highlight currentevents and skillfully blend them into thelessons as authentic materials. in elt,artificial or non-authentic materials areidentified as prescribed texts which are moremethodical and organized. authenticmaterials in curriculum imply additional non-traditional materials which are used to bringstudents closer to the target language culture(peacock, 1997: 144). in a classroom wherenewspaper articles and cartoons were suedas authentic materials, peacock found thatauthentic materials “significantly increasedlearner on task behavior”. hodson (2008)mentions a series of british newspaperspublished during the 2008 olympics. heused some of the following newspaperheadlines to illustrate puns and wordplay:  “peach volleyball”[the sun, 14 august]  “it’s oar-inspiring” [daily mirror, 18 august]  “it’s the bei-bling olympics” [the sun, 18august]although using authentic materials likethese may be challenging for teachers, they 91 farhanazrabbani the millennial generation and popular culture in efl classroom however, provides students with a freshoutlook on language itself. teachers canutilize the london olympics 2012 and collectmaterials for language instruction in class. print advertisementsprint advertisements are availableeverywhere-on billboards and in newspapersand magazines. since they are visuallyattractive, teachers can use advertisements todiscuss different issues and attitudes of thecurrent society. as williams (1999) states,advertising has crossed the “frontier of theselling of goods and services and has becomeinvolved with the teaching of social andpersonal values”. in figure 1, aprint advertisement has the caption‘ipod….i’m your father’. this interestingadvertisement focuses on the existence of thecassette tape long before ipod came intobeing. generation y students will be highlymotivated to study this advertisement sincethey are very familiar with ipods. teacherscan ask students to discover the history ofthe cassette tape and link it to thedevelopment of the ipod. students will learnresearching skills and will be able to writeessays on definition and classification ofdifferent technological tools over the pastfew decades. cartoonsother visual aids like cartoons can beused as authentic materials to motivate andto aid in comprehension. exercises withvisual aids like cartoon strips not only captivate students, but also help to transcendfirst and second language barriers. cartoonscan be ideal authentic materials because theyhave intersting story lines, promotingdiscussions on theme, moral, and characteranalysis. cartoon strips like garfield, peanuts,charlie brown and dilbert may be used tohighlight comedy, satire and symbolism.editorial cartoons can be used as excellentresources for writing teachers. editorialcartoons may be used to initiate a discussionof current events, to introduce writingassignment related to those events, and todesign vocabulary exercises based onparticular cartoon strips.figure 2 shows a cartoon published onjune 26, 2008 in a bangla daily newspaper the daily naya diganta. the word on thehuge hand implies the ‘rising prices ofessential commodities’ in bangla. esl andefl students in bangladesh who look at thiscartoon will immediately feel comfortablebecause the text is in bangla. as the figureshows, the price of essentials is creating awrenching pressure on an ordinary citizenwho, according to his attire, belongs to themiddle class. students may be asked toevaluate the significance of the wrench in thepicture and how it is related to real lifesituations. the colour schemes, and theexpression on the face of the little man in thepicture may also be discussed to help themunderstand the context. once students are intheir comfort zone, teachers can give themwriting assignments. figure 2. editorial cartoon(source: http://editorialcartoon.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/cartoon1.jpg) 92 http://editorialcartoon.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/cartoon1.jpg indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427 for generation y students, manga offersa combination of text and image on paper.manga are japanese comics on paper and areoften called graphic novels. this japanesephenomenon is extremely popular withyoungsters today specifically because of thestereotypical characters portrayed in them.soon after manga became popular, anotherform of cartoons-anime came into being.anime is characterized by colorful graphicsand often have themes for an adult audience.anime fans are a tight knit group whoreligiously follow their favourite characterson tv. teachers may begin with the printedmanga and introduce other “meaningmaking” elements like anime, or artwork ortelevision interviews related to manga. thesame form of relationships between print andnon-print forms can be found in other textsor documents used in classrooms (mojo et al.,2008). non-print media: television cartoonsapart from print cartoons, televisioncartoons like ‘the simpsons’ are widelypopular for its satire and the symbolicrepresentations of characters. while homerepitomizes the stereotypical ‘man’ (foolish,dumb, materialistic yet innocent at the sametime), his wife marge symbolizessophistication and intelligence. theirchildren’s antics and comments can be usedfor animated discussions in the classroom-where students can feel comfortable. someepisodes of ‘the simpsons’ are based onclassical texts like lord of the flies (das bus),a streetcar named desire (a streetcarnamed marge), moby dick (diatribe of a madhousewife) etc. by showing the cartoons first,teachers can then show the original moviesand ask the students to compare them.students will feel more at ease to expresstheir opinions and be more honest in theiranalysis. moviesmovies and videos in languageinstruction is strongly recommended incommunicative language teaching.therefore, it is natural for teachers to usethese materials as authentic materials in classrooms. eken (2003) identifies thefollowing literary elements that can be foundin movies and films:narrative charactersetting themesigns genreafter selecting a specific movie, teacherscan guide students to discuss on any of theseliterary topics or focus on elements that arealso found in tv and digital advertisements:cinematography, acting, colour schemes anddesign. movies like 2012 (directed by rolandemmerich, 2009) is a good example of howfilms can be used to motivate students tothink about their society. as the world faces acatastrophe in the form of huge tsunamis andearth quakes, the huge ships carrying menfrom different races and some people payingbillions of dollars to get inside the ship dwellson the darker sides of human nature.teachers can focus on any aspect of themovie and also encourage students to createa list of words commonly repeated in themovie. this enhances their listening,speaking and writing skills simultaneously.the chosen movie can also be compared totexts like robinson crusoe or heart ofdarkness. the following question may beasked to students: identify the sections in themovie and the text where you findcommercial /human exploitation, internalconflicts or poignant imageries.students feel highly motivated and selflearning occurs almost spontaneously. oncemovies and videos are introduced in aclassroom, the possibilities are endless. aftercompleting their assignments on the movie 2012, students can watch the tv movie the heart of darkness (directed by nicholas roeg,1993) and engage in a debate to determinewhether book is better than the movieversion. however, before showing any movieas a complimentary material to the text, it isessential for the teachers to ascertain that themovie corresponds to the written text(whatley, 2012). television showsnowadays reality shows and sitcoms like survivor and friends are watched by almost 93 farhanazrabbani the millennial generation and popular culture in efl classroom all generation y-ers. teachers can easilydraw in students by referring to a wellknown situation in a sitcom like friends andask students to comment on the crisis,conflict or humour found in that particularscene. the emmy winning sitcom the big bang theory is another show that generationy students find enjoyable mainly due to therepresentation of their interests. accordingto statistics by cbs, in the show’s thirdseason premiere in 2009, the big bang theory ranked as cbs's highest-rated show ofthat evening in the adults 18–49demographic. this proves that the big bang theory and the major characters in it areextremely popular among the generation y-ers. sheldon cooper, the geeky physicist whohas an iq of 187, is seen playing video gamespassionately completely disregarding whathappens around him. this character traitappeals greatly to the narcissistic generationy students (twenge, 2006), enabling them toengage in an interactive discussion on thecharacter and his dialogues. musicin 1989, griffee, in his preface to aspecial issue of the language teacher onsongs and music, wrote: “as the audio-lingual method receded, we can also expectone of its children, the esl songbook torecede with it. in its place will come anincreased awareness of popular songs andmusic.” his prophesy came true. due tocompact disks, mp3 and mp4, iphones, ipadsand youtube, music is an integral part of thelives of the generation y. whenever a song ora music video becomes ‘viral’ , it breaks downcultural and linguistic barriers andtransforms into a global trend. the southindian song ‘kolaveri di” is a good examplebecause it was instantly translated intodifferent languages by generation yyoungsters. most songs have themes that arerelated to love or emotions experiencedfrequently by listeners. therefore, whengeneration y students listen to a song, theyimmediately try to connect the song to theirown worlds. murphey (1989) opines thatsongs can act as initiators of studentinteraction, thereby propagating the clt approach in the classroom. the simple lyricsand repetitive structure of pop songsillustrate psycholinguistic and neuro-psychological qualities which make thediscourse extremely useful in the classroom.according to millington (2011), songs canenhance: listening skills and pronunciation,speaking skills, vocabulary and grammar(cloze passages and using key words) andtranslation skills when efl studentstranslate it into their mother tongue.today, students of generation y listen tolady gaga and beyonce. but teachers can useyoutube and refer to linkin park (crawling),bob dylan (like a rolling stone), john lennon(imagine), eminem (stan) and josh groban(you raise me up) in literature courses toillustrate concepts like imageries, dramaticelements, climax and crisis. wallace (2009)proudly quotes professor belcher who said:"today's popular culture is tomorrow's highculture," belcher explained, adding, "why notteach a popular form on the rise, rather thanonly after it has become respectable ormoribund?" online networkingin using popular culture, teachers haveto view students as a collective force,determine their preferences and choose theaccurate context for a classroom. it will notbe feasible to choose a song from a judygarland movie and expect the generation ystudents to feel enthusiastic about it.teachers need to contemplate on motivatinggeneration y by looking at them collectivelyas a highly connected generation who love todo networking online. online networking viathe internet is more focused on creatingcommunities where people come together tocollaborate, learn and build knowledge.therefore, students take control of thecontent they want to use and the manner inwhich they want to use it. the teacherdominated classroom becomes obsolete andstudents make new connections and createnew ideas through inquiry (mcloughlin,2007). as gee and hayes (2011) point out,digital media is reshaping communicationand therefore reshaping our classroomlessons. 94 indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427 taking advantage of online networkingin a language classroom requires an indepthknowledge of computer mediated discourse(cmd). cmd, which is an essentialcomponent of computer mediatedcommunication (cmc), is the communicationproduced by human beings when theytransmit messages to one another throughnetworked computers. in the past, teachershad to ward off informal discourse toemphasize on formal discourse. but ingeneration y classrooms, teachers have tonegotiate with computer mediated discourseand find a middle ground to implement theirlesson plans. i use the term ‘negotiate’because in a networked classroom, teachersalso need to understand the language appliedin the virtual environment. as studentscommunicate online, they create a languageof their own. for example, lol in emails andinstant chat sites means ‘laughing out loud’.online networking has developed a‘metadiscourse’ (discourse within discourse)or ‘metalanguage’ (thurlow, 2006) for theteachers to examine before using computersas pedagogical tools in a writing classroom. blogsthere are several ways in whichstudents can use online networking sites in alanguage class. a blog (or weblog) is awebsite in which items are posted and oftenfocus on a particular subject, such as food,politics, or local news. blogs are like onlinejournals. according to khampusaen (2012),blogs can be used as a pedagogical toolreplacing pre-writing and drafting stages ofwriting. in a blog, teachers can write orattach a given essay for the students and askthem to leave a comment on that essay orliterary piece. as more students comment onthe blog, it will promote an online peerdiscussion. teachers may use these blogs toguide the students to determine the variousdimensions of the topic and the languageused in the given essay. generation ystudents will enjoy this exercise immensely. twittertwitter is an online social networkingservice and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read text-basedposts of up to 140 characters, known as"tweets”. for example, the following websitesmay be useful for instruction:  twitaholic.com,  http://twitter.com/#!/webenglishteach,  http://wheretheclassroomends.com/teaching-logical-fallacies podcastspodcasts may also be used for writingexercises. podcast is a parody of thetraditional broadcast, the first 5 letters beingreplaced by the last 3 letters of ipod. bbc hasvery useful podcasts which reflect ondifferent aspects of daily life. students mayeither read or listen to podcasts and thenproceed to answer the teacher’s questions. facebookfacebook is probably the most familiarsocial networking site for generation y.facebook users can send instantmessages/comments and upload visual aidseasily. facebook can be used in the followingways: events can be ‘created’, useful sites canbe used for research by looking at the activitylog, facebook community pages can becreated and ‘liked’. clicking on the ‘like’option is not just a passive activity.generation y students prefer to learn morefrom facebook than a dictionary of literaryterms. facebooking provides ampleopportunities for research activities. forexample, in bangladesh, tagore’s songs arecalled rabindra sangeet. ‘rabindra sangeet’on facebook has 273,000 likes. but on visitngthis page, students encounter a list of ‘similar’or ‘related links’ options. ‘baul influences ontagore’ is in the ‘related links’ list provided inthe rabindra sangeet page. therefore,through facebooking, students not only learnmore about the core topic, but they can alsoexplore other related topics and issues in the‘related links ‘option. conclusionas the world becomes globalized,teachers have to attune themselves to thecurrent trends and use them in the classroom.having examined the various possibilities ofusing popular culture in the writingclassroom, it is evident that just as 95 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/social_networking_service http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/microblogging http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/character_(computing) farhanazrabbani the millennial generation and popular culture in efl classroom generation y students are re-wired bypopular culture and media, teachers can alsobe re-wired, retrained and remediated for thesole purpose of making the writing classroommore meaningful. but reshaping ourclassrooms requires extensive planning inboth communicative language teaching (clt)and computer mediated communication(cmc). in using popular culture, it isnecessary to maintain a fine balance betweenauthentic materials like songs, videos, andcartoons and artificial materials for the singlepurpose of effective teaching. in using thedigital devices, teachers need to addressissues related to computer mediatedcommunication and the metadiscoursearising from instant messaging and socialnetworking. since the dimensions of theclassroom and student teacher relationshipare changing rapidly, it is extremelyimportant to ascertain the perfect syllabus orcurriculum that will aid generation y to becreative and effective in all the four skills.while we are rapidly moving on to the year2020, the urgency of such a change in theclassrooms is intensifying, since the nextcyber generation, generation z, will infiltratewriting classrooms all over the world toprovide new challenges to writing teachers. referencesanderson, c. 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(2006). understanding generation y. in the oberlin review. retrieved may 03, 2012 fromhttp://www.oberlin.edu/stupub/ocreview/2006/12/08/features/understanding_generation_y.htm. 97 wallace,s.(2009,december03).popcultureinth yayan suryana & deden iskandar the use of process-product hybrid approach to improve students’ writing skills 164 the use of process-product hybrid approach to improve students’ writing skills yayan suryana department of english education, faculty of teachers training and education, university of kuningan, indonesia e-mail: ysuryana2008@gmail.com deden iskandar department of english education, faculty of teachers training and education, university of kuningan, indonesia e-mail: iskandardeden23@gmail.com apa citation: suryana, y. & iskandar, d. (2015). the use of process-product hybrid approach to improve students’ writing skills. indonesian efl journal, 1(2), 164-172 received: 02-04-2015 accepted: 06-05-2015 published: 01-07-2015 abstract: this paper comes out of concerns about teaching english writing to vocational high school students in efl learners’ context. this study points out how the process-product hybrid approach affects students’ writing skills in solving some complex problems in order to generate deep comprehension of writing. in this study, quasi-experimental research was applied to measure the students’ writing improvement by collecting the data from instruments which covered pre-test, posttest, and questionnaire. the findings showed that students’ writing skill improved significantly. it also revealed that almost all of the students responded the statements positively and they believed that this approach can help them in improving their writing skill since it gives full comprehension of writing and serves more interesting teaching learning activities. therefore, this integrated approach has become the most recommended approach for teachers to improve students’ writing competences. keywords: process-product hybrid approach, teaching english writing, students’ writing skills. introduction over the years, it has seemed that writing has been seen as only a support system for learning grammar and vocabulary, rather than as a skill in its own right (harmer, 2004) moreover, in the efl countries, this skill is very rarely practiced by students in the learning processes since it is thought as the most complex one. because of its complexities, “it is harder to get such skill as the efl learners only get some limited exposure of english, as most of them tend to use english in formal situation not in their daily communication, and the exposure of english is also limited to a few hours per week” (kim & kim, 2005, p 2). consequently, the efl learners’ ability to write in english is still low. writing is considered as an extremely complex cognitive activity, as the writer is required to demonstrate control of a number of variables simultaneously. at the sentence level, this skill includes control of content, format, sentence structure, vocabulary, punctuation, spelling and letter formation; and beyond the sentence, the writer must be able to structure and integrate information into cohesive and coherent paragraphs and texts (white 1981, as cited in nunan, 1989 and tribble, 2003). in order to overcome such complexities of writing skill, this research was formulated to create students’ balance competences by using an integrated approach called “processproduct hybrid” (tangpermpoon, 2008, p. 7), as a result of the three combination of writing approaches proposed by harmer (2001); the process-based approach, product-based approach, and genre-based approach. this integrated approach offers the efl learners a model to generate deep comprehension of how to construct text grammatically in the product-based approach, know the linguistic skills on the steps of writing a text in the process-based approach, and understand the mailto:ysuryana2008@gmail.com mailto:iskandardeden23@gmail.com indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 165 writing purpose of their texts in the genrebased approach. by using the integrated approach, it is assumed that although the efl learners only get very limited exposure of english, they can practice this skill within the very limited time with the full understanding they gain through the process of learning by using processproduct hybrid approach. in this case, before teaching writing by using this integrated approach, the efl teachers should be aware that the three approaches included to this integrated approach have their own characteristics which cover their strengths and weaknesses (tangpermpoon, 2008), and their characteristics are elaborated below: a product-based approach is “a traditional approach, in which students are encouraged to mimic a model text, usually is presented and analyzed at an early stage” (hasan & akhand, 2010, p. 78). this traditional approach focused on the final written product (mourssi, 2013), so it has been called by several names: the controlledto-free approach, the text-based approach, and the guided composition. basically, writing in product-based approach has served to reinforce efl writing in terms of grammatical and syntactical forms. there are variety of activities in product-based writing which can raise students’ awareness in efl writing from the lower level of language proficiency to advance like english major students such as the use of model paragraphs, sentencecombining, and rhetorical pattern exercises. those activities are viewed as “the simple linear model of the writing process which proceeds systematically from prewriting to composing and to correcting” (tribble, 2003, p. 3). besides, teachers and learners believe that planning stage of writing in text-based approach begins and finishes in the primary period of composition. the pattern-product writing approach is widely accepted among teachers because they have found several advantages in it for the writing classroom, such as: a. learners learn how to write in english composition systematically from using the pattern-product techniques, namely the logic of english rhetorical patterns such as narration, description, and persuasion. b. learners also learn how to use vocabulary and sentence structures for each type of rhetorical pattern appropriately. c. product-based writing helps teachers to raise efl learners’ writing awareness, especially in grammatical structures. however, there are also disadvantages associated with the use of the product-based writing like what is stated below: a. writing with product-based approach gives little attention to audience and the writing purpose since learners and instructors tend to overemphasize on the importance of grammar, syntax, and mechanics. b. learners will have lack motivation in learning and high pressure in creating their writing tasks, as their instructors mostly focus on the accuracy of the language structures. in order to teach writing for students, teachers should keep the strengths of the product-based writing approach to be used as a part of the integrated approach because the rhetorical patterns in this approach will help learners who have a certain amount of background knowledge in writing to write the organizational conventions appropriately. besides, learning pattern-product will help to shape students’ writing competence and allow them to create their written product in academic settings effectively in terms of language use. process-based writing is viewed as the way writers actually work on their writing tasks from the beginning stage to the end of the written product. it is defined as the concept of an activity in which teachers encourage learners to see writing not as grammar exercises, but as the discovery of meaning and ideas. through the various stage of writing processes, “students are trained to construct process-oriented writing that will affect their performance directly since it is a kind of student-centered approach” (miri, 2014, p. 164). to have an effective performance, teachers need to “systematically teach students problem yayan suryana & deden iskandar the use of process-product hybrid approach to improve students’ writing skills 166 solving skills connected with the writing process that will enable them to realize specific goals at each stage of the composing process” (richards & renandya, 2002, p. 316). during the writing process, teachers can enable learners to explore their thoughts and develop their own writing by using the fivestep writing process: a. prewriting teachers will provide a writing task and help students to generate vocabulary and ideas by applying a number of strategies in class namely brainstorming, clustering, and discussion, without concern for correctness or appropriateness in the first stage of writing. b. first draft composing learners will use vocabulary and ideas which they have got from the previous stage to express what they want to convey in their writing. c. feedback in this writing stage, learners will receive comments from real audiences which can be a writing teacher or their peers and move on to new ideas in another draft. this interaction in groups can be a productive strategy in writing (mourssi, 2013: 739). d. second draft writing based on the comment of teachers and peers, learners will modify their previous draft by revising, adding, and rearranging ideas. e. proofreading in the final stage, students will not only discover new ideas and language forms to express their ideas in writing but also focus on the appropriate use of vocabulary, layout, grammar, and mechanics. writing in the process approach can thus be seen as a dynamic and unpredictable process (tribble, 2003), while writers try to reformulate their ideas and approximate the meaning of what they want to express in their work. this approach is well-known tool for teachers to teach efl writing since they have a number of benefits, for instance: a. learners are able to learn how to compose writing in english with little or no when process-based writing is compared to other writing approaches. b. learners can improve their writing step by step since instructors will guide them through the whole process of their writing tasks by giving them feedback and enough time and opportunity through peer and teacher review to develop a sense of audience (boughey, 1997, p. 131), which allows them not only to reflect upon their previous writing but also to consider the possible existence of other viewpoints. in spite of being widely used in efl composition, process-based writing still has some limitations like what are stated below: a. learners have to spend quite a long time to complete one particular piece of writing in the classroom. b. badger and white (2000, p. 157) also point out that “learners have no clear understanding about the characteristics of writing and are provided insufficient linguistic input to write in l2 successfully in a certain text type”. in order to alleviate the weaknesses in the integrated approach, the typical process writing model should be modified in the following ways: a. teachers should provide learners with some examples of the text type that they have to write so as to allow them to have a clear understanding about the aim and the framework of a particular writing type (by involving productbased approach). b. teachers should not spend too much time on one piece of writing in the class because this may decrease students’ learning motivation and impede them from learning other types of writing. they should train students to develop a concept of audience by taking turns giving comment on their classmates’ writing. genre-based approach considers writing as a social and cultural practice. the purpose of this writing involves the context where the writing occurs, and the conventions of the indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 167 target discourse community. in this sense, “relevant genre knowledge needs to be taught explicitly in the language classroom” (hasan & akhand, 2010, p. 81). the genre-based approach can be called differently such as the “english for academic purposes approach” or the “english for specific purposes approach”, they stress the importance of various types of writing which are tied closely to social purposes (kim & kim, 2005, p. 5). in accordance with badger and white (2000, p 155), “writing in the genre-based approach is regarded as an extension of the product-oriented approach since learners have an opportunity to study a wide variety of writing patterns”, for instance, the business letter, the academic report, and the research paper. this approach argues that “students can only produce a composition to be successfully accepted by a particular english-language discourse community once they take context of a text into account into their own writing papers” (tuan, 2011, p. 1472). like other writing approaches, the genrebased approach is increasingly used in the efl writing classroom due to having certain strengths, such as: a. the focus of writing in this approach aims to integrate the knowledge of a particular genre and its communicative purpose, these help learners to produce their written products to communicate to others in the same discourse community successfully. b. by learning specific genre construction, it can be considered as a way to help learners come up with appropriate actual writing in their real life outside the classroom. c. genre-based approach also increases learners’ awareness of such writing conventions as organization, arrangement, form, and genre. d. through the composing process, genrebased writing reflects a particular purpose of a social situation and allows students to acquire writing skills consciously by imitation and analysis of each writing genre (badger & white, 2000, p. 156). in contrast with the advantages of using genre-based approach above, there are also some weaknesses of this approach such as follows: a. learners may not have enough knowledge of appropriate language or vocabulary to express what they intend to communicate to a specific audience. b. as badger and white (2000, p. 157) point out, is that “the genre-based approach undervalues the writing skills which learners need to produce a written product and ignores the writing abilities learners have in other areas”. the strengths and weaknesses of each writing approach described above show that the three approaches are complemented one another. therefore, teachers should use the combination of strengths from genre, product, and process approaches as a model to teach and improve students’ writing skills. to integrate each approach in the writing class, tangpermpoon (2008, p. 7) points out that teacher may follow the following steps, (1) teachers need to provide a clear model of the text; (2) teachers should use the techniques of generating ideas; (3) students are allowed to work in groups or pairs and (4) students use some comments from their groups or pairs to their writing. by applying those steps above, it can be concluded that learning through the integrated approach makes students have less difficulty in efl writing since they have enough input to create their writing tasks. therefore, using the integrated approach in the classroom has the main purpose of enabling learners to transfer the skills they have gained from each approach naturally from one mode to another and thus to produce their writing tasks efficiently. method to accomplish the objectives of this study, a quasi-experimental research was applied to test the objective theories by examining the relationship among variables. these variables, in turn, can be measured, typically on instruments, so that numbered of data can be analyzed by using statistical procedures. this research design is a form of experimental research in which individuals are not randomly assigned to groups (cresswell, 2012). a quasi-experimental yayan suryana & deden iskandar the use of process-product hybrid approach to improve students’ writing skills 168 design is considered appropriate since this study also attempts to investigate how the process-product hybrid approach influences students’ writing skills. this quasi-experimental study was conducted at one of the vocational high school in kuningan regency of west java province. there were 555 students of the eleventh grade acted as the population of this study, and 80 students were chosen as the sample of this study based on “the purposive sampling technique in which they were chosen based on the researcher’s prior information to provide the intended data” (fraenkel et al, 2012, p. 100). the 80 students were divided into two classes; 40 students were included to the experimental group, and the rest 40 students to the control group. the instruments used in this study involved pre-test, treatment, post-test, and questionnaire. in collecting the data, pre-test was employed to both groups as the first step of the study. it purposed to obtain the data of the students’ writing knowledge and to find out that students from both groups had the same capability of english before they received the treatment. then, the second instrument, treatment was carried out to the experimental group to know the differences of students’ improvement between two groups, so that later the writer can conclude whether the treatment was effectively improve students’ writing skill or not. third, this study employed post-test at the end of the study to measure the improvement of students’ writing skills after receiving the treatment. it was employed in both groups: experimental and control group which was intended to find out the differences between students’ score of both groups by using the assessment criteria of writing that covers content, organization, discourse, syntax, vocabulary, and mechanics (brown, 2000, p. 357). in this study, questionnaire was committed to measure the students’ attitude toward the given treatment. the type of questionnaire used in this study was adapted from the tri-componential viewpoint of attitudes proposed by oskamp & schultz (2005) which covers affective, behavioral, and cognitive components of attitudes. those three components were measured by using likert scale that asked individuals to respond to a series of statements of preference (fraenkel & wallen, 2009). in analyzing the data, t-test was used as the main test to measure the students’ improvement. before doing the t-test, there were several tests done either in pre-test or post-test which covered normality distribution, homogeneity of variance, and independent t-test. after those tests were administered, the dependent t-test was done in the end of the data analysis to compare the mean score from pre-test and post-test of the experimental group. then, the result of students’ improvement was confirmed by questionnaire in order to know the students’ attitude towards the administered treatment. results and discussion tests of normality distribution and homogeneity of variance on pre-test to test the normality distribution and the homogeneity of variance on pre-test, the kolmogorov-smirnov and levene statistic were used. the null hypotheses of these tests are that the distribution of the groups’ mean score is normal and the numbers of data collected from pre-test are homogenous. therefore, the probability of normality distribution and homogeneity of variance test must be more than the level of significance (p > 0.05). the results are depicted in the following tables: table 1 tests of normality on pre-test kolmogorov-smirnova statistic df sig. preex .119 40 .160 precon .117 40 .181 indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 169 table 1 tests of normality on pre-test kolmogorov-smirnova statistic df sig. preex .119 40 .160 precon .117 40 .181 based on the table 1 above, it shows that the pre-test result of the two groups are normally distributed, since the significance value of both groups are higher than the level of significance (0.160 > 0.05) and (0.181 > 0.05). the result of homogeneity of variance test in table 2 also shows the same thing with the significance value 0.450 which indicates the data variances of both groups are homogenous and t-test can be done in analyzing the data in this study. independent t-test on pre-test the independent t-test was aimed to investigate the significance difference of the data between experiment and control groups before administering the treatment. the null hypothesis used in this study is that there is no significance difference of means between two groups on pre-test. here is the result of the independent t-test on pre-test: table 3 group statistics on pre-test group n mean std. deviation std. error mean pre-test score preex 40 60.55 9.481 1.499 precon 40 60.40 10.375 1.640 table 4 independent t-test on pre-test levene's test for equality of variances t-test for equality of means 95% confidence interval of the difference f sig. t df sig. (2tailed) mean difference std. error difference lower upper pre-test score equal variances assumed .575 .450 .068 78 .946 .150 2.222 -4.274 4.574 equal variances not assumed .068 77.376 .946 .150 2.222 -4.275 4.575 table 2 test of homogeneity of variance on pre-test levene statistic df1 df2 sig. pre-test score based on mean .575 1 78 .450 based on median .576 1 78 .450 based on median and with adjusted df .576 1 77.969 .450 based on trimmed mean .596 1 78 .442 yayan suryana & deden iskandar the use of process-product hybrid approach to improve students’ writing skills 170 by seeing the data in table 4, it shows that the significance value of experimental and control group is 0.946, which means that it is higher than 0.05 (0.946 > 0,05) and the null hypothesis is accepted to prove that there is no significant difference between the data of the two groups. it can also be seen on table 3 that the mean score of both groups are not significantly different; the experimental group is 60.55 and the control group is 60.40. based on all of the data collected from pre-test which covers normality distribution, homogeneity of variance, and independent ttest, it can be concluded that the students’ writing skill was the same before being given the treatment. therefore, the two classes were utilized as the sample. tests of normality distribution and homogeneity of variance on post-test it is the same as what had been done on the pre-test; the normality distribution and homogeneity of variance test were done as the main requirements to conduct t-test in this study. and the results of both tests are elaborated in the following tables: table 5 tests of normality on post-test kolmogorov-smirnova statistic df sig. postex .091 40 .200* postcon .116 40 .188 table 6 test of homogeneity of variance on post-test levene statistic df1 df2 sig. post-test score based on mean .188 1 78 .665 based on median .087 1 78 .769 based on median and with adjusted df .087 1 73.292 .769 based on trimmed mean .203 1 78 .654 table 5 shows that the significance value on post-test of the experimental and control group are higher than the level of significance (0.200 > 0.05) and (0.188 > 0.05). likewise, table 6 shows that the significance value of the homogeneity of variance test is 0.665 higher than 0.05. those results mean that the mean score of the two groups are normally distributed, and the data variances of the experimental and control groups on post-test are homogenous, so the null hypothesis is accepted and t-test can be done. independent t-test on post-test the independent t-test on post-test was aimed to investigate the significant different of the data collected from experimental and control group after administering the treatment. the null hypothesis of this t-test is that there is no significant difference of means between the two groups. the result of this test is depicted in the following tables: table 7 group statistics on post-test group n mean std. deviation std. error mean score postex 40 75.63 6.582 1.041 postcon 40 67.85 7.273 1.150 indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 171 table 8 independent t-test on post-test levene's test for equality of variances t-test for equality of means 95% confidence interval of the difference f sig. t df sig. (2tailed) mean difference std. error difference lower upper score equal variances assumed .188 .665 5.013 78 .000 7.775 1.551 4.687 10.863 equal variances not assumed 5.013 77.234 .000 7.775 1.551 4.687 10.863 the data on table 8 shows that the score of both experimental and control groups indicate the significance value 0.000 which is lower than the level of significance 0.05 (0.000 < 0.005). therefore, the null hypothesis is rejected. it means that there is significance difference of data between the two groups. it can also be seen on table 7 that the mean score of both groups are significantly different; the experimental group is 75.63 and the control group is 67.85. dependent t-test of the experimental group the dependent t-test was used to know the significant differences of the experimental group mean score before and after having the treatment. the null hypothesis of this test is that there is no significant difference between the pre-test and post-test mean score of the experimental group. look at the following tables which show the result of this test. table 9 paired samples statistics of the experimental class mean n std. deviation std. error mean pair 1 preex 60.55 40 9.481 1.499 postex 75.63 40 6.582 1.041 table 10 paired samples test of the experimental class paired differences t df sig. (2-tailed) mean std. deviation std. error mean 95% confidence interval of the difference lower upper pair 1 preex postex -15.075 9.908 1.567 -18.244 -11.906 -9.623 39 .000 by seeing the data on table 9, the data shows that students’ mean score increased after having treatment. it can be seen that the pre-test mean score of the experimental class is 60.55 and the post-test mean score increased up to 75.63. the significance value on table 10 also supported the increasing of the experimental mean score during the study by resulting 0.000 lower than the significance level 0.05. based on such results, it is concluded that the null hypothesis is rejected which means that there is significant difference between the pre-test and post-test mean score of the experimental class, yayan suryana & deden iskandar the use of process-product hybrid approach to improve students’ writing skills 172 indicating that the process-product hybrid approach can be an effective approach to improve students’ writing skill. to confirm the students’ improvement in writing skill, this study was supported by the result of students’ attitude test in terms of questionnaire and the result was stated below: 1. affective aspect 87.5% of the students like writing, 100% agree that it’s hard to get good score in writing and 100% like writing by using process-product hybrid approach. 2. behavioral aspect most of the students agree that they are more enthusiastic and easier to get good score in learning writing comprehension by using this integrated approach resulting 97.5%, and 100% agree that it can serve them the more interesting learning activities which affect their achievement in writing. 3. cognitive aspect 97.5% of the students agree that this approach can give them the full comprehension and improve their skill in writing. conclusion based on the results and discussion presented in the previous section, this study proved that the use of process-product hybrid approach in students’ writing activities has a significant influence in improving students writing skills. this proof is supported by the data collected from instruments which resulting total mean score of the experimental group pre-test 60.55 improve to 75.63. it means that the processproduct hybrid can be an effective approach to improve students’ writing skills. besides proving the result by comparing the means of pre-test and post-test, the students’ attitude was also measured in questionnaire to confirm the result of this research. the result of the questionnaire reveals that almost all of the students give positive responses to the use of processproduct hybrid approach in their writing activities. such result indicates that this approach has a strong effect in improving students’ writing skills, as they agree that it can raise the students’ interest in learning and give the full comprehension of their writing skills. references badger, r. and white, g. (2000). a process genre approach to teaching writing. elt journal 54(2). 153-160. boughey, c. (1997). learning to write by writing to learn. elt journal, 51(2), 126-134. brown, h. d. (2000). teaching by principles: an interactive approach to language pedagogy (2nd ed.). california: longman. cresswell, j. w. (2012). educational research (4th ed.). boston: pearson. fraenkel, j. r., & wallen, n. e. (2009). how to design and evaluate research in education (7th ed.). new york: mcgraw-hill higher education. fraenkel, j.r., wallen, n.e., & hyun, h. h. (2012). how to design and evaluate research in education (8th ed.). new york: mcgraw-hill higher education. harmer, j. (2001). the practice of english language teaching (3rd ed.). essex: longman. harmer, j. (2004). how to teach writing. essex: longman. hasan, k. md. & akhand, m. m. (2010). approaches to writing in efl/esl context: balancing product and process in writing class at tertiary level. journal of nelta 15(1), 77-88. kim, y. & kim, j. (2005). teaching korean university writing class: balancing the process and the genre approach. asian efl journal 7(2) 1-15. miri, t. (2014). toward finding an approach for improving rhetorical organization of efl learners’ argumentative writing. international journal of applied linguistics & english literature 3(3), 164-170. mourssi, a. (2013). theoretical and practical linguistic shifting from product/guided writing to process writing and recently to the innovated writing process approach in teaching writing for second/foreign language learners. international journal of academic research in business and social sciences, 3(5), 731-751. nunan, d. (1989). designing tasks for the communicative classroom. cambridge: cambridge university press. oskamp, s., & schultz, p. w. (2005). attitudes and opinions. new jersey: lawrence erlbaum associates. richards, j. c. & renandya, w. a. (2002). methodology in language teaching: an anthology of current practice. cambridge: cambridge university press. tangpermpoon, t. (2008). integrated approaches to improve students writing skills for english major students. abac journal 28(2), 1-9. tribble, c. (2003). teaching writing. phd manuscript. 136 tuan, l. t. (2011). teaching writing through genrebased approach. journal of theory and practice in language studies 1(11), 1471-1478. white, r. (1981). approaches to writing guidelines. london: longman publishers. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 9, issue 1, january 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 43 exploring efl students’ perceptions of the use of podcasts/ted talks in extensive listening class muhammad handi gunawan english education study program, universitas pendidikan indonesia, bandung, indonesia email: handi_gunawan@upi.edu indra cipta putra mandiri english education study program, universitas pendidikan indonesia, bandung, indonesia email: indra18@upi.edu didi suherdi english education study program, universitas pendidikan indonesia, bandung, indonesia email: suherdi_d@upi.edu eisha sabila dieni hanifa english education study program, universitas pendidikan indonesia, bandung, indonesia email: eishasabila2@upi.edu aninda putri gunawan english education study program, universitas pendidikan indonesia, bandung, indonesia email: anindapegee@upi.edu apa citation: gunawan, m. h., mandiri, i. c. p., suherdi, d., hanifa, e. s. d., & gunawan, a. p. (2023). exploring efl students’ perceptions of the use of podcasts/ted talks in extensive listening class. indonesian efl journal, 9(1), 43-52. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v9i1.7486. received: 09-09-2022 accepted: 27-11-2022 published: 30-01-2023 introduction extensive listening can be described as “... all types of listening activities that allow learners to receive a lot of comprehensible and enjoyable listening input.” (ivone & renandya, 2019). under the context of english language teaching, the concept of extensive listening is a comparatively new concept in comparison to its “brother” concept, extensive reading. it is worthwhile to note that listening to itself, as a language skill, receives relatively smaller teaching and research attention, in comparison with other prevalent language skills (burns & siegel, 2018). the concept of extensive listening itself quite possibly started its development from the pre-existing concept of extensive reading (er). there is also a possibility that it is also developed from the novel concept of l1 listening (chang, 2018). regardless of its origin, it is generally agreed that extensive listening is beneficial to the increase of listening comprehension of its practitioners, as it allows them to adjust their listening activities to their preferred type of text, and their specific comprehension needs (ivone & renandya, 2019). with the above concepts taken into account, it can easily be concluded that extensive listening abstract: podcasts and ted talks are currently the most widely used resources to facilitate extensive listening activities. students can benefit greatly from the scaffolding provided by podcasts/ted talks as they practise extensive listening. in light of the demographics of indonesian efl students, this article aims to perform a qualitative analysis of efl students' perceptions on the usage of podcasts/ted talks as resources for their extensive listening activities. the primary information of the analysis comes from a post-course reflection questionnaire that was given out. the experiences that the students had during the course are the main focus of this reflective questionnaire. five of the 23 students were picked for an interview to further discuss their questionnaire responses. the findings of the study revealed that students have largely positive views of using podcasts/ted talks inside and outside the classroom. the students perceived that listening to podcasts/ted talks gives them freedom of choosing the topics, flexibility in strengthening their listening skills, and motivation to learn more about listening. keywords: extensive listening; podcast; ted talks mailto:indra18@upi.edu mailto:suherdi_d@upi.edu mailto:eishasabila2@upi.edu mailto:anindapegee@upi.edu muhammad handi gunawan, indra cipta putra mandiri, didi suherdi, eisha sabila dieni hanifa, & aninda putri gunawan exploring efl students’ perceptions of the use of podcasts/ted talks in extensive listening class 44 activities involve the act of listening to large amounts of motivating and engaging materials which are linguistically appropriate over a period of time, in which they listen to materials with a reasonable speed for general understanding (renandya & jacobs, 2016). with this, we can determine that in general, extensive listening is an engaging listening activity where attaining a general understanding of what is being spoken serves as the main emphasis and/or focus of the activity. renandya and farrell (2011) had previously argued that extensive listening is an oral version of the pre-existing concept of extensive reading. with that taken into account, extensive listening also complies with the predetermined principles of extensive reading as dictated by day and bamford (2002), specifically, el complies with the following principles: table 1. extensive listening principles no principle elaboration 1 extensive listening means that there needs to be plentiful availability of listening materials that covers a wide range of topics. language learners and el practitioners should have access to a multitude of listening materials with varying topics outside of the classroom. this can be through the means of the internet (through podcasts and youtube, for example). 2 extensive listening should allow its practitioners to choose their preferred audio/ material to be listened to. language learners and el practitioners should have the autonomy to freely choose their material(s) at their own convenience and/or based on their specific listening needs. 3 extensive listening’s main purposes should be centred around: listening for pleasure, listening for information, and listening for general understanding. language learners and practitioners of extensive listening place a much larger emphasis on inferring meaning based on the presented context. this means that practitioners need to engage with complete spoken texts. 4 extensive listening is a meaning-making activity. language learners and extensive listening practitioners aim their focus on understanding the gist or discourse of materials they are listening to. this means that the practitioners construe meaning from a certain perspective. among the most readily available, and numerous extensive listening resources that are on the internet are videos, sourced from various video hosting sites like youtube, dailymotion, and others. with the nature of these videos and resources, these materials can be considered authentic e-learning resources (kobayashi, 2020). watching authentic english videos like these can be considered one of the ways students can practise their listening skills outside of the classroom (metruk, 2018). since these videos are able to be perceived as enjoyable listening input, many previous researchers had also suggested the implementation of these videos for varying effects. saputra (2018) explores the possibility of using these talks to promote autonomy in learning. in support of that, kobayashi (2020) classifies ted talk videos as authentic materials to foster learning autonomy. ted talks cover a wide array of topics, resulting in intriguing finds for students (yue & song, 2020), which means that it can align itself as needed to a course’s needs. in support of this, wingrove (2017) stated that due to ted talks’ variation of available and accessible topics, it is applicable in various ranges of academic listening applications (liu & chen, 2019; wingrove, 2017). in addition to the previous points, with ted talks serving as visual aids in the extensive listening activity, the practitioners' listening comprehension may also be helped as they are assisted with visual aids in the activity (lee et al., 2015). several benefits (thanks to the aforementioned point) naturally birth positive boons, including (but not limited to): a way of implementing a comprehensive approach to learning, and significantly increasing learner’s motivation to learn a foreign language (zhdanov & baklanov, 2020). a previous study conducted by saputra and fatimah (2018) argued that extensive listening activities allow the students to receive abundant comprehensible and enjoyable input (sourced from sources like youtube, ted, etc). with the aforementioned arguments and the rising popularity of videos as learning tools, the use of videos may be considered one of the best ways to increase english listening comprehension. the role of a teacher here is to merely act as a motivator and a course programmer, encouraging the students to listen extensively to obtain valuable experiences and meaningful insight (saputra & fatimah, 2018). listening, possibly due to its nature of receiving relatively smaller teaching or research attention, in comparison with its peers, is considered to be a particularly difficult skill to acquire for language learners (nawir, 2020). this is because, in listening, extra attention and concentration are deemed crucial points for comprehending the utterances of the other speaker(s) (zulfikar et al., 2020). in support of the previous idea, renandya and farrell (2011) illustrated four reasons why listening is perceived to be a difficult skill to be nurtured by language learners: (1) speech is fast, as the normal speech rate of those who have english as their first language could be perceived as being too fast by beginner language learners, even more indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 9, issue 1, january 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 45 so by non-native speakers of english. this means that if one of the speakers speaks too fast, comprehension problems may appear, especially for those who are not native speakers of the english language, or those who are not used to being exposed to spoken english (saraswaty, 2018). (2) speech is variable, as when words are woven into a speech, they will oftentimes undergo (up to some extent, radical) phonological changes (e.g. modification, reduction, et cetera). third, word boundaries tend to get blurry, as in some words could seemingly “blend” with other words in certain dialects or speech rates. lastly, speech is by nature processed in real-time, meaning that unlike reading something, there is little to no chance to “re-read” what one may have missed, although the option of asking the interlocutor to repeat the sentence is viable. previous studies conducted under listening in academic contexts mainly focused on exploring difficulties that learners encounter in listening activities. a study conducted by nushi and orouji (2020) revealed that for learners, perceiving phonological processes such as assimilation, deletion, or addition of sounds poses a significant difficulty for their listening. in addition to that, it was also found that attempting to comprehend considerably lengthy and/or comparatively complex materials also serves as a difficulty. another research was also conducted by nadhira and warni (2021), providing more insight into the difficulties that learners face. these include the presence of unfamiliar words in the material, the speaker’s rate of speech and accent, and general technicalities around the use of the material. another study by rakhman et al. (2019) mirrors the results of the previously-mentioned study, specifically the difficulty of dealing with the speech rate of the speakers. additional difficulties were also revealed, namely difficulties related to the inadequate practice of listening outside the classroom, and difficulties in recalling spoken information. under the context of extensive listening studies, in her efl college class, takaesu (2013) looked into the usage of ted lectures as el resources. she paid close attention to how these materials affected her pupils' listening abilities and lower-proficiency students' listening techniques. students claimed that the ted-mediated lectures improved their listening comprehension, increased their motivation, and helped them get acclimated to listening to spoken english with varied accents, according to the qualitative data from two surveys and the students' journal entries. with the aforementioned in mind, it can clearly be seen that the big focus in listening– and extensive listening studies are centred around the challenges and difficulties present in the activity, while extensive listening studies focus on resources like ted, which are by nature video-assisted. in that regard, this paper aims to fill the present gap and means to uncover the opinions of students undergoing extensive listening activities through the use of online podcasts/ted talks. generally speaking, podcasts can be broadly defined as digital audio files that can be utilised as pedagogical tools (kukulska-hulme & shield, 2008). from this, it can be inferred that podcasts can serve as an educational resource, specifically as a means of nurturing listening skills (and in this context, as a resource for extensive listening). according to indahsari (2020), podcasts, as learning materials, can be divided into two categories. the first is authentic content from native speakers which is originally not intended for learning. however, in extensive learning, since students are encouraged to find various resources to nurture their listening comprehension, authentic contents from native speakers are highly encouraged. on top of that, using materials with real native speakers, like podcasts, is not considered to be a teaching strategy, but it does offer a real linguistic environment with real native speakers who are proficient in their original tongue. the second type of podcast is a podcast that is specifically designed for learning. for this podcast category, the materials are centred on how to fulfil the students’ knowledge. podcasts as learning materials are a good choice, since in terms of accessibility, podcasts are widely available online on varying platforms and service providers such as youtube, itunes, spotify, and google podcasts. podcasts are widely used in today’s day and age as a means of communication and information, and by listening to them, one can easily discover the information that he/she is looking for (insani, 2021). aside from the accessibility, podcasts in learning offer flexibility. time, place, and pacing have been described by the podcasting literature as the aspects where this flexibility can be realised (salmon and nie, 2008). in other words, assuming students own personal mobile devices like mobile phones and personal media players, learners can access the podcasts wherever they are. the easy access offered by podcasts to scaffold students’ learning can also be one of the learning aspects so that extensive listening can be more enjoyable for the students. alm (2013) investigated the use of podcasts for el practice using the metacognitive framework muhammad handi gunawan, indra cipta putra mandiri, didi suherdi, eisha sabila dieni hanifa, & aninda putri gunawan exploring efl students’ perceptions of the use of podcasts/ted talks in extensive listening class 46 developed by vandergrift and goh (2012). 28 intermediate german students participated in alm's study, listening to self-selected podcasts over the course of one semester. study findings demonstrate that the blogging activity scaffolded language learners to sustain a variety of el practices by drawing on data from focus group interviews, surveys, podcast reviews, and personal blogs (which track students' podcast use). individual listening goals and personal el practices may be matched accordingly with the materials chosen by the participants, who in turn felt empowered to make their own choices. their listening skills were therefore improved by the autonomy of the listening activity. method this paper intends to conduct a qualitative analysis of efl students’ perspectives on the use of podcasts/ted talks as resources for their extensive listening activities, under the demography of indonesian efl students. in order to do so, this study enlists first-semester english education department students of a public state university located in indonesia, under the class of listening for general communication 1 as its participants. the main data is sourced from a reflection questionnaire, distributed post-course. this reflective questionnaire is centred around the students’ experiences throughout the course. although the reflective questionnaire is by nature a means of unveiling the students’ experiences, questions that inquire about their perspective and opinion towards the usage of podcasts and ted talks as extensive listening materials were present. with this in mind, only the questions under the context of inquiring about the students’ perspectives on using podcasts/ted talks as extensive listening material are taken into account as the data for this study. specifically, the question that is the focus of this study is “what is your opinion on the use of podcasts/ted talks in learning english?” these questions are further divided into two sub-categories, each for the students’ opinion on the use of podcasts/ted talks in learning english inside and outside of the classroom, respectively. the usage of this reflective questionnaire is similar to the previous research by alm (2013), which investigates the use of podcasts for out-of-class listening practice. however, to differentiate this study from its predecessors– and to expand on it, this study would also investigate the use of podcasts/ted talks as a material for use inside of the classroom. it should also be noted that the questionnaire distributed is in bahasa indonesia, and as a result, all transcripts from the questionnaire will be translated into english, were they chosen to be included as examples in this paper. as previously mentioned, this study enlists first-semester english education department students of a public state university located in indonesia, under the class of listening for general communication 1 as its participants, all 23 students of the selected class are participating in the study. these 23 students consist of 7 male and 16 female students. in addition to that, 5 out of the 23 participants are picked for an additional interview session. this interview session was undergone as a means of clarification and to provide additional insights in regard to the aforementioned question. the five students were picked as their responses are deemed rather unclear, hence needing further elaboration and clarification on certain points. the interview sessions enlisted a semi-structured style of interview, where a set of predetermined questions were prepared in advance, but the possibility of formulating more questions should it be deemed necessary remains open. as with the nature of the questionnaires mentioned previously, the interview also uses bahasa indonesia, and therefore the original text and excerpts that will be provided in the article will be translated into the english version. the time allotted to each individual interview with each participant is roughly 30 minutes, and the questions that the interview is centred around are: (1) what is your opinion on the use of podcasts/ted talks in learning english inside the classroom? and (2) what is your opinion on the use of podcasts/ted talks in learning english outside of the classroom? it is worth noting that in the aforementioned class and course, the practice of both intensive and extensive listening is combined. this is because, in the department of english education at the aforementioned university, there are no standalone classes that focus solely on extensive listening. listening courses in the department rely heavily on the implementation of intensive listening, where the learning materials used in the course are by nature, predetermined. with that in mind, the extensive listening part comes in the form of a weekly assignment where the students are assigned to listen to various extensive listening materials such as podcasts and ted talks. in addition to undergoing said extensive listening activity, the students were also required to record their extensive listening activities through the use of listening journals, adapted from takaesu (2013). after writing down their extensive listening indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 9, issue 1, january 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 47 activity in their weekly listening journals, they would then be given time to discuss their weekly extensive listening journals with their classmates, and this is done after they are finished with the intensive listening part of the class. the time allotted for each extensive listening journal discussion session in the class is roughly 40 minutes. it can be inferred from the preceding elaborations that this study is heavily centred around the usage of online resources. this was done as the study was conducted during the situation when the covid-19 pandemic is ravaging the world. the reflective questionnaires (which serve as the main data to be analysed in the study) are gathered in a google drive folder, specific to the class in question. the weekly listening journals are also kept on track through the use of google sites, where each individual student/participant of the study is free to customise the structure and layout of their respective google sites. in addition to that, the semi-structured interviews that are undertaken by the aforementioned five participants are carried out through the use of the zoom application. this was, of course, done in conjunction with the university’s policy of ert (emergency remote teaching), which means that the utilisation of social media and online resources as an alternative method of conducting the teaching and learning process under these circumstances (kusuma, 2022). the analysis of the data involves a practice of coding similar to the one used in a study by widodo & rozak (2016), as a means of unveiling/generating codes alongside the emergent themes found throughout the data. this coding categorised all the data of the study into themespecific codes or patterns from which the data were extracted. as an example of the practice, the following data: “the use of podcasts in the english learning process provides an interesting alternative learning method” were grouped into a theme called “podcasts are an interesting tool to be used inside a listening classroom”. this was decided due to the presence of the lexical wording of “an interesting alternative learning method.” the identification and analysis of the lexical wording is the strategy used in the analysis to identify emergent themes throughout the data of the study. results and discussion an analysis of the gathered data from the distributed questionnaire revealed that the use of podcasts as a tool for extensive listening is viewed by students in a largely positive manner. participants argued that the use of podcasts increases their engagement in class, trains their ability in listening to native speech, and provides a new method of undergoing a listening class. recurring themes found in the students’ responses will be further elaborated below, followed by their sample excerpts. the results will mainly be divided into two sections, with one focusing on the general overview of the use of podcasts/ted talks inside the classroom, and the other focusing on the use of podcasts/ted talks outside of the classroom. considerations to be taken into account are: (1) the use of podcasts/ted talks in the classroom is through the use of the zoom meeting platform, and (2) technical difficulties under the context of network and/or signal problems will be discussed separately from the outlooks of the activities under either context, as the focus of this study is to uncover the opinions of students undergoing extensive listening activities. furthermore, recurring themes in students’ opinions on the use of podcasts/ted talks both inside and outside of the classroom will also be mentioned. the use of podcasts/ted talks inside the classroom the use of podcasts/ted talks inside the classroom receives a largely positive opinion from the students, with twenty out of the twenty-three students (approximately 87% of the study’s participants) finding its usage inside the classroom to overall provide them with a positive experience. common themes that are found in the participants’ positive responses are: (1) podcasts/ted talks are an interesting tool to be used inside a listening classroom, (2) listening to podcasts/ted talks improves their listening, and (3) it increases the lesson and assignment’s efficiency. excerpts from the questionnaire as samples for the aforementioned themes are provided below: podcasts/ted talks are an interesting tool to be used inside a listening classroom “the use of podcasts/ted talks in the english learning process provides an interesting alternative learning method because after listening to the discussion in a podcast we can express our understanding directly.” “of course, podcasts/ted talks for learning english make things interesting. in classroom learning, students can exchange opinions about topics that have been listened to through podcasts.” muhammad handi gunawan, indra cipta putra mandiri, didi suherdi, eisha sabila dieni hanifa, & aninda putri gunawan exploring efl students’ perceptions of the use of podcasts/ted talks in extensive listening class 48 “i think it's very helpful because the topics discussed in a podcast/ted talks are always informative, insightful, and are interesting to be discussed in class.” from the voices of students mentioned above, it can be summarised that students perceived that the use of podcasts in extensive listening classrooms provide an interesting alternative learning method as it offers a sense of freedom for students through the learning activity, starting from freedom to express themselves and their whole understanding directly towards certain topics they are discussing which are informative and insightful until exchange their reactions of the topics by giving opinions one by one. these points of view are in line with some studies, which concluded that podcasts trigger students’ interests (davydenko, 2021; harahap, 2020; and rachmaniputri et al., 2021), as well as enhance their motivation in listening activities due to its various and interesting topics (suzani, 2020; yoestara & putri, 2019). listening to podcasts improves their listening “it can improve listening comprehension, especially for the ielts and toefl tests because podcasts/ted talks make us used to listening to native speakers speak so they don't feel nervous during the test.” “i am comfortable using podcasts/ted talks because they are effective and can have a significant positive impact on improving listening skills.” “i think using podcasts/ted talks in the classroom is a great way of learning, also being able to make us good listeners (no matter what accent is used).” according to the findings, podcasts/ted talks have a major effect on students' listening comprehension. the positive responses from students have demonstrated the effectiveness of podcasts as a medium for improving students' listening comprehension. this fact clearly indicates that extensive listening to english podcasts has a significant impact on students' listening comprehension. this finding backs up previous research that found that students who received instruction via podcast achieved higher levels of listening comprehension than those who were not. (fardavoodi & bakhtiarvand, 2020; widodo & gunawan, 2019). since listening in efl/esl context was viewed as ‘passive’ skills to acknowledge and the materials for teaching listening skills seemed to be neglected in language teaching (renandya & widodo, 2016; robert & meenakshi, 2022), this technology can be an alternative media to develop students’ fluency in listening, introduce how to pronounce words, and enrich students’ vocabularies. this is also previously stated by jyoti (2020), listening is a complex, active process in which the listener must discriminate between sounds and understand vocabulary and grammatical structures. by incorporating podcasts/ted talks in teaching listening, students develop their proficiency in listening and english as general. therefore, podcasts can be used as main sources or supplementary tools as suggested by previous research (abdulrahman et al., 2018; ghoorchaei et al., 2021; indasari, 2020). podcasts enhance the efficiency of lessons and assignments “listening to podcasts/ted talks according to the given course materials increases efficiency in terms of assignments and allows for the creativity of students.” “for learning in the classroom, using podcasts/ted talks increases the efficiency in terms of assignments being given.” “using podcasts/ted talks in the classroom is very effective. in addition to training the focus in one-way communications, podcasts/ted talks have great potential to be a learning tool.” from the answers above, students acknowledged podcasts as learning media which helped them to enhance the efficiency of lessons and assignments in their listening classroom. this finding indicates that podcasting can be an effective study tool which facilitates the completion and evaluation of assignments in foreign language classes (abdous et al., 2009; panagiotidis, 2021). then, relating students’ perception with their experiences in using podcasts/ted talks, most of them agreed that podcasts are perfect and potential tools due to their effectiveness in training the students’ focus in oneway communications. using podcasts as a medium for learning opens up new opportunities in the language learning context: a research from najmi and navaee-lavasani (2021) showed that audio content facilitates memory retention three times as effectively as a text. the auditory dimension of podcasting, e.g., intonation or vocal expression, conveys a message directly to the listener’s heart and brain (clevenger & rick, 2021). same goes indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 9, issue 1, january 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 49 with the personal touch, including expression of emotions, a previous study from yuan et al. (2022) argued that feelings and tonal variations may contribute to a podcast message, in a way that cannot be achieved with a textual message. it should be noted that three students (approximately 13% of participants of the study) opted to have opinions where they see the use of podcasts/ted talks inside the classroom as something not entirely positive. excerpts from the three are provided below: “in my opinion, instead of using podcasts/ted talks, in class (online) it is more effective to hear conversations between lecturers and my friends. “i think it takes too much time because what i know about (raw) podcasts/ted talks is that they are very long in duration.” “there are times when using podcasts/ted talks in class becomes a challenge because the topics or podcasts used are not in accordance with the abilities of some students.” from what students’ have already mentioned above, the implementation of podcasts in listening classrooms makes them face several challenges as follows: 1) the effectiveness of podcasts if it is used both in offline or online classrooms compared to the real conversations between students and teachers; 2) the long duration of common podcasts; and 3) some of the topics of podcasts are not in accordance with students’ abilities. referring to one study conducted by hudson (2020), generally in today’s era, technology that is “always on, always on you” continually disrupts and prevents us from engaging with real people as real people. therefore, it is no wonder there will always be students who feel that podcasts are not as effective as real conversations if it is implied in real-life situations due to the limits of certain technologies. additionally, the variety of topics and length is based on the sources where the students find the audio files. a previous research about the impact of podcast length by şendağ et al. (2018) argued that students tend to get bored easily while listening to podcasts with repetitive topics and long audio duration, which usually takes too much time only to successfully grasp the whole conversation or speech. moreover, the limited ability of some students to be familiar enough with any topics while listening to podcasts also becomes a serious issue. they tend to struggle in encountering this barrier to get along with the lessons as it has already been stated before. the use of podcasts/ted talks outside of the classroom the use of podcasts/ted talks outside of the classroom receives an overwhelmingly positive opinion from the students, with twenty-two of the twenty-three students (approximately 96% of the study’s participants) finding its usage outside of the classroom to overall provide them with a positive experience. common themes that are found in the participants’ positive responses are: (1) podcasts/ted talks provide freedom of topics, (2) listening to podcasts/ted talks provides flexibility in honing their listening, and (3) listening to podcasts/ted talks provides motivation. excerpts from the questionnaire as samples for the aforementioned themes are provided below: podcasts/ ted talks provide freedom of topics “for learning outside the classroom, students can explore podcast/ted talks topics according to their respective interests to broaden their horizons.” (respondent 5) “i really enjoy the process of doing extensive listening assignments because i can choose the content that i like.” (respondent 13) “because the topics discussed in podcasts/ted talks are very diverse, i can choose the topics i want to hear without being tied to the material in the book or what is being discussed in class.” (respondent 17) as previously mentioned by students, all of them agreed that podcasts/ted talks help them in promoting student-centred learning since podcasts are varied based on their diversity of topics, which is able to make students build up the excitement and motivation in the learning process. a broad amount of content offered while listening to podcasts/ted talks obviously can become a starting point for students to enjoy every step and process they are going to take without any limitations to express themselves. podcasts/ted talks provide flexibility in honing their listening “the use of podcasts/ted talks outside the classroom, such as in extensive listening assignments, will make students more flexible to explore comfortably and indirectly give students time to assemble their understanding.” (respondent 2) muhammad handi gunawan, indra cipta putra mandiri, didi suherdi, eisha sabila dieni hanifa, & aninda putri gunawan exploring efl students’ perceptions of the use of podcasts/ted talks in extensive listening class 50 “it can be done at any time, place and situation. with a longer and more flexible time, it is more effective to improve listening skills in english.” (respondent 15) “it is fun. because i can listen to it anytime and it can be replayed until i understand.” (respondent 23) from the findings, it is concluded that podcasts/ted talks provide a sense of freedom for students as they feel the flexibility by using podcasts as their learning medium. podcasts can be accessed at any time, place, and situation which is effective for students not to feel the burdens of learning. podcasts/ted talks provide motivation “sometimes we don't have enough time or motivation to sit still and read. podcasts/ted talks can be a great substitute.” (respondent 6) “podcasts/ted talks can motivate us to be more observant in the words/vocabulary used in it.” (respondent 19) this study found that students in listening classrooms have high motivation to study english by using podcasts/ted talks due to the features provided by podcasts such as various listening classroom activities. specifically, podcasts/ted talks offer students the opportunity to enthusiastically observe and respond to teachers so the levels of their learning speed up desirably. some exercises and assignments of podcasts on english words and vocabularies motivates students to use their observative skill as well as to sharpen their listening skill. this finding is in line with abdulrahman et al.’s (2018) study that podcasts can be a way to help and motivate students in listening comprehension in which students use their imagination and build pictures of who and what they are listening to in their head. to summarise, the opinions on the use of podcasts/ted talks inside the classroom are overwhelmingly positive, racking up twenty-two positive opinions (accounting for 96% of the students involved in the study). a student, however, respondent 9 (accounting for approximately 4% of the students involved in the study), shared a different opinion, noting that the usage of the podcasts outside of the classroom limits the practitioner to their own understanding and point of view, as opposed to the possibility of discussing them with peers under the context of podcast usage inside of the classroom. technical difficulties encountered in the activity several technical difficulties were encountered throughout the extensive listening activities. these hurdles are present due to the inherent nature of the activity and resource of being online podcasts, which means they are dependent on the practitioner’s signal strength, and the potency of their network connection. excerpts that voices complaints in regard to these difficulties are as follows: “...when learning is carried out online as it is today, there are often obstacles such as internet connection so that what i hear is not clearly heard.” (respondent 1) “i personally feel i'm nervous because of the condition of the internet network, so it's a bit awkward to answer.” (respondent 13) “...sometimes the internet connection is simply insufficient.” (respondent 15) to summarise, the technical difficulties encountered in the extensive listening activities fall into the narrow category of network-related problems, as evident from the sample excerpts provided above. this is to be expected, due to the nature of the activities, being heavily reliant on the internet connection of an individual partaking in it. conclusion in conclusion to the aforementioned findings and discussion, it can be inferred that the use of podcasts/ted talks both inside and outside of the classroom is received overwhelmingly positively by the students. this is made evident by the findings that indicated that 87% of the students found its usage inside the classroom to be positive, citing that the usage of said media is interesting, that it improves their listening skills, and that it enhances the effectiveness of the lessons being conducted. as for the usage outside of the classroom, 96% of the participants found its usage to be positive, citing that it provides them with a broad range of topics they could choose from, that it provides flexibility in learning, and that it provides them with motivation. minor hiccups were found, however, presenting themselves in the form of occurring technical difficulties. the results of this study may be applied as considerations to be taken into account by educators who would like to enlist the use of indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 9, issue 1, january 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 51 podcasts inside and outside of the class as learning material. in other words, the findings may serve as an insight into the opinions of the students who use podcasts in their listening activities. as a recommendation for a follow-up or continuation of the study, it is possible that further study in regards to what would be the preferred source of podcasts used by students to be conducted, in order to complement the findings discovered in this study and to add another point of consideration for the aforementioned educators. references abdous, m., camarena, m., & facer, b. 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(2015). exploring the relationship between students’metafunction competence and their critical reading. indonesian efl journal, 1(1), 70-80received: 01-08-2014 accepted: 11-10-2014 published: 01-01-2015 abstract: this study explores the relationship between students’ metafunction competenceand their critical reading. this study uses mixed method approach to discover deep andwhole comprehension of the research problem. the five undergraduate students who haveattended functional grammar class are purposively involved. this study shows that students’metafunction competence and their critical reading positively correlate. in the other words,the students’ metafunction competence develops their critical reading ability. it iscorresponding with the conclusion which is drawn by bumela (2011) that the initialformation of meaning is also largely influences by reader’s expectations and backgroundknowledge. hereby, students’ metafunction competence plays as students’ backgroundknowledge to recognise the features of the texts and identify the metafunctions of the textswhich is beneficial as the departure for critical reading. keywords: students’ metafunction competence, critical reading. introductionthis study is intended to explore therelationship between students’ metafunctioncompetence and their critical reading. itexamines the influence of students’metafunction competence level toward theircompetence to read the text critically. inaddition, it also tries to discover thecorrelation of them. this study is inspired bythe works of maulana in “exploring thecritical reading sheet: a tool for students’meaning making practice” (2014); andbumela’s work entitled “the metafunctionsrevealed: efl learners’ experience inmaking sense of the text” (2011). maulana(2014) investigated the critical reading sheet(the list of guiding questions offered as aninstrument to analyse the text around thenotion of metafunctions – ideational,interpersonal, and textual) developed byeggins (1994), knapp & watkins (2005), thompson (2004) and wallace (2003) as atool for students meaning making practice. hetried to reveal how the critical reading sheethelps efl learners to make sense of the textas it offers them tool to generate deepcomprehension and interpretation of the text.the emphasis of his conclusion is that thecritical reading sheet gives them the ability torecognise the features of the texts andidentify the metafunctions of the texts.therefore, it triggers efl learners toapproach, make sense and read the textcritically.in addition, bumela (2011) captured theenglish as foreign language learners’experience in making sense of the text. heemphasized that reading is a discursiveactivity which is influenced by the previoustextual experiences. the quality ofinterpretation is always affected by thebackground knowledge of readers, the ability 70 mailto:nani_cute@yahoo.com mailto:prince_kafa@yahoo.com nani ronsani thamrin & jaruki andriansyah maulana exploring indonesian efllearners’ metafunction competence and their critical reading in recognizing the features of the texts, and, ofcourse, the ability to identify themetafunctions of the texts. critical readingmeans that a reader applies certain processes,models, questions, and theories that result inenhanced clarity and comprehension. thereis more involvement both in effort andunderstanding in a critical reading than in amere skimming of the text. the importance ofcritical reading of the text to get at deepstructure, as proposed by learningdevelopment at the university of leicester(2009), is because during the research andwriting process, the author(s) will have mademany decisions and each of these decisions isa potential topic for examination and debate,rather than for blind acceptance. in addition,authors design the texts for specific audiences.thus, readers need to be prepared to stepinto the academic debate and to make theirown evaluation of how much they are willingto accept what they read. importantly, apractical starting point of critical reading,therefore, is to consider anything the readersread not as fact, but as the argument of thewriter. taking this starting point, the readerswill be ready to engage with the text byzooming in and out, asking questions, andmaking decisions as they read the texts(anderson, 2011).the aim of critical reading is not to findfault, but to assess the strength of theevidence and the argument. it may includethe context of idea, context of culture, andcontext of situation of the text production. itis just as useful to conclude that a study, or anarticle, presents very strong evidence and awell-reasoned argument, as it is to identifythe studies or articles that are weak.learning development at the universityof leicester (2009) pointed that there are fivemost characteristic features of critical reading.firstly, readers can examine the evidences orarguments presented. secondly, readerscheck out any influences on the evidences orarguments. thirdly, readers check out thelimitations of study design or focus. fourthly,readers examine the interpretations made.lastly, readers decide to what extent thereaders are prepared to accept the authors’arguments, opinions, or conclusions. functional grammar reveals that everysingle text is grammaticalised in nature by thewriter/author to meet particular purposes(bumela, 2011). consequently, the text doesnot merely appear as it is, but it bears basedon the writer’s perspective toward thesubject matter, with its specific purposes andfor the specific audiences. in the other word,the construction of the text is politicized.therefore, to become good readers, studentshave to possess good reading competence todiscover what appears and what lies behindthe texts.functional grammar offers the studentsreading procedures to reveal themetafunction of the text designed to arm thestudents with competences to discover andcomprehend how grammar is used inparticular contexts and how grammaticalchoices are meaningful choices (jones &locke 2011). those competences to revealthe metafunction of the text is what is calledstudents’ metafunction competence.the metafunction is three types ofmeanings simultaneously constructed withinthe text: (1) ideational meanings; (2)interpersonal meaning; (3) and textualmeaning (eggins 1994; gerot & wignell 1994;halliday 1985). the ideational metafunctionrefers to the function for construing humanexperience which is the means by whichreaders make sense of reality (halliday,1985). it is what eggins calls the carrier of thecontent of the talk. the analysis of a text fromthe perspective of the ideational metafunctioninvolves inquiring into the choices in thegrammatical system of transitivity includingprocess types, participant types, andcircumstances. process types refers to thetypes of verbs used in the texts (material,relational, mental, behavioral, verbal,existential), participant refers to the name(s)of specific names or things as apparent in theclause, and circumstances commonly refersto specific places and times which occur inthe beginning or the end of the clause.the interpersonal metafunction relatesto a text's aspects of tenor or interactivity(o’halloran, 2006). like field, tenorcomprises three component areas includingthe speaker/writer persona, social distanceand relative social status (coffin, 2006). 71 indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427 interpersonal metafunction is fundamentallyrealized through the system of mood andmodality. mood refers to the forms of theclauses – declarative, interrogative,imperative –, while the modality refers to thedegree of commitment of the speaker/writerand hearer/reader towards the things he/shesays. the modal verbs such as must, can, andshould definitely depict different degrees ofobligation.the textual metafunction relates tomode that is the internal organisation andcommunicative nature of a text (o’halloran,2006). this comprises textual interactivity,spontaneity and communicative distance(coffin, 2006). the grammar of textualmeaning is chiefly realized within the theme-rheme system. theme is what occurs in thebeginning of the clause. it is usually apparentin the subject and finite of the clause, whilerheme is what occurs after the theme. areader needs to be completely aware of thetypes of themes constructed by the author sothat he/she can mark out the given/newinformation rooted in a clause (bumela,2011). methodthis study uses mixed method approachin which qualitative approach is used tounderstand and discover what lies behind thephenomenon while quantitative approach isto prove positive correlation betweenstudents’ metafunction competence and theircritical reading. the five respondents whohave attended functional grammar class fromenglish education department students atuniversity of kuningan, indonesia, arepurposively chosen. the data source used totest students’ metafunction competence andtheir critical reading taken from thetranscripts of the two selected articles fromthe jakarta post entitled sby asks pertaminato review lpg price hike and govt accused oflying over lpg price hike. the main reasonwhy newspaper articles are chosen is because,as lehtonen (2000) put it, newspaperdescriptions of reality are always producedfrom a certain perspective.the data in this study gained throughtriangulation technique consisting of twotests and semi-structured interview. the first test is in form of text response designed tomeasure students’ metafunction competence.the second test in form of critical reading testaimed at measuring students’ critical readingand thus exploring the relationship betweenstudents’ metafunction competence and theircritical reading. semi-structured interviewgiven to discover how students’ metafunctioncompetence helps them to read the textcritically. descriptive analysis used todescribe the basic features of the data whilepearson correlation is applied using spssstatistics to reveal the correlation betweenstudents’ metafunction competence and theircritical reading. findings and discussion qualitative analysisthe five respondents possess differentcategory of metafunction competence whichcorrespondingly influence their criticalreading. it is represented by how theyaddress every single question provided in thecritical reading sheet traced in figure 1.it can be seen from figure 1 that the fiverespondents possess different level ofmetafunction competence. #r1 and #r2 arecategorized into students who possess highcategory of metafunction competencealthough significantly they get unbalancedscores in which #r1 gets 90 while #r2 gets70. generally, #r1 can identify and interpretevery single aspect of every metafunctioncompetence while #r2, in some occasions,are failed to interpret what the findings mean.differently, #r3 and #r4 belong to thestudent with medium metafunctioncompetence. #r3 and #r4 mainly can identifyevery single aspect of every metafunctioncompetence but, unfortunately, they arefailed in interpreting the meaning lies behindit. #r5 has low metafunction competence.#r5 has the competence to identify aspect ofmetafunction competence but sometimes heis also failed to do it. in addition, #r5 cannotinterpret what the findings mean.as a matter of this study, therelationship between the students’metafunction competence and their criticalreading is the core discussion. to address thisobjective, the students are brought to answerthe following five guiding questions: (1) how 72 nani ronsani thamrin & jaruki andriansyah maulana exploring indonesian efllearners’ metafunction competence and their critical reading are the two titles constructed by the authors?(2) how are the events portrayed in the twoarticles? (3) how are the people representedin the articles? (4) how do the authorsevaluate the events depicted in the twoselected articles? and (5) how are the events concluded in the events? in responding thefive guiding questions, the five respondentsuse and reveal different category of criticalreading. it is represented by how theyaddress every guiding question recorded infigure 2. no competence score #r1 #r2 #r3 #r4 #r5 ideational metafunction competence(competence to reveal the writer's/speaker relationship to the subject matter. what the text is about. the languageused to talk about the world. who did what to whom)1 identifying and interpreting participants of the text 2 2 2 2 12 identifying and interpreting processes of the text 2 1 1 1 13 identifying and interpreting circumstances of the text 2 2 2 2 14 identifying and interpreting causation of the text 1 1 1 0 0 interpersonal metafunction competence(competence to reveal how the writer indicates his/her relationship with the reader and what his/her attitude to thesubject matter of the text is, what parts of grammar can be identified as enablers of interaction and who is takingpart?)5 identifying and interpreting person of the text 2 1 1 0 06 identifying and interpreting mood of the text 2 2 2 2 17 identifying and interpreting modality of the text 2 2 2 2 18 identifying and interpreting appraisal of the text 1 0 0 0 0 textual metafunction competence(competence to reveal what role language is playing in the interaction, how the text is organized, what kind of text isbeing made, and what the channel of communication is)9 identifying and interpreting theme of the text 2 2 1 1 110 identifying and interpreting cohesion of the text 2 1 1 0 0 total 18 14 13 10 6 score 90 70 65 50 30 percentage 90% 70% 65 % 50% 30% category h igh h igh m ed iu m m ed iu m low figure 1. the students’ metafunction competence analysis no characteristics of critical reading score #r1 #r2 #r3 #r4 #r51 readers examine the interpretations made. 2 1 1 1 02 readers will examine the evidences or arguments presented. 2 1 1 1 13 readers check out the limitations of study design or focus. 2 1 1 1 14 readers check out any influences on the evidences or arguments. 1 1 1 0 05 readers decide to what extent the readers are prepared to accept theauthors’ arguments, opinions, or conclusions. 1 2 1 1 1 total 8 6 5 4 3 score 80 60 50 40 30 percentage 80% 60 % 50% 40 % 30% category h igh m edium m edium m edium low figure 2: the students’ critical reading analysis 73 indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427 it is seen from figure 2 that differentcategory of students’ metafunctioncompetence directly influences their criticalreading category. figure 3 captures how therespondents address the first guidingquestion aimed at identifying whether therespondents read critically by taking a carefullook at the titles of the texts. as suggested bybumela (2011), a title can mean a lot as itdoes not only tell us the topic of the texts, butalso it leads us to trace the realm of meaningsof the texts.the responses given indicate whether ornot the five respondents can examine theinterpretations made by the author. seeingcarefully to the two titles of the text, #r1 issuccessful to examine the interpretationmade by the author. #r1 sees that the twotitles are grammatically constructed. this isalong with halliday theory (1985) that thetext is grammaticalised. if the second titleimplies how the government is blamed forlpg price hike, then the first title, reports how the government defense from publicopinion that lpg price hike is governmentpolicy, interestingly, #r1 is the onlyrespondent who can reveal that the twoarticles are written by the same writer andsee the relation between the two articles bytaking careful attention on the time release.#r2, #r3, and #r4 seem unsuccessful inexamining the interpretation made by theauthor. #r2 actually evaluates theconstruction of the two titles butunfortunately there is no further explanationabout the judgment by providing any textualevidence. #r3 does the same thing. #r3makes her own judgment on the titles but it islack of elaboration. similarly, #r4 canevaluate that the titles delivers someimportant information but she cannot revealwhat lies behind the two titles. #r5 justrewrites the two titles of the text. there isneither explanation about the interpretationmade by the author nor his own evaluation ofthe titles. #r response on text 1 response on text 2 #r1 the title is politicised. the writer supportspresident and gives positive view about presidentand government. the title seems to be political seen from the use ofwords “accused” and “lying over” indicating hiddenfacts and contrary arguments. the writer gives badimage for president. the second title is first in timerelease. but, what is more interesting is that thesearticles written by the same writer. #r2 the title is good and covers the content of thearticle. the title is constructed in the form that will bring us tothe pros and cons. #r3 the title is in declarative mood informing aparticular issue. the title tells how government is accused tomanipulate lpg price hike policy. #r4 the title tells about sby who asks pertamina toreview lpg price hike. the title tells how government accused of lying overlpg price hike. #r5 the title is sby asks pertamina to review lpgprice hike. the title is accused of lying over lpg price hike.figure 3. respondents’ responses on the first guiding questionhowever, the five respondents haveexamined the interpretation made by theauthor. their responses can generally revealthe ideation of the text, what the text is about.in other words, they identify who does whatto whom in what circumstance. the onlyrespondent who seems failed in criticallyunderstand the title is #r5. he neitherprovides any examination toward the titlenor appropriate textual evidences.the students’ responses on the secondguiding question recorded in figure 4. the responses given indicate whether ornot the five respondents can examine theevidences or arguments presented by theauthor. #r1 attempts to examine theevidences or arguments presented by theauthor correctly. she can evaluate theportrayal of the events and identify the focusof interest or focus event in the two articles.#r2 writes that the events which become thefocus of interest in the first article is thegovernment (president sby) asked pertaminato review lpg price hike and governmentgave the time to review it for about 24 hours. 74 nani ronsani thamrin & jaruki andriansyah maulana exploring indonesian efllearners’ metafunction competence and their critical reading while in responding to the second article, shewrites that the focus of interest is that thegovernment was being accused by the citizenabout lpg price hike. in this context, #r2seems successful to discover the portrayal ofthe events with no specific evaluation on howthe events are portrayed. in contrast, #r3tends to critically look at the portrayal of theevents. she sees that the first article isconstructed in the positive sense while the second one is in negative sense. the onlymissing point is that how the events areportrayed positively or negatively. there isno further explanation and textual evidence.#r4 and #r5 write that the events in the firstand second articles are chronologicallyportrayed. unwillingly, there is noexplanation on the types of events describedin the articles. #r response on text 1 response on text 2 #r1 the events are chronologic and strong to support eachother. the president’s statements support tosuccessfully help government to defense and tackleblame from citizen. the events seem more realistic, because bambangprovides and relates proof more logically. itmakes the events portrayed clearly and logically. #r2 the government asked pertamina to review lpg pricehike and they gave for about 24 hours to review it. the government was being accused by the citizen. #r3 the events are portrayed in the positive senses. the events are portrayed in the negative senses. #r4 the events are chronological. the events are chronological. #r5 the events are chronological. the events are chronological.figure 4: respondents’ responses on the second guiding questionit seems that the respondents canmainly examine the evidences or argumentspresented by the author correctly. this tendsto help them to reach critical comprehensionon how the text is constructed, whether thetext is coherent or not. although in some cases, they still have not supported theirjudgment by sufficient explanation andtextual evidences.the students’ responses on the thirdguiding question traced in figure 5. #r response on text 1 response on text 2 #r1 the writer interprets the people in a positiveside. the writer interprets the government in a negative side. #r2 the writer provides good image of president. bambang looks brave and great explaining lie ofpresident and government. #r3 the people or participants represented in thearticle were clear enough. sby is as the majorparticipant. bambang soesatyo is the major participant; hattarajasa and jero wacik are minor participant; and sby isthe invisible participant. #r4 the article presents good image of government. the article presents bad image of government. #r5 the writer focuses on presidents and pertamina. the writer focuses on president, pertamina, hattarajasa and jero.figure 5: respondents’ responses on the third guiding questionthe responses given indicate whether ornot the five respondents can check out thelimitations of study design or focus. itinvestigates what becomes the priority or thefocus. #r1 writes that the participant,especially the presidents, is describedpositively. the president is described as onewho is responsible for lpg price hike policy bytaking early action where the president askspertamina to review the regulation. incontrast, in responding to second article, heevaluates that president is guilty. he is described as the one who lies over lpg pricehike policy regarding pertamina is state-owned company. in this context, the writesquotes statements from bambang as amember of the house of representatives’commission iii overseeing legal affairs, withhis bravery and greatness to explain lie ofpresident and government over lpg price hike.#r2 and #r4 implies the same thing fromtheir responses. they argue that the focus ofthe first article is that the government is notguilty on the release of lpg price hike policy. 75 indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427 therefore, the presentation of the president ispositive. in contrast, they say that the focus ofthe second article is government lie over lpgprice hike policy. therefore, the presentationof the government is negative. unwillinglytheir arguments on the positive and negativedescription not explicitly described. #r3 canactually identifies who the main participant is.unfortunately, the participant who becomesthe focus of interest itself is not described well.#r5 writes that, in the first article, the writerfocuses on presidents and pertamina. while in the second article, the writer focuses onpresident, pertamina, hatta rajasa and jero.#r3 also can identify the focus of the twoarticles but unwillingly, the furtherexplanation is not explained.in conclusion, the five respondents havedifferent capacity to check out the limitationsof study design or focus. they mainly canidentify the focus, but seem failed to interprethow the focus is limited.the students’ responses on the fourthguiding question presented in figure 6. #r response on text 1 response on text 2 #r1 the writer looks wise and kind to describe president. the writer looks passionate to prove the lie andconspiration in the government. #r2 the author evaluates that the president is good. the author evaluates that the president is the onewho introduced lpg price hike, not pertamina. #r3 the author evaluates that the president is not guilty. the author evaluates that the president is guilty. #r4 no response #r5 no responsefigure 6: respondents’ responses on the fourth guiding questionthe responses indicate whether or notthe five respondents can check out anyinfluences on the evidences or arguments.this investigates how the author evaluate theevents (the focus of interest) depicted in thetwo selected articles. #r1 writes that for thefirst title, the writer looks wise and kind todescribe president. while for the second title,the writer looks passionate to prove the lieand conspiration made by the government.from this response, #r1 is rather focusing onthe whole idea of the articles to focusing onhow the author’s perspective influences theevidences or arguments presented in thearticles that should be taken care more. inalmost same response #r2 and #r3 tend tocritically evaluates how the author’s perspective influences the evidences orarguments presented in the articles. they canidentify that in the first article the authorevaluates that the president is not guilty whichis in contrast to the second article.unfortunately, they do not give any furtherexplanation and provide any textual evidence.in contrast, #r4 and #r5 give no response tothe fourth guiding questions. they seemconfused to identify how the author evaluatethe events depicted in the two selected articles.in brief, the five respondents tend to beconfused to check out any influences on theevidences or arguments. only #r1, #r2 and#r3 who are almost able to do it.the students’ responses on the fifthguiding question recorded in figure 7: #r response on text 1 response on text 2 #r1 the writer concludes that the events can be solvedby consultation of many sides/people. the writer argues that the most important person todecide lpg price hike policy is president. #r2 the author concludes that a consultation with bpkand related ministers is needed. the author concludes that hatta and jero must haveconsulted with president yudhoyono. #r3 pertamina should review lpg price hike. pertamina should classify the review of lpg pricehike to limit the misunderstanding between citizenand government. #r4 the writer concludes that pertamina should reviewlpg price hike. the writer concludes that government lies over lpgprice hike. #r5 the author concludes that bpk also recommendedpertamina to increase the price of 12-kg lpg canistersto contain, or at least to reduce, its financial losses. the author concludes that a consultation with thebpk is needed.figure 7: respondents’ responses on the fifth guiding question 76 nani ronsani thamrin & jaruki andriansyah maulana exploring indonesian efllearners’ metafunction competence and their critical reading the responses recorded in the figure 7indicates whether or not the five respondentscan decide to what extent the readers areprepared to accept the authors’ arguments,opinions, or conclusions. in responding to thefifth guiding question, #r1 writes textualconclusion which is drawn by the author. it isunwillingly found that #r1 is unable to checkreaders’ readiness to accept the authors’arguments, opinions, or conclusions.differently, #r2 writes that in the first article,the author concludes that a consultation withbpk and related ministers is needed to decidelpg price hike policy. in this text, the authorimplies that the author urges the reader tobelieve that government is not guiltyregarding lpg price hike policy. it is provenby government early action asking pertaminato soon review the policy. and in respondingto the second article, he argues that hatta andjero must have consulted with presidentyudhoyono deciding lpg price hike policy.therefore, the author implies that readersshould assume that it is a lie if the presidentaccused of lying over lpg price hike sincepertamina is a state-owned company. fromher responses, it can be drawn that #r2 hassuccessfully decided to what extent thereaders are prepared to accept the authors’arguments, opinions, or conclusions byexplaining the implication from the textualconclusion drawn by the author. #r3, #r4,and #r5 write textual conclusion which isdrawn by the author. it is similar to #r1 andunwillingly found that #r3, #r4 and #r5 areunable to check readers’ readiness to acceptthe authors’ arguments, opinions, orconclusions. in conclusion, the five respondents arestill confused to check readers’ readiness toaccept the authors’ arguments, opinions, orconclusions. although they can generallyidentify the textual conclusion made by theauthor, they seem failed to reveal what itimplies for the readers.semi-structured interview is conductedto reveal students’ perspective on howstudents’ metafunction competencecorresponds with their critical reading. thefindings show that all respondents agree thatstudents’ metafunction competence helpthem to read critically. #r1, #r2 and #r3believe that students’ metafunctioncompetence can be the way or guidelines todevelop someone’s critical reading skill. it isbecause by learning functional grammar, notonly the meaning of words or sentences thatthey gets. they can get the text as a whole:the meaning, function and the structure of thetext. similarly, #r3 argues that three systemsof metafunction including transitivity system,mood and modality and theme-rheme systemhelp her to read critically. #r5 argues thatshe can know the context of the text in awhole. it means that readers can know thepurpose of the writer and the reason why sheor he write a text. in conclusion, readers canbe more critical in reading a text. quantitative analysisquantitative analysis used to discoverthe correlation between students’metafunction competence and their criticalreading. pearson correlation is applied usingspss statistics to do the analysis. the resultof the analysis presented figure 8. students’ metafunction competence critical readingstudents’ metafunctioncompetence pearson correlation 1 .977**sig. (2-tailed) .004n 5 5criticalreading pearson correlation .977** 1sig. (2-tailed) .004n 5 5**. correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed).figure 8: correlation between students’ metafunction competence and critical readingit is found that the correlation betweenstudents’ metafunction competence and their critical reading is 0.997. it means that there isa correlation between students’ metafunction 77 indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427 competence and their critical reading. sincethe output is positive and clearly greater than(>) 0.5, it also means that the more studentspossess metafunction competence, the morestudents can read critically. means thatstudents metafunction competence closelycorrelates with their critical reading.secondly, the significance (2-tailed)gained from the test is 0,004. it is clearly lessthan (<) 0,01 supporting that students’metafunction competence and their criticalreading correlate. the correlation itself issignificant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed). thesefindings suggest that increased levels ofstudents’ metafunction competence areassociated with their critical reading. themetafunction competence tends to besignificantly associated with critical reading.in this context, students’ metafunction competence plays as their textualexperiences which determine their futuretextual experiences, including but not limitedto their critical reading. as suggested bysmith (2003) & lehtonen (2000) that thecomplexity of readers to texts are not definedby the text itself, but also by readers’ ownposition: their entire resources of textual andnon-textual knowledge and experience. relationship between students’ metafunction competence and their critical readingthe findings also discover that the threestrands of metafunction competencecorrespond with the characteristics of criticalreading. that is why the students’metafunction competence is positivelycorrelated with their critical reading. thecorrespondence is presented in figure 9. figure 9: the correspondence between students’ metafunction competence and their critical readingthe ideational metafunctioncompetence corresponds with one of thecharacteristics of critical reading that isreader examines the interpretations made bythe authors. ideational metafunction, asstated by #r4, helps her to reveal who doeswhat to whom in what circumstance. theknowledge to reveal the writer's/speaker relationship to the subject matter, what thetext is about and the language that is used totalk about the world becomes important toexamines the interpretations made by theauthors.the transitivity system which is used toreveal ideational metafunction competencedeals with participants, processes and examining the evidences or arguments presented checking out the limitations of study design or focus metafunction competence critical reading ideational metafunction competence interpersonal metafunction competence textual metafunction competence examining the interpretations made checking out any influences on the evidences or arguments deciding to what extent the readers are prepared to accept the authors’ arguments, opinions, or conclusions 78 nani ronsani thamrin & jaruki andriansyah maulana exploring indonesian efllearners’ metafunction competence and their critical reading circumstances. those three elements areconsiderably chosen. therefore, a conclusioncan be drawn that the better studentpossesses ideational metafunctioncompetence, the better student reveals theinterpretation made by the authors.the interpersonal metafunctioncompetence corresponds with two of thecharacteristics of critical reading those arereader decides to what extent the readers areprepared to accept the authors’ arguments,opinions, or conclusions and checks out anyinfluences on the evidences or arguments.basically, interpersonal metafunctioncompetence refers to the competence toreveal how the writer indicates his/herrelationship with the reader, what his/herattitude to the subject matter of the text is,and what parts of grammar can be identifiedas enablers of interaction.the competence to reveal how thewriter indicates his/her relationship with thereader makes the reader decide to whatextent he/she is prepared to accept theauthors’ arguments, opinions, or conclusions.moreover, the student’s competence to revealthe author’s attitude to the subject matter ofthe text is and what parts of grammar can beidentified as enablers of interaction helphim/her to check out any influences on theevidences or arguments.the textual metafunction competencedeals with student’s competence to revealwhat role language is playing in theinteraction, how the text is organized, whatkind of text is being made and what thechannel of communication is. thiscompetence corresponds with two of thecharacteristics of critical reading i.e. readerchecks out the limitations of study design orfocus, and examines the evidences orarguments presented.theme-rheme system investigates thechoice of the theme and coherence of the text.therefore, what this study shows is thatstudent’s competence to investigate thetheme of every single clause help him/her tocheck out the limitations of study design orfocus. in addition, student’s competence toidentify the coherence of the text also helpshim/her to examine the evidences orarguments presented in the text. conclusionwhat this study shows is that students’metafunction competence and their criticalreading correlate due to the significance thatis gained from the test (0,004) is less than (<)0,01. moreover, it can be concluded thatstudents’ metafunction competence and theircritical reading correlate positively. it isproven by the correlation output (0.977)which is clearly greater than (>) 0,5. thismeans that students metafunctioncompetence closely correlates with theircritical reading. therefore, the more studentspossess metafunction competence, the morestudents can read critically. in the otherwords, students’ metafunction competencedevelops their critical reading ability. thebetter student’s metafunction competence,the better student’s critical reading. it iscorresponding with the conclusion which isdrawn by bumela (2011) that the initialformation of meaning is also largelyinfluenced by reader’s expectations andbackground knowledge. hereby, students’metafunction competence plays asbackground knowledge of the students torecognise the features of the texts andidentify the metafunctions of the texts whichis beneficial as the departure for the criticalreading to discover what appears and whatlies behind the text. referencesanderson, d. (2011). write now. chapel hill: longman.bumela, l. (2011). the metafunctions revealed: efllearners‘ experience in making sense of the text. conaplin journal 2, 21-30.coffin, c. (2006). english grammar in context, book 3: getting practical. maidenhead: the openuniversity.eggins, s. (1994). an introduction to systemic functional linguistics. london: pinter publishers.gerot, l., & wignell, p. (1994). making sense of functional grammar. new south wales:antipodean educational enterprises.halliday, m.a.k. (1985). an introduction to functional grammar. london: edward arnold._________ (1994). an introduction to functional grammar(eds). london: edward arnold._________ (2003). architecture of human language. injonathan, w (eds). on language and linguistics,29.jones, r.h and lock, g. (2011). functional grammar in the esl classroom: noticing, exploring and practising. london: palgrave macmillan. 79 indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427 knapp, p., & watkins, m. (2005). genre, text, grammar: technologies for teaching and assessing writing.sydney: university of new south wales press.learning development at the university of leicester.(2009). what is critical reading?. retrievedjanuary 05, 2014, from http://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/ld/resources/pdfs-of-study-guides/writing-skills-pdfs/critical-reading-v1%200.pdflehtonen, m. (2000). the cultural analysis of text.london: sage publication ltd.maulana, j.a. (2014). exploring the critical reading sheet: a tool for students’ meaning making practice: a paper presented in the 6th national english language teachers and lecturers (neltal) conference on success stories in english language teaching (or learning), held in malang, indonesia,march 29, 2014. o’halloran, k.a. (2006). english grammar in context, book 2: getting inside english. maidenhead: theopen university.smith, c.s. (2003). modes of discourse: the local structure of text. cambridge: cambridgeuniversity press.thompson, g. (2004). introducing functional grammar.london: arnold.wallace, c. (2003). critical reading in language education. new york: palgrave mcmillan.yudhoyono, s. b. (2014, january 05). sby asks pertamina to review lpg price hike. the jakarta post. retrieved from http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2014/01/05/sby-asks-pertamina-review-lpg-price-hike.htmlyudhoyono, s. b. (2014, 2014, january 05). govt accused of lying over lpg price hike. the jakarta post.retrieved from http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2014/01/05/govt-accused-lying-over-lpg-price-hike.html 80 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 223 effectiveness of used goods utilization as learning media on fable for junior high school students hindun permanent lecturer of indonesian language and literature education, uin syarif hidayatullah, jakarta, indonesia email: hindun@uinjkt.ac.id fachrur rajabani ridwan indonesian language and literature education, uin syarif hidayatullah, jakarta, indonesia email: fachrur.rajabanir18@mhs.uinjkt.ac.id apa citation: hindun., & ridwan f. r. (2022). effectiveness of used goods utilization as learning media on fable for junior high school students. indonesian efl journal, 8(2), 223-236. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v8i2.6473 received: 07-03-2022 accepted: 12-05-2022 published: 31-07-2022 introduction waste or used goods is remnants of the results of human daily activies which sometimes causes many problems such as environmental pollution and health problems. various efforts have been made to reduce the waste, such as burning or recycling trash. waste or used goods are the remnants of human daily activities or natural processes that are solid or semi-solid in the form of organic or inorganic substances that are biodegradable or nonbiodegradable which are considered no longer useful and disposed of in the environment. waste is the remnants of human daily activities and/or natural processes in solid form (law no. 18, year 2008) (purwaningsih, 2021). the type of waste that is difficult to handle properly and has a greater potential to damage the environment is plastic waste. purwanto (2021) explained that the law of waste processing has not been maximized in indonesia so that waste processing has not been efficient. in addition, factors of population growth, lifestyle changes, and people's consumption patterns are the drivers of the growth of plastic waste. previous research on waste has been carried out by several people published in journals. among them, namely andy and lina purnama in the stupa journal (volume 1, april 2019) trying to offer a solution about waste, namely creating a space to educate the public and tourists about the importance of protecting the environment from waste and processing these wastes into something useful and making it a spectacle so that it is interesting. the advantages of using used goods as teaching materials are reducing waste that is difficult to decompose in the surrounding environment, bringing out student creativity, learning is not only racing to the teacher, but learning also becomes fun, can be used in other subjects, in accordance with expected competencies (nazihah, 2018). the use of used goods is also to help reduce waste that cannot be decomposed quickly for the sake of preserving the earth (kencono & winarsih, 2021). the process of burning used goods in the end will cause new problems in the form of air pollution, so researchers choose recycling used abstract: the management of waste or used goods that is still not optimal causes various environmental problems. one way to reduce the presence of used goods is to recycle them into learning media. this study focuses on the effectiveness of used goods effectiveness as learning media on fable storytelling in class vii. the method used is descriptive-qualitative. students’ storytelling skills were assessed by observation method using storytelling skills assessment rubric. storytelling style, mastery of the content of the story, volume of voice, and fluency were assessed. the results of the discussion show that the use of used goods as learning media is considered effective with an average student score of 89 which is included in the very good category. keywords: used goods; learning media; storytelling skill; fable. hindun effectiveness of used goods utilization as learning media on fable for junior high school students 224 goods to reduce waste used goods by being used as an alternative learning tool in schools. ways of learning that are transformed into creative and the use of media will foster students' desire and creativity (lestari & asma, 2020). the use of cartoon puppet media in fable story material can help students to concretize the content of the story through the description of story characters depicted through the form of cartoon puppets and students can better understand the content of the story. (tussifa, fikriyah, & nurhabibah, 2021). this animal paper puppet media is a media that presents images of animals made into puppets to facilitate or improve students' imagination skills in writing fabled texts delivered using animal paper puppets (hidayanti, purnamasari, & sarmi, 2021). learning media is a tool that has the function of conveying lesson messages more easily understood (hidayanti et al., 2021). the foundations for the use of learning media are as follows: (1) philosophical foundations, (2) psychological foundations, (3) technological foundations, (4) emporis foundations. (septy, 2021). learning media in terms of delivering material, can help and make it easier for teachers to carry it out. the use of learning media in classroom learning activities can increase the interest and motivation of teaching and learning activities. (purwasih, anita, & afrilianto, 2020). in storytelling learning, teachers should empower learning media that are in accordance with the learning methods applied. in addition, learning materials are also a determining factor in media selection (murianto, 2021). yaumi (2018) cites asyhar's opinion on four rational reasons why learning media is important to use in learning, namely (1) improving the quality of learning, (2) the demands of a new paradigm, (3) market needs, (4) the vision of global education. furthermore, prawiradilaga and siregar in batubara’s book (2020) have divided the history of the development of the use of media in learning into three main phases, namely as follows: (1) the use of images as teaching tools (1920s). (2) the use of audio media in learning after the invention of radio and audio technology (1930s). (3) the use of audiovisual media as a means of communication in the learning process (1944s). the activity of recycling used goods or waste is not new in the world of education, but these efforts are still relevant to form a clean, healthy, disciplined, and creative student character by utilizing the used goods around them as their learning tool. this activity supports the statement that learning process in the educational unit is held interactively, inspiringly, fun, challenging, motivating students to participate actively, and providing sufficient space for initiative, creativity, and independence in accordance with the talents, interests, and physical development and psychology of students (eliyanti & nurlita, 2018). the focus of this research is the subject of indonesian for class vii on fable material. fables or animal stories that resemble humans are considered suitable material and are not difficult to develop by involving data on students' imagination and creativity in using used goods as props to assess students' fable storytelling skills. fabled stories are stories played by animals, in which there are moral messages to shape the character of students. the various characters played make every reader able to learn the values contained (wardini, 2020). in recent study, puppet props are effectively used in learning to retell the content of fabled stories (munawaroh, 2018). another study results found that the application of the use of used goods as a medium for simple teaching tools with structured assignments can improve learning activities and biology learning outcomes of class x mipa3 man 2 bone students in bone regency (erwing & ahmad, 2021). by using cardboard as a puppet medium, it can bring out the curiosity and curiosity of students because it is considered unique so that it adds interest and enthusiasm in the learning process in the classroom. using cardboard as the main material for making puppets besides being easy to get, also does not require a lot of biyaya and its manufacture is also easy, environmentally friendly and also harmless to children (wijayak, wismanto, & mukhlis, 2019). many world literati and writers also make use of fabled forms in their essays. one of the famous fable authors was michael de la fontaine of france. the sufi poet fariuddin attar of persia also wrote his most famous work, “the bird deliberations” in the form of fables. usually there is implicit moral message or a deeper meaning in fable. (yulsafli, 2019). part of the fabled story contains a statement indicating a mandate or moral message from the author to the reader that can be found at the end or conclusion of the story (hidayanti et al., 2021). indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 225 speaking skills in indonesian are language skills that need to be mastered well, because these skills are the most important indicator for students' success in learning languages (nuryanto, abidin, setijowati, & sismulyasih, 2018). in line with it, koesoema (2021) stated that storytelling is always interesting for everyone because stories can form an understanding of oneself and the world around him. everyone understands and creates a world for us because of the stories they heard. therefore, storytelling will last longer than the one-way monologue teaching model. ardiana (2021) argued, that storytelling activities are most often listened to and without realizing it we often do it in everyday life. but unfortunately, in learning activities, storytelling activities began to be abandoned and seemed outdated. but now storytelling has become a part of the literacy that the government is promoting. storytelling is the activity of telling stories to explain an event that is conveyed to another person so that the person knows about it. assessment of students' storytelling skills includes mastery of story ideas, word selection, accuracy of story logic, expression and behavior, volume of voice, and fluency of student storytelling. (juniza, armariena, & prasrihamni, 2022). researchers will describe the results of this study to determine the effectiveness of using used goods as a learning media on the storytelling skills of grade vii students of smp negeri 7 depok for the 2021/2022 academic year. method this research is descriptive-qualitative. anggito (2018) explained that qualitative research is a method of collecting data on a natural setting with the intention of interpreting phenomena that occur where the researcher is a key instrument. describe the results of the research with detailed information to take a conclusion and with a practicum model that refers to the practice of telling students using props that have been made from garbage or used goods. results and discussion storytelling can be more than just storytelling but can be used as a means of combining facts and stories. so that it can steal the attention of early childhood children to hear it (noegroho, 2022). there are several types of storytelling method, namely telling stories with tools and without tools. katoningsih (2021) explained that the first method of storytelling is to use props that function to increase student concentration during the learning process. as for storytelling without props, it only emphasizes expression, facial mimics, vocals, tempo, language style, and intonation of speech. this study refers to the method of telling stories with props. the implementation of storytelling must master the material / story idea, language mastery, language selection, courage, calmness, ability to convey ideas fluently and regularly so that they are able and skilled in telling stories (ilmiyah, 2020). juniza et al. (2022) explained, that indicators in storytelling skills are (1) students are able to conceptualize the content of the story very well and easily understood, (2) students are able to use words, terms and expressions according to stories and varied, (3) students are able to be expressive, sane gestures, calm and not groggy, (4) students are able to tell stories clearly and loudly as a reference for this research. therefore, the researcher made a research instrument based on juniza et al.'s (2022) statement as follows. table 1. student storytelling skills assessment format* no aspects score gain 1. storytelling style 2. mastery of the content of the story 3. voice volume 4. fluency total score the number of scores obtained is divided by eight. (i.e. 400 : 4 = 100) *customized from juniza et al. (2022) assessment index description: excellent (perfect ) :85 – 100 good : 71 – 84 good enough : 61 – 70 less good : 51 – 60 very bad : 40 – 50 this research was addressed to representatives of class vii students. 8 smp negeri 7 depok for the 2021/2022 academic year as many as fifteen people as follow. table 2. panji raksa mahardika haryadi’s storytelling skills assesment hindun effectiveness of used goods utilization as learning media on fable for junior high school students 226 no aspects score gain 1. storytelling style 91 2. mastery of the content of the story 90 3, voice volume 86 4. fluency 90 total score 357 value 89 based on the results of research on fable storytelling skills entitled "empat sekawan" acting as a dog using props from used items in the form of cardboard, panji raksa mahardika haryadi obtained a score of 89.25 which was later rounded to 89. this means that student got very good category. the following will be elaborated according to the predetermined aspects of the assessment. the first assessment is related to the storytelling style carried out by panji. the dog character is played by pennant very well. improvisations carried out in terms of gestures are quite a lot done. the storytelling is flexible and very entertaining to the audience. this makes the assessment related to panji's storytelling style fall into the category of excellent. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 91. the second assessment is related to the mastery of the content of the story carried out by panji. the content of the story is very well mastered by panji, the storyline presented is clear and coherent, no scenes are missed, the dialogue of the characters is very well mastered, and the mandate in the story is clear and implicitly appropriate. this makes the judgment related to the mastery of the content of the panji story included into very good category. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 90. the third assessment is related to the panji’s voice volume. panji’s voice sounded quite loud with clear articulation. the intonation of the resulting sound is also appropriate and good. the tempo of the sound is normal and corresponds to the scene performed. this makes the assessment regarding panji's voice volume belongs to the category of excellent. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 86. the fourth assessment is related to the smoothness of storytelling carried out by panji. the story is performed without the use of text assistance. props in the form of a dog face-shaped mask were used very well and accordingly by panji. there are no mistakes and repetitions of the scene performed by panji. this makes the assessment related to the smoothness of panji's storytelling included into the category of very good. therefore, accordingly, the assessment rubric that has been made, then the researcher gives a score of 90. table 3. rafid athier mumtaz’s storytelling skills assessment no aspects score gain 1. storytelling style 92 2. mastery of the content of the story 90 3, voice volume 90 4. fluency 92 total score 364 value 91 based on the results of research on fable storytelling skills entitled "empat sekawan" acting as a cat using props from used items in the form of cardboard, rafid athier mumtaz obtained a score of 91. this means that students are included in the very good category. the following will be elaborated according to the predetermined aspects of the assessment. the first assessment is related to the storytelling style carried out by athier. the cat character is played very well, the characteristic of the cat can be seen from the gestures or movements when walking which are quite bent and slow to indicate that the character is old. improvisation is widely used in terms of gestures or gestures. the storytelling is flexible and very entertaining. this makes the assessment of athier's storytelling style included into the category of excellent. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 92. the second assessment is related to the mastery of the content of the story carried out by athier. the content of the story is very well mastered by athier, the storyline presented is clear and coherent, no scenes are missed, the dialogue of the characters is performed accordingly and very well, and the moral message in the story is clear and implicitly appropriate. as gussani (2022) explained that fairy tales are early stimulation that can stimulate language skills in children. in addition, this fairy tale about the life of animals is intended to be an example for human life in general. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 227 this makes the assessment regarding the mastery of the content of athier's story belonged to excellent. category. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 90. the third assessment is related to athier’s voice volume. athier's voice sounded loud with a very clear vocal articulation. the intonation of the sound perfectly corresponded to the expression displayed and corresponded to the punctuation marks contained in its dialogue to give a comma or period pause. the tempo of the voice produced is suitable to each scene of the story performed. this makes the assessment regarding athier's voice volume belonged to excellent category. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gives a score of 90 the fourth assessment is related to the smoothness of the story carried out by athier. the story is performed by athier very well without the help of the text. props in the form of cat masks are used accordingly and very well. there are no mistakes and repetitions of the scenes performed by athier. this makes the assessment regarding athier's storytelling fluency belonged to excellent category. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 92. table 4. deswita khoirunnisa rohim’s storytelling skills assessment no aspects score gain 1. storytelling style 81 2. mastery of the content of the story 90 3, voice volume 82 4. fluency 84 total score 337 value 84 based on the results of research on fable storytelling skills entitled "sapi yang sombong" acting as a goat using props from used items in the form of cardboard and dried leaves, deswita khairunisa rohim obtained a value of 84.25 which was later rounded to 84. this means that student included into the good category. the following will be elaborated according to the predetermined aspects of the assessment. speaking skills are the ability of a person to express ideas, ideas as well as thoughts expressed in oral form delivered by the speaker and understood by the listener (suheni, rita, & putri, 2020). the first assessment is related to the storytelling style carried out by deswita. the character performed by deswita is good but has not been able to bring out the characteristics of the character. improvisation is not visible in either dialogue or movement that can strengthen the character of the goat being played. however, the storytelling is flexible and quite entertaining to the audience. this makes the assessment related to deswita's storytelling style fall into the good category. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 81. the second assessment is related to the mastery of the content of the story carried out by deswita. the content of the story presented could be mastered very well as evidenced by the sequential, clear, and appropriate storyline. then the dialogue delivered was not missed and was smooth. this makes the assessment related to the mastery of the content of deswita's story belonged to very good category. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 90. the third assessment is related to the voice volume produced by deswita. deswita's voice sounds quite loud and clearly the articulation of her vowels, the intonation is good and corresponds to the emotions that arise, but the tempo tended to be fast. this makes the assessment regarding deswita's voice volume fall into the good category. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 82. the fourth assessment is related to the smoothness of the story carried out by deswita. the story is performed without looking at the text, this indicated that deswita already understood the content of the story and the dialogue very well. the improvisations carried out were not visible both in terms of dialogue and movement, so they had not given rise to the characteristics of the sheep character she played, the props in the form of puppets were used quite well, besides that no scenes were repeated. this made the assessment related to the smoothness of deswita's story belonged to the good category. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 84. table 5. najwa fajria salsa dila’s storytelling skills assesment hindun effectiveness of used goods utilization as learning media on fable for junior high school students 228 no aspects score gain 1. storytelling style 74 2. mastery of the content of the story 84 3, voice volume 84 4. fluency 85 total score 327 value 82 based on the results of the research on fable storytelling skills entitled "kelinci yang sombong" acted as a turtle by using props from used items in the form of bandos and patchwork, najwa fajria salsa dila obtained a score of 81.75 which was later rounded to 82. this means that the student is wellcategorized. the following will be elaborated according to the predetermined aspects of the assessment. the first assessment, which is related to the storytelling style carried out by najwa. the turtle character is well played by najwa. no improvisation is done as najwa refers to the text entirely. the storytelling was quite flexible and entertaining. this made the assessment regarding najwa's smoothness of storytelling belonged to the good category. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 76. the second assessment was related to the mastery of the content of the story carried out by najwa. the content of the story is well mastered by najwa, the storyline was presented clearly and coherently, no scenes were missed, the character's dialogue was able to be mastered well, and the mandate in the story is implicitly clear. this made the assessment regarding the mastery of the content of najwa's story belonged to the good category. therefore, according to the aspects of the assessment that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 84. the third assessment, which was related to the voice volume by najwa. najwa's voice sounded quite loud with clear vocal articulation. the intonation of the voice corresponded to the scene and the expressions brought. the tempo of the voice produced tends to be normal and appropriate. this made the assessment regarding najwa's vote volume belonged to the good category. therefore, according to the aspects of the assessment that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 84. the fourth assessment is related to the fluency of storytelling carried out by najwa. the story was well performed by najwa without looking at the text. props in the form of a bando with turtle-shaped decoration made of rags are used very well and accordingly. there are no errors and repetitions of the scene. this makes the assessment regarding najwa's storytelling fluency belonged to excellent category. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 85. table 6. syarifah hani al-thahirah’s storytelling skills assesment no aspects score gain 1. storytelling style 74 2. mastery of the content of the story 86 3, voice volume 76 4. fluency 87 total score 323 volume 81 based on the results of research on fable storytelling skills entitled "empat sekawan" acting as an antelope by using props from used items in the form of bandos and tree branches as antelope horns, syarifah hani al-thahirah obtained a value of 80.75 which was later rounded to 81. this means that the student was well-categorized. the following will be elaborated according to the predetermined aspects of the assessment. the first assessment is related to the storytelling style carried out by syarifah. the antelope character was able to be played by syarifah well even though there were no characteristics of the character. improvisation was seen several times, especially in terms of hand gestures that tell and remind his friend to move as if entering water. syarifah's story was quite flexible and entertaining. this made the assessment related to syarifah's storytelling style belonged to good category. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 74. the second assessment was related to the mastery of the content of the story carried out by syarifah. the content of the story was mastered very well, the storyline was presented clearly and coherently, as well as the dialogue of the characters who can be mastered very well. this made the assessment related to the mastery of the content of syarifah's story belonged to very good category. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 86. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 229 the third assessment was related to the voice volume produced by syarifah. sharifah's voice sounded quite loud with good vocal articulation, the intonation of the voice was quite in line with the expression displayed, and the tempo of the voice was appropriate. this made the assessment regarding syarifah's voice volume belonged to the good category. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 76. the fourth assessment is related to the smoothness of the story carried out by syarifah. the story was presented without tools in the form of text, so it can be concluded that syarifah has mastered and memorized the content of her story and dialogue. props in the form of a bando with tree branches decorated as if the headland of the antelope was used very well and accordingly by syarifah. as for the scene, syarifah did nothing wrong and presented the story smoothly without any repetition. this made the assessment related to the smoothness of syarifah's storytelling belonged to very good category. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 87. table 7. farizah dwi agustina’s storytelling skills assesment no aspects score gain 1. storytelling style 70 2. mastery of the content of the story 83 3, voice volume 88 4. fluency 78 total score 319 value 80 based on the results of research on fable storytelling skills entitled "sapi yang sombong" the role of frogs as by using puppet props from used items in the form of cardboard and sticks, farizah dwi agustina obtained a value of 79.75 which was later rounded to 80. this means that students belonged to the good category. the results will be elaborated according to the predetermined aspects of the assessment. the first assessment is related to the storytelling style carried out by farizah. the frog character was shown quite well even though none of the characteristics of the character have been displayed by farizah, improvisation tended not to be done because farizah followed the content of the story in the text completely, and the rendition was quite entertaining. this makes the assessment regarding farizah's storytelling style belonged to quite good category. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 70. the second assessment is related to the mastery of the content of the story carried out by farizah. the content of the story was very well mastered, besides that the dialogues presented were also clear and nothing is missed. the storyline was presented in a sequence, clear, and good manner. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 88. the third assessment is related to the voice volume produced by farizah. farizah's voice when telling stories was quite loud, the vocal articulation was clear, as well as a fairly good intonation. in addition, the tempo of the resulting dialogue was also good. this made the assessment regarding farizah's vote volume belonged to the good category. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 83. the fourth assessment is related to the smoothness of the story carried out by farizah. without looking at the text, farizah has memorized his storyline and dialogue, the props were in the form of frog puppets that farizah used quite well, and farizah played the frog character without any repetition. this made the assessment related to farizah's smoothness of storytelling belonged to the good category. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 78. table 8. razita nadhilah deviani’s storytelling skills assesment no aspects score gain 1. storytelling style 90 2. mastery of the content of the story 90 3. voice volume 90 4. fluency 85 total score 355 value 89 based on the results of the research on fable storytelling skills entitled "empat sekawan" as a narrator using home window props from used items in the form of cardboard, razita nadhilah deviani obtained a score of 88.75 which was later rounded hindun effectiveness of used goods utilization as learning media on fable for junior high school students 230 to 89. this means that student belonged to the excellent category. the results will be elaborated according to the predetermined aspects of the assessment. the first assessment is related to the storytelling style carried out by razita. playing the role of the narrator, razita did it very well and accordingly. improvisation was pretty much done in terms of gestures like helping to hold the window as a prop. her storytelling was flexible and very entertaining. this makes the assessment regarding razita's storytelling style was categorized as excellent. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gives a score of 90. the second assessment is related to the mastery of the content of the story carried out by razita. the content of the story was able to be mastered by razita very well, the storyline was presented clearly and in sequence, there were no missed scenes, the narrative of the story was performed very well because razita played the role of the narrator, and the moral message given was clear from the story that was performed implicitly. this made the assessment related to the mastery of the content of razita's story was categorized as very good. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 90. the third assessment is related to razita’s voice volume. razita's voice sounded loud with a very clear vocal articulation. the intonation of the sound corresponded to the expression and use of punctuation when she played the role was appropriate. the tempo of the sound produced was also very appropriate and good. this made the assessment regarding razita's voice volume was categorized as very good. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 90. the fourth assessment is related to the smoothness of the storytelling carried out by razita. acting as a narrator, razita was seen using text as a tool because she felt afraid that she was not optimal even though she already understood the content of the story. even as a narrator, razita used props in the form of windows made of cardboard and according to its function very well. there were no errors and repetitions of the scene. this made the assessment related to razita's smoothness of storytelling was categorized as very good. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 85. table 9. arfan sabiq ramadhan’s storytelling skills assesment no aspects score gain 1. storytelling style 90 2. mastery of the content of the story 88 3, voice volume 88 4. fluency 92 total score 358 value 90 based on the results of research on fable storytelling skills entitled "kelinci yang sombong" and acting as a rabbit by using mask props and medals from used items in the form of cardboard, cardboard, and canned pieces, arfan sabiq ramadhan obtained a score of 89.5 which was later rounded to 90. this means that student was categorized as excellent. the results will be elaborated according to the predetermined aspects of the assessment. the first assessment is related to the storytelling style carried out by arfan. the rabbit character was able to be played by arfan very well and was able to display the character's characteristics in the form of gestures when walking. improvisations performed in terms of gestures or gestures were often used. the storytelling was flexible and very entertaining to the audience. this made the assessment related to arfan's storytelling style was categorized as very good. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 90. the second assessment is related to the mastery of the content of the story carried out by arfan. the content of the story was mastered by arfan very well. the storyline was presented clearly and in sequence. there were no missed scenes, as well as the character's dialogue was very well mastered. the moral message was contained in the story quite clearly implicitly. this made the assessment related to the mastery of the content of arfan's story was categorized very good. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 88. the third assessment is related to the arfan’s voice volume. arfan's voice sounded loudly with very clear vocal articulation. the intonation of the voice was also very appropriate because arfan already understood the use of punctuation to provide pauses and emphasis of tone in his dialogues. the tempo of the sound produced was indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 231 normal and very appropriate. this made the assessment regarding arfan's voice volume was categorized as very good. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 88. the fourth assessment is related to the smoothness of storytelling carried out by arfan. the story brought by arfan smoothly without the help of text. props in the form of rabbit face-shaped eye masks were used accordingly and very well. this was reinforced by study where found that students were greatly helped by the existence of puppet media when they tell stories in front of the class. they are not fixated on the screenplay script but are more able to improvise by developing their imagination power towards the dolls they hold (anggraini, 2018, p. 45) there were no mistakes and repetitions of the scene performed by arfan. this made the assessment related to the smoothness of arfan's storytelling was categorized as very good. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 92. table 10. aisyah nur fadiah’s storytelling skills assesment no aspects score gain 1. storytelling style 88 2. mastery of the content of the story 87 3, voice volume 85 4. fluency 90 total score 350 value 88 based on the results of research on fable storytelling skills entitled "kelinci yang sombong" and acting as a turtle by using turtle bando props from used ribbon items, aisyah nur fadiah obtained a value of 87.5 which was later rounded to 88. this means that student was categorized as excellent. the results will be elaborated according to the predetermined aspects of the assessment. the first assessment is related to the storytelling style carried out by aisyah. the turtle character was played very well by aisyah, but it was not too optimal in bringing out the characteristics of her character. the improvisation carried out was contained in terms of the appropriate movements. the storytelling was flexible and very entertaining to the audience. this made the assessment regarding aisyah's storytelling style was categorized as very good. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 88. the second assessment is related to the mastery of the content of the story carried out by aisyah. the content of the story was very well mastered, the storyline was presented clearly and coherently, the dialogue of the characters was well mastered and clear, the scenes are performed without anything to miss, and the moral message in the story was clear from the implicitly presented dialogue. this made the assessment related to the mastery of the content of aisyah's story was categorized as very good. therefore, according to the aspects of the assessment that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 87. the third assessment is related to aisyah’s voice volume. aisyah's voice was quite loud, as well as a clear vocal articulation. the intonation of the voice corresponds to the relaxed and calm expression it brought. the resulting tempo was also appropriate and good. this made the assessment regarding aisyah's voice volume was categorized as very good. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 85. the fourth research, which is related to the fluency of storytelling conducted by aisyah. the story was presented by aisyah without the need for tools in the form of text. props in the form of a turtle-shaped bando were used by aisyah very well and suitable to their function. there were no errors and repetitions of the scene. this made the assessment regarding the fluency of aisyah's storytelling was categorized as very good. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 90. table 11. rendy ardiansyah’s storytelling skills assesment no aspects score gain 1. storytelling style 90 2. mastery of the content of the story 90 3, voice volume 88 4. fluency 88 total score 356 value 89 based on the results of research on fable storytelling skills entitled "empat sekawan" and acting as a chicken using chicken mask props from hindun effectiveness of used goods utilization as learning media on fable for junior high school students 232 used items in the form of cardboard, rendy ardiansyah obtained a score of 89. this means that student was categorized as excellent. the results will be elaborated according to the predetermined aspects of the assessment. the first assessment is related to the storytelling style carried out by rendy. the chicken character was able to be played very well by rendy. improvisation was quite a lot done in terms of body gestures. the storytelling was flexible and very entertaining. this made the assessment regarding rendy's storytelling style was categorized as excellent. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 90. the second assessment is related to the mastery of the content of the story carried out by rendy. the content of the story was able to be mastered very well by rendy, the storyline was presented clearly and in sequence, no scenes are missed, the dialogue of the characters was very well mastered, and the moral message in the story conveyed was very explicitly clear. this made the assessment related to rendy's mastery of the content of the story was categorized as very good. therefore, according to the aspects of the assessment that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 90. the third assessment is related to rendy’s voice volume. rendy's voice sounded loudly with clear vocal articulation. the intonation of the sound emitted corresponded to the expressions and scenes performed. the tempo of the sound produced corresponds to the dialogue performed. this made the assessment regarding rendy's voice volume was categorized as excellent. therefore, according to the aspects of the assessment that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 88. the fourth assessment is related to the smoothness of the story carried out by rendy. in bringing the story, rendy did not use the text as an auxiliary tool. props in the form of chicken masks made of cardboard are used accordingly and very well. there were no mistakes and repetitions of the scene performed by rendy. this made the assessment regarding rendy's smooth storytelling was categorized excellent. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 88. table 12. m aldiansyah saputra’s storytelling skills assessment no aspects score gain 1. storytelling style 58 2. mastery of the content of the story 83 3, voice volume 73 4. fluency 70 total score 284 value 71 based on the results of research on fable storytelling skills entitled "tikus yang malang" and acting as a ferret by using mask props from used items in the form of cardboard, m aldiansyah saputra obtained a score of 72.3 which was then rounded to 72. this means that student was categorized as good. the results will be elaborated according to the predetermined aspects of the assessment. the first assessment is related to the storytelling style carried out by aldi. there was no improvisation in terms of dialogue or movement, the storytelling tended to be less entertaining. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 58. the second assessment is related to the mastery of the content of the story carried out by aldi. in practice, aldi mastered the content of the story well, the storyline was also well presented. regarding the dialogue, there were some parts that have been forgotten, but after being reminded again by his friend, aldi was able to continue the story, so the assessment related to mastery of the content of the story was good. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 83. the third assessment is related to aldi’s voice volume. aldi's voice sounded quite loud, the intonation released was quite good and appropriate, the articulation sounds clear and good, but regarding the tempo still tended to be fast, so the assessment related to the volume of the sound was categorized as good. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 73. the fourth assessment is related to the smoothness of storytelling carried out by aldi. the story that aldi has memorized, but often aldi forgot his dialogue, so some friends had to remind and occasionally helped by showing the text. the props used were in the form of masks without supports which were used by holding them constantly quite well because they often forgot to be used by aldi indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 233 during dialogue several times. the character of the weasel character in the story presented was quite well displayed by aldi, so the assessment related to the smoothness of the story was quite good. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 70. table 13. jeriyanto rafael tampubolon’s storytelling skills assesment no aspects score gain 1. storytelling style 58 2. mastery of the content of the story 82 3, voice volume 60 4. fluency 70 total score 270 value 68 based on the results of research on fable storytelling skills entitled "tikus yang malang" and acting as a cat using mask props from used items in the form of cardboard, jeriyanto rafael tampubolon obtained a score of 68.5 which was later rounded to 69. this means that student was categorized as good enough. the results will be elaborated according to the predetermined aspects of the assessment. the first assessment is related to the storytelling style carried out by jeriyanto. in playing the cat character, jeriyanto tended to entertain the audience less and show less of a strong cat character in the story. in addition, there was no improvisation in terms of dialogue or movement. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 58. the second assessment is related to the mastery of the content of the story carried out by jeriyanto. mastery of the content of the story was relatively good and appropriate, the storyline presented was also relatively good, but regarding the dialogue still tends to be stammering. this showed the results of the assessment from the aspect of mastering the content of the story, including good. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 82. the third assessment is related to the volume of sound produced by jeriyanto. in practice, jeriyanto made a fairly loud voice and good articulation. however, related to intonation was still often flat, and the tempo tended to be fast so that it did not match what was in the story. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gives a score of 60. the fourth assessment is related to the smoothness of the story carried out by jeriyanto. in bringing the actual story, jeriyanto has memorized it and did not need to use text, but in some scenes, it had lost focus and was forced to be helped by his friend by seeing the text of the fabled story and then repeating the scene. in addition, the use of props in the form of masks without supports had also been done by holding them constantly well. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 70. this was due to students' difficulties in storytelling practices, among which are because factors in students become less clear and students are less likely to organize their words at the time of telling stories (ilmiyah, 2020, p. 28). table 14. akbar adliansyah’s storytelling skills assesment no aspects score gain 1. storytelling style 87 2. mastery of the content of the story 86 3, voice volume 86 4. fluency 85 total score 344 value 86 based on the results of research on fable storytelling skills entitled "kelinci yang sombong" and acting as a monkey by using mask props from used items in the form of cardboard, akbar adliansyah obtained a score of 86. this means that student was categorized as excellent. the results will be elaborated according to the predetermined aspects of the assessment. the first assessment is related to the storytelling style carried out by akbar. the monkey character was played by akbar very well and the character's characteristics were able to be displayed well through his walking gestures. improvisation was found in the gestures that akbar made to the monkey figure. the storytelling was flexible and entertained the audience. this made the assessment related to akbar's storytelling style was categorized as excellent. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 87. the second assessment is related to the mastery of the content of the story carried out by akbar. the hindun effectiveness of used goods utilization as learning media on fable for junior high school students 234 content of the story was very well mastered, the storyline was presented clearly and coherently, no scenes were missed, the character's dialogue was very well mastered. this made the assessment related to the mastery of the content of akbar's story was categorized as very good. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 86. the third assessment is related to akbar’s voice volume. akbar's voice sounded loudly with clear articulation. the intonation of the sound was properly produced to the expression displayed. the tempo of the resulting sound was normal and appropriate. this made the assessment regarding akbar's voice volume was categorized as excellent. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 86. the fourth assessment is related to the smoothness of storytelling carried out by akbar. the story is presented by akbar without the need for text as an auxiliary tool. props in the form of a mask in the form of a monkey face were used well, although it was still not optimal because it was often used to cover the mouth instead of the face. there were no mistakes and repetitions of the scene, it was just that he was often late to enter the next scene because of laughing because he felt funny about the behavior of friends and himself in front of the class. however, the assessment related to the smoothness of akbar's storytelling was still categorized as excellent. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 85. table 15. putri marsya ningsih’s storytelling skills assessment no aspects score gain 1. storytelling style 87 2. mastery of the content of the story 90 3, voice volume 85 4. fluency 88 total score 350 value 88 based on the results of research on fable storytelling skills entitled "empat sekawan" and acting as a deer using mask props from used items in the form of cardboard, princess marsya ningsih obtained a score of 87.5 which was later rounded to 88. this means that student was categorized as excellent. the results will be elaborated according to the predetermined aspects of the assessment. the first assessment is related to the storytelling style carried out by marsya. the deer character was played by marsya well and accordingly. the improvisation carried out wass dominant in terms of gestures. the storytelling was flexible and interesting. this made the assessment related to marsya's storytelling style was categorized excellent. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 87. the second assessment is related to the mastery of the content of the story carried out by marsya. the content of the story was able to be mastered very well by marsya, the storyline presented was clear and coherent, no scenes were missed, the character dialogue was able to be mastered very well, and the moral message in the story conveyed was very explicitly clear. this made the assessment related to the mastery of the content of marsya's story was categorized as very good. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 90. the third assessment is related to marsya’s voice volume. marsya's voice sounded quite loud and the articulation of her vocals was clear. intonation corresponded to the scene performed, although it was often less controlled due to laughter. the tempo of the resulting sound was normal and appropriate. this made the assessment regarding the volume of sound produced by marsya was categorized as excellent. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 85. the fourth assessment is related to the fluency of storytelling carried out by marsya. the story presented by marsya without using the text paper was very good. props in the form of deer masks were used accordingly and very well. there were no mistakes and repetitions of the scenes performed by marsya. this made the assessment of marsya's smoothness of storytelling was categorized excellent. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 88. table 16. muhamad rydho’s storytelling skills assesment no aspects score gain indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 235 1. storytelling style 63 2. mastery of the content of the story 83 3, voice volume 70 4. fluency 76 total score 292 value 73 based on the results of research on fable storytelling skills entitled "tikus yang malang" and acting as a rabbit by using mask props from used items in the form of cardboard and cardboard, muhamad rydho obtained a score of 73. this means that student was categorized as good. the results will be elaborated according to the predetermined aspects of the assessment. the first assessment is related to the storytelling style carried out by rydho. the rabbit character was played by rydho quite well, but the character had not seen the characteristics of the character. no improvisational look was done because rydho was referring to the text entirely. the storytelling tended to be less flexible and less entertaining. this made the assessment regarding rydho's storytelling style was still categorized as quite good. therefore, according to the aspects of the assessment that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 63. the second assessment is related to the mastery of the content of the story carried out by rydho. the content of the story was well mastered, the storyline was presented clearly and coherently, the dialogue of the characters was performed quite well, the giving of moral message in the dialogue was quite explicitly clear. this makes the assessment related to the mastery of the content of rydho's story was categorized as good. therefore, according to the aspects of the assessment that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 83. the third assessment is related to rydho’s voice volume. rydho's voice sounded loudly with clear articulation. the intonation of the sound emitted also tended to be flat according to the existing expression and is less in accordance with the use of periods, commas, and other punctuation marks in the dialogue. the tempo of the sound emitted tended to be normal and quite appropriate. this made the assessment regarding rydho's voice volume was categorized as quite good. therefore, according to the assessment rubric that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 70. the fourth assessment is related to the smoothness of the story carried out by rydho. in bringing the story, rydho without needing the help of the text. the props used were not suitable, because rydho only held his mask and was not worn. there were no mistakes and repetitions of the scene performed by rydho. this made the assessment regarding the smoothness of rydho's story still included in the good category. therefore, according to the aspects of the assessment that has been made, the researcher gave a score of 76. conclusion based on the results of the discussion from the research that has been carried out, the researcher draws the conclusion that the use of used goods as a learning meda in students’ fable storytelling skills at smp negeri 7 depok, class vii is effective. this was marked by the results of a study of fifteen students with an average score of 83.26 which was then rounded to 83 which was included in the good category. the highest score is 91 obtained by rafid athier mumtaz. acknowledgement i am incredibly grateful to, all the interviewees who contributed to the project. i would also like to thank the editorial team at for their helpful suggestions on this article. references anggito, a. 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(2019). kode-kode budaya dalam fabel masyarakat aceh. serambi akademica: jurnal pendidikan, sains, dan humaniora, 5(2), 224229. https://journal.unhas.ac.id/index.php/jish/article/vi ew/20750/8276 https://journal.universitaspahlawan.ac.id/index.php/jote/article/view/3563 https://journal.universitaspahlawan.ac.id/index.php/jote/article/view/3563 https://doi.org/10.33084/pengabdianmu.v6i3.2082 https://doi.org/10.33084/pengabdianmu.v6i3.2082 https://doi.org/10.33084/pengabdianmu.v6i3.2082 http://eprints.umsida.ac.id/1433/1/jurnal%20urwatun.pdf http://eprints.umsida.ac.id/1433/1/jurnal%20urwatun.pdf https://journal.uhamka.ac.id/index.php/solma/article/view/3650/1749 https://journal.uhamka.ac.id/index.php/solma/article/view/3650/1749 http://repository.upy.ac.id/3329/1/artikel_bella_shanty_wardini.pdf http://repository.upy.ac.id/3329/1/artikel_bella_shanty_wardini.pdf https://journal.unhas.ac.id/index.php/jish/article/view/20750/8276 https://journal.unhas.ac.id/index.php/jish/article/view/20750/8276 indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 135 effective teaching and language learning motivation: a study on the interconnection zeinab kafi phd candidate, english department, islamic azad university, torbat heydarieh branch, iran. email: kafizb@gmail.com khalil motallebzadeh associate professor, english department, islamic azad university, torbat heydarieh branch, iran. email: kmotallebz@gmail.com apa citation: kafi, z. & motallebzadeh, k. (2015). effective teaching and language learning motivation: a study on the interconnection. indonesian efl journal, 1(2), 135-143 received: 18-12-2014 accepted: 21-04-2015 published: 01-07-2015 abstract: the present study aimed at examining the relationship between efl teachers’ effective teaching and the language learning motivation of iranian efl learners whose english proficiency was upper-intermediate and above. to this end, 150 upper-intermediate and advance efl students, from some language schools in mashhad, iran participated in the study. the participants were firstly asked to fill out a researcher made questionnaire which aimed at checking their opinions on how effective they considered their teachers in teaching (effective teaching questionnaire). afterwards, the same students were asked to fill out a questionnaire that investigated how much motivated they were for learning english (language learning motivation questionnaire). these questionnaires were validated by two experts in the field, also their reliability, using cronbach's alpha, was estimated to be .87 and .80 respectively. afterwards the relation between teachers’ effectiveness in teaching and the extent to which students were motivated as a result was investigated. for measuring the probable relation, correlation as well as multiple regressions was run for analysis of the obtained data. the results exhibited the existence of a positive relation between the two. keywords: effective teaching, motivation, efl learners, efl teachers introduction background and purpose the question of what makes someone a good teacher is relevant for all teaching contexts, but it is especially important in the field of english as a foreign or second language where teachers can be hired simply for being a native speaker with a bachelor’s degree (darn, 2004, as cited in cambridge english teacher, 2014). generally speaking, there seems to be a widespread attention and research done regarding effective teaching which one is a sub category of quality teaching. within a wider scope, nearly all teachers across the globe seem to be highly interested in knowing what could work best in their classroom and how it is possible for them to boost their teaching outcome in order to further satisfy the learners. according to clark (1993) & sullivan (2001), “an effective teacher is one who demonstrates knowledge of the curriculum, provides instruction in a variety of approaches to varied students, and measurably increases students’ achievement”. to the knowledge of the researcher the kind of interaction between and among teachers and students and how it is maintained has long been the focus of attention to many elt researchers mainly because it is this kind of relation which gives us a thorough perspective on how effective teaching has taken place! therefore, whether or not this effective teaching literally takes place in language classrooms or not needs to be studied thoroughly in order to inform any further changes the teachers may deem useful and needed. moreover, according to papanastasiou (1999), who points out that “no single teacher attribute or characteristic is adequate to define an effective teacher”, it is almost impossible to call a teacher an effective one mailto:kafizb@gmail.com mailto:kmotallebz@gmail.com zeinab kafi & khalil motallebzadeh effective teaching and language learning motivation: a study on the interconnection 136 simply based on the results of the students’ grades, therefore a closer extraction of the elements contributing to effective teaching, at language schools as the immediate context of this study, was another point of discussion in this area of study. to address the above mentioned problem, the researchers tried to answer the following questions: q1. is there any significant relationship between effective teaching and iranian efl learners’ language learning motivation? q2. is there any significant relationship between any of the four sub-categories of effective teaching and efl learners’ language learning motivation? an important point motivating a work in this area is the status of teaching in general and its being effective in particular in iran which has recently turned into a hot issue among elt practitioners as well as teachers and its direct effect on students as a vast community. in other words, so many budgets on workshops, conferences, speeches and teacher awareness programs are spent so to improve the current teaching/learning status and outcome. therefore, getting to know about how far teachers have been able to achieve this effectiveness and how significant its impact on students are, could be an issue of a high vitality, because it would certainly aid teachers in finding out if they have been moving within the perspectives or the purposes of teaching are not primarily met. finally, according to naace (national association of advisors for computers in education), we know that as technology develops and new learning and teaching opportunities arise as a result, new examples of good practice will emerge. e-learning will offer new ways of learning, teachers will play new roles in the process and new models of excellent classroom practice will become apparent! therefore, a more detailed analysis of these factors and its effectiveness in teaching as the result is deemed delightful to focus on! like any other researches, some inevitable (de) limitations, which may raise new questions for further researches in the same field in the future, will be imposed on. first of all, variables such as gender and personal variables are not taken into account. however, the most important restriction in this study is the fact that the notion of effective teaching is a vast area to focus on and as the context of this study was a language school whose students were mainly high school ones, and thus understanding all the categories and sub-categories of effective teaching was rather a tough task for them, the researchers mainly focused on those aspects of effective teaching which seemed more relevant to the realm of language teaching in language schools. consequently, we would doubt about the extent to which the presence of other issues of effective teaching might influence the evaluation of these teachers in other similar academic/nonacademic contexts! definition of key terms motivation dornyei (1998) defines motivation as a “process whereby certain amount of instigation force arises, initiates action, and persists as long as no other force comes into play to weaken it and thereby terminate action or until the planned outcome has been reached”. effective teaching effectiveness has been defined differently in different contexts and based on different purposes. the following definition is the operational definition for the present paper: according to james and sammons (2013), it is the ability to produce gains on student achievement scores; taking account of a baseline measure of students’ prior attainment and other characteristics of student intake, the teacher effect is identified in relation to students’ progress measured by later attainment. such measures are often calculated in terms of progress over a school year. literature review possible ways for effective teaching to be maintained according to sharyn o’neill, the director general of the government of western australia, teachers can to an almost indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 137 absolute point, turn to be effective ones in the realm of teaching just in case they keep some factors highlighted in their profession. they namely include: having high expectations: she strongly believes that teachers should strive to motivate and engage all their students in learning rather than simply accepting that some students cannot be engaged and are destined to do poorly. moreover, they should have high expectations of themselves and their own learning! acknowledging individual differences: what is highly important here is the fact that teachers should bear this in mind that personalizing the learning for their students as well as knowing that students develop at different rates can help them up to a great deal. on top of all these, a teacher is to accommodate the different needs of students in his/her class rather than pitch his/her teaching to the middle. using a range of pedagogies: this mainly centers on the fact that teachers should use techniques that best serve the learning needs of their students so that they can learn on themselves through discovery. besides, effective teachers know that students learn best if they are provided with opportunities to learn not only from the teacher but also from other students and from sources outside the school that are now more readily accessible through various forms of technology. encouraging student responsibility: teachers had better teach in a way that encourages students to take greater responsibility for their own learning so to make sure their students know what the goals of the learning program are and therefore it results in students being actively involved in evaluating their own learning. having mastery over their teaching content: this mainly highlights the fact that teachers are to have thorough knowledge of their subject content and skills and accordingly use their knowledge of learning processes to determine which will be most effective to help the particular students in their classes learn successfully. monitoring progress and providing feedback: for teachers to be effective ones, it is absolutely necessary to closely monitor each student’s achievements mainly because this gives them valuable information to assess the impact of their teaching. effective teachers are also in the habit of constantly reflecting on how well they are getting through to their students and searching for better ways of teaching those who are not responding as well as extending those who are achieving well. providing a safe environment: provide a safe and orderly environment, both physically and emotionally so that students can achieve their potential because they learn best if they are in a classroom where they feel safe and confidently attempt new tasks even if at first they are unsure about how to tackle them. building positive relationships: teachers are advised to develop productive relationships with their students i.e. they get to know them and take a particular interest in their overall development and progress and also try to work collaboratively to benefit student learning. effective teachers according to kyriacou (1997), “over the years, thinking about effective teaching has been approached in a number of different ways. until the 1960s, research on effective teaching was largely dominated by attempts to identify attributes of teachers, such as personality traits, sex, age, knowledge and training, which might have a bearing on their effectiveness. as long ago as 1931, for example, cattell asked 254 people, including directors of education, teacher trainers, schoolteachers and pupils, to write down the most important qualities of the good teacher”. however, as cited in cambridge english teacher (2014), there exist numerous definitions and characteristics of highly effective teachers and educators in this area have come up with variety of terms and notions, but they put forward a 10 characteristic list which they believe feel constitutes characteristics of excellence in our profession. they namely include: a “calling” to the profession( attitude, pride) zeinab kafi & khalil motallebzadeh effective teaching and language learning motivation: a study on the interconnection 138 professional knowledge(curriculum, context, programs, technology) personality/personal qualities(creativity, patience, humor) with-it-ness (time, change ) instructional effectiveness (deliver effective lessons) good communication skills (how well a teacher conveys concepts & skills) street smarts (politically-savvy) willingness to go the extra mile (make a difference in students’ lives, high expectations) commitment to lifelong learning (self/professional development, reflection, engagement) life outside the classroom (not being too consumed by the job! teachers should find something that defines them out of the classroom). after all, although all these tips might definitely help us develop teaching as our profession, it is also suggested to bear in mind the fact that there is really no single recipe to being a perfect teacher, nor is being perfect even realistic meanwhile teacher effectiveness, is the single biggest contributor to students’ success mainly because it outweighs all the other factors such as class size, socio economic status and gender (wenglinsky, 2000)! motivation as a salient feature of language learning in educational psychology, the definition of what it is to be motivated is quite simple: “to be motivated is to be moved to do something.” (cited in xue, m., and han, b., 2014).to the knowledge of the researcher there has never been an agreed upon concept for what motivation can be defined. however, it can be claimed that motivation is responsible firstly for why people decide to learn a language (herein this means english as a foreign language), how hard they are going to pursue this study and finally how long they are willing to sustain the activity (as cited in kheradmandan, p. 2010). gardner (1985) identifies two types of motivation: integrative motivation and instrumental motivation. they define integrative motivation as the desire to achieve proficiency in a new language in order to know about the other culture and participate in the life of the community. or in cook's words, this type of motivation reflects the l2 learners' identification or rejection towards the target culture and its people (as cited in kheradmandan, p. 2010). deci and ryan (1985) also classify motivation into two types: extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. extrinsic motivation comes from the desire to get a reward or avoid punishment; the focus is on something that is external or functionally unrelated to the activity in which they engage. to some extent, it has something in common with instrumental motivation. with intrinsic motivation the learning experience is its own reward. as deci and ryan (1985:245) put it, "intrinsic motivation is in evidence whenever students' natural curiosity and interest energize their learning". in other words, intrinsic motivation exists when someone works because of an inner desire to accomplish a task successfully, whether it has some external value or not (as cited in kheradmandan, p. 2010). moreover, based on what xue (2014) states in his paper, dornyei (2005) puts forward the famous three-level motivational theory namely as language level, learner level, and learning situational level, which consists of course-specific, teacher-specific and group-specific motivational components. dornyei’s framework is very concrete and highlights that motivation will be affected by situational factors. related studies there have been similar studies carried out with regard to both or one of the variables. since the 1990s, many researchers have done some studies on the interrelationship between language learning motivation and the use of language learning strategies (macintyre and noels, 1996; schmidt, boraie, and kassabgy, 1996; schmidt and watanabe, 2001). the results indicate that motivation is significantly correlated with strategies. however, few, if any, studies have been conducted to investigate the relationships of the two indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 139 among chinese college students who learn english as a foreign language. in order to bridge this gap, an exploratory study is carried out to investigate the relationships between language learning motivation and language learning strategies (as cited in chun-huan, 2010). besides, it is worth noting here that a large number of researches have been carried out in china with regard to motivation. for instance, in china, motivation research began in the 1990s. professor wen qiufang (2001) classifies learner’s modified variables, among which motivation is closely related to belief and strategy on which deep motivation has more influence compared with surface motivation. other research in china also finds motivation determines the success and failure of second language learning and has direct influence on strategy frequency. with regard to the other variable, effective teaching, studies related to this notion seem to be very rare in efl context and those which are done are mostly qualitative ones aiming to define the construct or simply thinking of possible instruments to measure it as well as seeking different parties point of view about who an effect teacher can be. for instance, a number of studies have explored pupils’ views of teachers and teaching (cullingford, 2003; haydn, 2007; pollard et al., 2000). making a comparison between teachers’ effectiveness in teaching and students᾽ language learning motivation, is a hot issue embracing recent interest especially with regard to the notion of effective teaching in efl context. therefore, the researcher would investigate the probable relationship between the two variables. method participants the participants in this study consisted of 150 efl male and female students from 4 language schools in mashhad iran (zabansara, mahan, shokuh and elm fan baran). almost all of these participants marked their proficiency in english as excellent and very good. the aforementioned participants were asked to fill in two researcher made questionnaires checking their ideas about how effective they considered their teachers’ teaching and secondly how motivated they were for learning english as the immediate result of that teaching. the time allotted to each of these questionnaires was 15 minutes. instrumentation the means of gathering data in this research were two researchers made questionnaires each of which will be discussed briefly: effective teaching questionnaire in order to check students’ opinion on how effective their teachers’ teaching style has been, the researchers designed a 54 item questionnaire which asked students to mark their opinions on each of the 5 point likert scale items ranging from always to never. the questionnaire consisted of 4 categories on effective teaching (engagement, delivery of instruction, behavior management and selfawareness of personal features) each of which embraced up to 16 items. in order to design the questionnaire, the researchers went through a thorough corpus study and extracted the features of effective teaching from related textbooks and articles. once the questionnaire was designed, two experts in the field commented and reviewed the items for the sake of the validation of the questionnaire several times and necessary changes were applied accordingly. afterwards, its reliability was estimated after piloting the questionnaire, using cronbach alpha which revealed a high degree of .87 of reliability. the amount of time allotted for answering the questionnaire was 15 minutes. language learning motivation questionnaire in order to come up with how motivated students were for learning english, as a result of the effective teaching they had received, liu’s questionnaire on efl undergraduates’ motivation and their autonomy in english learning (2008) was modified based on the purpose of the present study (extracting items related to motivation in language learning) and finally its reliability was calculated again (.80).the questionnaire consisted of 23 five point likert scale ranging zeinab kafi & khalil motallebzadeh effective teaching and language learning motivation: a study on the interconnection 140 from strongly agree to strongly disagree. the amount of time allotted for answering the questionnaire was 15 minutes. procedure in this study, the researchers investigated the probable relationship between efl teachers’ effective teaching and the extent to which their students were motivated in learning the language (english in this context). to this end, the date and time were arranged with the institutes in order to be able to administer the questionnaires to upper intermediate and advance efl learners. the process of collecting the data in the current study started in may 2015 and ended in july 2015 in several language schools (zabansara, mahan, shokuh and elm-fan baran). the data collection means in this study were two researchers made questionnaires. the questionnaires were administered in upper-intermediate and advance classes. the researcher was present all throughout the administration in order to ease the process for the participants and keep the conditions consistent. as the researchers aimed at investigating the relation between effective teaching and language learning motivation, once the data was gathered, the results were analyzed through applying pearson correlation and multiple regression. and finally, the results were discussed in the teaching and learning setting. results and discussion in order to find the answer to the first research question i.e. whether there exists a significant relation between effective teaching and efl learners’ language learning motivation, the correlation between effective teaching and learners’ language learning motivation was estimated through pearson correlation. the data is presented in table 1. table 1. correlations: effective teaching and language learning motivation language learning motivation effective teaching language learning motivation pearson correlation 1 .095 sig. (2-tailed) .247 n 150 150 effective teaching pearson correlation .095 1 sig. (2-tailed) .247 n 150 150 as depicted in table 1, pearson correlation is .09 which is close to but smaller than 1; therefore, there exists an almost perfect positive correlation between effective teaching and efl learners’ language learning motivation. however, this positive relation between the two is not a significant one, probably because the participants weren’t cooperative enough while answering the items in either of the questionnaires or due to their affective/ physical status at that moment. in order to check which of the four sub categories of effective teaching (engagement, delivery of instruction, behavior management and self-awareness of personal features) possessed the highest level of correlation with the dependent variable (language learning motivation), multiple regression was employed the result of which is revealed in table 2. table 2. correlations: engagement, delivery of instruction, behavior management, self-awareness of personal features motivation engagement delivery behavior self-awareness pearson correlation motivation 1.000 .080 .172 .072 .000 engagement .080 1.000 .449 .361 .421 delivery .172 .449 1.000 .370 .603 behavior .072 .361 .370 1.000 .369 self-awareness .000 .421 .603 .369 1.000 indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 141 sig. (1tailed) motivation . .166 .017 .192 .498 engagement .166 . .000 .000 .000 delivery .017 .000 . .000 .000 behavior .192 .000 .000 . .000 self-awareness .498 .000 .000 .000 . n motivation 150 150 150 150 150 engagement 150 150 150 150 150 delivery 150 150 150 150 150 behavior 150 150 150 150 150 self-awareness 150 150 150 150 150 as for the analysis depicted in table 2, pearson correlation, all the four sub categories of effective teaching possess a value of above .3 which proves the positive interrelationship which exists between the dependent and independent variables (.42, .60, .36 and 1 respectively). after all, to check which one of these relations is a statistically significant, the sig. goes to the “delivery of instruction” depicting a level of significance of .01 which is smaller than .05! in order to check the multicollinearity assumption and also for comparing the contribution of each of independent variables to the dependent variable, coefficient correlation is employed and the results are shown in table 3. table 3. coefficients of correlation model unstandardized coefficients standardized coefficients t sig. 95% confidence interval for b correlations collinearity statistics b std. error beta lower bound upper bound zeroorder partial part tolerance vif 1 (constant) 76.017 9.521 7.984 .000 57.199 94.834 engagement .047 .157 .028 .298 .766 -.263 .356 .080 .025 .024 .732 1.366 delivery .406 .170 .254 2.387 .018 .070 .741 .172 .194 .193 .578 1.731 behavior .060 .167 .032 .357 .722 -.271 .390 .072 .030 .029 .796 1.257 selfawareness -.244 .145 -.177 -1.682 .095 -.530 .043 .000 -.138 -.136 .593 1.686 according to table 3, the tolerance values for each of the four subcategories is smaller than .10 (.73, .57, .79, .59 respectively), therefore it indicates that the multiple correlation with other variables is high, suggesting the possibility of multicollinearity. thus, the multicollinearity assumption is not violated. standardized coefficients (beta) was used to compare the contribution of each independent variable to the prediction of the dependent variable. the larger the beta value, the more contribution that particular independent variable depicts for the prediction of the dependent variable. the largest beta value in table 3 goes to “delivery of instruction”, “self-awareness”, and “behavior” respectively and the least amount of contribution is attributed to engagement. finally, the sig. values are employed in order to check whether the beta values are making a statistically significant contribution to the dependent value or not. among all the four independent variables, “delivery of instruction” depicts a statistically significant unique contribution to the prediction of the dependent variable (.01< .05). conclusion as illustrated through the data analysis and results, there existed a positive relation between efl teachers’ effective teaching and efl learners’ language learning motivation. also, the four sub-categories of effective teaching revealed to have a high multiple correlation, and each of which contributed up to a point to the prediction of the dependent variable i.e. language learning motivation, above all stood the “delivery of instruction” which proved to have the strongest significant unique contribution to language learning motivation. there has also been enormous attention and importance given to the notion of effective teaching by other language specialists and researchers in recent years. zeinab kafi & khalil motallebzadeh effective teaching and language learning motivation: a study on the interconnection 142 for instance some have attempted to systematically categorize different teaching behaviors and analyze the links between these categories and student achievement and as a result much has been written about specific effective teaching skills (clark & peterson ,1986; kyriacou ,2007; muijs & reynolds, 2005; philpott ,2009; wragg ,1984), different teaching styles (bennett ,1976; galton, simon & croll, 1980; opdenakke & van damme ,2006), and different models of teaching, which specify particular types of learning environment and approaches to teaching (joyce, calhoun & hopkins ,2008). these studies have shown that variations in teaching behaviours contribute much to teachers’ effectiveness in the classroom. in addition, they reveal a high degree of consensus concerning the generic features of effective teaching (as cited in james and sammons, 2013). after all, what we teachers should constantly maintain and take care of, is the notion of effective teaching which can bring about and open the doors for our students’ innovative, independent and motivated language learning styles and experiences. it would be definitely in this case that we have considered our teaching as a profession but not as a job/career! according to darlinghammond (2000), the importance of maintaining and ensuring high quality teaching can be explained in this way: “the effect of poor quality teaching on student outcomes is debilitating and cumulative. …the effects of quality teaching on educational outcomes are greater than those that arise from students’ backgrounds. … a reliance on curriculum standards and state-wide assessment strategies without paying due attention to teacher quality appears to be insufficient to gain the improvements in student outcomes sought. … the quality of teacher education and teaching appear to be more strongly related to student achievement than class sizes, overall spending levels or teacher salaries.” (p. 3). on the other hand, making sure that all students are enjoying and experiencing high quality teaching/effective teaching in one single classroom is a matter of skepticism and debate. however, although not sufficient enough, attracting high quality entrants to the teaching profession, and providing high quality pre-service education and ongoing professional development are important requirements for maintaining and raising standards in teaching (james and sammons, 2013). in conclusion, it can surely be claimed that effective teaching has got a main role in defining learners’ language learning motivation and the only unstable factor could be the extent to which motivation or other language learning features might increase as the result of effective/ high quality teaching and this may mainly be attributed to high quality schools, learning environment, teaching/ learning aids and facilities and of course to more and less effective teachers! accordingly, the need for a research on whether effective teaching is a stable factor or a flexible one, moving from the context of universities, to high schools or language schools is an immediate one! above all, the outcomes of the already carried out researches in this area can provide impetus to policymakers and practitioners to address the crucial issues of educational effectiveness, quality teaching and teaching standards. references bennett, n. (1976). teaching styles and pupil progress. london: open books. chun-huan, f. (2010). a correlational study of language learning motivation and strategies of chinese undergraduate. canadian social science, 6(4), 202-209. clark, c. & peterson, p. (1986). ‘teachers’ thought processes’. in m. wittrock (ed.), handbook of research on teaching, pp. 255-296. new york: macmillan. coombe, ch. (2014). 10 characteristics for highly effective ef/sl teachers. cambridge english teacher, cambridge university press and cambridge english language assessment 2014. darling-hammond, l. (2000). ‘teacher quality and student achievement: a review of state policy evidence’. education policy analysis archives, 8(1). darn, s. (2004). beyond training and teaching: a review of the state of efl in uk and out from uk. humanizing language teaching. retrieved june 24, 2013, from http;//www.hltmag.co.uk/may05/mart01.html, indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 143 deci, e. l., & ryan, r. m. (1985). intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behavior. plenum, new york. dornyei, z. (1998). motivation in second and foreign language learning. language teaching, 31, 11735. doi: 10.1017/s026144480001315x, http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s026144480001315 x galton, m., simon, b. & croll, p. (1980) inside the primary classroom. london: routledge and kegan paul. gardner, r. c. (1985). social psychology and second language learning: the role of attitudes and motivation, edward arnold, london. james, k., and sammons, p. (2013). effective teaching: a review of research and evidence. oxford university press. joyce, b., calhoun, e. & hopkins, d. (2008). models of learning, tools for teaching (3rd edn.). buckingham: open university press. kheradmandan, p. how can we maintain learners' ls motivation in a classroom setting? a thesis submitted to the department of applied english nanya institute of technology. kyriacou, c. (2007). effective teaching in schools – theory and practice. cheltenham: nelson thornes. language learning. in z. dörnyei and r. schmidt (eds.) motivation and second language learning acquisition. honolulu: university of hawaii press. macintyre, p, & k. noels. (1996). using socialpsychological variables to predict the use of language learning strategies. foreign language annals, 29: 373-386. muijs, d. & reynolds, d. (2005). effective teaching: evidence and practice (2nd edn.). london: sage. o’neill, sh. (2013). effective teaching. australia: the government of western australia. opdenakke, m. c. & van, j. d. (2006). ‘teacher characteristics and teaching styles as effectiveness enhancing factors of classroom practice’. teaching and teacher education, 22(1), 1-21. philpott, j. (2009). captivating your class: effective teaching skills. london: continuum. richards, j. c. (2001). curriculum development in language teaching. cambridge language education, cambridge. schmidt, r., boraie, d. and kassabgy, o. (1996). foreign language motivation: internal structure and external connections. in oxford r (ed.) language learning motivation: pathways to the new century. honolulu: university of hawaii press. schmidt, r. and y. watanabe. (2001). motivation, strategy use, and pedagogical preferences in foreign. wen, q. (2001). developmental patterns in motivation, beliefs and strategies of english learners in china. foreign language teaching and research, 33, 105-110. wragg, e. (1984). classroom teaching skills. london: croom helm. xue, f. & han, b. (2014). from conflicts to integration: an empirical study on chinese efl learners’ construction of bilingual identities. journal of language teaching and research, 5(5), 11601166. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s026144480001315x http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s026144480001315x introduction indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 189 a survey on several potentially problematic areas of pronunciation for iranian efl learners amir toghyani khorasgani young researchers club, khorasgan branch, islamic azad university, isfahan, iran email: toghyaniomid@yahoo.com ali toghyani khorasgani ph.d. student in the field of curriculum planning and young researchers club, khorasgan branch, islamic azad university, isfahan, iran email: alitoghiyany@yahoo.com narges keshti aray assistance professor at islamic azad university, isfahan, iran email: n_keshtiara@khuisf.ac.ir apa citation. khorasgani, khorasgani & aray (2015). a survey on several potentially problematic areas of pronunciation for iranian efl learners. indonesian efl journal, 1(2), 189-198 received: 02-04-2015 accepted: 24-04-2015 published: 01-07-2015 abstract: almost all english language teachers get students to study grammar, vocabulary, etc., but some of these same teachers make little attempt to teach pronunciation in any overt way and only give attention to it in passing. pronunciation teaching not only makes students aware of different sounds and sound features, but can also improve their speaking. concentrating on sounds, making aware of where words should be stressed, where words made in mouth, give students information about spoken english and help them achieve the goal of improved comprehension and intelligibility. pronunciation forms a natural link to other aspects of language use, such as listening, vocabulary, and grammar; ways of highlighting this interdependence in teaching need to be explored. the present paper looks at the problems which iranian learners are deal with through learning english according to the differences between their segmental and suprasegmental patterns in phonology. comparing the persian vowel system with that of english reveals some significant differences in the following three areas: 1) the number of vowels, 2) tense/lax distinctions, and 3) the pure/glide. there are also noticeable differences in consonantal distributions between persian and english such as their numbers, clusters, manner and place of articulation. the syllabus types of english and persian are also cause a lot of problem in spoken language. the differences between word stress patterns in persian and english also make problematic areas for iranian students. in this paper, through detailed examination of persian and english sound systems, some of the specific problems areas have been identified, especially in reference to some of the characteristic phonological differences between the two languages. keywords: vowel, consonant, syllable type, stress pattern introduction it is now generally acknowledged the term “intelligibility” as the primary concern for second or foreign language learners (derwing & munro, 2005). fraser (2000) claims that learners of english as a second language (esl), regardless of the accent they have, need to be able to speak in a way which is easily. the fact that native speakers of english can recognize foreign accents in esl/efl learners' speech such as spanish accents, japanese accents, chinese accents, iranian accents, etc., is a clear indication that the sound patterns or structure of their native languages have some influence on the speech or production of their second language. avery and ehrlich, (1992, cited in ohata, 2004) believe that the foreign accent of non-natives can be due to the influence of their native languages. a foreign accent is the constant occurrence of the phonetic differences from the norms of a language mailto:alitoghiyany@yahoo.com mailto:n_keshtiara@khuisf.ac.ir amir toghyani khorasgani, ali toghyani khorasgani, narges keshti aray a survey on several potentially problematic areas of pronunciation for iranian efl learners 190 which l1 speakers of that language recognize as unfamiliar to their own language sound system (brown, 2007; roach, 2009). in other words, it is quite reasonable to say that the nature of a foreign accent is determined to a large extent by a learner's native language (avery & ehrlich, 1992). thus, the pronunciation errors made by second language learners are considered not to be just random attempts to produce unfamiliar sounds but rather reflections of the sound inventory, rules of combining sounds, and the stress and intonation patterns of their native languages (swan & smith, 1987). moreover, the available literature illustrates that english loan words pose certain problems for non-native learners and students of english (bator, 2010; swan & smith, 2001). a number of researchers have focused specifically on the area of pronunciation and have reported that english loan words present non-native learners and students from different linguistic backgrounds with a number of pronunciation-related problems (daulton, 2008; johansson et al., 1999). in older method, such as audiolingualism, pronunciation has been largely identified with accurate production of isolated sounds or words, and this view is reflected in more contemporary methods such as the silent way. the contrastive analysis hypothesis (lado, 1957) regards pronunciation as central to second language proficiency, but it likewise largely restricts the domain of pronunciation to the segmental level. such observation of l2 pronunciation errors, naturally suggests the critical need for esl/efl teachers to become more aware of the impact that learners' l1 backgrounds would bring to the learning of english pronunciation. in order to identify specific areas of pronunciation difficulties caused by l1 phonological transfer, teachers need to cultivate a firm understanding of the differences between english and the native language of the learners. although contrastive analysis has often been criticized for its inadequacy to predict the transfer errors that learners will make in actual learning contexts, it cannot be easily denied that "such interference does exist and can explain difficulties" (brown, 1994, p. 200), especially in the phonological aspects of second language learning. in this sense, the significance of contrastive analysis may not necessarily lie in the predictability of transfer errors, but rather in the explanatory potential of learner errors that teachers encounter in their daily practices. schachter (1983, 1992) has considered the fact that learners may have imperfect knowledge of the second language and she even proposed that transfer is not a process at all, but rather a constraint on the acquisition process. odlin (1989, p.27) has brought some observations about what transfer is not and concluded that “transfer is the influence resulting from similarities and differences between the target language and any other language that has been previously (and perhaps imperfectly) acquired”. and then he stresses that it is only a working definition. even recently, pavlenko and scott (2002) as cited in ahmadvand, m. (n.d.) argued that transfer is not unidirectional but bidirectional and simultaneous that is shown by paradigmatic and syntagmatic categories. all this indicates the degree of the complexity of the notion of transfer without any consensus. segmental aspects of english & persian vowels what are the vowels? they are all voiced may be a single like /e/, as in let, or a combination, involving movement from one vowel sound to another like /ei/, as in late; such combination are know as diphthongs, and the combination of three vowel sounds are know as triphtonges like /auә/ in “our”. as yavas (2006) stated there are noticeable expected differences in vowel systems between persian and english. comparing the persian vowel system with that of english reveals some significant differences in the following three areas: 1) the number of vowels, 2) tense/lax distinctions, and 3) the pure/glide (by glide i mean the movement of articulator). in the english vowel system, there are 15 different vowels identified, indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 191 which include several diphthongs such as /aw/, /ay/, and/oy/. the differentiation between tense and lax vowels is made according to how much muscle tension or movement in the mouth is involved in producing vowels (ladefoged, 1982). thus, vowels produced with extra muscle tension are called tense, and vowels produced without that much tension are called lax vowels. for example, /i/ as in english /it/ "eat" is categorized as a tense vowel as the lips are spread (muscular tension in the mouth) and the tongue moves toward the root of the mouth. in persian we haven’t the exact thing, but we can show this by some words; for example, in the two words sib and sini we can notice this difference: for the word sib the vowel is a bit shorter than when we produce the word sini (more duration is needed to pronounce this sound). it is something similar to gemination, when persons believe that there is no gemination in english, but for example in a word like “bookcase” we can notice the geminating of the sound /k/ when we pronounce it. on the other hand, /i/ as in english "it" is considered to be a lax vowel as there is little movement of the tongue or muscular tension of the lips involved in its production, compared to the manner in which the tense vowel /i/ as in "eat" is produced. according to the number of vowels, there are apparently more vowels present in english than in persian. the fact that the persian vowel inventory is characterized as a typical six-vowel system and in english, there are five front vowels, and five back vowels suggests that iranian students would have difficulty producing english vowels that do not exist in the persian vowel system. there are six vowel sounds in the persian language. three are considered long vowels; the other three are short vowels. the three long vowels are [i:], [u], and [ ]; the three short vowels are [æ], [e], and [o]. there are also two diphthongs: [ei] and [ou]. all of the persian vowel sounds are the same or very similar to english vowels; however, english has several vowels that do not exist in persian. these include [i] as in bit, [ ] as in but, [ ] as in book, and [ ] as in the middle vowel sound in “sympathy”. so here it should be mentioned that the teachers should work more on these vowels. and as a method for a teacher is better to use minimal pairs to clarify the differences between pair familiar vowels for students first (by pair vowel i mean /i/ and /i:/ as in words like ship and sheep) and then uses some techniques to teach unfamiliar vowel (it is recommended teachers start with familiar and known vowels which are exist in both languages and their differences and then go through the unknown vowels combinations such a triphthongs). persian vowels tongue height part of tongue front centre back high i: u e o mid low amir toghyani khorasgani, ali toghyani khorasgani, narges keshti aray a survey on several potentially problematic areas of pronunciation for iranian efl learners 192 english vowel chart for comparison tongue height part of tongue front centre back high i: u i e o mid low consonants as with the differences in the vowel systems, there are also noticeable differences in consonantal distributions between persian and english (yavas, 2006). the tables, which show the consonant systems of english and persian languages, clearly illustrate the fact that there are more consonants in english. the researcher concluded that as same as the vowel, here for consonants students have face some problems again with those which are not exist in english and those which their pronunciation are different. another difference in the consonant is the sound /ή/ because in persian we pronounce /g/ after the sound /n/ like: chang, mang, tofang, hang, lang, feshang, here the absence of this unique sound cause the problem and researcher's suggestion is work on this sound as soon as possible from very beginning. for this sound, the absence of this sound in students’ native language (persian) cause to negative transfer from their l1 too; because they search for the nearest equivalence for this sound and find the combinations of the sound /n/ and /g/ as mention above. still another difference in the consonantal distribution between persian and english is that there exist some consonants found in the consonant inventory of persian but not in that of english and vice versa. for example, in persian there is /gh/ sound in a word like "bagh" or /x/ sound in a word like "xanevadeh". still another difference is that in persian we have four varieties of the sound /z/, and three varieties of the sound /s/ which their equivalent in english is absent. in english we have some consonant sounds like / ή/, /w/, / /, /ð/ which are absent in persian. it should be noted here for an iranian learner beginner or even advanced students it is difficult to differentiate between /w/ and /v/ automatically when they are speaking in a live speech and it is due to absence of the same differences in persian. a contrastive consonant list consonants that are common in english and persian are in the first line (level 0-transfe; no differences between english consonants and persian). consonants exclusive to english are in the second line level 4, over differentiated; new consonants in english which are not in persian). p, b, t, d, k, g, ?, m, n, r, f, v, s, z, ∫, з, h, l, r, j, t∫, dз. θ, ð ,w, ŋ. many consonants belonged to both languages, with the exception of w, θ, and ð. there are a few existing sounds that is not exist in english (level 2, under differentiation; some consonants are available in persian which are not in english): those were the persian letters; "ghaf" and "ghain" /g/ and also "khe" /χ/. the major difference between english and persian is the incapability of each language's speakers to pronounce the physical requirements of the other language's phonetic alphabet. the researcher encountered many english speakers that indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 193 couldn’t pronounce the "ghaf" or "khe" letters of the persian alphabet. and on the other hand, the researcher encountered persian speakers who can't pronounce the "th" sound of "θ" and some cannot distinguish between /w/ and /v/ sound as mention before. each language employs different ends of the spectrum of phonetics. here a delicate note should be mentioned; of course persian has two varieties of /g/ and four varieties of /z/ but most of the speakers even literate ones don’t know the differences between them due to the pronunciation although these varieties could change the meaning of the word when they are written. alveolar stops /t/ and /d/ are either alveolar or dental. the unvoiced stops /p, t, tʃ, k/ are aspirated much like their english counterparts: they become aspirated when they begin a syllable, though aspiration is not contrastive. persian does not have syllableinitial consonant clusters like cccv in linguistics, a consonant cluster (or consonant blend); it is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. in english, for example, the groups’ /spl/ and /ts/ are consonant clusters in the word splits. so unlike in english, /p, t/ are aspirated even following /s/, as in /hastam/ "i am"; thus, a word with initial consonant clusters such as "street" may be pronounced as /estirit/ or ‘student” may be pronounced /estju:dent/. word like “our” is difficult for iranian learners because it is one syllabus, a glide vowel. here i should mention; there are some languages that forbid empty onset such as, persian, hebrew, and arabic (actually begin with semiconsonantic glides or with glottal or pharyngeal consonant, like the word abr in persian). another problem for iranian students is syllabus; syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. for example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. a syllable is typically made up of a nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). so as we studied before in some words like street, and students, iranian learners make some syllable errors because of clustering absence in persian. in sum, there are 23 consonant sounds in persian, most of which are also found in english. the velar fricatives [x] and [q] are the only persian consonants that do not occur in english. conversely, there are four english consonants that do not exist in persian. these sounds are the interdentals [ ] and [ð], as in thigh and thy, the rounded velar glide [w], as in went, and the velar nasal [ ], as in the final sound of sing. the differences between the sounds of /v/ and /w/ when an iranian learner of english is speaking is not considered and most of the times if not always she or he uses /v/ for both even between advance students (although the advance students are aware of the difference pronunciations of these two sounds, but they mostly never correct it when they are speaking); the researcher approach to this problem from over generalization view. in over generalization view the students over generalize a rule, and here the pronunciation of the sound /v/, to other places incorrectly, here instead of the pronunciation of the sound /w/. persian consonants bilabial labiodental alveolar palatal velar glottal stops voiceless p t k voiced b d g fricatives voiceless f s x h voiced v z q affricates voiceless t voiced d http://wapedia.mobi/en/alveolar_consonant http://wapedia.mobi/en/dental_consonant http://wapedia.mobi/en/complementary_distribution http://wapedia.mobi/en/linguistics http://wapedia.mobi/en/consonant http://wapedia.mobi/en/vowel http://wapedia.mobi/en/speech_communication http://wapedia.mobi/en/vowel http://wapedia.mobi/en/consonant amir toghyani khorasgani, ali toghyani khorasgani, narges keshti aray a survey on several potentially problematic areas of pronunciation for iranian efl learners 194 nasals m n liquids r, l glides j syllable types comparing several words from english and persian can tell us some of the characteristic differences in the way that each language utilizes syllables for forming a word. the english syllable (and word) twelfths /twɛlfθs/ is divided into the onset /tw/, the nucleus /ɛ/, and the coda /lfθs/, and it can thus be described as ccvcccc (c = consonant, v = vowel). on this basis it is possible to form rules for which representations of phoneme classes may fill the cluster. for instance, english allows at most three consonants in an onset which is impossible in persian (it is never be beyond one c in onset) from these examples, we can say that english allows a wide variety of syllable types including both open and closed syllables: cv (open syllable), cvc ccvc, ccvcc, cccvcc (closed syllable). on the other hand, the syllable types that persian allows seem to be restricted. syllable structure is very predictable in persian; the possibilities are cv ba, cvc baz, and cvcc bast. we can conclude that some mispronunciation of words like student, split, string, splash, for iranian are due to consonant clusters, so the phonotactic constraints are language specific. for example, in persian, consonant clusters like /st/ are not allowed, although they are in english. similarly, the sounds /kn/ and /ɡn/ are not permitted at the beginning of a word in english. so because of this problem iranian learners’ are using to say /estiju:dent/ instead of /stu:d nt/ which is totally different from its origin. it causes to some misunderstanding between two speakers (if one of them is native speaker); as a observer, in a conversation with a native who was not familiar with this problem of iranian speakers and not familiar with the iranian culture when interlocutor offered him “ice cream” he understood “i scream” and he really was confused and couldn’t get the point immediately. as a method for teaching students to prevent such errors we should first teach our teachers don’t such errors (pedagogical effect), and then correct our students immediately after they produce such errors (theses errors are hinder to full understanding). suprasegmental aspects of english & persian suprasegmental aspects of the english sound system such as rhythm, stress, and intonation are often distinguished from the segmental aspects such as consonants and vowels discussed earlier. these suprasegmental aspects of english are also considered to be different from those of persian in many respects. stress stress and intonation, the so-called prosodic, or suprasegmental, domain, together with the related coarticulatory phenomena of the blending and overlapping of sounds in fluent speech. prosodic features involve the relative levels of stress and pitch within syllables, words, phrases, and longer stretches of speech. coarticulation causes elisions, contractions, and assimilations of neighboring sounds in the stream of speech under the influence of stress and intonation (ladefoged,1982, pp. 52-56, 98). stress refers to the degree of effort involved in the production of individual syllables or combinations of syllables making up a word or longer utterance. for longer utterances a combination of strong and weak syllables comprises a rhythmic pattern. english, like any language, is spoken with a distinct rhythmic pattern. rules of word stress http://wapedia.mobi/en/english_language indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 195 the researcher makes the differences between word stress patterns in persian and english to pinpoint the problematic areas for iranian students. rules of word stress in persian one syllable in each word (or breath group) is stressed. general rule: i. stress falls on the last stem syllable of most words. exceptions and clarifications: ii. stress falls on the first syllable of interjections, conjunctions and vocatives. e.g. /'bale/ "yes", /'nakheir/ "no indeed", /'vali/ "but", /'cerā/ "why", /'agar/ "if", /'mersi/ "thanks", /'xānom/ "ma'am", /'āqā/ "sir". iii. never stressed are: 1) personal suffixes on verbs (-am "i do..", -i "you do..", .., -and "they do..") 2) a small set of very common noun enclitics: the ezāfe (-e/-ye) "of", -rā "[direct object marker]", -i "a, an", -o "and"; 3) the possessive and pronoun-object suffixes, -am, et, -esh. iv. always stressed are: 1) the personal suffixes on the positive future auxiliary verb; 2) the negative verb prefix na-/ne-, if present; 3) if na-/neis not present, then the first nonnegative verb prefix (e.g. mi"-ing", bi"do!", and the prefix noun in compound verbs (e.g. kār in kār mi-kardam); 3) the last syllable of all other words, including the infinitive ending -an and the participial ending -te/-de in verbal derivatives, noun suffixes like -i "ish" and -egi, all plural suffixes (-hā, -ān), adjective comparative suffixes (-tar, -tarin), and ordinal-number suffixes (-om). nouns not in the vocative are stressed on the final syllable: /xā'nom/ "lady", /ā'qā/ "gentleman". v. in the informal language the present perfect tense is pronounced like the simple past tense. only the stress distinguishes between these tenses: the stressed personal suffix indicates the present perfect and the unstressed one the simple past tense which this rule is totally absent in english: formal informal meaning dī'de-am dī'dam i have seen 'dīdam 'dīdam i saw rules of word stress in english (note: the syllables indicated in capitals are the stressed syllables for these english words). core vocabulary: many nouns and adjectives of two-syllable length are stressed on the first syllable. for example, sister, brother, mother, water, lovely etc. prefix and suffixes: these are not usually stress in english. quietly, defective, and so on. exceptions: bicycle, dislocate. compound verb: words formed from a combination of two words tend to be stressed on the first element: postman, newspaper, teapot, crossword etc. words having a dual role: in the case of the words which can be used as either a noun or a verb, the noun will tend to be stressed on the first syllable and the verb on the last syllable. examples: import(n), import(v). rebel(n), rebel(v), and increase(n), increase(v). in persian, word stress is progressive; therefore, it falls on the final syllable of a word, unless the final syllable is a clitic. phrase stress, however, is regressive; therefore, verbs tend to be stressed on the initial syllable which is totally different in english language. for example, the compound noun baz-kon, which means 'opener,' is stressed on the final syllable, while the verb phrase represented by baz kon, which means 'open,' is stressed on the initial syllable; we have a related but completely different rule in english too. for example, the word import with stress on “port” when it is verb and with stress on “im” when it is noun; the first word, the verb means: to bring it from another amir toghyani khorasgani, ali toghyani khorasgani, narges keshti aray a survey on several potentially problematic areas of pronunciation for iranian efl learners 196 countries for sale or use; the second, the noun means: something bought and taken into a country from another. the similarity between two languages here is that in both stress pattern change the meaning and part of speech altogether. although both english and persian are similar in having word stress, they differ in terms of how word stress is realized in creating characteristic stress patterns of each language. most often in english, stressed syllables are marked primarily by making vowels longer and louder, while in persian syllable stress involves simply saying vowels at a higher pitch. a good method to teach the stress patterns in a foreign language are repetition after a model (it can be a teacher or a tape recorder) for students to internalize and cognize the rules. some other problematic areas for iranian learners final rising intonation pattern as used in yes-no question or final rising-falling as used in statements, commands, and whquestions often cause problems for nonnative speakers. for example, even if an iranian student intends to say a sentence as a statement, a native english speaker might misinterpret the statement as a question or assume that the speaker has not finished speaking yet. this example of misinterpretation as to the intent of the speaker's utterances clearly illustrates one of the most common problems that iranian learners of english may encounter in communication. when a speaker fails to lower the pitch level far enough at the end of a sentence, the utterance might be perceived as a continuation of the speech, in spite of the speaker's initial intention to finish the line. furthermore, it should be noted that since pitch changes can convey not only the meaning of sentences but also the speaker's attitude toward a topic of conversation, narrower use of pitch ranges by iranian students in their speech might be (mis)interpreted as a sign of boredom or lack of interest by the native english speakers. acquisition processes in l2 phonology second language acquisition (sla) research has confirmed that many other processes interact with language transfer in shaping the l2 (second language) phonological system. some of these acquisition processes are similar to those found in first language phonological development and may be interpreted as a reactivation of first language development strategies. for example, children acquire voiceless consonants before voiced consonants (macken & ferguson, 1981), and the same order of acquisition has been observed in second language phonological development, even when the learner’s native language possesses voiced final consonants. another phenomenon cited as a developmental process in first and second language acquisition is simplification largescale simplification of the target language by nonnative speakers has been seen as a kind of pidginization (ferguson, 1971; schumann, 1978). for second language learning the pidginization model predicts that a learner’s interlanguage forms will either fossilize at some distance from the target or go through a process of decreolization to approximate the target phonology over time. the teaching of pronunciation must focus on longer term goals; short-term objectives must be developed with reference to long term goals. the goal of any explicit training in pronunciation should be to bring learners gradually from controlled, cognitively based performance to automatic, skill-based performance. conclusion flege’s (2005) full access hypothesis states that the processes and devices that control successful l1 speech acquisition, including the ability to develop new phonetic categories, remain intact across the life span. this means that brain retains its plasticity and ability to change even at adult age. as we have seen in the preceding sections, many of the potential pronunciation difficulties for iranian esl/efl learners are found to be a clear reflection of the l1 phonological transfer. through detailed examination of persian and english sound systems, some of the specific problems areas indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 197 have been identified, especially in reference to some of the characteristic phonological differences between the two languages. pronunciation difficulties for iranian learners of english may arise: 1) when they encounter sounds in english that are not part of the sound inventory of persian; 2) when the rules of combining consonant sounds into words in persian are different from those in english (i.e., different consonant cluster); 3) when the characteristic patterns of stress in english, are different from those in persian; 4) when the stress change both the part of speech and meaning of a word. it should be noted, however, that identifying specific pronunciation difficulties for iranian learners of english do not necessarily lead to the dramatic improvement of their pronunciation, but rather that such knowledge can only constitute a prerequisite for teachers in creating actual teaching activities. teachers of english as a second/foreign language are now believed to have a more enabling role in the classroom (chang, 2007; kumaravadivelu, 2012, nosratinia & zaker, 2013a, 2013b). in other words, whether pronunciation teaching can become effective or not largely depends on how teachers can utilize such knowledge in designing the teaching materials or activities that help students become aware of the differences between english and persian sound systems and improve their pronunciation by themselves (kelly, 2000; celce-murcia, brinton & goodwin, 1996). although it is almost a cliché that the better the pronunciation, the more effective the communication becomes, it is equally true that even if l2 learners could attain perfect pronunciation of separate sound items, that does not guarantee smooth communication with native speakers nor effective presentation of the ideas that they intend to convey. communicative aspect of language learning, which involves many other competence requirements such as grammatical, strategic, sociolinguistic, or discourse knowledge, should not be neglected for the sake of native-like accuracy of pronunciation (morley, 1987; celce-murcia, 1987). teaching should aim toward gradually reducing the amount of native language influence on segmental, voice-setting, and prosodic features but should not necessarily seek to eradicate totally the influence of the native language on the speaker’s pronunciation in the second language. pronunciation ought to be taught as an integral part of oral language use, as part of the means for creating both referential and interfactional meaning, not merely as an aspect of the oral production of words and sentences. pronunciation forms a natural link to other aspects of language use, such as listening, vocabulary, and grammar; ways of highlighting this interdependence in teaching need to be explored. references ahmadvand, m. (2015). analysing errors of iranian efl learners in their written productions. retrieved 12 14, 2008, from knol beta: a unit of knowlede: http://knol.google.com/k/moslemahmadvand/analysing-errors-of-iranian-efl/ tbh5kkwy5hmk/2?locale=en. avery, p. & ehrlich, s. (1992). teaching american english pronunciation. oxford: oxford university press. bator, m. (2010). obsolete scandinavian loanwords in english. frankfurt: peter lang. brown, h. d. (1994). principles of language learning and teaching (3rd ed.). englewood cliffs, nj: prentice hall. brown, h. d. (2007). principles of language learning and teaching (5th ed.). new york: pearson education. catford, j. c. (1977). fundamental problems in phonetics. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. celce-murcia, m., brinton, d., & goodwin, j. (1996). teaching pronunciation: a reference for teachers of english to speakers of other languages. cambridge: cambridge university press. chang, y. l. 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(1999). out of corpora: studies in honor of stig johansson. the netherlands: rodopi. kelly, g. (2000). how to teach pronunciation. essex: longman. kumaravadivelu, b. (2012). language teacher education for a global society: a modular model for knowing, analyzing, recognizing, doing, and seeing. new york: routledge. ladefoged, p. (1982). a course in phonetics. new york: harcourt brace macken, m. a., & ferguson, c. a. (1981). phonological universals in language acquisition. annals of the new york academy of sciences, 379, 110-129. nosratinia, m., & zaker, a. (2013, april). creativity and autonomy: connections for language learning. paper presented at the second elt conference, allameh tabataba’i university, tehran, iran. nosratinia, m., & zaker, a. (2013, august). autonomous learning and critical thinking: inspecting the association among efl learners. paper presented at the first national conference on teaching english, literature, and translation, shiraz university, shiraz, iran. odlin, t. (1989). language transfer, cambridge: cambridge university press. ohata, k. (2004, october 20). phonological differences between japanese and english, retrieved, 14 dec 2008, from resource center for vietnamese students of english: http://khoaanh.hcmup.edu.vn/index.php?name=n ews&file=article&sid=608 pavlenko, a. and scott, j. (2002). “bidirectional transfer”, applied linguistic, 23, 2, pp: 190-214. roach, p. (2009). english phonetics and phonology: a practical course (4th ed.). cambridge: cambridge university press. schachter, j. (1983). “a new account of language transfer”, in s. gass and l. selinker (eds.), language transfer in language learning. rowley, ma: newbury house, pp.98-111. swan, m., & smith, b. (eds.). (1987). learner english: a teacher's guide to interference and other problems. cambridge: cambridge university press. swan, m., & smith, b. (2001). learner english: a teacher's guide to interference and other problems, (vol. 1). united kingdom: cambridge university press. yavas, m. (2006). applied english phonology. malden: blackwell. whatsapp mobile tool in second language learning nanan abdul manan teacher training and education higher school of muhammadiyah, kuningan e-mail : naba8288@gmail.com apa citation: manan, n. a. (2017). whatsapp mobile tool in second language learning. indonesian efl journal, 3(1), 87-92 received: 21-11-2016 accepted: 26-12-2016 published: 01-01-2017 abstract: this research focuses on the improvements of communicative learning skill. it uses a common technology tool of commonucation, whats application. english, as in nonnative education athmosphere, is dangerous lecture. the students of university, eventhough, have learnt english from primary school up to senior high school, they still find difficulty in practicing and understanding english as their custom and community. the difficult one can occur as the threarthening problem in every opportunity in english practicing. some problems are from teachers, methods, instrumets or motivation in providing english at class. what sapp is an application in currently technology used by many people, not exception for students at stkip muhammadiyah kuningan. it gives some interesting communication among students. the tool provides many advantages in communication. in this case, whatsapp mobile tool can support communicative learning in second language learning among students of university whether in writing and reading skills or in improving motivation to learn. english interractively is needed as the result of this lecture. the students use the application as fun and relax activities without barrier and ashamed communication. in this point, they can increase and improve their vocabularies by means of whatsapp tool communication. this study purposes to be fully utilized whatsapp mobil e tool to improve communicative skill in english language learning. key words: whatsapp, second language, improving communication skill, motivation. introduction language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is distrinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently (pinker) as cited on (brown, 2000). teaching english as a second language is unique. that is, the different language background of the language learners gives various effects and responses in leaning. as we know that, english in all universities in indonesia has been placed as the second language. the problem occured is how to adopt and adapt the source language culture toward the target language culture. the problem should be overcome with any methods, strategies or media to achieve the goals of the teaching and learning process. in learning english, there are four basic language skills that should be mastered by the learners, including reading, listening, writing, and speaking. speaking is always considered as the most difficult skill since this skill requires the learners to think and speak at the same time. sometimes, they have many ideas in their mind but find it difficult to be delivered by usig the target language. in addition, rebecca (2002, p. 6) says that one of the central difficulties inherent in the study of speaking is that it overlaps with a considerable number of other areas and activities. basically, speaking proficiency consists of four basic competences. as canale and swain as cited in richards and renandya (2002) explain that communicative competence includes grammatical competence, discourse competence, sociolinguistic competence, and strategic competence. in teaching speaking, a lecturer needs to differ between teaching speaking and using speaking to teach. it has to differ ditinctly. a key question to ask, therefore, is whether a indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 87 teacher is engaged in ‘teaching the spoken form of a language’ or ‘ teaching a language through speaking’ (rebecca, 2002, p. 7). teaching speaking is always related to communicative approach. communicative approach which is also referred to as communicative language teaching can be understood as a set of principles about the goals of language teaching, how learners learn a language, the kinds of classroom activities that best facilitate learning, and the roles of teachers and learners in the classroom (richards & rodgers, 2002). communicative language teaching (clt), which is an approach to the teaching of second and foreign languages, emphasizes interaction as both the means and the ultimate goal of learning a language. today, technology plays a dominant role in teaching and learning process. by using technology, most students are more motivated in learning english. brown (2000, p. 160) states that motivation is probably the most frequently used catch-all term for explaining the success or failure of virtually any complex task. therefore, it is easy to assume that success in any task is due simply to the fact that someone is “motivated.” the development of technology is getting faster. deskstop computer that many people know is not a high technology more. the modification of many application on appstore gadget has given the new inspiration for all leaners to be easer gaining the information of knowledge and science. more over, studying english language also gets the influence of technology development. considering digital technologies’ widespread availability and its influence in everyday life, the use of different technologies for educational purposes is an important subject for teachers to consider. whether referencing specific lowor hightech tools for learning and instruction or the collective grouping of these tools, technology offers the potential to impact positively students’ learning and teachers’ instruction (flanagan & shoffner, 2016). technology has a prominent position to create a new technique that can be more effective than before. the current technique shifts from teacher-centered to studentscentered. the students can create the real class situation by means of their manner; attractively, interestingly, and more impression. whatsapp messenger is a proprietary, cross-platform, encrypted instant messaging client for smartphones. it uses the internet to send text messages, documents, images, video, user location and audio messages to other users using standard cellular mobile numbers. whatsapp is one of the commonly social network applications. it is used for social communication. the trend of this communication application is in the young generation. this application is easier than others that need several ways or steps to starts. finally, this study is purposely designed to explore the contribution of whatsapp mobile tool in improving students’ speaking skill and their motivation in learning english as a second language. method this research uses the one group pretestpost-test design. the design describes the one group given a treatment after pretest in the obviously. it tends to measure the changing of english language skill especially in speaking skill of the students and their motivation in learning english after using whatsapp tool as a medium in the teaching and learning process. the design of the research is shown below. experimental design o1 x o2 note: x : treatment given (whatsapp mobile use) o1 : pretest value (before a treatment) o2 : posttest value (after a treatment) then, the hypothesis of this research can be drawn as follows. descriptive hypothesis h0 : there is no significant difference of means between students’ score before and after using whatsapp mobile tools as a medium in the teaching and learning process. nanan abdul manan whatsapp mobile tool in second language learning 88 h1 : there is a significant difference of means between students’ score before and after using whatsapp mobile tools as a medium in the teaching and learning process. statistic hypotesis this experimental research involves 120 students of the second grade who are studying english one at teacher training and education higher school (stkip) muhammadiyah kuningan. in collecting the data, there are two instruments used by the researcher. the first is test including pretest and posttest which is used to measure students’ speaking skill after the treatment. the second is questionnaire which is used to explore students’ motivation after attending the english class by using whatsapp mobile tool. finally, the collected data are the analyzed statistically by using spss. results and discussion the improvement of students’ speaking skill in the teaching and learning process, the materials were given by using whatsapp mobile tool. in this case, the materials discussed in the class activity are continued and reviewed on this application. the further discussion was carried out personally. this activity was done in order to stimulate the students to practice the grammarical pattern through writing and make a correction towards the mistakes they made. the next step, the students were given some tasks and exercises that force them to speak in front of the class. the speaking skill practiced in front of the class is used as data relating to the students’ progress in speaking. then, the effectiveness of this application in improving students’ speaking skill was measured by the test. the following data indicated the positive effect of the application used in teaching and learning process towards students’ speaking skills. data description table 1. descriptive statistics n mean std. deviation minimum maximum pretest 30 55,67 7,958 40 65 postest 30 77,17 8,167 60 90 data interpretation  number of pretest and posttest data are 30.  the pretest mean is 55.67 and the posttest mean is 77.17.  deviation standard in pretest is 7.958 and 8.167 in posttest.  pretest data has maximum score 65 and minimum score 40, while posttest data has maximum score 90 and minimum score 60. basic assumption test table 2. tests of normality kolmogorov-smirnova shapiro-wilk statistic df sig. statistic df sig. pretest ,240 30 ,000 ,886 30 ,004 postest ,210 30 ,002 ,916 30 ,021 a. lilliefors significance correction interpretation: based on the result of normality test by means of kolmogorov-smirnov test, the significant value gained on pretest is 0.000 (0.000<0.05), and 0.002 on posttest (0.002<0.05). therefore, it can be concluded that both pretest and posttest scores are not normally distributed. indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 89 the average difference mean based on the result of normality distribution test showing that the data is not normally distributed, the non-parametric hypotesis test is then conducted to find out the average difference mean by using wilcoxon test. table 3. the difference of means ranks n mean rank sum of ranks postest pretest negative ranks 0a ,00 ,00 positive ranks 30b 15,50 465,00 ties 0c total 30 a. postest < pretest b. postest > pretest c. postest = pretest test statisticsa postest pretest z -4,824b asymp. sig. (2-tailed) ,000 a. wilcoxon signed ranks test b. based on negative ranks. interpretation: the result of the difference mean test between pretest and postest by using wilcoxon test showed that the significance of pretest is (0.000<0.05). so, referring to the criterion of the test (if sig. < 0.05, it means that h0 is denied and h1 is accepted), it can be concluded that the h1 is accepted meaning that h1 there is a significant difference of means between students’ score before and after using whatsapp mobile tools in the teaching and learning process. motivation to practice to explore students’ motivation to learn english as their second language, every student was given ten statements with three response choices in the questionnaire form. each statement of the questionnaire indicates the students’ responses in using this application for study. they can respond whether they agree, neutral, or disagree towards the ten statements given. based on the data analysis on the questionnaire, it can be concluded that whatsapp mobile tool can motivate students to learn. in this case, the researcher found out the improvement of students’ motivation to speak in english, either in presenting materials in front of the class or discussing in a group. the summary of data analysis on questionnaire is presented below. tabel 4. students’ motivation in speaking by means of whatsapp mobile tool no statement answer i agree neutral i disagree 1 whatsapp has helped me to improve my english language vocabulary 20 (67%) 5 (17%) 5 (17%) 2 whatsapp strengthened and gave me broader understanding of the topics discussed in class 25 (83%) 3 (10%) 2 (7%) 3 it has increased my ability to ask for clarity, apology, questions or to explain something in english 24 (80%) 4 (13%) 2 (7%) 4 it has helped me to improve my reading and writing. 21 (70%) 5 (17%) 4 (13%) nanan abdul manan whatsapp mobile tool in second language learning 90 5 it has helped me improve my language style in english 23 (77%) 4 (13%) 3 (10%) 6 it has helped me improve the knowledge of current issues by sharing one another 26 (87%) 3 (10%) 1 (3%) 7 participating in the english forum helped me improve my interaction in english than when i wouldn’t participate 23 (77%) 4 (13%) 3 (10%) 8 whatsapp helped me to know my errors and mistakes through editing and errors/mistakes of other students 22 (73%) 5 (17%) 3 (10%) 9 whatsapp helped me to know topics of the next lesson/ what is going to be done in the next lesson 24 (80%) 4 (13%) 2 (7%) 10 i was happy to know my mistakes/errors and to comment on peers’ texts/peers’ errors 26 (87%) 2 (7%) 2 (7%) the data above presents the students’ response towards the questionnaire given. regarding the first statement, 20 students or 67% of the students agreed to this statement stating that the application had helped them in improving their english vocabulary, while another 5 students or 17% of the students choose ‘neutral’, and the other 5 students or 17% of the students disagreed to the first statement. thus, as it can be seen in the data above, the domination response given by the students towards the first statement was ‘agree’. it means that the students felt enjoy and helpful with the use of whatsapp mobile tool in the teaching and learning activity. they could share the unfamiliar words or phrases without any doubt. then, the students who chose the neutral choice, they felt doubt and did not understand enough regarding the usefulness of thi application. meanwhile, the students who chose ‘disagree’ got the mispercepsion towards whatsapp mobile tool that could be used in the teaching and learning activity. in the second statement, the students knew that this application could give broader understanding regarding the topic discussed in the classroom. sometimes, the students felt reluctant in conveying the difficult topic in the classroom. after the class ended, they could continue discussing the topic by using this application. thus, there were 25 students or 83% out of the sample agreed to the second statement stating that whatsapp strengthened and gave them broader understanding regarding the topics discussed in class, whereas another 3 students or 10% out of the sample chose ‘neutral’ and the other 2 students or 7% out of the sample disagreed to the second statement. the third statement stating whatsapp has increased their ability to ask for clarity, apology, questions or to explain something in english. this research revealed that whatsapp application provides easier access for the students to communicate and discuss about the materials discussed in the classroom. it can be seen from the data above showing that there were 24 students or 80% of the students agreed to the third statement, 4 students or 13% of the students choosing neutral, and only 2 students or 7% of the student disagreed to the statement given. so, it can be concluded that whatsapp application can be one of useful media for increasing students’ ability especially in their english speaking skill. then, 21 students or 70% out of the sample agreed to the fourth statement stating that they felt helpful by the use of this application in improving their reading and writing ability. while another 5 students or 17% of the students chose ‘neutral, and the other 3 students or 13% of the students disagreed to the statement given. regarding the fifth statement, the students felt that their language style in english is improved by means of this application. of course, the language style contingented to the writing on whatsapp group. they finally knew the communication style in english resulting their improved motivation in using english in a daily life. indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 91 next, referring to the sixth statement, the students thought that the application served some current issues to them. by using whatsapp application, the lectures gave new information related to the development of materials or the common issues in reality. here, by sharing sharing, adding, and commenting on the issues, the students were accustomed to practice their english. finally, regarding the seventh until tenth statements, the students felt that the application has helped them to improve their interaction with their friends (seventh statement), to know more the mistakes and errors to correct (eighth statement), to know the next topic discussed (ninth statement), and to correct one another without an obstacle in revising (tenth statement). conclusion based on the result of hypotesis test, it can be concluded that there is a significant difference of means on students’ speaking skills before and after using whatsapp mobile tool in which the average of students’ speaking skills score increase 21.5 point after using whatsapp mobile tool. besides, there is an improvement in students’ motivation to practice english, either in writing or speaking. the high motivation is indicated with overall statements responded by the students. the highest one is the tenth statement stating that whatsapp helps them in knowing their mistakes/errors and commenting on peers’ texts/peers’ errors. this statement was endorsed by 26 students or 87% out of the sample. in addition, there are also so many advantages the students can get by using this application, such as they can share not only academic information but also another interesting topic as well. references brown, h. d. (2000). principles of language learning and teaching. new york: pearson longman. richards, & renandya. (2002). methodology in language teaching: an anthology of current practice. cambridge: cambrige university press. richards, c. j., & rodgers, t. s. (2001). approaches and methods in language teaching. new york: cambridge university press. http://www.citejournal.org/volume-13/issue-313/general/teaching-without-technologysecondary-english-teachers-and-classroomtechnology-use/29/11/2016 http://www.myenglishpages.com/blog/communicative -language-teaching-communicative-approach/ nanan abdul manan whatsapp mobile tool in second language learning 92 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 113 teachers language assessment literacy: a systematic review indah puspawati english language education department, faculty of education, universitas muhammadiyah yogyakarta, indonesia email: indahpuspawati@umy.ac.id apa citation: puspawati, i. (2022). teachers language assessment literacy: a systematic review. indonesian efl journal, 8(1), 113-126. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v8i1.5613 received: 23-09-2021 accepted: 21-11-2021 published: 30-01-2022 introduction language assessment literacy (henceforth lal) has been used for more than twenty years to describe the teachers’ ability to use their knowledge and skills of designing assessments, administering them, and interpreting the assessment result (sevimel-sahin & subasi, 2019). sevimel-sahin and subasi (2019) added that lal also referred to teachers’ ability to understand trends in assessments and use them to evaluate their assessment practices in their teaching context. giraldo (2020) explained that lal represented teachers’ level of knowledge, skills, and principles required to involve in language assessment. the lal included designing and evaluating language assessment, understanding and using scores from assessment to make decisions about students’ language abilities (giraldo, 2020). in attempts to further define lal, researchers had offered descriptions of what lal entails. one of the more detailed description of lal was offered by giraldo (2018). he argued that four sets of skills are important for teachers lal. those are instructional skills, design skills for designing language assessment, skills in educational measurements, and technological skills needed for language measurements such as using software, programs, and the internet needed for assessment purposes. for knowledge components, knowledge of applied linguistics, theories and concepts of language assessments, and teachers’ language assessment context are three knowledge that teachers should have (giraldo, 2018). finally, those principles measure the teachers’ awareness and action toward critical issues in language assessment, such as using the assessment results to decide about the learners, critically analyzing the impact of standardized tests, and awareness of applying fair and transparent language assessments. giraldo (2018) also developed descriptors for every component, resulting in sixty-six descriptors to assess teachers’ lal. research on teachers’ lal revealed that teachers’ lal certainly played important roles in teachers’ assessment practices. teachers with abstract: as an integral part of teaching, assessment is critical since the information from the assessment is essential for many decisions in teaching and learning. therefore, teachers must hold sufficient knowledge of assessment literacy. the interest in developing language assessment literacy (lal) has grown rapidly in the last few years. this growing interest for teachers lal has sparked discussions related to the topics. this article aims to review research conducted related to the topic of teachers’ lal. this research used a systematic review as the research methodology where 21 articles from various peer-reviewed and reputable journals related to language assessment literacy in the past five years were reviewed to understand lal comprehensively. five steps of the systematic review were done in this research, namely framing the questions, identifying relevant works, assessing the quality of the studies, summarizing the evidence, and interpreting the findings. the findings of the reviews reported that the research of lal in the past five years were teachers’ lal beliefs, the lal beliefs and their assessment practices, teachers’ lal training needs, and developing teachers’ lal. the findings also suggested that teachers were still in needs of continuous support to develop teachers’ lal because they lack of lal training both for pre-service and in-service training. this research recommended that lal training should be carefully planned to cater the needs of teachers assessment practices. keywords: language assessment literacy; teachers’ language assessment literacy; lal beliefs, assessment practices, systematic review https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i2.4564 indah puspawati teachers language assessment literacy: a systematic review 114 adequate lal proved to be able to assess in their teaching. in contrast, teachers with inadequate lal had problems with their assessment practices. giraldo (2021) suggested that there is an urgent need for making sure that teachers had appropriate levels of lal because they are the one who constantly involved in collecting data about their students language abilities. the needs for improving teachers’ lal also constantly reported in many research. however, in order to provide teachers with lal training, there is also a need for understanding lal in various contexts and how lal is interpreted in different educational contexts (coombe et al., 2020). coombe, et. al. (2020) also suggested that more recent research of lal can identify recent construct of teachers lal knowledge and the conception on how the knowledge is put into practice. thus, understanding these recent issues may provide clear pictures on how to support teachers’ lal. in addition, sevimel-sahin and subasi (2019) suggested that exploring recent trends in lal can give information on what has been known, what gaps and challenges are and what needs to be done in the future related to teachers lal. therefore, this research aims to determine the topics included in teachers’ lal research in the last five years. by investigating the trends and topics in teachers’ lal, future research on teachers’ lal can be determined to fill the gaps in research in teachers’ lal. thus, the needs of teachers’ lal can be clearly identified through reviewing the research that has been done in the past five years. thus, this research question is formulated as follows. what has been studied on the empirical research on lal in the past five years? method this study used a systematic review as its methodology. a systematic review is a detailed and comprehensive review of relevant studies on a particular topic to address formulated questions or problems (uman, 2011). a systematic review usually involves identifying and evaluating all relevant studies and presenting the conclusions as cohesive (ungvarsky, 2020). this research methodology is particularly suitable for research that investigates a specific topic’s research trends to determine their implications for future research (sevimel-sahin & subasi, 2019). the systematic review in this study was done in five steps: framing the questions, identifying relevant works, assessing the quality of the studies, summarizing the evidence, and interpreting the findings (khan et al., 2003). the research question used for collecting the relevant study was what has been studied on the empirical research on lal in the past five years to determine the implication of these topics for future research on lal. with this research question in mind, the step of relevant research article was done. the researcher searched for articles from reputable databases using the keywords “language assessment literacy” and “teachers assessment literacy”, the researcher searched for articles from reputable databases. database from eresources.perpusnas.go.id was mainly used for collecting relevant research. the researcher set the criteria to identify relevant works included in this research. they should be empirical research on teachers’ lal, going through peer review for publication, published in the last five years (january 2017 – april 2021), published in english, and accessible to the researcher. with the criteria, there were 22 articles included in this research. below is the profile of the articles. table 1. the profile of lal research articles author(s)/year design participants 1. öz & attay (2017) qualitative 12 turkish university teachers 2. baker and riches (2017) action research 120 highschool efl teachers in haiti 3. janatifar and marandi (2018) mixed 280 iranian english language teachers 4. razavipour and rezagah (2018) qualitative 14 iranian english teachers 5. yastıbaş and takkaç (2018) qualitative 8 turkish teachers 6. giraldo and murcia (2018) action research professors, language education experts and pre-service teachers 7. kremmel et al. (2018) action research 102 test items writers from austria 8. giraldo (2019) qualitative 5 columbian teachers 9. babaii and asadnia (2019) qualitative 5 iranian efl teachers 10. firoozi et al. (2019) qualitative 15 iranian efl headteachers indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 115 11. ölmezer-öztürk & aydin (2019) quantitative 542 iranian university language teachers 12. sultana (2019) qualitative 10 bangladeshi secondary school teachers 13. levi and inbar-lourie’s (2019) action research 16 language teachers 14. giraldo and murcia (2019) action research 33 pre-service teachers in columbia 15. puspawati (2019) mixed 30 indonesian university teachers 16. zulaiha et al. (2020) mixed 22 indonesian efl junior high school teachers 17. liu and li (2020) mixed 65 primary school english teachers in china 18. ahmadi and ketabi (2020) mixed 309 iranian teachers 19. bahtiar and purnawarman (2020) mixed 40 indonesian english teachers 20. saputra et al. (2020) qualitative 25 indonesian secondary school teachers 21. yan and fan (2020) qualitative language testers, efl teachers, and graduate students in china 22. bøhn and tsagari (2021) qualitative five teacher educators in norway from the article profile above, there were variations in the research methodology used, such as qualitative, action research, and mixed-method. it could be considered an improvement because the earlier research about lal relied heavily on qualitative design (sevimel-sahin & subasi, 2019). there were also variations in the participants involved in the studies where more stakeholders were involved. these variations in research design and participants could contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of lal. the research in lal had developed in complexity and scope to understand lal better. finally, the last step for the systematic reviews was summarizing the evidence and interpreting the findings. the evidence summary and the findings are presented in the next section. results and discussion the research on teachers’ lal included in this study was analyzed to interpret the findings to answer the earlier research question. after careful analysis, four main topics emerged from the topics being discussed in the articles. those topics are teachers’ lal beliefs, teachers’ lal beliefs and practices, teachers’ lal training needs, and developing teachers’ lal. therefore, this research will discuss those four topics. results teachers’ lal beliefs research on teachers’ lal beliefs discussed how teachers perceived their ability in assessment, as found in ölmezer-öztürk & aydin’s (2019) study that investigated language assessment knowledge (lak) of efl teachers in higher education context in turkey using the lak scale developed and validated by the researchers. this research attempted to answer these research questions: 1) what are the general and skill-based lak levels of the teachers?; 2) is there any correlation among the skill-based lak levels?; 3) does lak level change according to demographic features such as years of teaching experience, educational background, workplace, having an assessment course in their undergraduate program, training in assessment, and being a testing office member?, and 4) does the teachers’ lal level change corresponding to their perceived self-competency in assessing each language skills? five hundred forty-two (542) language teachers from 53 iranian universities participated in the data collection for this study. participants filled out a 60-item language assessment knowledge scale (laks), and the data were analyzed statistically. the data showed that teachers had more knowledge of assessing reading comprehension than assessing other language skills. it was also revealed that all types of skill-based knowledge were significantly and positively correlated with general laks. also, there was no significant difference among the demographic features and their laks except for the testing office members whose laks were significantly higher than the non-members. finally, there was a mismatch between teachers’ self-perceived assessment competence and their actual lal level. there were also studies related to teachers’ lal level, conducted using a self-rating questionnaire where teachers rated their ability in assessment. one research about teachers’ lal level was indah puspawati teachers language assessment literacy: a systematic review 116 conducted by puspawati (2019). her research studied teachers’ knowledge, skills, and principles of indonesian teachers of higher education. the research investigated the teachers’ lal levels and their perceptions toward their lal. thirty (30) language teachers in higher education in indonesia participated in this study. surveys and interviews were conducted to collect the data. the survey was a self-rating questionnaire where participants rated their knowledge, skills, and principles in language assessment. the interviews were carried out with five teachers to collect data on their lal perceptions. the data from the questionnaire revealed that teachers generally had a ‘fair’ lal level, which means that teachers had a wide range of basic concepts and terms related to language assessment but were not yet capable of applying them in their practice. the interview data revealed that teachers were more confident in their teaching skills than their assessment skills. another research on teachers’ lal levels was conducted by bahtiar and purnawarman (2020). their research explored the indonesian junior and senior high school english teachers’ lal levels and investigated their perception of lal and their experiences in assessing the students. the participants of this research were 40 indonesian english teachers. a 66-item questionnaire was used as a primary instrument in this study, and interviews were also used for collecting the data. the questionnaire comprised four parts such as lal knowledge, skills, principles, and practices. the interviews were done as a follow-up to the questionnaire. the data revealed that even though most teachers rate themselves ‘good’ and ‘fair’ in the lal surveys, they claimed they were not familiar with lal. therefore, these teachers still needed training in lal, preferably training that covered topics such as choosing the right assessment method for their students, writing test items, and conducting assessment validity and reliability. this study emphasizes the need for continued lal training for teachers. the research about teachers’ lal level revealed how teachers perceived their ability to assess, and both studies reported that teachers had inadequate lal to carry out assessments in their teaching context. the inadequate lal to carry out assessment also reflected on research conducted by sultana (2019) that defined and measured the english teachers in bangladesh lal. first, the research objectives were to determine the teachers’ readiness to execute assessment-related tasks and examine to what extent and how the teachers perceived their lal in their teaching practices. ten teachers at secondary schools in dhaka, bangladesh, participated in this study. the participants were interviewed to obtain the data, then recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using inductive thematic analysis. the findings revealed that teachers hardly had academic qualifications related to language testing because the training programs in undergraduate studies mainly focused on teaching and placed little to no attention on language testing. therefore, teachers relied on ready-to-use tests to assess their students and professional suggestions from their senior colleagues to improve their assessment practices. teachers also rarely used alternative assessments such as portfolio, peer assessment, or any other assessment form due to their lack of knowledge on such assessments. critical examinations on their assessment practices were also never conducted by the teachers. babaii and asadnia (2019) also conducted research investigating the teachers’ reflective practices on the lal. this research answered the following questions: 1) what teachers reflected on their assessment practices; 2) what lal dimensions the teacher reflected on their current assessment practices; 3) what the teacher recommendations for improving their lal; and 4) how their reflections affected their future language assessment planning. the data in this study were collected through online discussions, reflective narratives, interviews, and scenarios. a constant cooperative method analyzed and identified the emerging themes, categorized the codes and determined the categories. the findings revealed that teachers did not put as much attention to language assessment as to language teaching methodology in their practice since they were not professionally trained about assessment. they relied on colleagues’ consultations, mentorships, and published materials to develop their lal. therefore, teachers suggested that language assessment communities where teachers could share knowledge and practices would be the best platform for improving their lal. lastly, teacher professional development programs devoted to improving their lal should be transformational rather than transmissive. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 117 similarly, ahmadi and ketabi (2020) conducted research investigating the iranian teachers’ lal status. the objective of this research was to explore the features that characterized iranian english teachers’ perceptions of lal. the data collection methods used in this study were questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. three hundred and nine (309) iranian teachers answered the close-ended questionnaire, and 24 teachers were interviewed using semi-structured interviews. the data showed that lal was still of concern to the teachers, and teachers agreed that their lal knowledge and practice were not ideal and needed to be improved. however, they agreed that knowledge of assessment concepts and principles, understanding of local assessment practices, and the ability to use assessment results to make decisions were features participants deemed important for language teachers to have. therefore, this research suggested that lal be emphasized in pre-service and in-service teacher training programs. teachers’ lal beliefs and assessment practices some studies investigated teachers’ beliefs on their lal and how it was reflected in their assessment practices. the research about teachers’ lal beliefs and their assessment practices had two different results. research reported discrepancies in the teachers’ lal beliefs and their practices (liu & li, 2020; öz & attay, 2017; zulaiha et al., 2020), while research conducted by giraldo’s (2019) and yastıbaş and takkaç (2018) revealed that teachers’ lal beliefs were reflected in their assessment practices. the studies are summarized below. liu and li’s (2020) study aimed at investigating primary school english teachers’ assessment literacy. the research attempted to answer the lal level of those teachers, find the teachers’ problems to design assessments for young learners and solve those problems. sixty-five (65) primary school english teachers participated in this study, and the data were collected through a survey of language assessment inventory, recorded classroom observations, and interviews. the survey data revealed that teachers who participated in this study showed a low level of assessment literacy, especially in understanding principles of language assessments, administering, scoring, and interpreting the results of assessments, and communicating assessment results. although teachers claimed that they were well-prepared for their assessment practices, no evidence showed in the observations. teachers also claimed that they lacked language assessment training when they were both pre-service and in-service teachers. therefore, training on language assessment should be included in pre-service teacher training programs, and professional development programs to improve in-service teachers’ assessment literacy should also be emphasized to help teachers solve problems in assessment. oz and attay (2017) investigated the teachers’ literacy on in-class assessments and its reflection on the literacy on their in-class assessments practice. specifically, this study examined turkish efl instructors’ perceptions of in-class language assessment and how they reflect their knowledge of language assessment in their in-class assessment practice. this study involved twelve teachers working in a turkish university. teachers who participated in this study consisted of novice teachers with less than five years of teaching experience and expert teachers with more than five years of experience. they conducted qualitative data with a semi-structured interview as a data collection method. each interview was recorded, transcribed, and analyzed, but no article on how the transcribed interviews were analyzed. the result showed a mismatch between teachers’ assessment literacy knowledge and their in-class assessment practices. teachers in this research were knowledgeable in the importance of in-class assessment, and they were also familiar with the theory of principles of a good language assessment. however, their practice in in-class language assessment did not reflect their knowledge. thus, this study recommended giving teachers continuous professional development programs to raise their awareness and improve their assessment practices. zulaiha et al. (2020) investigated teachers’ perceptions and their practices in assessment. this study also examined how teachers’ assessments perception are reflected in their assessment practices. twenty-two (22) indonesian efl junior high school teachers participated in this study. a survey was developed to collect the data on teachers’ perceptions and practices of assessment, and interviews were also conducted with five teachers. the data from questionnaires were analyzed quantitatively by calculating means, frequency, and standard deviation, while the data from the interviews were transcribed and coded to indah puspawati teachers language assessment literacy: a systematic review 118 find emerging themes. the data from both the questionnaire and the interview suggested a discrepancy between the teachers’ perception of assessment and their assessment practices. the teachers reported good assessment knowledge, but they failed to implement it in their assessment practices. giraldo’s (2019) research examined teachers’ practices and beliefs in lal. specifically, the research investigated what language assessment practices teachers had, what beliefs about language assessment those teachers had, and what the implications can be derived from the teachers’ assessment practices and beliefs for teachers lal. this study was a qualitative case study involving five columbian teachers. the data were collected through online interviews and online reflective journals. the grounded approach was used to analyze the data both from the interviews and the reflective journals. the findings in this study revealed that teachers’ practices and beliefs had implied that they had good lal as they exhibited the knowledge, skills, and principles in lal in both their practice and beliefs. it was also indicated that teachers’ knowledge, skills, and principles in language assessment originated from their experience designing and using assessment for their teaching rather than formal training. it implied that training for developing teachers’ lal should include the teachers’ assessment context. with similar findings, yastıbaş and takkaç (2018) explored the turkish efl teachers’ strategies in developing their assessments to understand the implementation of lal in their assessment practice. eight turkish teachers participated in this study, and the think-aloud protocol was used as the data collection method “to describe the cognitive processes the participants used in developing their exams” (p. 181). the data analysis was carried out using content analysis involving a process of coding, theming, organizing, and interpreting. the finding reported that the teachers in this study showed an appropriate implementation of lal in their assessment practices. when designing and developing assessments, teachers considered content validity, student-centeredness, washback effects, and critical attitude toward their developed assessment. the findings of this study were certainly different from other studies, which reported that teachers had inadequate lal. other research on teachers’ lal beliefs and assessment practice also revealed that teachers’ lal had a big influence on their practices. the research indicated that teachers who had inadequate lal could not respond to the policy changes in their teaching context to carry out the assessment practices. they were reported to fail to adapt their assessment practices in response to policy changes regarding the curriculum in their teaching context. for example, firoozi et al. (2019) explored the lal essential element needs of iranian efl secondary school teachers to adapt to the recently changing curriculum policy. the research studied how teachers adapted to the assessment policy recently reinforced in their assessment practices. it also investigated what lal components could bridge the assessment policy to their practices. fifteen (15) efl headteachers in iran participated in this study, and interviews were used as a data collection method. the study suggested that the participants still had trouble adapting their assessment practices to the new curriculum reform. the headteachers needed transparent and practical guidelines of language assessment. more language assessment knowledge and changes in teachers’ beliefs in the assessment were also needed to implement the assessment policy better into their assessment practices. the gap between the assessment policy and assessment practice can be a bridge by aligning the policies with the norms of assessment practice and improving teachers’ lal. this research also suggested that for teachers to do an effective assessment, they needed sufficient knowledge of the curriculum, course content, and subject matter knowledge. razavipour and rezagah (2018) explored the challenges iranian teachers faced dealing with language assessment reform in iran and investigated whether the teachers possess the professional competencies (lal) to adjust their assessment practice as demanded by the reform. the data in this study were collected through focus group interviews and content analysis on the recently designed and used teachers’ assessments. fourteen (14) teachers participated in this study. the data revealed that participants believed that the assessment reform in their context was pretty much forcefully imposed on them, so that they faced many challenges in adapting their assessment practices to the guidelines of the assessment reform. difficulties included the lack of infrastructure and indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 119 resources to adapt to the assessment reforms and the high demand for the assessment results that made teachers hesitant in adapting to the reform. this research reported that teachers did not have adequate lal to meet their lal reform demands. for example, teachers’ skills in designing tests were still inadequate. it was proven from the tests or assessments that they created or used recently lacked construct validity. teachers were also reported to have inadequate basic knowledge of language assessment. the researchers suggested giving more training to improve teachers’ lal to adapt to the assessment reform. teachers’ lal training needs the findings on the teachers’ beliefs, teachers’ beliefs and assessment practices concluded an emergence need to develop lal through training. before deciding what training would be effective for both pre-service and in-service teachers to develop teachers’ lal, studies were conducted to serve as a needs analysis to find out what aspects of lal should be included. the research included in this study investigated the training needs from teachers’ perspectives (giraldo & murcia, 2018; janatifar & marandi, 2018) and other stakeholders’ perceptions (bøhn & tsagari, 2021; giraldo, 2018; yan & fan, 2020). the needs analysis on lal was usually done to identify what lal aspects teachers and other stakeholders thought needed to be developed to enable teachers to carry out their assessment practices. the summaries of their research are presented below. janatifar and marandi (2018) defined the nature of lal in the iranian context based on efl teachers’ beliefs. this research aimed to determine the components included in a language testing or assessment course based on the teachers’ perceptions. the study employed a mix-method design and involved 280 iranian english language teachers. the data in this study were collected using a survey that consists of three parts. in the first part of the survey, participants were asked to rate components of lal on a 5-point scale ranging from unimportant to essentials. the data were then analyzed quantitatively using confirmatory and exploratory factor analyses and cross-validation. the second part of the survey was open-ended questions where the participants were asked to offer their opinion on some language assessment issues, particularly focusing on components they believed should be included in the language test/assessment course. the data from the open-ended questions were analyzed qualitatively. the results suggested that the participants in this study believed that four components should be included in la, such as “test design and development, large-scale standardized testing and classroom assessment, beyond-the-test aspects (which mainly includes social and ethical aspects of language testing or assessment), and reliability and validity” (p. 369). thus, the researchers suggested that these four components be considered when designing courses to improve lal teachers. giraldo and murcia (2018) attempted to expand the construct of lal by investigating the preservice teachers’ and language teacher educators’ perceptions on the components that should be included in a language assessment course. it was a part of an action research study conducted in an english language teaching program in a state university in columbia. the action research was conducted in a course entitled seminar in language assessments. this research was the diagnostic stage of the action research, which aimed to collect data from professors, a language teacher education expert, and pre-service teachers who enrolled in the course. the data collected were about the components included in the course. in this diagnostic, the data were collected through open questionnaires, a semi-structured interview, multiple-choice questionnaires, and researchers’ notes. the data were analyzed qualitatively, employing open, axial, and selective coding, and the multiple-choice questionnaire was analyzed quantitatively by calculating percentages on language assessment topics included in the course. the findings indicated that designing assessments was the most important component included in an assessment course. participants in this study all agreed that practical issues on designing assessments were needed for teachers to help them carry out the task in their teaching. secondly, knowledge of assessment methods, the validity of the assessment, and bilingualism issues should also be included in an assessment course. finally, the study suggested that fairness issues in assessment should also be included in a language assessment course to develop teachers’ lal comprehensively. bøhn and tsagari (2021) explored the teachers’ lal development. this research investigated the point of view of teacher educators on aspects of indah puspawati teachers language assessment literacy: a systematic review 120 lal norwegian teachers’ need to carry out sound assessment practices. the research also scrutinized teacher educators’ perception of whether norwegian teachers’ lal was compatible with eight dimensions of lal. five teacher educators from five different universities in norway were recruited to participate in the study. interviews were used for collecting the data in this research. the interview consisted of open-ended questions which collected the data about the participants’ perceptions about skills and knowledge norwegian teachers needed to carry out good assessments and close-ended questions which collected the data on the relevance of the lal eight dimension for norwegian teachers. according to the participants, the findings reported that to carry out good assessments, teachers need at least four competence, namely disciplinary competence assessment-specific, pedagogical and collaboration competence. principles and concepts of assessment, local assessment practices, scores, and decisionmaking were three dimensions that teacher educators found relevant to teachers’ lal. the findings implied that collaborative professional community activities where teachers could communicate and interact with colleagues might be good for improving teachers’ lal. yan and fan (2020) investigated the perceptions of different stakeholders on profiles and the development of lal. this research involved language testers, efl teachers, and graduate students of language studies program to explore their interests, needs, and expectations in language assessment. semi-structured interviews were used for the data collection, and twenty stakeholders participated in this study. the study revealed a major difference in lal profiles across the stakeholders. language testers and graduate students were more familiar with lal terminologies and assessment research, more capable of assessing their lal profiles and describing their lal development. meanwhile, efl teachers’ lal profiles revealed that they were less familiar with lal, but they showed a good level of assessment intuitions. the teachers claimed they develop their lal through a range of experiences of the assessment practices in their teaching context. with the different profiles and development of lal across stakeholders, the research recommended that apprenticeship and the local assessment context be two important elements to consider when designing assessment training programs. developing teachers’ lal the last finding of the systematic reviews on the articles revealed some attempts to improve or develop teachers’ lal. most of the research reported the professional development program conducted to develop in-service teachers’ lal (baker & riches, 2017; kremmel et al., 2018; levi & inbar-lourie, 2019; saputra et al., 2020), and one research reported a course to develop pre-service teachers’ lal (giraldo & murcia, 2019). all research reported positive development on teachers’ lal. the summaries of the research are presented below: baker and riches (2017) studied a series of workshops to develop teachers’ and language assessment professionals’ language assessment literacy. this research aimed to investigate how teachers’ and language assessment specialists’ lal developed during the collaborative process of critiquing and revising haitian efl national examinations and examine what successes and challenges arise for teachers during this collaboration process. this study was qualitative research involving 120 high school efl teachers in haiti. the data collection methods in this study involved teachers’ feedback on drafts of the revised haitian efl national exam where teachers demonstrate their knowledge on language assessments, an open-ended survey with teachers’ participants (n= 92), which was conducted after the workshop, and semi-structured interviews to 11 teachers who are willing to participate after the workshop. the data were analyzed through open coding and iterative analysis for determining categories of findings. the findings revealed that the workshop had developed teachers’ lal. teachers reportedly improved their understanding of designing assessments, such as creating reading comprehension questions, evaluating integrated skills and language components, understanding the importance of assessment in teaching, understanding the construct of language ability, and being aware of a more student-centered approach in assessment. similarly, the language assessment specialist who became the facilitators in the workshop also showed development in their lal. they showed increasing awareness of cultural issues, political indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 121 issues in language assessment, practical constraints in assessment administration, and exam washback issues. finally, building a good rapport between teachers and facilitators was considered a success in the workshop, and communicating and cooperative decision-making with colleagues was proven challenging. kremmel et al. (2018) investigated the effects of a project to improve the teachers’ lal. in the project, teachers developed high-stake tests as a part of their professional development program. in this project, teachers were involved in activities to develop high-stake tests such as writing test specification, developing test items, developing tasks for productive skills, developing rating scales, giving feedback on the developed tests, tasks, and rating scale, revising the tests, tasks, and rating scale, and participating in standard-setting. the data in this research were obtained from a lal questionnaire that collected data about the teachers’ motivation to be involved in the project, their motivation to stay involved, and their attitudes toward their involvement in the project. the last part of the survey collected the data about whether the training fostered their lal and what areas of the project best fostered their lal. one hundred two (102) item writers participated in the project completed the survey. the teachers’ lal findings indicated that the project helped the teachers gain their expertise in an item and task development, selecting tests for their teaching context, understanding concepts of validity, reliability, and practicality. the study also suggested that teachers involved in the project could apply the skills and knowledge they got from the project into their small-scale classroom context, indicating that hands-on assessment training could develop teachers’ lal. levi and inbar-lourie (2019) examined the assessment knowledge base or lal of prospective and practicing teachers who were participated in a formative classroom assessment course. after a formative classroom assessment course, their research examined the language teachers’ lal through assessment tools and reflection. besides, the research also intended to find out whether the teachers’ lal could be associated with the current constructs of lal. sixteen language teachers participated in this study. they attended the course and created language tests and performance-based tasks focused mainly on reading comprehension with essay writing and listening comprehension. the data in this research were collected through the thematic content analysis of the teacher-produced tests and tasks and compared with the current lal construct. reflective comments from the teachers were also used for collecting the data. the findings reported that after the course, teachers attested that they could plan, design and construct test items and constructs to match their assessment objectives claiming that they implemented assessment knowledge and skills presented in the course to their assessment practices. however, only a little evidence of their claim was shown in their assessment artifacts, further verifying the gap between teachers’ understanding of lal and their assessment practices. saputra et al. (2020) reported a case study studying the teachers engaged in a professional learning community (plc) project to develop their lal. this research. the project was designed to familiarize the teachers with the policies, theories, and practices of authentic language assessment in the curriculum currently enforced in the teaching context. the study investigated the changes that teachers experienced in their assessment beliefs and practices. 25 english teachers in secondary schools in indonesia were invited to join the project, where they had weekly discussions and observations spanning one semester for one semester. multiple interviews and observations of six out of 25 teachers were done to collect the data analyzed thematically. the study revealed that the plc project contributed to the changes in participants’ beliefs and practices of authentic assessment in their class. the study suggested the use of collaborative projects to improve in-service teachers’ lal. giraldo and murcia (2019) conducted action research to see the effects of a classroom language assessment course toward pre-service teachers lal. its objectives were to investigate how preservice teachers lal developed during the course, what factors of the course impacted their lal, and what instructional recommendations this study could offer. the course ran for one semester and met for four hours a week. thirty-three (33) preservice teachers and one-course instructors participated in this study. data were collected through questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, and instructor and researcher’s journals. the data revealed that the pre-service teachers enrolled in the course developed their lal in two areas: indah puspawati teachers language assessment literacy: a systematic review 122 improvement in their perception of language assessment from limited views to a more professionalized process-oriented assessment. besides, they were able to review assessments and assessment practices critically. the act of designing language assessment and how the course was carefully designed based on needs analysis and taught engagingly and strategically to improve lal were two factors that contributed to the pre-service teachers’ lal improvements. this study recommended that to design an effective language assessment course for pre-service teachers needs analysis from multi-stakeholders should be conducted before designing the course. besides, the course should involve pre-service teachers actively designing assessments tasks to trigger informed decisions in assessment. discussion after carefully reviewing each article in this study, four main topics were discussed in the empirical research regarding teachers’ lal in the past five years. the first topic discussed teachers’ beliefs of lal. the research methodology used in this topic was mostly mixed methods using quantitative design using survey or questionnaire of self-rating lal level and knowledge, and qualitative design using interviews, reflections, and scenarios. the findings showed that teachers in the studies recognized that knowledge and skills in language assessment were important aspects of their teaching (ahmadi & ketabi, 2020), but teachers also claimed that they had concerns about their lal (ahmadi & ketabi, 2020; bahtiar & purnawarman, 2020; puspawati, 2019; sultana, 2019). teachers claimed that they were more confident in their teaching skills than their assessment skills (puspawati, 2019; sultana, 2019), and they even claimed that they somewhat neglected their lal and put more emphasis on language teaching methodologies (babaii & asadnia, 2019; bahtiar & purnawarman, 2020; sultana, 2019). one of the causes of that practice was because teachers lacked training on lal both when they were pre-service teachers and in-service teachers (babaii & asadnia, 2019; sultana, 2019). in addition, the studies investigated on the teachers’ lal levels revealed that teachers often reported their perceived ability as not ideal (ahmadi & ketabi, 2020), fair (puspawati, 2019) or good (bahtiar & purnawarman, 2020). similarly, teachers in ölmezer-öztürk & aydin’s (2019) research also reported lower language assessment knowledge than testing office members. the teachers were reported to rely on ready-made assessment tools instead of developing their assessment, and they also relied on mentorship from more senior teachers or colleagues to help them improve their lal. thus, the studies suggested that training on lal for both pre-service and in-service teachers is vital to equip teachers better to do assessment practices. the next emergence themes from the studies included in this review were the teachers’ lal beliefs and assessment practices. the research on this topic explored the teachers’ beliefs on their lal and how they reflect on their assessment practices. the research methodologies used in the studies exploring this issue were mostly interviews, reflective journals for their beliefs, content analysis of the teachers’ assessment tools, and observations to compare the assessment beliefs and practices. there were two different findings reported for this issue. the first findings reported teacher beliefs and assessment practices (liu & li, 2020; öz & attay, 2017; zulaiha et al., 2020). teachers in those studies claimed they were well prepared for their assessment practices, but there was no evidence on their assessment practices (liu & li, 2020). teachers were also claimed that they had good knowledge in lal (zulaiha et al., 2020), and they also believed that they had good knowledge of inclass assessment and theories of principles of language assessments (öz & attay, 2017). however, their lal knowledge was not reflected in their assessment practices (öz & attay, 2017; zulaiha et al., 2020). on the other hand, different findings of teachers’ lal beliefs and their assessment practices were reported in the studies conducted by yastıbaş and takkaç (2018) and giraldo (2019). these two studies reported that teachers showed knowledge skills and principles in both their beliefs and practices (giraldo, 2019), and they also showed an appropriate implementation of lal in their assessment practices. their assessment practices also included elements needed to present in lal, such as content validity, students-centeredness, washback effects, and critical attitude. these two different findings certainly bring enrichment to the lal research, which might indicate that lal had finally started to get recognized for its importance in the language education field that stakeholders indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 123 started to focus on developing teachers’ lal. lal’s importance is also shown in studies conducted by razavipour and rezagah (2018) and firoozi et al. (2019). their research investigated how teachers’ lal allowed them to respond to the curriculum changes in their respective teaching contexts. both studies reported that teachers with inadequate lal struggled to adapt their assessment practices to the new curriculum demands. their studies suggested that teachers need more training to respond to the new curriculum reforms. all studies suggested lal training for better assessment practices regardless of the teachers’ lal beliefs and assessment practices. however, the kinds of training given to teachers should be chosen carefully to facilitate lal development. thus, careful needs analysis for teachers’ training for developing teachers’ lal needs to be carried out. the next emergent finding from this review was about needs analysis on what components of lal teachers should develop. studies included in this review suggested some components of lal that needed to be incorporated into lal training. the components for lal training included lal knowledge such as knowledge of different assessment methods (giraldo & murcia, 2018), principles and concepts of assessments designing and developing assessments (bøhn & tsagari, 2021), knowledge on large-scale standardized testing and classroom assessment (janatifar & marandi, 2018), and knowledge on local assessment practices (bøhn & tsagari, 2021). besides, skills of lal should also be included, such as the skill to design and develop assessments (janatifar & marandi, 2018), to test assessments’ validity and reliability (giraldo & murcia, 2018; janatifar & marandi, 2018), and to score and make a decision based on the assessment (bøhn & tsagari, 2021). other aspects such as social and ethical aspects of language assessment (janatifar & marandi, 2018) and issues on bilingualism and fairness in assessments (giraldo & murcia, 2018) also needed to be included in lal training. in addition, the main consideration when designing the training for teachers’ lal was that training should be designed in such a way that teachers had hands-on experience on the assessment, it should also consider the collaborative nature of the training, and it should be contextualized in the teachers’ teaching, or this sense, assessment context (bøhn & tsagari, 2021; giraldo & murcia, 2018; janatifar & marandi, 2018; yan & fan, 2020). these components could be valuable to consider when designing the lal training for pre-service and in-service teachers. the fourth topic discussed in the studies was about developing teachers’ lal. studies have reported professional development programs for developing in-service teachers’ lal and training programs for developing lal pre-service teachers. various programs were conducted to develop teachers lal, such as a workshop to collaboratively critique and revise standardized testing (baker & riches, 2017), a project to develop a high-stake test where participants develop, revise, and rate tests, tasks, and rating scales of a standardized high-stakes test (kremmel et al., 2018), a formative assessment course where teachers created language test and performancebased tasks (levi & inbar-lourie, 2019), and a project of a professional learning community (plc) where teachers collaboratively learn to design authentic language assessment (saputra et al., 2020). besides, a study reported action research to develop pre-service teachers lal through a classroom language assessment course designed to involve pre-service teachers to gain knowledge, skills, and principles in lal (giraldo & murcia, 2019). all the studies reported positive effects on the teachers who participated in the programs they developed and improved their lal. it is proven from the studies that teachers’ active involvement in assessment starting from planning, designing, administering, scoring, giving feedback, critiquing, and revising assessment was necessary for improving teachers’ lal. besides, collaboration was also important for teachers’ lal since it could help teachers support one another in their assessment practices. conclusion this systematic review investigated the topics discussed in the empirical research of lal to see what has been discussed and what future research should be directed. the findings of this review indicated that the topics discussed covered teachers’ lal beliefs, teachers’ lal beliefs and their assessment practices, teachers’ lal training needs, and developing teachers’ lal. the discussion on teachers’ lal beliefs reported that although teachers acknowledge the importance of lal, lal has been somewhat neglected by teachers who emphasize language teaching methodologies in their indah puspawati teachers language assessment literacy: a systematic review 124 teaching. teachers also believed that they were not professionally trained to carry out assessment tasks in their teaching contexts, so they relied so much on the mentorship from their senior peers to develop their lal. from this finding, the teachers believed that continuous development programs were needed to help teachers improve their lal. the next topics discussed in the studies included in this review were how teachers’ beliefs are reflected in their assessment practices. the findings suggested two different results where. the first result indicated a mismatch between teachers’ lal beliefs and their assessment practices, where teachers’ assessment practices did not reflect their lal beliefs. however, other studies indicated that teachers had adequate, even good, lal, which was shown clearly in their assessment practices. despite the different findings, the studies about teachers’ lal beliefs and assessment practices revealed that lal influenced teachers’ practice. teachers who had inadequate lal failed to carry out assessments practices as mandated in the curriculum reforms because teachers did not have the assessment knowledge and skills to respond to the policy changes. the third topic discussed in the studies was teachers’ lal training needs. the needs analysis showed what lal components need to be included in the training and how effective lal training should be conducted. the last topic discussed was related to programs and courses to develop teachers’ lal. the programs and courses developed mainly offered teachers hands-on experience on assessment and involved collaborative work in assessment. references ahmadi, m. r. s., & ketabi, s. 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(2020). an investigation into efl teachers’ assessment literacy: indonesian teachers’ perceptions and classroom practice. european journal of contemporary education, 9(1), 189–201. https://doi.org/10.13187/ejced.2020.1.189 indah puspawati teachers language assessment literacy: a systematic review 126 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 91 investigating efl teachers’ approaches to meaningful learning in blended-learning listening and speaking courses fitria rahmawati english language education department, faculty of language education, universitas muhammadiyah yogyakarta, indonesia email: fitriarahmawati@umy.ac.id apa citation: rahmawati, f. (2022). investigating efl teachers’ approaches to meaningful learning in blendedlearning listening and speaking courses. indonesian efl journal, 8(1), 91-104. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v8i1.5602 received: 27-09-2021 accepted: 28-11-2021 published: 30-01-2022 introduction creating a meaningful learning experience has become the goal of every teacher, especially in a foreign language instruction context. by developing technology, blended learning methods have commonly been used to facilitate meaningful learning experiences. several aspects should be considered to achieve the said goal during blended learning. blended learning activities should facilitate: 1) students-centeredness (lim, 2015; arteaga & rodas, 2018), 2018; huang, 2019), 2) collaborative learning (anjaniputra, 2013; ahmad, 2016; arteaga & rodas, 2018; cordova & dechsubha, 2018; ginaya, rejeki & astuti, 2018; huang, 2019), 3) self-paced and independent learning (hung, 2015; banditvilai, 2016; arteaga & rodas). one of the efforts to provide meaningful learning experiences is implementing blended learning into foreign language classrooms with several careful considerations. blended learning in efl speaking and listening classes does not always meet the expectations. several studies revealed some findings, including teachers’ lack of preparation and ability to use the learning management system (lms) while using blended learning. a study conducted by jeffrey, milne, suddaby and higgins (2014) proved that only nine of ten teachers invited in their study could take all potentials of the blended learning method, especially its online aspect. another study conducted by bueno-alastuey and lópez pérez (2014) strengthened the fact by showcasing that teachers only used the learning platform as a storage space for providing the learning materials or presenting other materials relevant website links for additional learning resources. these situations potentially lead students to become confused and not fully engaged in the lesson, which further hinders the teachers’ aim in creating a meaningful learning experience during the blended learning implementation. in addition, the potentials of blended learning will be shown if the teachers have a positive attitude and careful preparation towards the implementation. abstract: this study explored the approaches applied by efl teachers to create meaningful learning activities to teach listening and speaking skills in a blended learning context and investigated some contributing factors in implementing the activities. six efl teachers with a diverse length of teaching experiences were purposively selected as the participants of this study. a case study was adopted as the research design involving several datagathering techniques, including in-depth interview, document analysis, and observation. the study revealed some approaches implemented by the efl teacher-participants to facilitate meaningful learning activities to teach listening and speaking skills in a blended learning context, both in the offline and online delivery modes. in addition, drawing inferences from the data, some factors became considerations by the teachers in selecting instructional approaches to be implemented to teach both english skills in a blended learning context. the study’s findings suggest the need for efl teachers to carefully select and implement meaningful learning activities in a blended learning context specifically for teaching listening and speaking skills to assist student learning and provide better learning outcomes. keywords: blended learning; in-class learning; out-class learning; listening and speaking skills; instructional activities; contributing factors https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i2.4564 fitria rahmawati investigating efl teachers’ approaches to meaningful learning in blended-learning listening and speaking courses 92 there are some aspects of blended learning which can be further investigated. the development of technology gives an additional option for the efl teachers by implementing blended learning methods; however, it also creates a demand for learning activities to become more meaningful and effective. the teachers should wisely consider the learning activities provided both in-class and outclass learning to achieve the learning objectives (ahmad, 2016; mcmurry, rich, hartshorn, anderson & williams, 2016). eventually, teachers considerably play an important role in classroom instructions. thus, exploring their experiences and acknowledging their beliefs towards meaningful blended learning instructions is valuable. the present study was conducted to shed light on how teachers, especially the efl teachers, manage the activities in their blended learning courses and their consideration towards the selected activities. the study focused on implementing blended learning for english listening and speaking skill courses for adult efl learners in a university context. the study is designed to answer the following research questions: (1) what approaches are implemented by the efl teachers to facilitate meaningful learning activities to teach listening and speaking skills in a blended learning context, both offline and online delivery modes? (2) what factors became the efl teachers’ considerations towards the selected approaches to teach listening and speaking skills in a blended learning context? blended learning method several experts and researchers have defined the blended learning method based on its implementation date. in the early 2000s, cooney, gupton and o’laughlin (2000, as cited in güzer & caner, 2014) defined blended learning as the combination of ‘work’ and ‘play’ in the learning activities. students are believed to study when they are playing and vice versa unwittingly. thus, blended learning was used to add to classroom interactions in its early presence. procter (2003) and ata (2016) defined blended learning as a combination of more than one learning method in a certain course. moreover, graham (2006) defined the involvement of teaching media in learning activities, also called blended learning. however, blended learning method recently and commonly defined as a combination of in-class and out-class learning using technology-based systems to control (jenkins & hanson, 2003; osguthorpe & graham, 2003; graham, 2006; brew, 2008; arteaga & rodas, 2018; he, 2018; huang, 2019). those varied definitions of blended learning showed that the blended learning method has developed from time to time, thus continuing until now. lms has various terms. some experts and researchers also refer to lms as a course management system (cms) (tang, 2013); virtual platform (bueno-alastuey & lópez pérez, 2014); virtual learning environment (vle) (tang, 2013; arteaga & rodas, 2018); online platform (cordova & dechsubha, 2018; xu, glick, rodriguez, cung, li, & warschauer, 2020), and the lms itself (tang, 2013; caruso, colombi & tebbit, 2017). despite having different terms, its function assists the learning process using technology as an integral part of a blended learning or an online learning method. several experts and researchers mentioned the function of lms in a blended learning context. teachers can use lms for different purposes, such as 1) to control the students in the distance learning (staker & horn, 2012), 2) as a platform to communicate between the students and their teacher, 3) to deliver the instructional materials, 4) to conduct quizzes or tests and even online registration (cavus, 2010; ouadoud, chkouri & nejjari, 2018). in conclusion, lms can make many tasks easier and time-saving for teachers if used properly. approaches to blended-learning listening and speaking courses technology in a blended learning method gives other options of teaching approaches, especially for teaching listening and speaking skills. the approaches are not only in the classrooms but also in course books. the method aims to gain more meaningful learning activities. several experts and researchers mentioned several in-class and out-class teaching and learning approaches for listening and speaking courses that can support students to achieve the learning objectives effectively in a blended-learning model. many teaching approaches can be adapted or adopted in blended learning listening and speaking courses. teachers and students are familiar with the in-class approaches such as dictation (richards, 2008; nation & newton, 2009), cloze listening indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 93 (richards, 2008), note-taking (nation & newton, 2009; ahmad, 2016) and listening tests or quizzes (nation & newton, 2009) in listening courses. moreover, there are speaking approaches such as cooperative activities (richards, 2008; anjaniputra, 2013), creative activities (anjaniputra, 2013), debates (ahmad, 2016), learning by teaching (ahmad, 2016), drilling (richards, 2008; anjaniputra, 2013), and speaking performances such as role-play or simulation (nation & newton, 2009). those teaching approaches are generally used in in-class listening and speaking courses. technology plays a significant role in instructional approaches in a blended learning context. there are various approaches available to be included in the listening courses, such as accessing listening materials on the lms (takaesu, 2017; yeh, 2017), watching instructional media, such as recorded video materials (ahmad, 2016; jalaludin, 2016; caruso et al., 2017), conducting online quizzes or tests (cavus, 2010; caruso et al., 2017; xu et al., 2020). in addition, in the speaking courses, there are several approaches such as accessing authentic materials (harris, 2015; takaesu, 2017; yeh, 2017), learning by doing (jalaludin, 2016; bakar, noordin & razali, 2019; precintha rubini, james, yong & yunus, 2019), video conferencing, and recorder role-playing or simulation (correa, 2015; lenkaitis, 2019). those approaches have eventually proven to enrich the choices to be adopted and the in-class learning mode. factors of a blended-learning listening and speaking course some factors need to be considered carefully to facilitate meaningful blended learning experiences for students to learn listening and speaking skills. in selecting and deciding the teaching and learning approaches executed, the efl teachers should consider which approaches can facilitate their students to achieve the learning objectives (ahmad, 2016; mcmurry et al., 2016). therefore, instructional approaches become the key component of the blended learning method. many experts and researchers revealed some factors in selecting instructional approaches for listening and speaking courses in a blended-learning context. they mentioned in the researches and books about the factors such as the approaches should be able to: 1) assist students to obtain the learning objectives (ahmad, 2016), 2) support students’ autonomous learning (hung, 2015; ahmad, 2016; banditvilai, 2016; arteaga & rodas, 2018; huang, 2019), 3) improve interaction and communication between the students and their teacher (qomar, 2016), 4) allow for differences in students’ interests (nation & newton, 2009; anjaniputra, 2013; ahmad, 2016; qomar, 2016), 5) encourage supportive learning environment (vaughan, 2014; ouadoud, et al., 2018); 6) expose students to how to listen and how to speak (caruso, et.al., 2017), 7) facilitate student-centered principle (lim, 2015; ahmad, 2016), 8) attract students’ attention (anjaniputra, 2013; cordova & dechsubha, 2018), 9) show real-life situation or authenticity (anjaniputra, 2013; caruso, et.al., 2017; harris, 2015; jalaludin, 2016), 10) provide proper facilities and quality learning materiasl (anjaniputra, 2013; nation & newton, 2009), and 11) support flexibility principle (caruso, et.al., 2017). method the research was conducted using the qualitative method. this selection of research methods is on the availability of comprehensive summarization and personal experiences on specific occasions (lambert & lambert, 2012). moreover, in-depth and wide-ranging answers of the participants are available in this kind of inquiry method. the participants are free to share their ideas according to the topic for gaining deep understanding and comprehension (creswell & creswell, 2018). in addition, the case study was chosen as the research design of the current study. the reason for selecting is the delimitation of the discussed topic on the object of the study or the case (merriam, 1998). moreover, a specific policy was investigated in this study regarding the implementation of blended learning in a higher education context (merriam, 1998). eventually, a policy would be a new thing for some people in a certain context and not for others. hence, this study is expected to portray a blended learning method for listening and speaking courses in an efl context based on the efl teachers’ experiences and beliefs during their teaching practices. the research subjects in this research are six efl teachers of a private university in yogyakarta, indonesia, were voluntarily involved in this study. specifically, they have been teaching listening and fitria rahmawati investigating efl teachers’ approaches to meaningful learning in blended-learning listening and speaking courses 94 speaking courses, either for daily conversation, formal setting, career development, or academic purposes. a university’s english language education department offers the courses for its first-year students. the study was conducted during the academic year of 2019/2020. pseudonyms were used to protect the participants’ confidentiality. since the first implementation of blended learning in the university in 2018, the teachers have already had adequate experiences implementing blended learning in the listening and speaking courses. thus, it fits the qualitative method that seeks direct experiences regarding the issues (creswell & creswell, 2018). for collecting the data, the researcher arranged the sequences to obtain the data of this research. interview, document analysis, and observation were conducted for data collection purposes. specific explanations on each of the techniques are presented below. the researcher arranged and utilized an interview guideline to focus more on the discussed topic in the first phase. the interview covered research questions about which instructional approaches were implemented and what factors were considered in selecting the approaches, both in the online and offline delivery modes. the questions were delivered in bahasa indonesia to gain a more in-depth explanation about the topic. the interview was conducted in about 40-60 minutes for each participant. however, since the coronavirus (covid-19) pandemic, two out of the six participants were interviewed using videoconference platforms. the researcher used an audio-recorder feature built in the mobile phone for recording the interview. the researcher also used field notes to take notes on the interesting discussions during the interview. document analysis. in the next phase, the researcher analysed the course guidelines used by the participants during listening and speaking courses in the academic year of 2019/2020. the document analysis was used to reveal the first research question on the selected instructional approaches implemented by the teachers both in inclass and out-class learning modes of the blended learning method. the researcher asked permission from the teacher-participants to get the course guidelines or syllabus. besides, the researcher also accessed the course guideline available inside the lms. observation. in the final phase, the researcher observed to get the data for further clarification to answer the first research question on the approaches being implemented, especially in the online learning mode. the researcher observed the listening and speaking courses. the researcher also observed the lms or the platform used by the teachers to conduct the learning blended-learning activities, especially the online mode. thus, the researcher asked permission from the participants to access the lms for each course. afterward, the researcher observed the approaches arranged by the teachers in the lms. the researcher took notes while observing the course lms. table 1. research questions and instruments research questions research instruments 1. what approaches are implemented by the efl teachers to facilitate meaningful learning activities to teach listening and speaking skills in a blended learning context, both offline and online delivery modes? 1. offline learning activities: interview and document analysis 2. online learning activities: interview, document analysis, observation of the lms 2. what factors became the efl teachers’ considerations towards the selected approaches to teach listening and speaking skills in a blended learning context? interview results and discussion this study provides information on the approaches implemented by the elf teachers in the blendedlearning listening and speaking courses and the factors in selecting the approaches. the following explanations are divided into two sub-themes. the first is the teaching and learning approaches implemented in a blended-learning context to teach listening and speaking courses. the second is the factors of selecting the approaches. darwin, paul, ivy, poppy, angel, clara were used as pseudonyms representing the participants involved in the study. the entire research findings are presented and discussed below. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 95 approaches to blended-learning listening and speaking courses blended learning is commonly known as combining in-class learning activities and out-class learning activities using technology. integrating information and communication technology in a blended learning method gives both teacher and students a chance to conduct classroom activities inside and outside the classroom. therefore, the findings of the teaching approaches were presented in two different sections, namely 1) the offline and 2) the online teaching and learning approaches. the offline instructional approaches. the teacher-participants applied different approaches in their listening and speaking classes during the offline learning modes. the offline learning mode refers to in-class learning activities. the participants mentioned some approaches that consist of listening, speaking, and a mixture of both language skills during the interviews and based on the course guidelines. the approaches were as follows: input session the study participants applied different ways of lecturing techniques in classroom meetings. darwin explained that “each meeting of the course consists of 4 credits, the first two-credit was for giving input sections through delivering the learning material by direct lecturing or watching a video(s) about the topic, and the last two credits were for reviewing the materials”. moreover, another teacher applied another way of learning. paul stated that “the teacher explained the materials and also instructed the students for a direct practice”. hence, the teachers applied different instructional approaches to deliver the learning materials in the classrooms and lecture in front of the class. lesson review during the interview, ivy explained that “after watching a video, students have to retell what is in the video”. two participants mentioned reviewing the lesson in their classroom activity in the course guidelines. darwin and ivy mentioned, “i asked my students to review the learning materials, either from the video or other resources.” besides the interview, their course syllabus presents the information regarding the activity related to the reviewing process. the teachers provided quiz(es) to check the students’ understanding of the lessons. the purpose of reviewing was for the teachers to check the students’ comprehension of material through reviewing or discussing the learning materials. listening comprehension practice. the teacher-participants implemented listening comprehension practice during the classroom interaction in different ways. darwin, poppy and paul mentioned listening comprehension practices were conducted in their classrooms to teach listening and speaking courses. they revealed it during the interview, as seen in the following excerpts. “i gave listening quiz(es) to my students to give them exposures to the native speakers’ dialogues and accents” (darwin). in addition, poppy stated that “i provided listening activities in the classroom, such as by giving the recorded dialogue about the topic or video from youtube. then give them a quiz afterward.” besides, quizzes contribute to the course’s final grade from the course syllabus, especially in the assessment and grading system. each quiz was worth 3-5% of the total course grade. furthermore, darwin, poppy, paul, and iris mentioned that they conducted listening comprehension quizzes in the classroom and graded the quiz. classroom discussion classroom discussion was also revealed as another approach. inferred from the interview data, darwin, paul, and ivy admitted that they regularly conducted a classroom discussion in their in-class learning sessions. furthermore, darwin and poppy mentioned classroom discussion in their course syllabus. ivy mentioned that “classroom discussion was conducted in a small-group and a whole-class discussion”. paul and ivy stated that students were divided into several groups and discussed the lesson topic in the small-group discussion. other than that, in the whole-class discussion, ivy explained that “all students in the classroom discussed what they had learned, then the teacher provided a brief explanation to clarify things, and then followed by a question and answer session”. accordingly, based on the participants’ experiences, classroom discussion can be conducted in classroom sessions or offline modes. fitria rahmawati investigating efl teachers’ approaches to meaningful learning in blended-learning listening and speaking courses 96 communicative tasks. another in-class instructional approach was intended for speaking skills. speaking is a productive skill. the students can explore their knowledge during the activity or learning-by-doing (bakar et al., 2019). the participants implemented several speaking practices in their offline classroom mode, including presentation, speech, role-play, and job-interview simulation. presentation. presentation is one of the in-class learning activities. poppy and paul mentioned presentation as the approach they assigned to their students during the in-class activity in the interview. poppy stated that presentations could be conducted individually or in groups. furthermore, poppy’s course syllabus proves that the presentations were conducted in groups and individually. moreover, poppy also explained how she conducted the presentation in her class during the interview. eventually, the interview data were not similar to the information from the course syllabus. all of the teacher-participants included in-class presentations written in the syllabus. the researcher made a follow-up interview session with the other participants who were not mentioning presentation as the in-class instructional approach. the reason was revealed as the answer to the case. some participants planned to have it as the approach, and they had written it in the syllabus. however, they had to switch the plan as the covid-19 pandemic hit indonesia as the learning process was completely online. angel admitted that one of the participants changed the plan, “i changed the plan. it (presentation) took more time, which was impossible to be conducted in an a-full-4-credit course. unless students have a stable and sufficient internet data to listen to their classmates live presentation session”. therefore, they had to adapt that the whole courses should be conducted fully online with limitations. speech. another speaking practice implemented during the in-class sessions was speech. the participants only mentioned it in the course guides. darwin and ivy mentioned speech activity in their list of learning activities in the course guide. moreover, darwin and ivy explained that “students were required to write about 250 words for a speech text and delivered a speech for 4-5 minutes. role-play and simulation. the findings from the interview revealed that roleplay and simulation become the most favourable approach for teaching listening and speaking skills during the offline mode. in the interview, ivy mentioned that “role-play was implemented as one of the classroom activities”. moreover, paul and clara mentioned the in-class role-play as the instructional approach in the interview and their course syllabus. in general, role-play was performed by the students in groups. poppy and angel explained that in the role-play, the students had to perform the scenario in groups with their friends, and they had to consult the script before the performance. furthermore, role-play activity can be applied for students’ exercise and is an assessment tool to evaluate students’ speaking proficiency. poppy explained that “i assigned my students to perform a role-play in groups. then, i asked them to perform in front of the classroom for speaking practice”. in addition to role play, darwin applied interview simulation as a tool to assess his students’ speaking performance. he shared his teaching practice, “as i teach speaking for career development purposes, one of the assignments was an in-class job interview simulation”. darwin paired the students, asked them to practice before the simulation performance. he further explained that each student performed both as the employer and the employee candidate. the online instructional approaches besides the offline instructional approaches, the teacher-participants also implemented some approaches to teach listening and speaking skills during the online learning modes of a blended learning method. they used the university lms as the learning platform to manage the course works and progresses. the interview, the course syllabus analysis and the lms observation were used as the data sources for approaches implemented to teach listening and speaking skills and the combination of both skills. the findings were as follows. self-access to the online learning materials. one of the most common approaches done by teachers in online learning, either a fully online or blended learning context, was sharing content. the contents include the learning materials, including indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 97 the .pdf files, presentation slides, recorded dialogues, recorded video learnings, links, or other relevant contents embedded on the lms as additional resources. by doing so, students were given adequate exposure to the language. they can, thus, learn the materials autonomously according to their own learning pace and time. based on the interview with ivy, she revealed that “students learned the materials which i provided inside the lms prior to the classroom session”. in the lms, darwin, poppy and paul facilitated their students with various learning materials, such as recorded audio and video learning, to access and learn the material individually and autonomously. the students accessed the lms and learned the materials before the face-to-face in-class session. further, the study participants explained that they provided the video from different sources, especially regarding the video. from the interview, poppy and ivy mentioned a video-sharing platform for their sources of the video learning materials. they acknowledged using youtube videos to get relevant and appropriate videos to the lesson. in addition, darwin, poppy and paul provided url links from other websites or video-sharing platforms on the lms from the observation of the lms. in addition, darwin and ivy uploaded their own created video learning materials. in addition to taking the materials from the internet, teachers can also create their video learning materials. online discussion forums. the findings revealed that the teacher-participants used the “forum” feature offered by the lms to conduct an online discussion about the lesson topic among the students and the teacher. the teacher gave a case as the material to be discussed, while the students followed the instruction and shared their experiences and analysis by posting a reply or comment on the teacher’s post. poppy and ivy stated that they had some online discussion forums in the interview. in addition, as observed from the course guide and the lms, darwin, poppy, paul, and ivy included online discussion forums in their list of the online teaching and learning approaches. furthermore, poppy and paul explained that students answered the questions based on the video provided by the teacher in the lms. then, they discussed the language expressions and other aspects of the language, and finally, they were given a case or situation which required them to apply the language expressions they had learned. other than that, as seen in paul’s course lms, his aim of having an online discussion forum was to ask the student to answer the open-ended questions based on students’ experiences and opinions regarding the course topic. synchronous meeting sessions. the teacher-participants delivered and explained the lesson through videoconferencing platforms. during the interview, paul explained that he used videoconferencing application to conduct synchronous online meetings. in addition to explaining the lesson through the synchronous meeting, the teachers sometimes conducted synchronous discussion using the same platform through the chat or dialogue box or live qna sessions. ivy explained the learning process that the students were divided into groups and used videoconferencing platform for an online discussion (p4.42). several video conferencing applications were used for synchronous meetings. in the interview, darwin and paul stated that the classroom sessions turned into online video conference modes since the pandemic. they used zoom as the platform. differ from darwin and paul, poppy and ivy used microsoft teams (ms. teams) for having synchronous meetings with the students. those participants used different videoconferencing platforms for teaching listening and speaking courses. online listening comprehension practices. based on the interview and the observation of the participants’ lms, the online listening quizzes were conducted in different formats. poppy mentioned several listening quizzes, such as multiple choices, filling in the blanks (cloze quiz), and correcting inappropriate words/phrases/language expressions. in addition to poppy, darwin stated the learning media used for the listening comprehension quizzes, “the teachers can use video or audio files for the listening comprehension practices”. using the lms, several participants also mentioned other types of quizzes for the listening comprehension practices. darwin applied the true-false question type for the online listening quiz. although the lms provides a “quiz” feature to conduct the online quiz, the participants also used several other online quiz applications. in the interview, poppy mentioned, “i used kahoot! for conducting online quizzes fitria rahmawati investigating efl teachers’ approaches to meaningful learning in blended-learning listening and speaking courses 98 (p2.36)”. darwin and ivy were also confirmed to use padlet to conduct online quizzes in their lms in lms. the findings revealed that the lms, to some extent, facilitated the participants to assess the students’ understanding of the lesson through the quiz feature. in addition, the lms allows the teachers to use other quiz applications by embedding the link to the post. project-based speaking assessment the final approach implemented by the participants was a project-based speaking assignment. the aim was to make the students create real products in english as the target language. based on the findings, this activity can involve many variations. paul mentioned ‘video blog’ (vlog) and podcast using the anchor application. darwin also recorded a video on interviewing foreigners, while ivy applied a recorded role-play video. during the interview, paul also mentioned the synchronous job interview as the approach for the speaking assessment conducted using the videoconferencing platform. unlike the in-class interview simulation, the teacher was the interviewer in this activity, while the students were the interviewees. he further explained the process, “the meeting was recorded using the platform, and the teacher only focused on giving questions for the students”. in addition to the interview, the course syllabus and the lms contents also revealed the same findings. paul, darwin, poppy, and ivy stated the approach clearly in the course syllabus. they explained that students created the video of their presentation about a specific topic, uploaded the video on the videosharing platform or cloud drive, and shared the video link in the lms. thus, the study participants become an alternative to provide meaningful learning experiences to teach listening and speaking skills in a blended learning context. considering factors in adopting teaching approaches implemented in a blended-learning listening and speaking course the participants revealed various instructional approaches for teaching listening and speaking courses in a blended-learning context. they chose those approaches with several factors which were carefully considered. an interview was used for collecting the data to get the answers on the factors being considered by the efl teachers in selecting the approaches. the findings regarding the factors were presented as the following. meet the learning objectives. meeting the course learning objectives became the most considering factor for the participants in selecting the teaching and learning approaches. it was revealed from the interview that most of the participants, darwin, poppy, and ivy, mentioned that the approaches should be appropriate for the objectives. one of the learning objectives is improving students’ listening and speaking proficiency. thus, it is also important to consider implementing teaching and learning approaches that enable the teachers to achieve the said objective. darwin stated that the selected approaches should train students’ listening and speaking proficiencies. fit the students’ needs teachers must understand their students’ needs and take necessary actions to facilitate them. based on the interview, another factor considered by the teachers in selecting and implementing a teaching approach to teach listening and speaking skills was that the approach should fit the students’ needs. ivy stated that teachers should consider students’ needs when selecting teaching approaches. hence, if teachers understand the needs of their students, it becomes easier for them to select suitable teaching and learning approaches. expose the students to real-life language contexts based on the interview, darwin and paul mentioned that students had to get sufficient exposure to the real language use from the classroom interactions. furthermore, paul asserted that exposures to meaningful real-life context learning experiences would affect students’ future lives. in other words, the approaches being implemented should fit the criteria of providing an adequate amount of english language exposure relevant to the real-life context. during the interview, darwin stated that he implemented a teaching approach that can expose his students to as much as language exposures necessary for real-life language use. encourage student-centred learning principles that the approach facilitates student-centeredness becomes another factor the study participants consider in selecting the teaching approach. paul asserted that the approach should be studentcentred. he further explained, “in a blendedindonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 99 learning method, students are expected to become autonomous and initiative”. student-centredness is essential to be encouraged in a blended-learning context as it allows students to be autonomous and independent over their work. thus, efl teachers should carefully decide how to teach listening and speaking skills in a blended learning context that promotes student-centred learning. validate the students’ performance effectively another factor that was being considered by the teacher-participants in selecting the teaching approaches was that the approaches should be able to measure the students’ performance, especially their listening and speaking skills. teachers need to assess the students’ performance effectively and appropriately. that being said, the selected approaches should deem fit as a valid assessment tool to measure students’ performance. from the interview, paul and ivy stated that the approaches implemented by the teachers should be able to measure students’ listening comprehension and speaking performance. in addition, poppy highlighted the importance of implementing appropriate teaching approaches to assess the students’ language performance online, both for the listening and speaking skills. like the offline learning mode, the teachers should also carefully choose the approaches that can validate their students’ english performance in an online learning mode. promote the students’ interest and motivation the teaching approaches should be thoughtprovoking and attention-grabbing for students. paul stated that the approaches should make students attracted. if so, the students would voluntarily take part in the learning process. in addition, the participants also considered that the approach should promote students’ motivation in learning. as english is a foreign language to the indonesian context, not every student is motivated to master it. poppy and ivy explained that the instructional approaches enhanced students’ motivation to learn english. thus, efl teachers must maintain their teaching approaches to engage and motivate. enhance the interaction between teachers and students the development of technology provides a possibility of facilitating interaction and communication between students and their teachers. especially in the online learning model, teachers should select the teaching approach which enables interaction between both parties as to the factor. paul, during the interview, asserted that one major difference between online and offline learning is in terms of intense communication between the teachers and the students. in addition, poppy shared her experience that she also provided more informal channels to communicate with her students, such as through whatsapp chat groups and lms (online discussion forum). teachers, thus, are responsible for establishing rapport to facilitate the students’ needs by providing a sufficient amount of verbal or non-verbal communication during the online learning classroom. in doing so, teachers could encourage their students to participate more in the learning process. provide practicality and flexibility the findings from the interview revealed that the participants agreed that practicality and flexibility were important factors to be taken into account in selecting teaching approaches. the issue of practicality and flexibility is strongly interconnected to the online learning mode of a blended learning implementation. darwin, poppy, paul and ivy acknowledged that the teaching approaches should be simple and easy to conduct. furthermore, paul and ivy identified that the approach should be possible to do in various time, place, and technical aspects. in addition, ivy asserted that the learning activity should be flexible to conduct at students’ respective times and place. regarding the time, paul and ivy expressed a thoughtful idea about the time length or duration of the approach. they stated that the duration is for the teachers to decide. teachers should consider the appropriate duration of the learning process, especially in the online learning mode with limited resources. the duration can be adjusted to the difficulty level and the weight of the tasks being provided. accordingly, it would be fair for the students. therefore, in a blended-learning method, which combines two different learning modes: the in-class learning session and the out-class learning session, the instructional activities should be practical and flexible to be conducted. the study revealed findings on various teaching approaches implemented by the efl teachers in a blended learning model. in addition, some factors fitria rahmawati investigating efl teachers’ approaches to meaningful learning in blended-learning listening and speaking courses 100 that become the teachers’ consideration in selecting the approaches were also revealed. this section discusses the interpretation of findings using multiple data sources, including interviews, document analysis (the syllabus), and observation. the teaching approaches implemented by the efl teachers to create meaningful learning activities in blended learning listening and speaking courses were categorized into two following the nature of a blended-learning method, namely the in-class session and the out-class session. the approaches were input sessions, lesson reviews, listening comprehension practices, classroom discussion, and speaking practices in the in-class or offline learning mode. while for the out-class session or the online learning mode, the approaches were self-access to the online learning materials, online discussion forums, synchronous meeting sessions, online listening comprehension practices, and projectbased speaking assessment. the efl teacher-participants of the study varied the teaching approaches to facilitate meaningful learning experiences in a blended-learning method. the following discussion focuses on the finding regarding the offline teaching approaches. the first approach implemented to create a meaningful learning experience was the input session. the teachers can apply several ways of delivering material in the classrooms. the teacher can involve the students in learning activities instead of only listening to the teachers’ explanations. besides explaining the learning material, the teacher can apply a learning-by-doing approach (bakar et al., 2019) using the media or inviting the students to learn activities. the second approach was lesson review. the teachers are required to check students’ comprehension of the learning material. one of the review activities was note-taking (ahmad, 2016). students were supposed to take notes on the important information when listening to the material. another approach was by providing listening comprehension practices. following the lesson review, teachers provided a quiz or test to check the students’ understanding further. this way helped the teachers to confirm the students’ comprehension. listening comprehension practice was flexible to be conducted in the classroom activities. the activity can be graded or only used for an exercise without a grade. different listening comprehension activities included partial dictation, statement response, recorded cloze, and information transfer (nation & newton, 2009). the fourth approach was a classroom discussion. classroom discussion was conducted in groups. it means that classroom discussion can be included in cooperative activities (richards, 2008; anjaniputra, 2013). in this activity, the students did not only listen, but they also had to talk to each other, even in pairs or groups, to discuss the learning topic. the last approach conducted in an offline mode was communicative tasks. teachers can expose students to various speaking tasks, including presentation, interview, role-play, and simulation. these tasks involve interaction and communication among the students in using english. accordingly, the students practice producing the target language for communication purposes. communicative task engages students in producing the target language to complete meaningful tasks they might encounter in the real world (ellis, 2003; harmer, 2007). in addition to the offline instructional approach, the online instructional approach was also conducted in a blended learning method by the teacher-participants of the study. teachers could assign students the following approach for listening and speaking courses: self-access to the online learning materials, online discussion forums, synchronous meeting sessions, online listening comprehension practices, and project-based speaking assessment. the first approach was providing self-access online learning materials. the use of technology provides teachers with alternatives in delivering the learning materials, including video for students to practice their skills. the teachers could use video from free accessed video-sharing platforms (harris, 2015). otherwise, the teachers could also create the instructional video by themselves (ahmad, 2016). moreover, the students can access the learning material (harris, 2015; jalaludin, 2016). the internet gives more options for the students to access additional learning material anytime and anywhere using their gadgets or personal devices. the second approach was by initiating online discussion forums. an online discussion forum is an activity to check the students’ comprehension of learning material and interact using the target language. online discussion should be conducted student-centred (lim, 2015; arteaga & rodas, 2018) independently (arteaga & rodas, 2018; huang, 2019). the students were expected to indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 101 express their ideas using the target language. the next approach was by performing online listening comprehension practices. teachers can use various alternatives to conduct online quizzes through the lms. several types of listening quizzes such as partial dictation, responding to statement, recorded close-ended questions, and information transfer can be applied by the teachers (nation & newton, 2009). another online, blended learning method for teaching listening and speaking skills was conducting synchronous meeting sessions. several previous studies had mentioned videoconferencing as the activity for online listening and speaking courses (correa, 2015; lenkaitis, 2019). therefore, it gives the teacher another alternative for conducting the learning activities and presenting the materials to students. by having this synchronous meeting, students can interact with their teachers in real-time. finally, a teacher could also conduct an online project-based speaking assessment. the students need to experience the real activity using the target language. a learning-by-doing principle is appropriate for project-based learning concepts (bakar et al., 2019). thus, the students were expected to be proficient in listening and speaking by doing the projects. one example of the project was that the students created an instructional video (precintha rubini et al., 2019), then shared their video on a video-sharing platform (jalaludin, 2016). the teachers considered several factors in adopting the teaching approaches in a blendedlearning listening and speaking course. the study revealed that one of the most significant factors to be considered was that the approach should facilitate meeting the learning objectives. a previous study mentioned that the expected outcomes should be the first factor in selecting teaching and learning approaches (arteaga & rodas, 2018). hence, it infers that appropriateness towards learning objectives becomes an important factor in selecting the approach. the second consideration was regarding the students’ needs. teachers are required to identify their students’ characters. gonzalez, ochoa, cabrera, castillo, quinonez, solano, espinosa, ulehlova and arias (2015) mentioned several factors that the teachers should consider in selecting instructional approaches and materials, including age, learning style, and proficiency level. thus, the teachers have to consider those aspects. the approaches should also expose the students to real-life language contexts. the students should practice what they have learned in the classrooms. therefore, the teachers should consider the learning activities that are real and appropriate to the real-life context (anjaniputra, 2013 & caruso et al., 2017) as experiences are expected to give basic knowledge and enhance students’ proficiencies for their future. the next factor was that the approaches should encourage the student-centred learning principle. the student-centred learning principle is the main principle of the blended learning method. a previous study mentioned that blended learning implementation should increase self-learning principles and students’ activeness during the learning process rather than dominate teacher talk (lim, 2015). moreover, several studies stated that blended learning emphasized that students become autonomous learners (hung, 2015; ahmad, 2016; banditvilai, 2016; arteaga & rodas, 2018; huang, 2019). hence, a teacher should carefully select instructional approaches which facilitate students to be more active and independent during the learning process. another factor was regarding the assessment. the students should achieve proficiency at the end of the course. hence, the instructional approach aims to measure students’ ability to comprehend the learning materials (caruso et al., 2017). therefore, it is important to implement an instructional approach that can effectively validate the students’ performance, especially regarding their listening and speaking skills. it infers that the students’ comprehension and progress can be effectively measured during the learning process. in addition, the approach should be able to promote students’ attention. a varying instructional approach enables teachers to attract students’ attention. previous research revealed that the instructional approaches must be meaningful and attract students’ attention (anjaniputra, 2013; cordova & dechsubha, 2018). meaningful and attractive learning can make the learning process more effective. vaughan (2014) assured that it is important to have an active learning environment to support learning activities. promoting students’ attention can be done by supporting collaboration and communication during the learning process (vaughan, 2014; ouadoud et al., 2018). the participants’ next factor was that the instructional approaches should enhance the interaction between teachers and students. fitria rahmawati investigating efl teachers’ approaches to meaningful learning in blended-learning listening and speaking courses 102 educational technology provides more chances for teachers and students to interact. a previous study mentioned that technology improves communication intensity between teachers and students (qomar, 2016). hence, the learning process can still be carried outside the classroom learning, especially in an online learning mode. the last considering factor was regarding practicality and flexibility. simple and easy learning activity is important, in line with the concept of a ‘stress-free’ learning activity (nation & newton, 2009). moreover, nation and newton (2009) referred to stress-free as a fun learning environment. thus, students can enjoy the learning activity, and it becomes more effective to achieve the learning objectives. online learning gave flexibility and probability for teachers and students to conduct outside classroom learning activities (caruso et al., 2017). however, teachers also have to consider the duration of the learning activities. even though online learning is flexible in time and place, considering the duration is also important. conclusion the findings of the current study revealed the efl teachers’ approaches to teach listening and speaking skills in a blended learning context, covering both the offline and online delivery modes. since teachers are required to wisely integrate various instructional approaches, this study is valuable to provide practical knowledge and best practices for them in order to facilitate meaningful learning experiences and achieve better learning outcomes. in addition, this study identified some factors valued by the efl teachers in selecting the approaches. thus, other teachers could also consider some factors revealed from the study to select instructional approaches both for in-class and out-class learning based on their students’ background and condition. the study implies the needs for efl teachers to carefully select and implement meaningful learning activities in a blended learning context specifically for teaching listening and speaking skills. before implementing an instructional approach, several factors need to take into account. moreover, especially for the online learning mode, the availability of a stable, integrative, and user-friendly learning management system, which has various learning materials and activities, should be well-developed. thus, the institution should continuously evaluate its progress. references ahmad, s. z. 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(2014). flipping the learning: an investigation into the use of the flipped classroom model in an introductory teaching course. education research & perspectives, 41, 25-41. xu, d., glick, d., rodriguez, f., cung, b., li, q., & warschauer, m. (2020). does blended instruction enhance english language learning in developing countries? evidence from mexico. british journal of educational technology, 51(1), 211-227. yeh, c. c. (2017). an investigation of a podcast learning project for extensive listening. asian-focused elt research and practice: voices from the far edge, 87. thematic and transitivity analysis in children’s song and story indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427 story and song in teaching english to young indonesian efl learners: how powerful? diah gusrayanidepartment of english education, indonesia university of education, indonesiae-mail: gusrayanidiah@yahoo.comapa citation: gusrayani, d. (2015). story and song in teaching english to young indonesian efl learners:how powerful? indonesian efl journal, 1(1), 63-69received: 05-09-2014 accepted: 23-09-2014 published: 01-01-2015 abstract: to children especially, song and story bring a lot of joys and happiness. how far childrencan understand the meaning of vocabularies contained in a song and a story will depend mainly onthe pattern of cohesiveness of both text genres and this is the main concern of this study. one storyand one song were chosen—they were judgmentally selected regarding that: 1) they were favored by3 english teachers in elementary schools to be taught in their class; 2) they were listed in thetextbooks used by those three teachers. 30 children aged 10 were chosen as the participants of thisstudy. the discourse patterns of cohesion (reference, lexical relations, conjunctive relations, andconversational structure) served as a tool of analysis and were applied to both song and story inorder to figure out the semantic unity of both texts. this research revealed that: 1) presumingreferences were found more in story meanwhile presenting references were recognized more in song;2) classification and composition were found more in story and contrast feature was found in song; 3)conjunctive reticulum for the story shows more for internal relations while song shows the opposite;4) the choice of speech function and type of exchange structure are displayed more clearly in storythan in song. these results lead to a conclusion that in understanding vocabularies contained in bothtexts; children show conceptual and metalinguistic knowledge more in understanding the story andexpose their interest, joyful and happiness while learning song. keywords: reference, lexical relations, conjunctive relations, conversational structure, semantic unity, conceptual, metalinguistic. introductionvocabulary is considered as the mostprominent subject to teach to children wholearn language. they understand the meaningfirst and later on are able to apply it in thecontext of usage in turn. by this mastery,children extend their understanding on theconcept of discourse: all linguistics patternsexist beyond the words, clauses andsentences (gerrot and wignel, 1994;paltridge, 2000). at the same time, they beginto enter larger units of language, one of themis conversations. in brief, the mastery ofvocabulary enables children to begin a veryimportant phase in their life: performcommunication. having considered the fact,the teaching of vocabulary will consequentlybe as important as it is.teaching vocabularies, especially tochildren are urgently performed by joyfullearning activities since they learn fruitfully in low tense atmosphere (lie, 2002;gusrayani, 2006). by low tense atmosphere,they are required to acquire and learn usefulamounts of vocabularies, retain them in along period of time, understand the context ofusage and finally of course, use itappropriately in the context. song and storyare two among many tools believed byindonesian teachers as to serve this purpose.they found encouraging results when givingsong and stories to children to facilitate theirlearning (in first, second or foreign language).class is enlivened with students’participation: raising hands, answeringquestions, contextualizing words and othersimilar phenomena (melani, 2007). it isexplained by several factors: in teachingvocabularies through song and story, thenumber of occurrences of new words isabundant; the number of times the word waspictured; the helpfulness of cues to meaning 63 diah gusrayani story and song in teaching english to young indonesian efl learners: how powerful? in text (cameron, 2001; pinter, 1999). whenteacher explanations of new words wereadded to the process, gains in vocabularydoubled.assuming song and story as have beenproviding a perfect environment and settingfor children to learn a new language shouldnot be made in a rush. should it beconsidered the content of those tools;whether they have given an appropriateattendance of what is relevant andunderstandable for children to adopt. inlearning english, indonesian children shouldwork quite hard since english is not theirfirst or even second language. they should beprovided with an appropriate learningcontext and atmosphere in order to enablethem to adopt the strategy of acquiring as intheir acquisition to the first language. thestory and song themselves should beanalyzed in term of their meanings, cohesionand coherence in order to serve the needs.this is the first step following otheranalysis—how the story and song serveindonesian context at their best. disbandingthe song and story to grasp the meaning andcoherence would be the first concern of thisstudy. cohesion analysis (lexical cohesion,reference, conjunction, and conversationalstructure) would be applied to both song andstory as the tools of analysis. following it, theimplementation of both texts to children—how they acquire them successfully in termof meaning especially for several mainvocabularies—will also be described here. inlater analysis, it will be unveiled which oneamong song and story serve the cohesiverelationship at best and compare the result tothe real implication in children mastery ofthe song and the story.a text is referred so if it has a property ofa text; what eggins (1994) has confirmed usas ‘a dimension of the paragraph’. aparagraph, as eggins (1994) further statedmust hang itself together contextually andinternally or coherently and cohesively.contextually, a paragraph must have a ‘seriesof clauses relate to the context’ (halliday andhasan, 1976). the contextual properties canbe recognized by specifying the field, modeand tenor for the entire collection of the clauses; this is a situational coherence. wecan also recognize whether the textcontextually related or not by identifying itsgeneric structure, i.e. whether it isidentifiable as a genre. this is a genericcoherence. if the text has a situational andgeneric coherence, this text is provable in onedimension of a paragraph. internally, the texthas to fulfill the main pattern of cohesion asmartin (1992) in paltridge (2000) showed usthey are: reference, lexical cohesion,conjunction, substitution, and ellipsis. eggins(1994) also argued that different types ofcohesion in text include: lexical cohesion,reference, conjunction and conversationalstructure. these concepts i will elaborateprincipally throughout the study.the cohesive resource of reference refersto how the writer/speaker introducesparticipants and then keeps track of themonce they are in the text (eggins, 1994). itmeans that once a text introducesparticipants involved in it (people, places andthings that get talked about in the text), thewriter must signal to the reader where istheir position later on in the text. the signalmust be in the form of ‘identity’ of theparticipants, whether they are already knownor not; i.e. participants in the text may beeither presented to us (introduced as “new”to the text) or presumed (encoded in such away that we need to retrieve their identityfrom somewhere). only presumingparticipants create cohesion in a text (eggins,1994). look at this example: i have a unique niece who lived in australia.if we find this sentence initiating aparagraph, it will presumably raise aquestion: who is she? we are not expected toknow anything about this participant, she,who is being introduced to us. therefore, thissentence contains a presenting reference.now, look at another example: i have a unique niece who lived in australia. hername is vian. she has a long and black hair.the second example here gives us a clearclue of who is she. it is presumed that weknow, or can establish, who that she refers to. 64 indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427 the second example shows us the presuming reference. only presumingparticipants create cohesion in a text sinceties of dependency are constructed betweenthe presuming item and what it refers to (itsreferent). eggins (1994) identified thecommonest presuming reference items, thoseare:i) the definite article : thei had to deliver it to the clinic.ii) demonstrative pronouns: that, these, those,this was in geneva.iii) pronouns: he, she, it, they, etchere they give you tea and bikkiesthe identity of presuming reference canbe retrievable from the general context ofculture (homophoric) or from the immediatecontext of situation (exophoric). when thewriter uses a presuming reference item, thereader needs to retrieve the identity of thatitem in order to follow the text (eggins,1994). if presuming referents are notretrievable, the interaction will run intoproblem. the identity of presuming referenceitem may be retrievable from a number ofdifferent contexts: from the general contextof culture, the immediate context of situation,from elsewhere within the text itself. whenwe identify a referent item retrieved fromwithin the text, it is called endophoricreference. the main patterns of cohesionexamined in the area of reference areanaphoric, cataphoric, esphoric, andhomophoric reference. anaphoric happenswhen the referent has appeared at an earlierpoint in the text. cataphoric happens whenthe referent has not yet appeared, but will beprovided subsequently. esphoric happenswhen the referent occurs in the phraseimmediately following the presuming referentitem (within the same nominal group/nounphrase, not in a separate clause. homophoricreference refers to items the identity of whichcan be retrieved by reference to culturalknowledge in general rather than the specificcontext of the text.lexical relations refer to how lexicalitems are used by the writer relationally. therelationship occurs between lexical items in atext and, in particular, among content words.the cohesive resource of lexical relations refers to how the writer/speaker uses lexicalitems (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) andevent sequences (chains of clauses andsentences) to relate to text consistently to itsarea of focus (eggins, 1994).the main kinds of lexical relations aretaxonomic and expectancy relations.taxonomic explains repetition, synonymy,antonymy, hyponymy, meronymy andcollocation. repetition refers to words thatare repeated in the text, as well as words thathave changed to reflect tense or number.synonymy refers to the relationship betweenwords that are similar in meaning.hyponymy refers to classes of lexical itemswhere the relationship is one of ‘generalspecific’ or ‘a type of’. meronymy refers tolexical items which are in a whole-partrelation. collocation describes associationsbetween words that tend to co-occur.meanwhile expectancy relations explain howeach word expects another word following it;and this is approved by many minds.the cohesive pattern of conjunctionrefers to how the writer creates andexpresses logical relationships between theparts of a text. it refers to words such as ‘and’,‘but’, ‘however’, ‘finally’, ‘then’, etc. martin(1992) in paltridge (2000) categorizesconjunctions as additive (and, or, etc),comparative (whereas, but, etc), temporal(while, when, after, etc), and consequentialconjunctions include items such as ‘so that’,‘because’, ‘since’ etc. while halliday (1985)recognize three main types of conjunctiverelations, those are: elaboration (in otherwords, that is, i mean etc.), extension (and,also, but, yet, etc), and enhancement(whereupon, then, etc). this type has beenconsidered appropriate and applied in thisstudy. conversational structureconversational structures describe howthe interactants negotiate the exchange ofmeanings in dialogue. it involves twocomponents (eggins, 1994): speech functionsand exchange structures. speech function orcan be regarded as speech act refers to anutterance and the total situation in which theutterance is issued (thomas, 1995). the basic 65 diah gusrayani story and song in teaching english to young indonesian efl learners: how powerful? initiating speech functions are offer,command, statement, and question.responding speech functions can be in theform of accepting, declining, complying,acknowledging, answering etc. meanwhileexchange structure is the sequence of thosespeech functions and constitutes jointlynegotiated exchanges. children learning a foreign languagethere are many unique phenomena forchildren as they learn a foreign language. it isso different comparing to adults as children:a) are often more enthusiastic and lively, b)want to please the teacher rather than theirpeer group, c) will have a go at an activityeven when they don’t quite understand whyor how, do not have the same access as olderlearners to meta language than adults(cameron, 2001; pinter, 1999). realizingthese characteristics of learning, teachersshould be made aware of bringing teachingmaterials to the classroom since the notablycharacteristics can be challenging or evenimpeding. it should also be put intoconsideration some remarkable theories ofchildren’s characteristics from some expertspiaget’s concern for example, was on thechild as an active learner and sense maker (incameron, 2001).the child is seen as continuallyinteracting with the world around her/hissolving problems that are presented by theenvironment. through taking action to solveproblems learning significantly occurs.children also deal with concrete thinking andconcrete objects at their initial stage of life.the implication of learning suggests thatchildren are active learners and thinkers andthus seek out intentions and purposes inwhat they see other people’s actions andlanguage. children are active ‘sense makers’,but their sense-making is limited to theirexperience. this is the key for them torespond to all classroom activities includingif s teacher involves them in story telling orsinging. the teacher should think ofclassroom activities as creating and offeringopportunities to learners for learning.meanwhile vygotsky (in cameron, 2001)concerns more or less differently to piaget in the sense that he relates a child with hissocial life instead of merely concerning onchild’s individual cognitive development.associating with this theory, languageprovides the child with a new tool, opens upnew opportunities for doing things and fororganizing information through the use ofwords as symbols (clark and clark, 1977;ellis, 1994).here vygotsky further emphasizes thatchildren learning to do things and learning tothink are both assisted by interacting with anadult. another vygotsky’s theory which isquite helpful to this study beside the conceptof zpd (zone of proximal development) andinternalization is the concept of how childrenlearn words and meanings. from the earliestlesson, children are encouraged to think ofthe new language as a set of words. brunner(in cameron, 2001) proposed the concept ofscaffolding and routines in setting the tasksand activities for children learning a newlanguage. doing routine introduction to thenew language gives an opportunity toscaffold the new language to a child’s mind.routines then can provide opportunities formeaningful language development and willlater on open up many possibilities fordeveloping language skills. all these theorieswill shed light on this study in the basis ofhow story and song would be effectivelyserve the children’s learning a new languagesince these theories reflect the naturalness ofsong and story in exposing context andvocabularies within.richards and nation (1990) in cameron(2001) describes the type ofunderstanding/knowledge about a word.there are: receptive (understanding when itis spoken/written), memory (recalling itwhen needed), conceptual (using it with thecorrect meaning), phonological (hearing theword and pronouncing acceptably),grammatical (using it in a grammaticallyaccurate way; knowing grammaticalconnections with other words), collocational(knowing which other words can be usedwith it), orthographic (spelling it correctly),pragmatic (using it in the right situation),connotational (knowing its positive andnegative associations; knowing its 66 indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427 associations with related words) andmetalinguistic knowledge (knowing explicitlyabout the word, i.e. grammatical properties).students’ understanding on the vocabulariesdrawn from song and story will becategorized into these types. methodthe research is aimed at unveiling themeanings which is scrutinized in the form ofcohesion of two texts: oly, the fat caterpillar(story) and angels, watching over me (song)in order to figure out the mostunderstandable text to be exercised tochildren for the sake of their mastery ofvocabulary. the title of both texts werechosen in consideration that they are mostpreferably applied by 3 english teachers in 2elementary schools (sd salman al-farisi andsd darul hikam) in their classrooms aslearning materials. having selected the title,analysis of reference, lexical relations,conjunction and conversational structureswere applied to both song and story in orderto find out the cohesion pattern of andtherefore reflect the messages carried byboth texts. the analysis was initiated bysumming up clauses contained in both texts.this is conducted due to the sake ofcomparing percentage of reference, lexicalrelations and conjunctions in both song and story which have been quantitativelyanalyzed, whereas the conversationalstructure is depicted. the results are, then,sliced by the knife of qualitative analysis tofind out theoretically which one seems toprovide richer contexts derived from thecohesiveness built internally by both texts.vocabularies contain in text with richercontexts are assumed to be meaningful to beexercised to students. the result of analysis isthen confirmed to 30 children at the 5th gradeof sd salman al-farisi as the material toteaching and learning. the participants werechosen due to the fact that they have enoughbackground in english. all phenomenainvolved were related to theories of childrenlearning a new language. findings and discussion analysis of cohesiveness in song and storythe first tool applied to both text andsong is analysis of reference. it clearly showsthat story has presuming reference which isthe main hint of cohesiveness of a text;meanwhile song provides presentingreference mostly throughout the clauses.there is indeed one presuming phenomenonfound in the song; nevertheless this referencemust be drawn externally, from the generalcontext of culture (homophoric) instead ofinternally within the text (endophoric). table 1. cohesiveness in song and story song % story % reference 9 clauses 62 clausespresenting angels watching over me (6times repeated) my child (once) 11.29% 0presuming god and angels (homophoric) 1.62% anaphoric:she (9 times repeated)i and me (2 times)you (2 times)i (8 times repeated)you (2 times repeated)oly and pronoun (3 times)ibel and pronoun (3 times)they (once) cataphoric:these and wings (2 times)thank you, god (once)it is me, oly (once) esphoric:oly meets ibel, the dragonfly.i am oly, the fat caterpillar.now, i am oly, the butterfly. 61.29% 67 diah gusrayani story and song in teaching english to young indonesian efl learners: how powerful? as has been stated earlier, onlypresuming participants create cohesion intext, since ties of dependency are constructedbetween the presuming item and what itrefers to. among these two texts, storycontains presuming reference in a larger amount than song. from this first item, wecan temporarily conclude that story buildscohesiveness in a tighter manner than song.the second analysis was about its lexicalrelations. look again at the following table 2. table 2: lexical relations between song and story lexical relations song storytaxonomic classification:(1) class-sub class lord and angels(2) antonym night and day(3) repetition all night all day angels watching over me composition: co-meronymy god: sun, angels classification:(1) synonymy good-kind(2) co-hyponymy the fat caterpillar-the butterfly (refers to the samereferent, oly) colorful-beautiful(3) repetition fat (3 times) sleeps (3 times) eats (3 times) wings (2 times) thank you (2 times) play together (2 times) composition(1) meronymycaterpillar=green, long, has a lot of hair, has a lot of legs,eats fruits, eats leavesexpectancy relations make friendwakes upfly aroundplay togetherit is shown from the table that thequantity of taxonomic and expectancyrelations of lexical relations in both song andstory differ a great deal. expectancy relationswere not even found in song. it indicates lowcohesiveness in song compared to the story.only two types of conjunction found in thestory, that is, enhancement type (then) andextension type (and); and none was found insong. the song is minus conjunctions. thestory contains many short sentences which isindeed understandable without conjunction.last, the analysis of conversational structure.speech functions and exchange structure canonly be found in story. there is one speechfunction in song that is statement;nevertheless it is not accompanied bysequences of the other speech function whichcan also constitute jointly negotiatedexchanges. meanwhile in the story, we canfind many exchange structures in dialogs forexample. one of them can be seen as at thetable 3. from this exchange structure, we can besure who makes what kinds of moves, whoplay which roles in the exchanges of a text.this provides a good context for studentsespecially children in recognizing newvocabularies. those conclusions were drawntheoretically. nevertheless, having them(song and story) all taught, children show agreat response to story. they show theirknowledge on several words which weremagnificently constructed. they show notonly receptive knowledge (understand itwhen it is spoken/written), memory (recall itwhen needed) but also pragmatic knowledge(use it in the right situation). for example,from all context provided by the story, onechild without being told of the meaningpreviously, talked about his own experienceof feeling ashamed (like oly), then shepronounce the word ‘ashamed’ quiteconvincingly. 68 indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427 table 3: the negotiation of meaning exchanges in dialogue exchanges speech functionoly: hello, my name is olyi am green caterpillarwhat is your name?ibel: i am ibeli am dragonflygo awayyou are fatyou are not my friendoly: ibel, i am a good animal.i am kindlet’s play together.ibel : goodbye fat oly… fat oly… fat oly.ibel flies and praysoh god, help me…i need a friend statementstatementquestionanswerstatementcommand of refusalstatementrefusalstatementacknowledgeofferdeclinestatementrequeststatementthey can even re-create the words intheir own language (bahasa indonesia) or putthem in a correct grammar (metalinguisticknowledge). as what brunner had suggested,story, along with its repetitions (in relationalprocess and same rheme for example)provide good scaffolding for children.meanwhile song proves to be quite lack inproviding them benefit environment forlearning vocabularies. they only sang, andlaughed, banged their hands, bended theirknees and any other physical responses. theyliked the song, but remembered almostnothing the words it is introduced. thisphenomenon explains contexts boundary alot; story provides children with manycontextual boundaries which ease them toremember the vocabularies significantlywhile song does not work in a similar way. itdoes not scaffold the child enough. conclusionfrom above analysis we can concludethat song provides greater opportunities forchildren learning in a joyful situation sincesong can enliven the situation and thechildren responded it sufficiently. however,having song as a material to teachingvocabularies should be considered twice. wehave to select song with more cohesivenessbuilt in it. the implication to teaching andlearning is that; if teacher’s intention is tobuild vocabulary mastery on children, theycan consider story better than song. if thepurpose is only to make the class relieved, unstressed, and enlivened, teacher canchoose song. even though the result mayconsiderably depend on the song and thestory chosen, this finding can establishawareness among teacher that everyteaching act has to have purposes; andteacher has to decide them at the beginning. referencescameron, l. (2001). teaching languages to young learners. cambridge: cambridge university press.clark, h. h & clark, e. (1977). psychology and language.new york: hbj incorporation.cook, v. (1993). linguistics and second language acquisition. great britain: moc plc.eggins, s. (1994). an introduction to systemic functional linguistics. great britain: biddles, ltdellis, r. (1994). the study of second language acquisition.oxford: oxford university press.ellis, r.(1985). understanding second language acquisition. oxford: oxford university press.gerrot, l and wignell, p. (1994). making sense of functional grammar. australia : gerd stabler.gusrayani, diah. (2007) teaching grammar in context through constructivism. unpublished paper.hadley, a.o. (2001). teaching language in context.boston: heinle and heinle thomson learning.halliday, m.a.k. (1985). an introduction to functional grammar. london: edward arnold.halliday, m.a.k. (1994). an introduction to functional grammar. london: edward arnold.lie, a. (2002). pengajaran bahasa asing. jakarta:kompas.mc glothlin, j. d. (1997). a child’s first steps in languagelearning. the internet tesl journal, 3(10).melani, m. (2004). teaching trough story. unpublishedpaper.paltridge, b. (2000). making sense of discourse analysis.queensland: gold coast.pinter, a. (2006) teaching young language learners.oxford: oxford university press. 69 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 69 the effect of e-learning on students speaking skill progress: a case of the seventh grade at smp pencawan medan rahmawati english department, faculty of teacher training and education,university of prima indonesia, sekip, indonesia e-mail: rahmawati165@gmail.com chanji sihombing english department, faculty of teacher training and education,university of prima indonesia, sekip, indonesia e-mail: chanjis12@gmail.com elya karnela br ginting english department, faculty of teacher training and education,university of prima indonesia, sekip, indonesia e-mail: elya28karnela@gmail.com elfrida arimonnaria english department, faculty of teacher training and education,university of prima indonesia, sekip, indonesia e-mail: arimonnaria@gmail.com apa citation: rahmawati, sihombing, c. ginting, e. k. b., arimonnaria, e. (2021). the effect of e-learning on students speaking skill progress: a case of the seventh grade at smp pencawan medan. indonesian efl journal 7(1), pp. 69-78. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i1.3995 received: 12-12-2020 accepted: 24-12-2020 published: 31-01-2020 abstract: this study aims to see whether e-learning has an effect on the progress of students' speaking skill and know the process of students' speaking skill in e-learning. this research uses quantitative methods with a descriptive approach. the study population was smp pencawan medan with a sample of seventh grade of junior high school students. the data was collected by first explaining the recorded material orally through the whatsapp group which contained 20 students and after that the students collected the audio of their voice by recording. the results of this study indicate that in seventh grade student s at smp pencawan medan who can understand 20 students who have experienced a decreasing in speaking during face to face leaning before pandemic than e-learning from the score table during the pandemic, from the table of score during the pandemic, there were 2 students with excellent categories, no students with nice category, 8 students with the sufficient categories and 10 students with the not satisfactory categories. the researchers find some problems, namely in pronunciation, fluently, vocabulary and accuracy. when in e-learning process, students become embarrassed to speak and become lazy to speak english, then there is a decreasing in vocabulary, a decreasing in pronunciation and a decreasing in students' speaking fluency and accuracy. keywords: e-learning; speaking skills; progress. introduction at the end of january 2020, the world health organization (who) declared a covid-19 pandemic around the world. this pandemic condition has forced all activities that tend to cause crowds to be stopped, including teaching and learning activities at schools and on campus. as a result, the learning process is carried out online (elearning). the development of digital technology is very influential in the scope of education in the world, including in indonesia, one of which it is the e-learning-based learning method. e-learning stands for electronic learning, where learning is carried out with an online system or in a network that uses electronic media. walabe and luppicini (2020) stated that e-learning refers to courses that use technology and the internet to provide constructive learning opportunities for students. however, applying technology in education is not as easy as it seems considering so many aspects take roll in it as they are related one to another. this is in line with ali (2020), stating that technology is the means for delivery and requires a close crosscollaboration between instructional, content, and technology teams. murgatrotd (2020) also added certain deficiencies such as the weakness of online mailto:rahmawati165@gmail.com mailto:chanjis12@gmail.com mailto:elya28karnela@gmail.com mailto:arimonnaria@gmail.com rahmawati, chanji sihombing, elya karnela br ginting, elfrida arimonnaria the effect of e-learning on students speaking skill progress: a case of the seventh grade at smp pencawan medan 70 teaching infrastructure, the inexperience of teachers, the information gap, the complex environment at home, and so forth. of course, if you use electronic media or technology to carry out learning through e-learning, internet data is very much needed, because without the internet, everyone will not be able to access the learning that is done online. syaifudin (2017) also emphasized that online learning has no time and place restrictions as long as the learning is connected to internet access. similarly, dhawan (2020) also believed that e-learning is student-centered and offers a great deal of flexibility in terms of time and location, so the use of the internet in e-learning is very influential in the learning process. saleem & rasheed (2014) argued that the main of e-learning is to increase accessibility of education and reducing the costs and time as well as improving students’s academic performance. e-learning is very efficient, but on the other hand learning has shortcomings and unfavorable effects on students first in the aspect of student speaking. armasita (2017) said that speaking is an activity used by someone to communicate with other. in the other meaning that speaking is the skill to express ideas or thought in yourself that involve other people using words that can be understood and accepted by many people. abdullah (2017) said that learning to speak obviously more difficult than learning to understand the spoken language. having the skill in speaking means that someone is have courage or confidence. a student becomes confident when they have speaking skill, the student will be more active in the class when the educator asks something, it will be an additional score for the students who have the skill in speaking. dhawan (2020) also found that one of elearning weaknesses is lack of personal/physical attention. that’s why it makes the wrong way, where the student's language development does not get optimal changes when he learns face-to-face, the use of e-learning in the speaking aspect actually makes students less efficient in mastering the learning because students become lazy to practice because there is no interaction that makes students do speaking skills that can be practiced directly in order to produce good speaking skills. even so, it cannot replace actual class interactions as in conventional classrooms (mardiah, 2020). similarly, a finding in ichsan, rahmayanti, purwanto, sigit, kurniawan, dewi, wirdianti, hermawati, and marhento (2020) also showed the same result in a different subject which is in science, they found that there were various shortcomings and obstacles during applying elearning strategy. as becker (2020) stated that it is common in universities and colleges to provide online resources to supplement traditional teaching methods in order to replace conventional classroom. even unesco is aware that transitioning to online learning at scale is a very difficult and highly complex undertaking for education systems (unesco, 2020). therefore, these institutions must understand what drives instructors and learners toward the e-learning system. (alqahtani and rajkhan, 2020). based on this, it can be explained that the main phenomenon to be discussed in this case is a technical problem in e-learning. since e-learning has begun to be carried out by all spheres of life, especially education, new problems and challenges will be faced between students., educators, and parents. this creates a dilemma that will have a negative effect on online learning. according to (salleh, et al, 2020) also said that e-learning has a negative impact in his journals such as: no selfdiscipline, no face-to-face interaction, lack of input from lecturers, good online learning is difficult to do, no facilities to support online learning, and hard to resolve difficulties the difference in this study from previous research is that it lies in the research method, which is where we use audio-visual recordings by whatsapp because by using audio visuals we can provide more accurate results about the speaking student where we listen directly to the voice of the student which makes researchers more easy to see the progress of students 'speaking skills and makes it easier for researchers to get the results of students' speaking comparisons while studying face-to-face and learning by e-learning. the points above are too in the learning process of e-learning, where the learning process in the student network is currently visible and visible to various parties such as teachers, students, or can have an effect on parents. that is why, we see elearning as not having a good effect on learning. for this reason, the researcher is interested in taking the title "the effect of e-learning on students' speaking skill progress: a case of the seventh grade at smp pencawan medan". this title attracts the attention of the writer because of the phenomenon that occurs nowadays make the students difficult in speaking that using e-learning and this is important to know to figure out does elearning affect students’ speaking skill progress and to figure out how is the process speaking skill of students’ progress on e-learning. because the previous research (hamid, 2020) state that students perceived that the implementation of online indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 71 learning during the covid-19 period has been not fully effective. vocabulary is a very necessary basic for speaking. speaking is the human ability to produce sound or voice orally and to share or express feelings and thoughts with others as a means of communication in life using or without any particular gadgets to fulfill human needs and emotion (munawar, 2015). without knowing the number of vocabularies, people will have difficulty in speaking english. learners often find difficulties in using appropriate words to convey their thoughts be-cause of their limited vocabulary (jati et al, 2019). that is why researchers take vocabulary as the most important aspect of assessing students' speaking skill because researchers see the lack of knowledge about vocabulary, many are lazy to memorize it but it is precisely with a lot of vocabulary that we can speak english without faltering, that is why vocabulary is made as a major aspect of speaking. that is why researchers make vocabulary a very important aspect of speaking. after vocabulary, the aspect that is needed is pronunciation. teaching pronunciation though neglected in most of the classes, is an important aspect for focus (thamarana & kallepali, 2018) pronunciation is a way of pronouncing word correctly. pronunciation is a way of pronouncing words correctly. pronunciation is needed in students' speaking assessment, because if someone speaks with the wrong pronunciation, the meaning of the word becomes different and makes the listener not understand the meaning of the speaker. therefore, pronunciation is also very important to pay attention to so that the meaning and meaning of a sentence can be accepted by others and easily be understood. accuracy is the students' speaking accuracy in pronouncing words, fluency and accuracy are inseparable things, these are two factors that can determine the success of english for students. accuracy can be said to be the ability to produce grammatically accurate sentences while fluency is the ability students must have to produce language easily. such as using correct punctuation, using verbs, articles and prepositions this aspect also needs to be considered in speaking where in speaking it is also necessary to use proper punctuation so that the words we speak are not flat and make other people like to hear it. tahir and hanapi (2020) state that accuracy in speaking means when someone can produce correct sentences in pronunciation, grammar and word choice so it can be understood. if someone doesn't learn accuracy in speaking, then it will affects the students accuracy in speaking, because accuracy consists of the use of vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation through several activities, fluency takes into account (parmawati, aseptiana & inayah,2019). while, fluency is expressing ideas clearly and continuously, but english teaching is usually more concerned with accuracy than fluency (shofi, 2018). however, that does not mean things that can be underestimated not to be mastered, because they are all related in order to achieve good results in speaking. if this aspect of speaking is not mastered, then it cannot be said that speaking properly and correctly, speaking well and correctly is speaking that can be opposed by the interlocutor. where when speaking is not stiff and anxious, when the situation students can speak properly and correctly in speaking, but so that this aspect can be mastered, students must practice a lot and try to make their fluency in speaking better. method this study aims to answer to the following research questions: does e-learning affect students’ speaking skill progress? how is the process of students’ speaking skill progress on e-learning? this review covers a period starting from 14-15 september 2020 in an effort to capture the effect of e-learning on the progress of students' speaking skills which was carried out in seventh grade at smp pencawan medan towards 20 students in that class. the researcher used quantitative data from this research. according bhandari (2020), quantitative research is the process of collecting and analyzing numerical data. in the use of quantitative research methods, the results obtained are more accurate and clearer than research using qualitative methods, due to quantitative methods, the results obtained are in the form of numbers and cannot be verified, because it is through accurate research. in this study, researchers used instruments that could help researchers collect data where the data was a result of determining the students' speaking progress. the researcher used documentation as an instrument where the researcher assigned the seventh grade students of smp pencawan medan to do audio recording where they told their daily activity in an audio where the audio would be sent via whatsapp. in the data collection process, the researcher will ask several topics obtained through the english teacher, especially in speaking lessons given by the english teacher at smp pencawan medan in the seventh grade during the e-learning process at the school. then after the researcher gets the material rahmawati, chanji sihombing, elya karnela br ginting, elfrida arimonnaria the effect of e-learning on students speaking skill progress: a case of the seventh grade at smp pencawan medan 72 from the english teacher, the researcher will start the data collection process by verbally examining the students with the topics obtained from the teacher, which has been taught to students of smp pencawan medan in seventh grade. the time to be given is 90 minutes. in the process of carrying out the assessment, in the field, the researcher has several categories that will be assessed and taken from each of these students, each criterion has 25 points and there are 4 categories to be assessed, namely vocabulary, pronunciation, accuracy and fluency. overall, the points to be obtained from the four categories are 100 points. the researcher obtained the total of this research are the results of voice recordings. however, in collecting the sound recordings, there are several aspects that will be assessed from the data, which is where this aspect like vocabulary, pronunciation, accuracy and fluency that can help the researcher to assess the student's speaking progress. the following is a table of rating categories. table 1. rating categories no type feature scale result 1. vocabulary a. not satisfactory limited vocabulary will make understanding difficult. if you want to say something, without understanding a lot of vocabulary, it will be difficult to speak well 1-6 b. sufficient students who often use the wrong words in simple vocabulary in speaking, because they do not understand many vocabulary 7-12 c. nice sometimes many students use unclear and inaccurate terms about language because of inadequate vocabulary, so their speaking results are also not good due to the lack of vocabulary 13-18 d. excellent problems rarely occur, because students' vocabulary can be understood. students have good vocabulary, listeners can also understand what students are talking about or saying 19-25 2. pronunciation a. not satisfactory students must understand sounds, accents, pitch, difficulty, stressing in order to be understood by listeners. 1-6 b. sufficient basic pronunciation errors. pronunciation is very important, so that the listener can easily understand what the students are saying 7-12 c. nice the mistakes that students make are only visible, there are not many mistakes students make in their pronunciation when speaking, which allows the listener to be a little easier to understand what the students are talking about 13-18 d. excellent students' pronunciation can be understood and can be accepted well by listeners. because students understand the pronunciation of vocabulary well 19-25 3. accuracy a. not satisfactory its use is clearly unsatisfactory, students need to rearrange clarity or limit themselves to basic structures . 1-6 b. sufficient students' basic structural errors, which are sometimes obscured by grammatical errors or unclear pronunciation of the word when students speak . 7-12 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 73 c. nice occasional grammatical mistakes made by students that do not obscure the meaning or what students say even though it is not clear, but can still be accepted and understood by the listener . 13-18 d. excellent students make no more than two mistakes, the pronunciation of the vocabulary is accurate and the listener understands what the student is saying . 19-25 4 fluency a. not satisfactory fluency in students' speaking is below normal, too long pause when speaking affects fluency. 1-6 b. sufficient some students definitely stumble while talking, some are because they are nervous or they lack a lot of vocabulary, but the therapy students manage to repeat it well. and listeners can also accept these mistakes . 7-12 c. nice students speak must be natural, pronunciation errors are rarely found, because students already understand a lot of vocabulary, the accuracy of pronunciation is also good and the pause when speaking is also a little . 13-18 d. excellent speaking students can be understood and accepted well, because of fluency and obscurity when speaking. pause when speaking is appropriate. tone and emphasis are also good and can be understood by the listener . 19-25 total result 100 the criteria are successful if > 75. the formula used to calculate the criteria points discussed above, then these points will prove how the students' speaking ability during the e-learning process is increasing or decreasing, if < 75, then the student's points or score does not meet the criteria for success, the formula used is: 𝑋 = ∑𝑋 𝑁 where : x = mean of students’ result ∑x = total of the result n = the number of students in order to categories the member of master students, the writer used the following formula : 𝑋 = ∑𝑋 𝑁 where : p = percentage students get 75 result r= the number of students get 75result t= total of students get the best result table 2. classification percentage classification average percentage % vocabulary 25 pronunciation 25 accuracy 25 fluency 25 total 100 % form for count students score: 𝑇𝑜𝑡𝑎𝑙𝑆𝑐𝑜𝑟𝑒 40 × 100 table 3. criteria of score percentage predicate excellent 75-100 nice 69-74 sufficient 59-68 rahmawati, chanji sihombing, elya karnela br ginting, elfrida arimonnaria the effect of e-learning on students speaking skill progress: a case of the seventh grade at smp pencawan medan 74 not satisfactory 49-58 result and discussion table 4. the students’ speaking skill score table (before pandemic) no name score percentage 1 bernike 78 excellent 2 cut cahaya 75 excellent 3 dosma 70 nice 4 gery 72 nice 5 ichi gita sembiring 70 nice 6 rizky 70 nice 7 ivan santo 72 nice 8 syakira 75 excellent 9 rafika sembiring 72 nice 10 yotam 76 excellent 11 dimas 72 nice 12 josua 75 excellent 13 mery 75 excellent 14 steven 80 excellent 15 m.faisal 72 nice 16 bethania 72 nice 17 sindy 72 nice 18 reyhan 72 nice 19 pangeran 72 nice 20 devika 72 nice table 5. the students’ speaking skill score table (pandemic period) no name score percentage 1 bernike 82,5 excellent 2 cut cahaya 75 excellent 3 dosma 65 sufficient 4 gery 25 not satisfactory 5 ichi gita sembiring 47,5 not satisfactory 6 rizky 20 not satisfactory 7 ivan santo 52,5 not satisfactory 8 syakira 52,5 not satisfactory 9 rafika sembiring 42,5 not satisfactory 10 yotam 67,5 sufficient 11 dimas 65 sufficient 12 josua 60 sufficient 13 mery 60 sufficient 14 steven 65 sufficient 15 m.faisal 60 sufficient 16 bethania 60 sufficient 17 sindy 52 not satisfactory 18 reyhan 32 not satisfactory 19 pangeran 45 not satisfactory 20 devika 22 not satisfactory indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 75 from the table 1, showing that values during the pandemic, there were 2 students with excellent category, no students with nice category,8 students with the sufficient category and 10 students with the not satisfactory category. while from the table 2 before the pandemic and the table during the pandemic, there are two significant differences which indicate that the table during the pandemic has a lower speaking skill score than the table before the pandemic. from the research data conducted by researchers, researchers get many striking differences between students' speaking skill progress before pandemic and pandemic during the period. from the data above, it concludes that elearning does not produce a good effect and is not asked to be used in learning media for speaking skills. this happens because there are several difficulties found in students where students cannot do the practice directly to hone the speaking. the difficulties experienced by students are the lack of pre-media facilities to support the process of implementing e-learning-based learning, such as students who do not have gadgets to be able to carry out e-learning, besides that many students have not mastered electronic media or lack knowledge of ict (information communication technology) where it can affect performance in online-based learning. apart from technology, the difficulties that can be found in the e-learning process are due to the lack of seriousness of students in participating in learning in the elearning system because many students feel bored and bored in taking e-learning by sitting and paying attention to their cellphones or laptops to follow. learning. in addition, what makes students difficult to improve speaking skills is the absence of direct practice in the learning process of speaking which requires interlocutors to interact between students and other students, so that students are more interested and not easily bored in the learning process. so, it is clear that learning using e-learning is very efficient to improve students' speaking skills because through electronic media there are so many obstacles that can hinder the teaching and learning process. in this study, researchers not only found problems with students, but e-learning also had a negative impact on teachers who taught at that time, where many of the teachers were less proficient in electronic media, because in general the teacher did the learning normally face to face only. in addition, the provision of less targeted material to students can make students less understanding and less interested in practicing and learning these speaking skills. e-learning affect the progress of students' speaking skills yes, e-learning has a huge effect on students' speaking ability. this is because there is a difference in the scores listed in one table and another which makes a significant difference and shows the difference between the two tables. in the table, it is quite clear that learning using elearning makes students have a decrease in the quality of speaking compared to students who do face-to-face speaking learning. therefore this hampers the progress of students' speaking skills. because it should be, making a student able to improve speaking skills, in the interaction of two or more people, the speaker can be immediately evaluated and returned if there is an error in pronunciation (yulia, 2020) said that "in interactive learning, technology mediates human interaction both synchronous and asynchronous; learning arises through interaction with other students and technology”. however, it is difficult to do in learning using e-learning. the limited communication space for a is free from each other between students which makes it difficult for students to directly practice their speaking skills. no process of the progress of student speaking skills there is no process that occurs in students 'speaking skills because the students' speaking ability has decreased significantly. improving student speaking should students continue to hone speaking skills by continuing to speak and practice, but with a productive system students cannot continue to hone their speaking skills due to limited space and time. (barron, 2020) stated that “student interaction plays an important role in the classroom because students are able to improve their speaking skills in the classroom. mardiah (2020) also conducted research on the effects of e-learning on students' speaking skills. he realized that teacher-student interactive talk is not as effective as in normal classes. this is the basis that e-learning is not the right choice in learning, especially in training students' speaking skills. from the results of research that conducted by researchers, researchers found several factors that caused students' speaking progress decreasing. student difficulties and student scores decreased after doing e-learning, some of the factors that influence this are in pronunciation, we rahmawati, chanji sihombing, elya karnela br ginting, elfrida arimonnaria the effect of e-learning on students speaking skill progress: a case of the seventh grade at smp pencawan medan 76 can see that in the language before the pandemic, students pronunciation are good, but during the pandemic student pronunciation has decreased greatly, many words are lacking. pronunciation is not right and makes the listener confused in interpreting it, then another factor is in vocabulary, the vocabulary of students before the pandemic good, but after the pandemic has greatly decreased, because students become lazy to practice at home, because practicing speaking is usually done by practice directly in the classroom, students will be more interested in learning vocabulary. it’s mean that there is a decreasing in students' skill in vocabulary during e-learning compared with face-to-face learning in the classroom. therefore using a suitable is one of the ways to improve students speaking skill and it is important to apply and alternative strategy in teaching (novita t , 2017). these factors are things that make it difficult for students to practice speaking skills, make a significant decrease and make them have a higher speaking quality than usual. for this reason, the only thing that can make students improve their speaking ability is by doing speaking exercises or the learning process face-toface with other people. this is what really helps students' speaking develop to get good results. conclusion references abdullah, m. 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(2020). employing multimedia -based learning to improve english speaking skill. eltics journal.55(1). syaifudin, m. (2017). improving students speaking skill by implementing blended learning (online learning and classroom). informa politeknik indonusa surakarta journal, 3(2) syaifudin, m. (2017). improving students speaking skill by implementing bleanded learning indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 77 (online learning and class room).politeknik indonusa surakarta journal, 3(2). tahir, s. z. b.,hanapi. (2020). need-based learning : the simulation approach in english teaching. uniqbu journal of sciences (ujjs). 1(2). thamarana, s.,kallepalli, m. (2018). teaching speaking skil online: prospects and possibilities . researchgate.. pp1-8. unesco. (2020). covid-19 educational disruption and response. retrieved from https://en.unesco.org/covid19/educationrespons e/ utami,t. r. (2020). an analysis of teachers’ strategies on english e-learning classes during covid-19 pandemic. salatiga : english education department teacher training and education faculty state institute for islamic studies (iain) salatiga. walabe, rocci lubicini (2020). e-learning refers to courses that use technology and the internet to provide constructiv e-learning opportunities to students. ijede jounal, 35(2) yulia, h. (2020). online learning to prevent the spread of pandemic corona virus in indonesia. english teaching journal, 11(1) indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 89 a conversational analysis encountered by english young learners: a pedagogical experience reza pustika english education study program universitas teknokrat indonesia email: reza_pustika@teknokrat.ac.id apa citation: pustika, r. (2021). a conversational analysis encountered by english young learners: a pedagogical experience. indonesian efl journal. 7(1), 89-96. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i1.3997 received: 29-09-2020 accepted: 27-11-2020 published:31-01-2021 introduction english is an important skill that is needed by some people to be globalized civilians. today, english is widely used in several aspects of humans’ life namely education, technology, tourism, health, economics, and so on. it is common to see or hear some english discourses in our society. it means that english is somehow close to people’s life. since there are big numbers of english text and discourse existing in our society, people start to realize that they need english to be globalized. to be globalized, people need to be updated about what happens now in the world. the existence of the internet allows people to keep being updated with some news and information from around the world. this awareness leads people to learn english. therefore, many adults learn english for their own sake. besides, some adults who are already parents inquire their children to learn english as young as possible. nowadays, it is normal to see children speak english very fluently. it happens because those children are accustomed to speak english. some experts believe that english is best learnt when the learners are still young than old. harmer (2007) believes that the reason why some parents inquire their children to learn english is that english serves as a lingua franca today meaning that english is a communication language used by two people speaking different languages. besides, shin (2006) states that it would be advantageous for language learners to start studying english within a critical period before 12 or 13 years old so that they can enjoy the developmental benefits of that period. many people are already familiar with the term ‘critical period hypotheses. the hypothesis believes that “the younger the better” and children learn much more quickly and efficiently is generally appreciated by many, especially by the supporters (brewster et al., 2004). further, brewster et al (2004) suggest the teachers contextualize the language by making use of visuals, realia, and mime and gestures. cameron (2001) claims that young children may learn a foreign language more effectively because their brains are still able to use the mechanisms that assisted first language acquisition. it is proved by research conducted by katsuyama, nishigaki and wang in 2008. they found in their research on 1466 elementary school children in japan that children who took english lessons in elementary school have more aptitude and interest in english than the children who do not receive english. therefore, birdsong (2007) in matsuoka (2008) believes that learners who start learning english early in life are more likely to attain a native or native-like accent than older starters. likewise, birdsong (2007) in matsuoka (2008) argues that age should be regarded as an important factor that abstract: this article is written to evaluate the conversational analysis encountered by english young learners. the subjects of this study were 4th-grade students in primary school. since english serves as a lingua franca, there are a big number of parents who invite their children to learn english. young learners are frequently involved in speaking discourses. speaking discourses are quite related to a conversation. this article evaluated the conversational analysis, especially turn-taking encountered by young learners. the use of pictures and a video facilitate the implementation of the activities. the analysis was done by the teacher’s observation during the activities. from the activities, it can be concluded that young learners encounter turn-taking when they are involved in a conversation. keywords: young learners; conversational analysis; turn-taking. mailto:reza_pustika@teknokrat.ac.id reza pustika a conversational analysis encountered by english young learners: a pedagogical experience 90 influences the possibility of attaining native-like proficiency in a second language. matsuoka and smith (2008) believe that in foreign language teaching, age is one of the most critical individual differences. the ability of children in acquiring a second language is closely related to their language development. kelle (2001) states that the concept of development refers to physical, intellectual, psychological, or social getting on in life. it means that learning english functions as the life course as a passing of phases, a particular age, and a particular stage of development being linked ideal typically. some of the new social constructionist approaches focusing on interaction, social life, and relationships reintegrate their results into the scientific discourse which is concerned with individual development. however, a problem becomes the concern of the writer. it has been stated that learning english when the learners were young is better than learning english when the learners are adults. the writer of this article is eager to see how young learners encounter conversational analysis when they are involved in communication. as conversational analysis functions to see social interaction among people, some studies under the issue of conversational analysis have been carried out. a study by il jannah (2014) investigated conversation in a movie that proves the turn-taking process occurred in that movie. besides, a study conducted by huda (2017) investigating the debate between obama and romney reveals that starting up, taking over, interruption, and overlapping is found in the conversational analysis. also, jufadri (2017) investigates the turn-taking process between david beckham and the host of the ‘google’ talk show. from jufadri’s result, it can be shown that the topics conveyed in the conversation will affect the turn-taking process. many studies have been done to investigate conversational analysis. however, those studies investigate adults and mostly did not investigate the conversational analysis under the instruction set. therefore, it is essential to investigate a conversational analysis conveyed by young learners under the teaching instruction set. the definitions of young learners some experts have defined children as learners. the first definition is stated by slatterly and willis (2001). they classify young learners into two, namely children who are 7–12 years old and those who are under 7 years old. meanwhile, scott and ytreberg (2001) have different classification of age for young learners. they distinguish young learners into those who are between 5-7 years old and those who are between 811. yet, their ability to perceive the abstract and concrete should be taken into account. the turkish primary curriculum for teaching english (ministry of national education [mone], 2006) defines young learners as the children from the first year of formal schooling (6 12 years of age). the characteristics of young learners the way children learn is extremely different from adults. to deal with this, the teachers of young learners should treat them differently so the teaching and learning process will be meaningful and effective for young learners. to treat young learners as who they are in the english classroom, it is suggested for the teachers of young learners to know their students’ characteristics, in this case, is young learners. many experts have provided the english education practitioners with lot of articles containing children’s characteristics. scott and ytreberg (1995) have formulated the characteristics of eight to ten-year-old learners. children at these ages are mature children with an adult side and a childish side. their basic concepts are formed. they have very decided views of the world. at this age, they are already able to tell the difference between fact and fiction. they ask questions all the time that sometimes make adults around them confused to respond to their critical questions. therefore, they tend to speak as well as make a physical movement to convey and understand the meaning. scott and ytreberg (1995) believe that children at this age are able to make some decisions about their own learning because they already have definite views about what they like and do not like doing. 8-10 years old children start to be able to work with others and learn from others. in their language development, scott and ytreberg (1995) argue that 8-10 years old children have developed their understanding of abstracts and symbols. siswanto (2017) characterizes young learners as enthusiastic and lively learners. they also have a lot of physical energy. therefore, young learners can be easily stimulated. learners in this age are at a maximum of openness to people and situations which are different from their own experience. for these children, a global emphasis is extremely important, which gives them an opportunity to work with information from all parts of the world. as they develop the cognitive characteristics of the indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 91 concrete level, they begin to understand cause and effect. learners at these ages can work well in groups (curtain & dahlberg 2010). rhalmi (2019) states that young learners get bored quickly, are meaning-oriented, like to discover things, prefer concrete activities, more egocentric and imaginative, and they imitate others. since children's cognitive processes develop further, the strategies used by the teachers of young learners will matter. primary school learners use more complex vocabulary and grammar. their ability to make mental representations are growing, but they still need guidance in grasping abstract concepts without the aid of real-life references and materials. (tomlinson, 2014). in addition, cdc (2014) states that children at this age show more independence from parents and family, while friendship, being liked and accepted by peers, becomes more important. being in school most of the day means greater contact with a larger world, and children begin to develop a greater understanding of their place in that world. children's ability to self-regulate their emotions also is evident in this period. they start to understand their own feelings and learn better ways to describe experiences and express thoughts and feelings. they better understand the consequences of their actions, and their focus on concern for others grows. they are very observant, are willing to play cooperatively and work in teams, and can resolve some conflicts without seeking adult intervention. teaching english for young learners through videos the characteristics of young learners have been portrayed in the previous section. as has been mentioned before, the teachers of young learners should treat young learners appropriately. slatterly and willis (2003) believe that young learners need to hear clear pronunciation and intonation to feel successful when using english plenty of opportunities to communicate to enjoy their efforts at speaking in english to know they have achieved something worthwhile. to do so, the english teachers should be role models in the classroom by performing english accurately, fluently, and appropriately. slatterly and willis (2003) suggest the teachers of young learners by showing them what to do first, then, practicing an activity with the whole class. having the learners in several groups can help the teachers to listen and talk to them. moreover, children love stories. they are always eager to listen to stories know how stories work and they always want to understand what is happening. therefore, in writing the article, the writer used a video to teach the students. it is in line with what shin (2006) has stated. shin (2006) states that one way to capture their attention and keep them engaged in activities is to supplement the activities with lots of brightly colored visuals, toys, puppets, or objects to match the ones used in the stories that you tell or songs that you sing. these can also help make the language input comprehensible and can be used for follow-up activities, such as re-telling stories. the use of video can help young learners to learn english in a fun way. shin (2006) mentions that stories represent holistic approaches to language teaching and learning that place a high premium on children’s involvement with rich, authentic uses of the foreign language. nowadays, stories include in both printed and digital form. in this digital era, children tend to read stories in form of digital or video. the teachers of young learners should take this as a chance to motivate the learners. stories offer a whole imaginary world. the language used in stories is quite easy and enjoyable for children. the story makes dramatic irony so the readers know more about the central character. besides, there is predictability built into the story that leads inevitably to the next. this predictability and sense of inevitability are broken by the surprise event. however, the teachers should consider the topic and the length of stories or videos. the topic and the length of stories or videos depending on the students’ level and characteristics. after portraying the young learners’ definition, characteristics, and way of learning, the discourse, and conversational analysis will be portrayed as well. the definitions of discourse pearson and villiers (2005) define discourse as a structural unit larger than the sentence. discourse minimally involves more than one sentence, and the sentences must be contingent. when children can both speak and elicit speech, they have the basic tools for creating discourse through conversation. hickmann (2003) further argues that the basic unit of analysis in a language is discourse. it requires us to go beyond the sentence to include an intrinsic relation between utterances and their context of use. while discourse competence concerns the mastery of how to combine grammatical forms and meanings to achieve a unified spoken or written text in different genres, the cohesion, and coherence of utterances or sentences. it is used to https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/nbk310550/ reza pustika a conversational analysis encountered by english young learners: a pedagogical experience 92 refer to two related, but distinct abilities (lasala, 2013). discourse competence can be seen as the ability to understand, create and develop forms of the language that are longer than sentences (stories, conversations, letters) with the appropriate cohesion, coherence, and rhetorical organization to combine ideas. discourse analysis provides a new window on teaching and learning an oral language. it focuses on “the skills needed to put the knowledge into action and to achieve a successful communication.” (cook, 1989). cook’s (1989) definition of discourse analysis has been employed in how discourse analysis examines how stretches of language, considered in their full textual, social and psychological context, become meaningful and unified for their users. in other words, discourse analysis describes the interrelationships between language and its context (mccarthy, 2002) in wu (2013). conversational analysis this writing is derived from the young learners’ activities in the english speaking class. speaking is closely related to the conversation. the conversation reflects the rules and procedures that govern face-to-face encounters, as well as the constraints that derive from the use of spoken language. this is seen in the nature of turns, the role of topics, how speakers repair trouble spots, as well as the syntax and register of conversational discourse (nordquist, 2017). therefore, mccarthy (2002) in wu (2013) emphasizes that ca (conversational analysis) is important in fostering learners’ sociolinguistic competence, linguistic competence, discourse competence, and strategic competence. the examples of conversation cover greeting-greeting, congratulation-tanks. meanwhile, according to ghilzai and baloch (2015), the turn-taking refers to the process by which people in conversation decide who will speak next. wu (2013) believe that openings and closings are important in a conversation. they are the words people used to initiate or end a conversation. they vary in terms of different speech communities (wu, 2013). garvey (1984) mentions that in emerging conversational skill in face-to-face interaction, people should include knowing when and how to take a turn in conversation; how to initiate, elaborate, or terminate a topic; and how to respond to a speaker in keeping with the pragmatic constraints set by the preceding utterance. they also include skills in detecting the presence and source of any breakdown in communication and knowing how to repair such breakdowns. the first of these behaviors to show development is turn-taking. a second key to promoting conversation is learning to be relevant. the second speaker must make his or her responses to share the first speaker’s topic and add new information to it. skill at conversational exchanges also involves being aware of when a turn is not successful. efforts at repairing misunderstood turns are seen before age three (garvey, 1984). what is often called a conversation analysis within the american tradition can also be included under the general heading of discourse analysis. in conversational analysis, the emphasis is not upon building structural models but on the close observation of the behavior of participants in talk and on patterns that recur over a wide range of natural data (mccarthy, 1991). sacks, shcegloff, and jefferson (1974) in mccarthy (1991) believes that it is important to study conversational norms, turn-taking, and other aspects of spoken interaction. pour (2015) emphasizes that conversational analysis is worth paying attention to as it gives humans a chance to manage what they want to say, how long it takes, or how it affects others, therefore humans are able to live and make the relationship with others successfully. assessing speaking for young learners cameron (2001) lists some principles in assessing children’s language learning. first, an assessment should be seen from a learning-centered perspective. the teachers should understand how classroom activities and talk will be experienced by children. the teachers should be sure that the children have a willingness to participate in social interaction and engage in classroom activities. learning that occurs in social contexts and through interaction with helpful adults or other children will help the young learners to learn. secondly, an assessment should support learning and teaching. assessment should contribute to the learning process, for both an individual child and for the class. in order to be more in control of the relationship between assessment and learning, teachers need to have a clear understanding of language learning processes and of the socio-cultural context in which they operate. next, assessment is more than testing. a skilled teacher continuously assessed pupils’ learning through what s/he notices and how s/he interprets these observations in the light of experience and knowledge. finally, an assessment should be congruent with learning. cameron (2001) defines ‘congruent’ as the assessment should fit indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 93 comfortably with children’s learning experience. on the whole, it is fairer to assess children on the basis of what they have been taught and how, using assessment activities that are familiar to children from their classroom experience. method the study was aimed at evaluating the young learners’ performance in a communicative activity. students’ conversational analysis was a skill that was analyzed. a qualitative approach was used to gather the data for this writing. the teacher was the instrument for this writing. the teacher did an observation during the implementation of the activity. an observation was used as data collecting technique in this study because the the subjects of the study were students of 4th-grade primary school. as young learners are not ready yet to fill a questionnaire as the data collecting technique, an observation was regarded as an appropriate tool for gathering the data. findings and discussions the students have been taking an english course for 5 years meaning that they already have sufficient english proficiency for their level. they shared a quite similar level proficiency in english. the procedure of the activity for this writing covered both preand communicative activities. in pre-communicative activities, the teacher made sure that all of the students had the same schemata about the video they were going to listen to. it was important to ease the students to be involved in the activities. the teacher used the video of food and all of the learners were already familiar with the topics. in conducting all activities in this meeting, the teacher only chose one topic which was foods and beverages. to make sure that all students had the same schemata, at the beginning of the activities, the teacher showed them several pictures of fruits and asked whether they liked them or not. then, the teacher told the students how to ask others’ preferences by making use of a video. the teacher provided the students with some jumbled pictures derived from the video and asked the students to arrange it before watching the video. after the students arranged the pictures, the teacher played the video for them and asked the students what the video was about. at the end of the meeting, the teacher invited the students to involve in a short conversation by asking and responding about preference. the teaching and learning process was done in one of the student’s house, so the learning environment was so comfortable for the students who were young learners. all the young learners were little girls so they talked much during the learning process. at the beginning of learning, the teacher showed them some colorful pictures of fruits. the teacher asked whether they like or do not like certain fruits. the students were excited because they were interested in looking at the colorful pictures. the students were a little bit confused when the teacher gave them a jumbled picture. the teacher provided them with several scissors so the students could cut the jumbled pictures out then arrange them into the correct sequence based on their schemata and conversational skills. it has been stated in the previous section that when the students are involved in a certain conversation, they will activate their skills such as turn-taking. by looking at the jumbled pictures, the students were expected to arrange the pictures into the correct sequence by activating their ‘turn-taking’ skill. at the end of the meeting, the students were asked to choose some pictures of beverage and asked their friends’ preferences. besides responding by “yes, i like” or “no, i don’t”, the students were asked to state their reasons as well. after implementing the activity, the writer figured out that this kind of activity can be used for advanced learners by choosing more challenging topics. the activities can be adapted to any age and level. however, the topics should be challenging enough for any students so the students will be motivated. however, the teacher cannot force young learners to have the same discourse skills as adults. in this writing, the teacher only focused on conversational analysis. the teacher may require more skills for adults such as cohesion, coherence, speech acts, etc., depending on the students’ competence. conclusion as english is regarded as an important skill for people to live in this global era, there is high demand by parents to invite their children to learn english as early as possible. some studies have shown the benefits of learning english at a young age. however, young learners have different characteristics from adults, so the teachers of english young learners should treat them differently. discourse already exists since childhood. this writing which concerns speaking takes conversational analysis as the discourse branch that has been analyzed. the analysis is derived from the activities done in the english classroom. reza pustika a conversational analysis encountered by english young learners: a pedagogical experience 94 the conversation is taken for this activity. in a conversation, actually, the students activate their skill namely turn-taking. as a result of this activity, it is shown that the students are able to do turntaking when they are involved in a conversation. this was done by the students by asking and responding to their friends’ preferences about foods and beverages. this writing can become a reference for other parties who are interested in teaching young learners and teaching discourse. however, this writing cannot escape from its limitation. further research with larger subjects is needed to deepen the findings so the findings can be generalized. references brewster, j., ellis, g., & girard, d. (2004). the primary english teacher’s guide (new edition). england: pearson education limited. cameron, l. (2001). teaching languages to young learners. cambridge: cambridge university press. cdc (centers for disease control and prevention). (2014). middle childhood (6-8 years of age): developmental milestones. retrieved from http://www .cdc.gov/ncbddd/childdevelopment /positiveparenting/middle.html. cook, g. (1989). discourse. oxford: oxford university press. curtain, h.i. & dahlberg, c.a.a. (2010). language and children: making the match new languages for young learners, grade k-8, 4th ed. boston: pearson. garvey, c. (1984). children’s talk. cambridge: harvard university press. ghilzai, s.a. & baloch, m. (2015). conversational analysis of turn taking behavior and gender differences in multimodal conversation. perspectives in language, linguistics and media. harmer, j. (2001). the practice of english language teaching. essex, england: longman. hickmann, m. (2003). children’s discourse: person, space and time across languages. cambridge: cambridge university press. huda, a. n. (2017). a conversational analysis of application turn taking mechanism. (a thesis). state islamic university hidayatullah, jakarta, indonesia. il jannah, h.m. (2014). conversational analysis of turntaking in “the social network” film. (a thesis). state islmaic university maulana malik ibrahim, malang, indonesia. jufadri. (2017). turn taking strategies used by david beckam and the host in ‘google’ talk show. (a thesis). universitas islam negeri maulana malik ibrahim, malang, indonesia. katsuyama, h., nishigaki, c., & wang, j. (2008). the effectiveness of english teaching in japanese elementary schools: measured by proficiency tests administered to seventh-year students. relc journal vol. 39 no. 3. kelle, h. (2001). the discourse of development: how 9to 12-year-old children construct “childish” and “further developed” identities within their peer culture. childhood vol. 8 no. 1. lasala, c.b. (2013). communicative competence of secondary senior students: language instructional pocket. social and behavioral sciences 134. matsuoka, r. & smith, i. (2008). age effects in second language acquisition: overview. j nurs studies ncnj vol. 7 no. 1. mccarthy, m. (1991). discourse analysis for language teachers. cambridge: cambridge university press. nordquist, richard.. what are hyponyms in english? retrieved on 9th november 2020, from https://www.thoughtco.com/hyponym-wordsterm-1690946 pearson, b. z. & de villiers, p.a. (2005). child language acquisition: discourse, narrative, and pragmatics. in brown, k. & lieven, e. (eds.). encyclopedia of language and linguistics (2nd edition). oxford, uk: elsevier. pour, f. k. & yazd, a. l. (2015). turn taking in conversation analysis. international journal of educational investigations, 2(6), 5863. rhalmi, m. (2019). seven characteristics of young learners. retrieved from https://www.myenglishpages.com/blog/sevencharacteristics-of-young-learners/ november 11th 2020. sáez, f.t., & martin, l.o.. (2011). discourse competence: dealing with texts in the efl classroom. retrieved from http://fernandotrujillo.es/wpcontent/uploads/2010/05/discourse.pdf. scott, w.a. & ytreberg, l.h. (1995). teaching english to children: longman keys to language teaching. london: longman. shin, j. k. (2006). ten helpful ideas for teaching english to young learners. english teaching forum, vol. 44 no. 2. siswanto, a. (2017, april). teaching english to young leaners: a reflection form englaoshi community. paper presented at the 2nd teylin international conference. slatterly, m. & willis, j. (2003). english for primary teachers. oxford: oxford university press. tomlinson, h.b. (2014). an overview of development in the primary grades. in copple, c., bredekamp, s., koralek, d.g., charner, k., & et al. developmentally appropriate practice. national association for the education of young children. http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/childdevelopment/positiveparenting/middle.html http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/childdevelopment/positiveparenting/middle.html http://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/childdevelopment/positiveparenting/middle.html https://www.thoughtco.com/hyponym-words-term-1690946 https://www.thoughtco.com/hyponym-words-term-1690946 https://www.myenglishpages.com/blog/seven-characteristics-of-young-learners/ https://www.myenglishpages.com/blog/seven-characteristics-of-young-learners/ indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 1, january 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 95 wu, y. (2013). conversation analysis: a discourse approach to teaching oral english skills. international education studies vol. 6, no.5 reza pustika a conversational analysis encountered by english young learners: a pedagogical experience 96 indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(2) july 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 145 verbal communication analysis in the oprah winfrey show hani nurfazrina department of english education, university of kuningan email: nurfazrina_hani@yahoo.co.id apa citation: nurfazrina, h. (2016). verbal communication analysis in the oprah winfrey show. indonesian efl journal, 2(2), 145-153 received: 20-05-2016 accepted: 26-06-2016 published: 01-07-2016 abstract: this paper aims at finding verbal communication used by an interviewer and interviewee in oprah winfrey show. the theory used in this research was levine’s and adelman theory. the data were taken from two different videos of oprah winfrey show. this study used descriptive qualitative method. based on the result of the research, in the first video, it was found 81 of high involvement and 129 of high considerateness used by oprah and 54 of high involvement and 125 of high considerateness used by thich, 21 directness and 20 indirectness used by oprah and 18 directness and 21 indirectness used by thich, 3 bowling conversational style applied by oprah and thich. in the second video, there were109 high involvement and 66 of high considerateness used by oprah, 131 high involvement and 69 of high consideratness used by alanis, 26 directness and 7 indirectness used by oprah and 26 of directness and 7 of indirectness used by alanis, and 1 ping-pong conversation used by oprah and alanis. in addition, there were the changes of communication style occured in the conversation between an interviewee and an interviewer in oprah winfrey show that indicate that there are the influences of cultural background towards communication style. keywords: analysis, verbal communication, oprah winfrey show introduction verbal communication is the communication delivered by a communicator to the other people by using words. although verbal communication is effective to share information between one another, but it will be difficult when it is applied in a communication with people who have different cultures. levine and adelman (1993, p. 65) state that “cultures influence communication style. cultural say and do create misunderstandings in conversation among people from different cultures.” regarding the cultural issue, oprah winfrey show is a good talk show because it always invites people from different country. oprah winfrey show hosted by oprah gail winfrey is a talk show program in america which has been shown from 1986 until now. the show has been successful and has a highest rating in almost 24 years shown not only in america but also in all around the world. this paper would present the verbal communication and the influence of cultural background towards the communication style used in the oprah winfrey shows in thich (4 january 2016) in which oprah had a discussion with alanis (september 18, 2014). there were only two people having the conversation including oprah and a person. the transcript and videos of the oprah shows were downloaded in order to analyze the characteristics of verbal communication used by them. the verbal communication were classified into conversational involvement, incorrect judgment of character, directness and indirectness, american male and female differences in hani nurfazrina verbal communication analysis in the oprah winfrey show 146 directness, conversation structure, and ethnocentric judgment (levine & adelman, 1993). regarding the conversational involvement, levine & adelman (1993) divided it into high involvement and high considerateness. according to beaumont (2000), the person who uses high involvement style features, especially faster turn taking and overlap usually will interrupt another turn. on the other hand, the high considerateness style consists of slower speech, slower turn taking, longer pauses between turns, and an avoidance of simultaneous speech. the incorrect judgment of character is “the judgments that people make about the regional differences within a country are similar to those they make about people from another culture” (levine & adelman, 1993). moreover, indirectness is the communication that focus on the relationship. it spends much times to talk and it can be connected to the nonverbal communication. in contrast, the directness style in communication speaks straight to the point and they do not use an introduction or platitude in sharing information to make the other people understand the information. the directness found in american and indirectness found in asian culture (chambers, 2012). according to levine and adelman (1993), “american women have traditionally been less direct (more polite and soft) than man in making requests, expressing critism and offering opinions.” the conversation structure divided into ping-pong and bowling conversation. the bowling conversation is going on relax and it certainly has a lot of space in their conversation because as we know that the illustration of bowling game itself is hit the ball into same direction and after it finished, we let the other to hit the ball take turns. meanwhile, the ping-pong conversation illustrates the ping-pong game in conversation (sakamoto, 1931, p. 389). the last verbal communication pattern is ethnocentric judgment. neuliep, hintz and mccroskey (2005, p. 44) state that “ethnocentric perceive themselves as superior to out groups (e.g., ethnic/racial groups). hence, when interacting with people from a different culture or ethnic, high ethnocentric are likely to perceive out group members as less attractive than in group members.” therefore, the presence of various types of verbal communication pattern is interesting to be learnt to avoid misunderstanding between people who are doing conversation with different communication style. the issue raised in this study are: 1. what are the types of verbal communication pattern used by an interviewer and interviewee in oprah winfrey show? 2. does the cultural background influence the style of communication in oprah winfrey show? method this study applied a descriptive qualitative method. descriptive method is a method that aims to make a description, describing in systematic, factual and accurate information on the data, the properties and relations of phenomena under study (khotari, 2004). meanwhile, fraenkel and wallen (2009, p. 423) state that “qualitative methods are data collected in the form of words or pictures rather than numbers.” the data sources in this study are videos of oprah winfrey show downloaded from youtube. this study uses two episodes of the show those are thich and alanis edition. in analyzing the data, the writer used morill (2000) theory. the analysis process includes identifying the data based on levine and adelman (1993) theory about verbal communication in indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(2) july 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 147 oprah winfrey show in both videos, classifying the conversation used by an interviewer and interviewee in oprah winfrey show in both videos into types of verbal communication, analyzing the type of verbal communication pattern that consists of conversational structure, incorrect judgment of character, directness and indirectness, american male and female differences in directness, conversation structure and ethnocentric judgment, calculating each type of verbal communication pattern used by an interviewer and interviewee, describing the data analysis based on theory, and the last is concluding the result of the data that have been analyzed. results and discussion this research was conducted to investigate the verbal communication used by an interviewer and an interviewee in oprah winfery show and the infuence of cultural background toward the style of communication. the findings of this research are explained below. 1. conversational involement a. high involvement table 1. the frequencies of high involvement characteristics in thich edition done by oprah. high involvement characteristics utterances description total a. fast rate of speech 1. >”how old were you?”< 2. >“so, this desire to become a monk started when you were seven years old?”< 3. >”i never had much thought about a cup of tea.”< 4. >“was in the princeton.”< 5. > “it was changing?”< 6. >”that you are a monk.”< in those utterances beside, oprah did a fast rate of speech, because there was no pause used by her. it is done when they talked about thich’s story when he decided to become a monk and what are the purposes to be a monk in the first segment. 6 b. rapid exchange of word (heated conversation) 1. thich: “in the beginning they were reluctant because they thought that the life of a monk is hard and difficult.” oprah: “so, this desire to become a monk started when you were seven years old?” 2. thich: “and you enjoy it.” oprah:”and i enjoyed it. if people follow their passion it’s like following their beginner’s mind, so what is the life of a monk like in this country we just think of it and i think a lot of people just think it’s a lot of chanting and bringing and being peaceful with yourself.” based on the utterances beside, oprah did a rapid exchange of word, because she showed the fast turn taking. it proved with when oprah taking over the turn, there was no pause in the commutation of word between the last word of thich and the first word of oprah. it can be seen as follows: a. the last word of thich “difficult” and the first word of oprah “so” b. the last word of thich “it” and the first word of oprah “and”. 2 hani nurfazrina verbal communication analysis in the oprah winfrey show 148 c. interruption 1. thich: “one day i saw a picture of the buddha on a buddhist magazine and he was sitting on the grass.”// oprah: //“how old were you?” 2. thich:”i would not be happy if i cannot become a monk and that is the feeling. and we call it the beginner’s mind”// oprah: //“beginners mind.” in those utterances, oprah interrupted what thich said. oprah also did not give a chance to thich to finish her turn. therefore, thich did not finish his turn and his turn is continued by oprah. 2 d. loudness 1. ”thank you for the honor of talking to me today thank you for that. already just being in your presence for a short time i feel less stressed than i did when i starting out the day. less stressed because you have such a peaceful are that follows you, that you carry with yourself. are you always this content and peaceful?” (l) 2. “and i enjoyed it. if people follow their passion it’s like following their beginner’s mind, so what is the life of a monk like in this country we just think of it and i think a lot of people just think it’s a lot of chanting and bringing and being peaceful with yourself.” (l) based on the utterances in the second column, oprah produced a loud speaking in her talking, because there was the raising intonation done by oprah and it showed in the utterances beside that has been thicked, such as: a. “already” and “less stressed”. b. “people” , “follow” “beginners” and “ mind”. 2 e. talk more 1. “thank you for the honor of talking to me today thank you for that. already just being in your presence for a short time i feel less stressed than i did when i starting out the day. less stressed because you have such a peaceful are that follows you, that you carry with yourself. are you always this content and peaceful?” (tm) 2. “and i enjoyed it people follow their passion it’s like following their begginer’s mind, so what is the life of a monk like in this country we just think of it and i think a lot of people just think it’s it’s a lot of chanting and bringing and being peaceful with yourself.” (tm in the utterances beside, oprah talked more, because she produced the length sentence that consists of more than 35 words, such as: a. she produced 61 words. b. she produced 53 words. 2 total 14 table 1 showed the characteristics of high involvement communication style done by oprah. it showed 14 characteristics of high involvement occurred in thich edition. b. high considerateness table 2. the frequencies of high considerateness characteristics in thich edition in the first segments. high considerateness characteristics utterances description total a. speak one at a time and refrain from interrupting 1. oprah: “thank you for the honor of talking to me today thank you for that. already just being in your presence for a short time i feel less stressed than i did when i starting out the day. less stressed because you have such a peaceful are that follows you, that you carry with yourself. are you always this content and peaceful?” √ thich: “this is my training, this is my practice and we try to live every moment like that, relax dwelling peacefully in the present moment and respond to events with compassion.” (r) √ oprah: “so in the moment where you are perhaps going to miss a plane or be late for an appointment or something is causing you to be stressful you do in the utterances beside, oprah and thich spoke one at a time or did the turn taking, because between them did not speak all at the same time and they did not interrupt of each other. they knew the time to take the turn and time to listen. beside that the turn taking here also indicates that oprah and thich refrained from interrupting, because as said before that speak one at (√) t: 3 o: 2 (r) t: 3 o: 2 indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(2) july 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 149 what.” (r) √ thich: “go back to my breathing and try to be in that moment deeply because there is a possibility to handle every kind of event and the essential is to keep the peace in yourself.” (r) √ oprah:“so let’s start with 1926 born in vietnam, any wonderful memories that you can share your childhood, your favorite childhood memory?” (r) √ thich: “one day i saw the picture of the buddha on a buddhist magazine and he was sitting on the grass.” (r) a time itself is the talking that ongoing and arranged without an interruption. it can be called refrain from interrupting whether it is fast or slow turn taking. b. politeness 1. oprah 1. “thank you for the honor of talking to me today thank you for that. already just being in your presence for a short time i feel less stressed than i did when i starting out the day. less stressed because you have such a peaceful are that follows you, that you carry with yourself. are you always this content and peaceful?” 1. oprah a. the utterance said by oprah showed the politeness speaking. it can be seen by the context of the sentence itself, such as in the first utterance, oprah said “thank you for the honor of talking to me today thank you for that.” it was polite because oprah showed a modesty talking and respect to another and it include of the negative face in politeness strategies. o: 1 c. positive respectful response a. oprah 1. thich:“in the beginning they were reluctant because they thought that the life of a monk is hard and difficult.” oprah: “so, this desire to become a monk started when you were seven years old?” pr 2. thich: “everyone has a desire, but the desire to transform oneself. to transform one’s affliction, suffering, in order to get free and help other people and change the world. that is a good desire.” oprah: “it is what a lot of people refer to as passion when you’re passionate about your work.” pr a. oprah 1. oprah responded the talking through clarified her understanding about thich’s answer from her question or made a conclusion of thich’s answer, therefore it indicates that oprah was pay attention of thich’s talking and it indicates a positive respectful response too. 2. oprah made a statement through clarified her understanding of thich’s talking. it is a good information too for the listener, therefore it indicates that oprah was pay attention of thich’s talking and intends a positive respectful response too. o: 2 total thich oprah 6 7 table 2 showed the characteristics of high considerateness communication style done by oprah. from the table, it can be seen that oprah produced 7 and thich produced 6 characteristics of high considerateness. hani nurfazrina verbal communication analysis in the oprah winfrey show 150 2. directness and indirectness a. directness table 3. the frequency of directness in alanis edition done by alanis in the first segment. directness utterances description 1. oprah: “so many people first came to know you through “jagged little pill” wow. that was nearly 20 years ago and now you’ve just recently turned 40 and call that a seminal moment. i thought “jagged little pill” that was a seminal moment was it?” alanis: “yes, that was a seminal moment that i’m only able to process now for having ptsd my way through the last 20 years in response to the “my hump” that was that chapter for sure.” direct 2. oprah: “so “jagged little pill” came out. and it just turned you into a phenomenon?” alanis: “yes, we were playing 100 seater clubs and then we were playing stadiums so went from zero to 650 3.5 seconds.” direct based on the utterances beside, indicate that alanis did a direct speech because when oprah stated the questions, alanis always answered it get to the point and did not beat around the bush. she always talked in essential. it was done in the first segment when oprah and alanis talked about alanis’s album and her personal psyche experience. total 2 table 3 showed the directness style of verbal communication used by alanis. it can be seen that there are 2 times of directness done by alanis. b. indirectness table 4. the frequency of indirectness in thich edition done by alanis in the first segment. indirectness utterances description 1. oprah:“thank you for the honor of talking to me today thank you for that. already just being in your presence for a short time i feel less stressed than i did when i starting out the day less stressed because you have such a peaceful are that follows you, that you carry with yourself are you always this content and peaceful?” thich: “this is my training, this is my practice and we try to live every moment like that, relax dwelling peacefully in the present moment and respond to events with compassion.” indirect 2. oprah:“how would you describe begginer’s mind is it that desire is it your purpose, what is it your calling?” thich: “everyone has a desire, but the desire to transform oneself. to transform one’s affliction, suffering, in order to get free and help other people and change the world. that is a good desire.” indirect in the utterances beside, thich showed the indirect speech because when oprah stated the question, thich answered it did not get to the point and beat around the bush. thich also always answered the question unclearly. it can be seen when thich began to talk, he always use the small talk in the beginning of the sentence, such as in the first example. oprah:“thank you for the honor of talking to me today thank you for that. already just being in your presence for a short time i feel less stressed than i did when i starting out the day less stressed because you have such a peaceful are that follows you, that you carry with yourself are you always this content and peaceful?” thich: “this is my training, this is my practice and we try to live every moment like that, relax dwelling peacefully in the present moment and respond to events with compassion.” total 2 table 4 showed the indirectness style of verbal communication used by thich. the table showed that there are 2 times of indirectness done by thich. indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(2) july 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 151 3. conversation structure a. ping-pong conversational style table 5. the frequency of ping-pong conversational style in alanis edition done by oprah and alanis in the third segment. ping-pong conversational style utterances description oprah: “so you had keeping love you find. i read well i had you know i had horrible on here in like whenever he wrote getting the love you want. i would not still be in relationship with seven had enough.”// alanis: //”we need that.”// oprah: //”that book is the best relationship book ever.”// alanis: //”it explains at all.”// oprah: // “it explains everything.”// alanis: //”everything. and it’s so merciful and it’s so intelligent and it blends for me that stages of development chart not only explains how to navigate the relationship but how to navigate this relationship.” oprah: “absolutely.” the conversation beside, indicate that oprah and alanis showed ping-pong conversational style. for the first time, oprah informed the book that has been read by her to alanis and it indicates that oprah has the ball because she started to talk “so you had keeping love you find. i read well i had you know i had horrible on here in like whenever he wrote getting the love you want. i would not still be in relationship with seven had enough” and after that, alanis interrupted oprah said because oprah produced a lot of sentences, therefore it indicates that oprah monopolized the conversation. after that both of them stopped doing a ping-pong conversational style illustration until oprah said absolutely when alanis finished talking about the book that have read by her too. total 1 the table above showed that alanis and oprah applied the ping-pong conversational style as the first type of conversation structure. this ping-pong style only occurred in the third segment with duration 04:34 minutes as much as 1 time. b. bowling conversational style table 6. the frequency of bowling conversational style in thich edition done by oprah and thich in the first segment. ping-pong conversational style utterances description oprah : ”thank you for the honor of talking to me today thank you for that. already just being in your presence for a short time i feel less stressed than i did when i starting out the day. less stressed because you have such a peaceful are that follows you, that you carry with yourself are you always this content and peaceful?” thich :“this is my training, this is my practice and we try to live every moment like that, relax dwelling peacefully in the present moment and respond to events with compassion.” oprah : “so in the moment where you are perhaps going to miss a plane or be late for an appointment or something is causing you to be stressful, you do what?” thich :“go back to my breathing and try to be in that moment deeply. because there is a possibility to handle every kind of event and based on the conversation above, oprah and thich showed the bowling conversational style. it proved with, in the beginning of the conversation, oprah has the turn slowly by using pause in her talking, therefore it indicates that oprah bowl carefully ”thank you for the honor of talking to me today thank you for that. [pause: 1 second]already just being in your presence for a short time i feel less stressed than i did when i starting out the day. less stressed because you have such a peaceful are [short pause]that follows you, that you carry with yourself [short pause]are you always this [pause: 1 second]content and peaceful?” on the other side, thich watched politely of oprah’s talking. thich did not speak until oprah finished talking and after oprah finished talking, thich took the turn slowly, therefore it indicates that thich bowl carefully too “this is my training, this is my practice [pause: 1 hani nurfazrina verbal communication analysis in the oprah winfrey show 152 the essential is to keep the peace in yourself.” second]and we try to live every moment like that, relax [short pause]dwelling [pause: 1 second]peacefully in the present moment [pause: 1 second]and[pause: 1 second] respond to events with[short pause] compassion.” it was done continually. total 1 table 6 showed the bowling conversational style as one of the part of conversation structure in verbal communication. it occurred one time in the first segment, with duration 11: 39 minutes in thich edition done by oprah and thich. the result of the analysis relating to verbal communication used is shown in the table below. table 7. frequency of verbal communication used in oprah winfrey show. no aspect thich edition alanis edition thich oprah alanis oprah 1 conversational involvement a. high involvement 54 81 131 109 b. high considerateness 125 109 69 66 total 369 375 2 incorrect judgment of characters 0 0 0 0 3 a. directness 18 21 24 26 b. indirectness 21 20 8 7 total directness: 39 indirectness: 41 directness: 50 indirectness: 15 4 american male and female differences in directness 0 0 0 0 5 conversation structure a. ping-pong conversational style 0 1 b. bowling conversational style 3 0 total 3 1 6 ethnocentric judgment 0 0 0 0 based on the table above, there are three types of verbal communication employed in both videos. the first type is conversational involvement. it occured 369 times that contains high involvement and high considerateness in thich edition and 375 times in alanis edition. the second type was directness and indirectness. the directness occurred 39 times while indirectness occurred 41 times in thich edition. in addition, the directness occurred 50 times and 15 times for indirectness in alanis edition. the last type was conversation structure. conversation structure occurred 3 times. it consists of ping-pong and bowling conversation in thich edition. meanwhile in alanis edition, it only occurred once. the second aspect that was being analyzed was about the influence of cultural background towards the communication style. this analysis triggered by the fact that misunderstanding and the changes of communication style can be happened because of cultural background indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(2) july 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 153 differences. as result, in thich and alanis edition, there was no misunderstanding occurred, but their communication style changed because of their cultural background. in analyzing this influences, the researcher used tannen (2001) theory. according to tannen (2001), two countries that usually use the high involvement and directness communication are america and canada. moreover, the ping-pong communication style appeared in america and bowling communication style appear in japan. in thich edition, the interviewee comes from vietnam and he is an immigrant from america and oprah herself comes from america. in that show, thich sometimes produced high involvement style as much as 54 times. on the other hand, oprah showed the high considerateness style that was higher than high involvement. oprah used 109 times of high considerateness. in terms of directness, thich sometimes showed direct speech and oprah showed indirect speech. meanwhile, both of them showed the bowling conversation style which was japanese communication pattern. in alanis edition, alanis and oprah sometimes showed the high considerateness style and indirectness. besides, alanis also showed ping-pong conversational style which was american communication pattern. conclusion this research focuses on analyzing the type of verbal communication used by the interviewer and interviewee in oprah winfrey show and the influence of cultural background towards the communication style in oprah winfrey show. here, the researcher takes two videos of opah winfrey show; thich and alanis edition in super soul sunday. as result, it was found that the types of verbal communication occured in oprah winfrey show conversation are conversational involvement, direct and indirect, and conversation structure. the conversational involvement that occured in that videos consists of high involvement and high considerateness, direct and indirect speech, and the conversation structure that consists of ping-pong and bowling conversation. moreover, the cultural background that influence the style of communication occured through the changes of communication style of each person in oprah winfrey show. references chambers, b. (2012). intercultural communication handbook. ceslm intercultural project. fraenkel, j., & wallen, n. (2009). how to design and evaluate research in education (7th ed). new york: mc graw-hill. khotari, c. r. (2004). research methodology methods and techniques (2nd ed). new delhi: new age internasional (p), ltd. levine, d. r., & adelman, m. b. (1993). beyond language cross cultural communication (2nd ed.). englewood: prentice hall, inc. neuliep, hintz, & mccroskey. (2005). the influence of ethnocentrism in organizational contexts: perceptions of interviewee and managerial, attractiveness, credibility, and effectiveness. morgantown: eastern communication association. sakamoto, n. m. (1931). build understanding conversational ball games. hawai: go online. tannen, d. (2001). you just don’t understand: women and men in conversation. william morrow paper back. the dynamism of english as a global language in post-genocide rwanda jacques lwaboshi kayigema department of african languages, university of south africa email: jacqueskayigema@yahoo.com davie e. mutasa department of african languages, university of south africa email : mutasde@unisa.ac.za apa citation: kayigema, j. l., & mutasa, d. e. (2017). the dynamism of english as a global language in postgenocide rwanda. indonesian efl journal, 3(1), 101110 received: 18-11-2016 accepted: 24-12-2016 published: 01-01-2017 abstract: english, as global language, has had great influence over most languages of the world for nearly two centuries now. the expansion of english is no exception in rwanda, though. for the last two decades, the importance of english has been felt in the day to day activities of rwanda. english became a third official language in rwanda just after the 1994 genocide and a compulsory language of instruction since january 2009. this paper discusses the use of english in post-genocide rwanda and its impact on french, over a borrowing one, kinyarwanda and french. english has risen sharply for the last two decades because of the will of the rwandan government to find ways of communicating with the external world in a more powerful language, english, than the previously predominant one, french. it also highlights major domains where english speaks of its strength and the factors that led to the spread of english. introduction kinyarwanda is primarily the language spoken in rwanda, which is a land-locked country on the african continent, 26.338 sq km in size, and with a population of 11.689.696 (july 2012 estimate) people. rwanda is thus the most populated country in africa with a population density of almost 420 people per sq km. the country is very often given the title ‘land of a thousand hills,’ simply because of its fertile and hilly terrain. with an average altitude of 1.600 m above sea level, the country enjoys a temperate climate. currently, rwanda has three official languages: kinyarwanda, french, and english. in addition, in view of the cultural, social, commercial, and political ties that exist between rwanda and east african countries (kenya, tanzania, uganda), kiswahili too has been used in commercial centres as a lingua franca, and on the nationally broadcast radio. before belgians introduced french into primary school in 1929, kiswahili was used to serve as a language of communication in the colonial administration. most belgian colonial masters and missionaries of all denominations were using kiswahili. french is more widely spoken and more predominant than english and kiswahili. it has been an official language since 1962, during which time the first constitutional law of the republic of rwanda was voted (24 november 1962). article 69 of the decree of the ministry of education of 27 august 1966 stipulates that the language of instruction for primary school education is kinyarwanda, but that the minister can authorise the use of another language. as for languages of instruction in secondary education, article 80 of the same decree gives the minister of education the authorization of introducing another official language. it stipulates that kinyarwanda and french are the official languages, but that the minister can authorise the use of another language. indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 101 before 1994 english was not used at primary school. at secondary school it was studied like any other subjects and at the tertiary level it could be studied among other subjects or as a major in the department of languages and literature. the weekly class load for english was based on a particular line or section of study. the number of hours per week ranged between 2 and 4. on the other hand, french was the language of instruction at secondary level. english became a third official language just after the 1994 genocide. article 5 of the current rwandan constitution law stipulates that ‘the national language is kinyarwanda and that the official languages are kinyarwanda, french and english’ (official journal, 2003). it is in this perspective that since january 2009, english has been adopted as a medium language of instruction at all levels. more than 24.000 rwandans speak english. rwanda is one of the territories where english is spoken as an “official (institutionalized) second language (l2) in the fields such as government, law, and education” (jenkins, 2003, p. 2). english is gaining more influence over french. the motivation of using a prestigious language like english is highly noticed in every activity of life. crystal (2003, p. 67) notes that “new political decisions on the matter continue to be made: for example, rwanda gave english official status in 1996.” this policy will make linguists have special consideration for rwanda, unlike its neighbour, burundi, which is not represented in the list of speakers of english in countries where the language has had special relevance. in fact, burundi shares almost entirely the same historical and political background. kinyarwanda is not only spoken in rwanda, though. it is also widely spoken across politically agreed upon borders in neighbouring countries, such as the eastern congo: northern kivu (rutshuru, masisi) and southern kivu (uvira, fizi, mwenga, moba). in addition it has spread across to western uganda (where it is spoken by the bafumbira tribe) and eastern tanzania (where it is spoken by the abanyakaragwe and abaha tribes). in burundi, the neighbour to the south, it is mutually intelligible with kirundi; in a similar way flemish is intelligible to the dutch-speaking inhabitants of the netherlands. writing in english is fashionable the subtitle above recalls senghor’s question “why do we write in french?” “we write in french because french is a universal language,” he answered (ngugi, 2005, p. 32). however, in rwanda the aim of writing in english is totally different. the question as to know why today we prefer to write in english rather in other languages in order to express ideas more accurately, can be answered in the perspective of the supremacy of english. unlike senghor who wanted to tame the french language for cultural, political, and literary purposes, there is no leading literary figure in rwanda who writes to promote english culturally, politically, or literarily, but rather people write english for lucrative and prestige ends. in schools, english is taught because it is a global language for communication, scientific research, economy and commerce. however, outside the classroom, for example at home, parents and children use the vernacular language, kinyarwanda, which makes it hard to practice english. asked why we teach french in africa, senghor (1993) answered the question starting with the definition of francophonie, which aims to spread french politics and culture. la francophonie, c’est cet humanisme intégral qui se tisse autour de la terre: cette symbiose des « énergies dormantes » de tous les continents, de toutes les races, qui se réveillent à leur chaleur complémentaire […] le français est déjà enseigné comme langue nationale, langue officielle, langue de communication internationale ou, simplement, mais essentiellement, comme langue de culture. si on introduit ou maintient l’enseignement du français en afrique, si on l’y renforce, c’est, d’abord, pour des raisons politiques. cependant, la principale raison de l’expansion du français hors de l’hexagone, de la naissance d’une francophonie est d’ordre culturel. francophonie is that integral humanism which weaves around the globe: that symbiosis of jacques lwaboshi kayigema & davie e. mutasa the dynamism of english as a global language in post-genocide rwanda 102 dormant energies of all the continents, all the races, which awake for the complementary warmth [...] french is already taught as a national language, an official language, a language of international communication or, simply, but essentially, as a language of culture. if teaching french in africa is introduced or maintained, if it is reinforced there, it is first for political reasons. however, the major reason for french expansion outside the hexagone (france), the birth of francophonie is cultural. (senghor) in diagonales, n° 28 (1993) unlike the french academy which sets up rules on the use of french as far as spelling and pronunciation are concerned, there is no english academy which regulates the use of english worldwide. there has not been any officially recognized institution to promote english. probably the british council has been doing this work but with not strict regulations on the spelling and the pronunciation of english. there is no such a thing as “anglophonia”. the commonwealth organization has no aim to promote the expansion of english culturally and politically among member countries. there is no english academy to regulate the use of english as far as grammar, spelling, and pronunciation are concerned. however, today’s tendency is to write, especially where french and english cohabitate. materials which are very often written in english include commercial advertisements (signs, posters, film strips, radio, and tv commercials), official reports, project proposals, academic transcripts, newspapers, catalogues, folders, and booklets. a new form of english in rwanda varieties of languages very often result from the non-confirmity to the pronunciation model of the standard language. although mistakes are part of learning process, they simply reveal a failure in language competence. due to various forms of english worldwide in general, and nationwide in particular, the english spoken in rwanda reflects interference from east african english, west african/nigerian english, indian english, american english, south african english, french, kinyarwanda. in addition to mistakes due to french and kinyarwanda interference, varieties of english are also responsible for the mistakes which are very often made. most mistakes occur in the area of phonology, orthography, syntax, and semantics. because of the phonological perception and production, some mispronounced english words have become integrated loanwords in kinyarwanda. english name changes from 1994 onward in rwanda it is currently easier to count shops and commercial buildings with fewer names in french than in english because of the significance drop in french usage. from 1994 rwandans find it more fashionable and prestigious to use a global language like english than french. the interest in this shift of name change triggered the motivation for researching on the rise and spread of english in rwanda after the 1994 events. the sense of observation and curiosity of the use of the word ‘house’ on most names of shops, firms, and organizations challenges researchers in language contact and change. for example, a careful eye can read the following names with the word ‘house’ in them in the city of kigali: blue star house, centenary house, prince house, city plazza house, ebenezer house, mathias house, rugigana house, rubangura house, la bonne adresse house, omega house, promise house, isaro house, ituze house, magnificat house, nartzalus house, soafa house, iramiro house. in addition to names bearing the word ‘house’ in them, public and private establishments (schools, hotels, restaurants, pubs) have also adopted english identifications: kigali parents school, green hills academy, kicukiro college of technology, umutara polytechnique, foundation school, sun city hotel, alfa palace hotel, bloom hotel, kivu sun hotel, peace hotel, greenland hotel, luxury hotel. names of organizations and state-run authorities have completely shifted from french to english. for example, one may read: rwanda environment management authority (rema), rwanda revenue authority (raa), rwanda bureau of standard (rbs), rwanda development board (rdb), indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 103 rwanda governance board (rgb), rwanda defence force (rdf), national commission for reconciliation (ncr). however, those organizations and state undertakings which existed before 1994 are still written in french: magasins généraux du rwanda (magerwa), usine de textile au rwanda (utexrwa), société nationale d’assurance au rwanda (sonarwa), brasserie et limonaderie du rwanda bralirwa), ciment du rwanda (cimerwa) everybody wants a change and something new. this phenomenon of name change is a paradigm shift. not only names and styles of firms have changed after 1994 but also anthroponyms and names of persons. today you will find that young people bear names such as nice, joy, hope, peace, shalom, bob, jimmy, jackson, steve. globalization as a major factor for the spread of english most people see globalization as a major factor in the spread of english in rwanda. globalization creates free flow of information on the information highway which is dominated by english. indeed the views of the respondents tally with those of crystal (2003) in his book entitled english as a global language. the spread of english in the world in general is the result of the first migrations of mother-tongue english speakers from england, scotland and ireland predominantly to north america, australia, new zealand and the establishment of british colonies in africa, asia, and central america (jenkins, 2003, p. 5). subsequently, the rise of english in rwanda is linked to the position of english as a global language and it has been reinforced by the change of the regime whereby the repatriation of rwandans who returned from exile in the neighbouring english speaking countries triggered the use of english in all the major domains of public and private sectors. the increasing influence of english in rwanda like in many other parts of the world makes people think that english is very likely to be a dominant language over other languages of the world for many years to come. with some reservations, abdulla (2005, pp. 3-10) supports this view when he points out that english is a global language: while english has become the latin of the contemporary world, such a position, one can say in the light of historical experience, has always been precarious. whether english will be unanimously accepted as the one unifying international language of the globe, whether it will share this role with one or more other languages or whether an artificial language will be adopted for that purpose is the question that sooner or later we will all be facing […]. still, one may well conclude, as a result of what has been discussed so far, and in spite of all the reservations expressed, that english is now ipso facto the uncontested international language. without any prior agreement, or officially imposed policy, it has practically that status in trade, science, tourism, and most importantly, in the educational system, through the world. the possibility of any other language, whether natural (spanish) or chinese or artificial (esperanto) replacing it in the near future seems remote. while in the above statement abdulla is reserved as to whether english will remain the contemporary global language of the world as was latin for more than seven centuries. mufwene (2010, p. 57) thinks that “although english has become a global language geographically, it is not becoming a universal one, a fear mitigated by its speciation into so many varieties, some of which have already been disfranchised as separate languages, viz. creoles and pidgins.”. in fact, mufwene (2010, p. 57) wonders whether english is becoming as universal as crystal and others who marvel on the globalization of english put it. he rather attributes the spread of english to the prescription of english as a second or foreign language in the secondary schools in most countries of the world: so much has been published over the past decade about the extent to which world-wide globalization (…) has spread english into a “global language,” i.e., one spoken all over the world. much of this evolution can be attributed as much to the prescription of english as a second or foreign language in secondary schools of almost every country of the outer and expanding circles today as to its usage as the primary lingua franca of business, jacques lwaboshi kayigema & davie e. mutasa the dynamism of english as a global language in post-genocide rwanda 104 navigation, science and technology, and academia (mufwene, 2010, p. 57) in the university of chicago chronicle, mufwene quoted by schonwald (2008) gives the example of the democratic republic of congo, whereby french is not threatened by the global english but rather by lingala: english is far from functioning as the vernacular of many parts of the world,” he said. in kinshasa, the capital of his native congo, for instance, there is little economic incentive to learn english as a vernacular. there, the official language, french, is threatened not by english, but by lingala, a contact-based bantu language that has become increasingly popular. many linguists focus on worldwide trends, which spread english as a lingua franca but don’t recognize the dynamics of the local ecology of a language. “language evolution is driven primarily by the interplay of local ecological factors, which are largely socio-economic,” he said. crystal (2003, p. 67) supports the view that rwanda has adopted the global english and attributes this move to the political decision. rwanda is classified in the three concentric circles as developed by kachru (1988). in pointing out the example of rwanda which gave english official status in 1996 because of the new political decision, crystal compares rwanda to burundi and apparently gives them the same status. he comments that “english is probably represented in rwanda and burundi in very comparable ways, but rwanda is in the list (and burundi is not) only because the former has (in 1996) made a political decision to give the language special status.” the status of english in both countries is totally different. therefore the classification should be very clear. burundi uses english simply as a foreign language, which has great importance for communication, whereas rwanda uses it as an official language alongside kinyarwanda and french. the context is different in both countries. burundi did not find any sound reason to adopt english as an official language. however, after the 1994 genocide and the war, rwanda had no other option. it had to accommodate rwandans speaking the two international languages: english and french. thus, rwanda marked a significant step in leaving the expanding circle or extending circle to join the outer circle or the extended circle when it institutionalised english. in rwanda the expansion circle period of english is marked by the use of english as a mere foreign language. although this period starts before 1996, during which time english was officially recognized by the rwandan government, the researcher could say that the expansion period is located between 1962 and 1994. during this period english gradually spread in various areas such as education, agriculture, commerce, technology, communication and the press, just to mention the most influential ones. in 2009 the position of english was reinforced by adopting it as a language of instruction. education is the most influential domain which determines whether a language will be predominant in a given country or not. this is because all linguistic and scientific knowledge is acquired at school. the use of a language cannot be efficient unless teaching the language has taken place. at primary school english was neither used as a subject nor an instructional language. english as a language of learning and teaching today learning english is very important because it offers better opportunities in communication and employment. the rise of english in rwanda is an asset rather than a threat to kinyarwanda because it connects rwanda to the external world. however, it may lead to diminishing use and role of french and kinyarwanda. before 1994 english was taught from the first to to the sixth year of secondary school. of course, the number of class contact hours sometimes differed from one line to another. language-based lines, commerce and accounting had more hours than other lines. at the national office of curricula development there was a department in charge of english curriculum development. english curriculum developers were recruited among university graduates who had completed three to five years of university programme. however, some were indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 105 not necessarily trained to teach english, nor develop curricula of english. in addition to the formal education of english there were some organisations and embassies which offered english programmes to boost the level of english language proficiency for beginners, intermediate and advanced students. for example, in the early 1980s, the information service of the us embassy in kigali opened the english language teaching centre to cater for civil servants and other people who did not have enough knowledge of english as working language. the centre also provided english language training to prepare individuals who wished to take some international tests like toefl or the michigan test to pursue their studies abroad. at tertiary level, the national university of rwanda and other institutions of higher learning offered english as a major in the department of english. most teachers of english were trained in local universities and institutions of higher learning. some others were trained in the neighbouring countries (drc, kenya, uganda, tanzania, burundi) where english programmes are offered at various levels. exceptionally, some teachers of english were trained in the uk, the usa, and canada. just after the war, with repatriated rwandans from both french and englishspeaking countries, there has been a great need for bilingual workers in post-war rwanda. as a result, educational reforms have taken place. the 1996 educational reform adopted both french and english as medium languages for instruction and as subjects. until 2008, from primary one to primary three, where possible, french and english were taught as subjects, whereas from primary four to primary six, they were both subjects and languages of teaching other subjects, except kinyarwanda. today, english is a medium of instruction from nursery to university. besides this, short courses of english are offered by both public and private institutions to train french and kinyarwanda speakers in english. of course, one may wonder which form of english rwanda is very likely going to adopt. everything will start from the class. owing to the training in different countries, teachers are very likely to bring in various accents of english which will be passed onto students. thus, among rwandan english speakers or bilingual speakers of english and french it is very likely to hear ugandan english accent, south african english, british english, american english, nigerian english, just to name a few. english in the media “in the novel, the media are at the centre of everyone’s life – the press, radio, advertising, and especially television. even the ‘hint of a nuance’ can make a difference… the english language has been an important medium of the press for nearly 400 years” (crystal, 2003, p. 91). people listen to the news broadcast, watch tv programmes, and read newspapers in english because they want to improve their level of performance in it and because of their positive attitude towards english. although english does not dominate the media now, this is a sign of motivation for people who are eager to improve their english performance. the state runs the largest radio and television stations. on the national television, rwanda television (rtv), and radio broadcast, news broadcast programmes in english are given equal weight as in kinyarwanda and french. after all, these are the three official languages recognized by the rwandan constitution. english is not dominating in the media, though. kinyarwanda is the most dominant language in the media. the media are taking the lead in today’s globalization, and in view of the pace english is making, a global language is very likely to dominate the media in the near future. most people do not have access to television because it is limited to urban areas. kinyarwanda dominates on the national television broadcast. however, with private companies, such as star africa media, branded star times, a chinese digital television company operating a pay television service with 35000 registered users, english is the dominating language. of the 44 channels, 5 broadcast entirely in french, 2 in kinyarwanda, english and french. obviously, jacques lwaboshi kayigema & davie e. mutasa the dynamism of english as a global language in post-genocide rwanda 106 this has a great impact on the role of other languages in media. as for the radio broadcast, there are more than 30 radio stations operating in rwanda now and each of them has one or more english programmes. these include radio rwanda, radio 10, flash fm, contact fm, city radio, radio isango star, radio maria, radio izuba, radio salus, amazing grace radio, umucyo community radio, voice of hope, voa, dw, rfi, bbc. up to 70 local newspapers are written in kinyarwanda, 5 in english (with the weekly leading, the new times), and 3 in french. of course, the national language, kinyarwanda, occupies the first position, followed by english and then french. impact of english: code-switching and borrowing in a bilingual context, code-switching is very common. this impacts on the structure of kinyarwanda. in rwanda, it is very common to hear a bilingual speaker using french and english words without altering the grammatical structure, the morphological and phonological aspects of a foreign word, a phrase, or a sentence. frequently used code-switches from french may include simple words such as donc, ‘so’; vraiment, ‘truly’; responsable, ‘responsible’; sérieux, ‘serious’; grave ‘serious’; comment (ça va)?, ‘how are you (doing)?’; ça va? , ‘is it okay?’; ni dix heures, ‘it is 10 o’clock’. the level of code-switching varies from one bilingual to another. one may switch codes at the level of: (1) words, for example, lundi uzanyoherereze call: “give me a call on monday”. (2) tags, for example, he sings well, n'est-ce pas? : “he sings well, doesn't he?”. (3) clause or sentence (intersentential switching). for example, je voudrais te parler (i would like to talk to you), come quickly. however, it may or not be intentional. for example, during some simultaneous translation activities, the researcher has experienced a situation whereby an interpreter, from time to time, could switch from english to french while he was translating from french into english. he would not be aware of his error until the public reacted to his unintentional switching. this would create a funny situation. in fact, rwandan monolinguals think their language has been diluted. following the current sociolinguistic situation in rwanda, whereby most people have various backgrounds because they lived in a multilingual community, one may hear, for example, the following code-switches: tokomonana lobi, ariko uzibuke cya gitabo (lingala-kinyarwanda): ‘we shall meet tomorrow, but remember to bring that book’. lundi uzanyohereze call (frenchkinyarwanda-english): ‘call me on monday’. urebe ako gaka, mwanawafe (kinyarwandakiganda): ‘look after that cow, our child!’ ndagutegetse ngo toka shetani (kinyarwanda-kiswahili): ‘i command you: go way, satan!’ bagiye, je le sais bien! (kinyaruanda-french): ‘they have gone, i know it well’. concerning code-switching, (field, 1998, p. 241) explains that it involves running syntactic analyses. in production, it involves the establishment of entry and exit points in the linear speech stream, so-called switch points at which the language in use is deactivated to an extent. in today’s bilingual context in rwanda, a bilingual speaker of english and kinyarwanda may frequently use codeswitches such as: so, actually, anyway, okay, now, sharp. the phenomenon of code-mixing is very common when bilingual speakers are making speeches or conversing with the audience they think understands the languages they are using. the word which comes more easily than another is immediately uttered. some bilinguals make efforts not to mix the codes. however, this will depend upon one’s language competence. since language is a vehicle of the culture of a given nation, english has bequeathed to kinyarwanda words and elements of the western culture. the motivation for borrowing which must readily indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 107 come to mind is need. if the speakers of a given language take over new cultural items, new technical, religious concepts, or references to foreign locations, fauna, flora, there obviously is a need for vocabulary to express these concepts or references. in addition to the need, the speaker of a may have a prestige motive, especially when speaker b is more powerful economically, politically, religiously, and technologically. for example, the speaker of kinyarwanda has borrowed many religious terminologies not because he did not have any religion and beliefs, but simply because he was persuaded by the western religious clergy that his religion was heathenish. that is why he quickly forsook ‘indigenous names’ and adopted ‘christian names’, which were in fact from ‘hebrew and western names’. english and the young generation and the impact on the future role of kinyarwanda english is viewed by the young generation as a language of hope, empowerment, opportunities, openness and prestige. young rwandans are eager to use english at school, in various english language centres, sports, cinema, music and other daily activities which attract the youth. young generation users of english include young artists, musicians, football players, drivers, and civil servants. they want to use english in their entertainment because they hope english will help them become successful in their occupations. the media help the youth attain the goals of practicing english when they are present their talents on the radio or television. crystal (2003, p. 101) observes that “radio sets around the world hourly testify to the dominance of english in the popular music scene today.” he adds that “many people make their first contact with english in this way.” most people have expressed their enthusiasm in welcoming english as an asset to the existing benefits of french and kinyarwanda. they do not consider english as a threat at all. on the contrary, they would like the country to develop into a bilingual system of english and french, in addition to their lingua franca, kinyarwanda. youth find the rise and spread of english in rwanda as an asset rather than being a threat to kinyarwanda and french. very few people think english may be a threat because english may be a contributing factor to forget existing official languages. the proponents of english maintain that it facilitates communication among people who speak it. conclusion this paper has established that the rise and the spread of english in rwanda is linked first to the return and repatriation from exile in the neighbouring english-speaking countries of sons and daughters of rwanda who had fled the 1960s events which caused many a rwandan to flee the country. it is also enshrined in the framework of globalization which makes rwanda open to the external world and therefore complies with globalization in order to communicate and cooperate with great powers and the international community at large. globalization is a major factor for the spread of english from the time of the british empire and the supremacy of the united states of america until the present time. besides this, english will continue to be an international language for the foreseeable future even if some major languages of the world like french, spanish and the mandarin chinese are widely spoken in the world. with regard to learning and teaching a foreign language, english takes the lead in schools. it is the medium of instruction which no one dares to oppose. everybody agrees that today english is needed in all major areas. after all, most countries of the world have adopted it as the language of instruction. beside national and official languages, english occupies a very important position in learning and teaching other subjects. this study has indicated that a new form of english is developing in rwanda as it is in other parts of the world. world englishes is currently a hot topic of linguistic research and the variety of english in rwanda which results from the influence of kinyarwanda, french and east african english will not escape from the eye of the researchers. based on the mistakes of pronunciation, grammar, jacques lwaboshi kayigema & davie e. mutasa the dynamism of english as a global language in post-genocide rwanda 108 spelling and vocabulary which are encountered in rwanda, another form of english will appear, unless there is an academy of english which would curtail the wrong usage of the english language worldwide. with regard to the presence of english in major domains, this study established that english is ever dominant in the areas of education, the media, commerce, banks and banking, information communication, technology, science, army and diplomacy. you feel the presence of english in the text materials, teaching materials and visual aids, newspapers, computers, laboratory and army equipment, and the international diplomacy. the aspect of bilingualism has been highlighted in this study. code-switching and borrowing are a reality in a multilingual community. the degree of performance depends on how the individual copes with this reality of language contact. owing to the educational system and the need in training bilingual speakers of english and french, both languages will continue to cohabitate in rwanda alongside kinyarwanda. the study has concluded that the name change and the display of english from 1994 onward on new buildings, styles, firms, organizations and institutions is a paradigm shift. people want to use a fashionable language because it sounds scientific, intellectual and witty. as far as the impact of english on the role of kinyarwanda and the attitudes of people towards other languages, the study has indicated that the young generation considers english as a language of hope because of the opportunities to communicate and pursue studies. it does not threaten kinyarwanda at all because the latter is a lingua franca and is widely spoken in families, schools, offices and elsewhere in rwanda, and across the borders. references abdulla, a. d. (2005). globalism and the universal language. english today, 82(2), 3-10. cambridge: cambridge university press. crystal, d. (2003). english as a global language (2nd ed.). cambridge: cambridge university press. jenkins, j. (2003). world englishes. london: routledge kachru, b. (1988). the sacred cows of english. english today, 16, 3-8. cambridge: cambridge university press. mufwene, s. (2010). globalization and the spread of english: what does it mean to be anglophone? english today, 26, 57-59. cambridge: cambridge university press. senghor, l.s. (1993). pourquoi enseigner le français en afrique. diagonales 28, 4-5. paris: edicef. indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 109 teacher a teacher asks her class, "if there are 5 birds sitting on a fence and you shoot one of them, how many will be left?" she calls on little johnny. he replies, "none, they all fly away with the first gun shot" the teacher replies, "the correct answer is 4, but i like your thinking." then, little johnny says "i have a question for you. there are three women sitting on a bench having ice cream: one is delicately licking the sides of the triple scoop of ice cream. the second is gobbling down the top and sucking the cone. the third is biting off the top of the ice cream. which one is married?" the teacher, blushing a great deal, replied "well i suppose the one that's gobbled down the top and sucked the cone" to which little johnny replied, "the correct answer is the one with the wedding ring on, but i like your thinking." (source: http://www.study-express.ru/humour/funny-stories.shtml, picture: www.google.co.id) jacques lwaboshi kayigema & davie e. mutasa the dynamism of english as a global language in post-genocide rwanda 110 translation analysis of body-related metaphors in the holy koran by yusuf ali, marmaduke pickthal, and thomas irving seyyed ali keshvari islamic azad university, parand branch email: seyyed.ali.keshvari@gmail.com razieh eslamieh islamic azad university, parand branch email: eslami_paranduniv@yahoo.com apa citation: keshvari, s. a., & eslamieh, r. (2017). translation analysis of body-related metaphors in the holy koran by yusuf ali, marmaduke pickthal, and thomas irving. indonesian efl journal, 3(1), 45-56 received: 08-11-2016 accepted: 19-12-2016 published: 01-01-2017 abstract: the present study is a corpus-based research which analyzes the translation of bodyrelated metaphors in the holy koran by yusuf ali, marmaduke pickthal and thomas irving, within the framework of peter newmark’s procedures of metaphor translation. the data analyzed consists of a sample of 107 words and phrases which are categorized as metaphors of ear, eye, face, and hand. out of the seven procedures proposed by newmark for translating metaphors, the translators applied five procedures. none of the translators applied newmark’s fourth or sixth procedure and no new procedure was observed. the results revealed that among 107 metaphors examined, there is a general tendency (57.94%) towards reproducing the same image in the tl, and the three translators translated 68 metaphors (63.55%) using similar procedures. this study concludes that the likely and the most frequent metaphor translation procedures in the holy koran are: (1) to reproduce the same image in the tl, newmark’s first procedure; and (2) to convert metaphor to sense (literal meaning), newmark’s fifth procedure. keywords: metaphor, the holy koran, peter newmark, procedure introduction every now and then different sciences are discovered and developed in every corner of the world. these sciences which could be worldly or spiritual would have great influence on the welfare and prosperity of people. people are scattered throughout the world and speak in many languages. one of this spiritual science which helps to increase people understanding and lead them to salvation is the science of the holy koran. the holy koran is not just for muslims but for all mankind who believe in one god: “this is the book; in it is guidance sure, without doubt, to those who fear allah” (holy koran, sura baqara, verse 2: yusuf ali). one of the most important tools for transferring the messages of this sacred and divinely scripture to other people and nations (muslims or nonmuslims) is translation. if the holy koran aims to throw light on the path of people, lead them to salvation, and convinces them to act according to god’s revelations, it has to persuade people to read it, to contemplate about its messages and to understand and grasp the deep meaning of those messages. if the holy koran is to be persuasive, it has to be understandable for people. the implicit and deep messages of the holy koran are stated via figures of speech like: similes, metaphors and irony. “the most figurative language that occurs in the holy qur’an is metaphor. modern muslim scholars gather there are more than four hundred metaphoric words in the holy qur’an, although many of those words are become common words” (as cited in maula, 2011, p. indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 45 3). khoramshahi (2012) states that “point to untranslatability in the qur’an because of its figurative language and literary speech” (as cited in hassan zadeh, lashkarian & sadegh zadeh, 2015, p. 2). metaphor is a rhetorical device and a figure of speech which is used frequently in literary and religious texts and from early years of our life we are surrounded with metaphors. fez-barringten (2012, p. 1) states that “metaphors are everywhere as in song, conversation, media, school, work, etc.” lakoff and johnson (1980, p. 8) maintain that “metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action.” according to soskice (1985), “the study of metaphor begins with the study of language itself and in almost all traditions, religious language is closely connected with metaphorical talk” (as cited in mohaghegh & ketabi, 2013, p. 104). metaphor has constantly been of concern to translation scholars. over the years, literature, linguistic, and translation scholars have classified metaphors in different ways. the classification of metaphors into dead or live has always been the main concern of the scholars. in classifying metaphor, they have included dead or live metaphor or both of them. according to almisned (2001), fowler (1926) divides metaphor into live and dead. fowler (1926) believes that we are conscious of live metaphors and says “it must be borne in mind that some metaphors are living, i.e., are offered & accepted with a consciousness of their literal equivalents” (as cited in almisned, 2001, p. 77). in dealing with dead metaphors fowler (1926) says that dead metaphors “have been so often used that speaker and hearer have ceased to be aware that the words used are not literal” (as cited in almisned, 2001, p. 77). in line with this, dickins (1998) in almisned (2001) proposes two major kinds of metaphor: lexicalised (dead) metaphors and non-lexicalised (live) metaphors. dickins (1998) says that in lexicalised (dead) metaphors “metaphorical meaning is so well established that it can be regarded as lexicalised and is therefore likely to appear as a dictionary definition of the word or phrase in question”; he maintains that nonlexicalised (live) metaphors “do not have a well-established or stable meaning of this sort and therefore cannot be regarded as lexicalised, and will not appear as dictionary definitions of the word or phrase in question” (as cited in almisned, 2001, p. 86). in addition, goatly (1997) divides metaphor into five different types of metaphors: dead and buried, dead, sleeping, tired, and active (as cited in almisned, 2001, p. 83). we can classify goatly’s division of metaphor into dead and live: dead and buried, and dead metaphors as dead metaphors; and sleeping, tired, and active metaphors as live metaphor. furthermore, newmark (1988a) distinguishes six types of metaphor (dead, cliche, stock, adapted, recent and original) and proposes seven procedures for translating metaphor. in some ways, we can say that newmark’s (1988a) classification of metaphor is also dead and live; because he believes that we are hardly conscious of dead metaphors, but regarding the other five metaphors (cliche, stock, adapted, recent and original) we are aware and conscious that they are metaphors. larson (1998) classifies metaphor into ‘live’ and ‘dead’ metaphors and asserts that there are five ways that metaphor can be translated. larson (1998, p. 277) believes that, considering all of the problems regarding metaphor, “the translator must give careful consideration whenever a metaphor is found in the source text.” larson (1998, p. 277) adds that “the first step towards adequate translation of a metaphor (or simile) is to determine whether the comparison is a “live” metaphor or simile, or whether it is simply a “dead” figure.” in larson’s opinion, it is important for the translator to make distinction between “live” and “dead” metaphors. larson (1998, p. 275) says that “dead metaphors will be translated directly, without any attempt to keep the metaphorical content of the idiom.” if the words which are figurative are simply an idiom, i.e., a “dead” metaphor, then the image does not need to be kept, but the meaning can be translated directly, i.e., nonfiguratively (larson 1998, p. 277-288). seyyed ali keshvari & razieh eslamieh translation analysis of body-related metaphors in the holy koran by yusuf ali, marmaduke pickthal, and thomas irving 46 soskice (1985) confirms that in almost all traditions, religious language depends upon metaphorical talk (as cited in mohaghegh & ketabi, 2013, p. 104). if we want to translate a religious or holy scripture, we have to adopt a logical metaphor translation procedure. literature, linguistic, and translation scholars have defined metaphor in different ways, classified it into different types and proposed different procedures for translating it. the analysis of metaphor translation procedure in this study is based on seven procedures proposed by newmark (1988a). newmark (1988b, p. 104) states that “whilst the central problem of translation is the overall choice of a translation method for a text, the most important particular problem is the translation of metaphor.” by metaphor newmark (1988b, p. 104) means that “any figurative expression: the transferred sense of a physical word; the personification of an abstraction; the application of a word or collocation to what it does not literally denote, i.e., to describe one thing in terms of another.” newmark believes that metaphor always involves illusion, like a lie, often used to conceal an intention. so, if a sentence (a text) is grammatical, and is an authoritative or expressive or anonymous text, but does make sense, we have to look for possible metaphorical meaning and make sense of it. as stated above, newmark distinguishes six types of metaphor (dead, cliche, stock, adapted, recent and original) and discusses them in relation to their contextual factors and translation procedures. newmark (1988a) proposes seven procedures for translating metaphor, in order of preference: 1. reproducing the same image in the tl. no man is an island: نیست جزیره یک مردی هیچ 2. replacing the image in the sl with a standard tl image which does not clash with the tl culture. no man is an island: ندارد صدا دست یک 3. translating metaphor by simile, retaining the image. no man is an island: مردی هیچ نیست جزیره یک شبیه 4. translation of metaphor (or simile) by simile plus sense (or occasionally a metaphor plus sense). no man is an island: تنها جزیره. نیست جزیره یک شبیه مردی هیچ اجتماع از دور به تواند نمی انسان اما است، کند زندگی 5. conversion of metaphor to sense. no man is an island: اجتماع از دور به تواند نمی انسان کند زندگی 6. deletion, if the metaphor is redundant, together with its sense components. a deletion of metaphor can be justified empirically on the ground that the metaphor’s function is being fulfilled elsewhere in the text 7. same metaphor combined with sense. no man is an island: جزیره یک مردی هیچ تواند نمی انسان اما است، تنها جزیره. نیست کند زندگی اجتماع از دور به due to the above explanations of the importance of metaphor translation in the holy koran, this research attempts to find answers for the following questions: 1. which of newmark’s seven procedures for translating the metaphors are applied by yusuf ali, pickthal, and irving? 2. what are the likely and the most frequent procedures for translating metaphors in the holy koran? 3. what new procedures are applied by the three translators? 4. what is the frequency of body-related metaphor translation procedure? method the present study is a corpus-based research (product-oriented research) which analyzes the translation of body-related metaphors in the holy koran by yusuf ali, marmaduke pickthal and thomas irving, within the framework of peter newmark’s (1988a) procedures of metaphor translation in a descriptive manner. in the holy koran, body-related words are used both in metaphorical and non-metaphorical contexts. this study focuses on the metaphorical use of these words and analyzes them in their metaphorical contexts. for this aim, certain aayas (verses) of the holy koran with bodyrelated metaphors are chosen with their farsi translation of mohammad mahdi fooladvand, and three english translations of yusuf ali, marmaduke pickthal, and thomas irving; and the translators’ procedures of body-related metaphor will be analyzed, compared and assessed. since this research indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 47 uses qualitative descriptive method, the researcher compares the arabic bodyrelated metaphors in the holy koran with the three english translations and aims at identifying the best english translation of body-related metaphors, techniques, and procedures of their translations. the researcher has collected a sample of 107 words and phrases functioning as body-related metaphors in the holy koran. for the sake of facility, this study categorizes body-related metaphors as the following: 1) metaphors of ear, 2) metaphors of eye, 3) metaphors of face, and 4) metaphors of hand. to identify the arabic meanings of the bodyrelated words of ear, eye, face, and hand, the researcher has used english to arabic glossary. to find the body-related words and the number of their repetition in the holy koran, the researcher has used pars quran website. this classification can be shown in table 1. table 1. classification of body-related metaphors in the holy koran no body-related word number of repetition number of metaphors 1 ear 18 10 2 eye 40 13 3 face 73 33 4 hand 83 51 the distinction between metaphorical and non-metaphorical use of words and the procedure for identification of metaphor in the holy koran are based on the metaphor definition of newmark (1988b), larson (1998), cuddon (2013), merriam-webster dictionary, longman dictionary, oxford english dictionary, and more importantly on pragglejaz group’s (2007) metaphor identification procedures. also, in order to identify and explain metaphors, the researcher seeks extensive help from noor comprehensive commentary collection ver. 3. to analyze the collected data, the researcher reads the verses that contain body–related words and phrases of ear, eye, face, and hand, and metaphor identification procedures try to identify the metaphorical verses. the researcher reads metaphorical verses of the holy koran and their farsi translation for better understanding, and then the three english translations will be analyzed according to newmark’s (1988a) seven procedures of metaphor translation. each metaphor is compared with its english translations. each metaphor is carefully analyzed to see how it is translated into english. for each metaphor it is determined which one of the newmark’s seven approaches are applied by the three english translators. in analyzing metaphorical words or phrases, the researcher uses the exegeses in the noor comprehensive commentary collection to explain the metaphors and to decode the meaning behind them. the researcher selected the body-related metaphors from the entire holy koran. the following example shows how the researcher identifies and analyzes the collected sample of 107 words and phrases functioning as body-related metaphors in the holy koran: الّلهن رمس ول ي ؤهذوون وماَلذنينم مننكومه آممن وْا للَلذنينم ومرمحهممٌة لنْلم ؤهمنننيم ومي ؤهمنن بنالّلهن ي ؤهمنن َلكومه خميهر أوذونو قوْل أوذوٌن ه وم ومينقوولوون الَنبنَي ي ؤهذوون اَلذنينم وممننهه م )61 التوبه،( أ لنيٌم عمذ اٌب ل ه مه و دارد اي**ان خدا به شاست، براى خوب گوش: «بگو.» است زودباور او: «گويندمى و دهندمى آزار را پيامب كه هستند كسان ايشان از و پ**ر عذاب رسانند،مى آزار را خدا پيامب كه كسان و.» است رحت اندآورده ايان كه شا از كسان براى و كند،مى باور را مؤمنان] سخن[ )فولدوند. (داشت خواهند] پيش در[ درد seyyed ali keshvari & razieh eslamieh translation analysis of body-related metaphors in the holy koran by yusuf ali, marmaduke pickthal, and thomas irving 48 among them are men who molest the prophet and say, “he is (all) ear.” say, “he listens to what is best for you: he believes in allah, has faith in the believers, and is a mercy to those of you who believe.” but those who molest the messenger will have a grievous chastisement. (yusuf ali) and of them are those who vex the prophet and say: he is only a hearer. say: a hearer of good for you, who believeth in allah and is true to the believers, and a mercy for such of you as believe. those who vex the messenger of allah, for them there is a painful doom. (pickthal) there are some [people] who annoy the prophet by saying:” he’s (all) ears!” say: “[he’s] an ear for good for you! he believes in god and believes for the believers' sake, and is a mercy for any of you who do believe.” those who annoy god's messenger will have painful torment. (irving) without using dictionaries, commentaries and exegeses, and without knowing the context and occasion of the revelation of this verse, it is really difficult to understand and translate the word “ُأُذن” correctly. newmark (1988b) believes that if a sentence (a text) is grammatical, and is an authoritative (reliable and valid) or expressive (showing feeling or emotion) or anonymous text, but does make sense, we have to look for possible metaphorical meaning and make sense of it. newmark (1988b) asserts that we ‘have to make sense of everything.’ regarding the occasion of the revelation of this verse, sadr-'ameli (1383sh) says “some of the hypocrites said that the prophet (p. b. u. h.) was a simple and whimsical person, and he accepts whatever everybody says” (vol.2, p. 650). sadr-'ameli (1383sh) argues that the hypocrites demonstrated “one of the advantages of the prophet (p. b. u. h.) in the form of his disadvantage, the existence of which is necessary in a leader” (vol.2, p. 650). in analyzing the word “ُأُذن”, khorramdel (1384sh) says that “by the word we mean someone who believes in ”ُأُذن“ everything we tell him; a credulous (over trusting) and whimsical person” (vol. 1, p. 371). it can be noticed that the word “ُأُذن” which is expected to be associated with part of the body used for hearing, is associated with credulous person. considering the oxford english dictionary definition of metaphor, we can say that the word “ُأُذن” is used to describe a credulous and whimsical person in a way that is different from its normal use (part of the body used for hearing). by using merriamwebster dictionary definition of metaphor we can say that there is an analogy between the word “ُأُذن” and a credulous and whimsical person in that both listen to people. the word is implicitly compared to a credulous ”ُأُذن“ and whimsical person and shows that they have the same qualities. the original meaning of the word “ُأُذن” is not used in this verse and the word “ُأُذن” has a more basic contemporary meaning in other contexts than the one in this verse, then according to pragglejaz group’s metaphor identification procedures, the word “ُأُذن” is a metaphor. as it is mentioned in the longman dictionary, english language has an idiom like ‘be all ears’ which means: ‘to be very keen to hear what someone is going to tell you’. tl culture does not clash with sl culture, so the image in the sl may be either reproduced in the english language (newmark’s first procedure), or the image may be replaced with an english language image (newmark’s second procedure), or sl metaphor may be converted to sense (newmark’s fifth procedure). yusuf ali replaces the image of the first metaphor in the sl with a standard tl image (newmark’s second procedure). then, he converts the second metaphor to sense (to literal meaning of the metaphor) (newmark’s fifth procedure). on the other hand, pickthal converts both source arabic metaphors to sense (to literal meaning of the metaphor) (newmark’s fifth procedure). while, irving replaces the image of the first metaphor in the sl with a standard tl image (newmark’s second procedure). regarding the second metaphor, he reproduces the same image in his english translation (keeps the source arabic metaphor) (newmark’s first procedure). indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 49 due to the fact that revelation of the holy koran was according to events and knowing the occasion of the revelation of some verses help translators to have an appropriate, desirable, and reasonable translation, then more appropriate translation procedure for the first metaphor would be to translate it according to newmark’s seventh procedure (same metaphor combined with sense), because by using seventh procedure, the image is kept and the meaning is clarified. needless to say, translators are free to choose any of the newmark’s (1988a) seven procedures for translating metaphor; surely in order of preference. results and discussion in this section, the researcher analyzed the procedures of the body-related metaphors translations in the holy koran by yusuf ali, marmaduke pickthal and thomas irving, within the framework of peter newmark’s (1988a) seven procedures of metaphor translation in a descriptive manner. body-related metaphors are: 1) metaphors of ear, 2) metaphors of eye, 3) metaphors of face, and 4) metaphors of hand. 1. metaphors of ear in the holy koran, the arabic term for “ear”, ‘one of the organs on either side of your head that you hear with “ُأُذن” which means “ والحیوان النسان في السمع عضو ”. the term “ “ is the single form of “ear”, and the term ”ُأُذن is the plural form of “ear”. according to ”آَذان pars quran website, the words “ُأُذن” and “ are mentioned 6 and 12 times ,”آَذان respectively as a noun in the holy koran. although the word “ear”, as a noun (simple or plural), is mentioned 18 times in the holy koran, it is used only 10 times as a metaphor. as a metaphor in the holy koran, the word “ear”: 1. metaphorically refers to “a credulous (over trusting) and whimsical person.” 2. in a metaphorical phrase refers to “imam ali (peace be upon him).” 3. in a metaphorical sentence refers to “deafness.” 4. in a metaphorical sentence refers to “deep sleep.” 2. metaphors of eye in the holy koran, the arabic term for “eye”, ‘one of the two parts of the body that you use to see with is “َعْین” which means: “ الحیوان من وغیره للنسان البصار عضو ”. the term “َعْین” is the single form of “eye”, and the terms “ َأْعَیاٌن”, “َأْعُیٌن”, “ُعُیوٌن ”, and “َعْیَناِن” are the plural forms of “eye”. according to pars quran website, the word “َعْین” (simple or plural) is mentioned 40 times in the holy koran. although the word “eye”, as a noun (simple or plural), is mentioned 40 times in the holy koran, it is used only 13 times as a metaphor. as a metaphor in the holy koran, the word “eye”: 1. refers to “the supervision of god” or “the angels.” 2. in a metaphorical phrase refers to “blindness.” 3. in a metaphorical sentence refers to “lack of insight.” 4. in a metaphorical sentence refers to “happiness.” 5. in a metaphorical phrase refers to “houris” or “women in paradise.” 3. metaphors of face in the holy koran, the arabic term for “face”, ‘the front part of your head, where your eyes, nose, and mouth are’, is “َوْجه” which means: “ َوالَعْیَناِن الَجْبَهُة َوِفیِه الرaْأِس ِمَن ُيَقاِبُلَك َما وَالَفُم وَالَْنُف َوالَخدaاِن ”. the term “َوْجه” is the single form of “face”, and the terms “ُوُجوٌه”and “ are the plural forms of “face.” according ”َأْوُجٌه to pars quran website, the words “َوْجه” and “ are mentioned 35 and 38 times ”ُوُجوٌه respectively as a noun in the holy koran. although the word “face”, as a noun (simple or plural), is mentioned 73 times in the holy koran, it is used only 33 times as a metaphor. as a metaphor in the holy koran, the word “face”: 1. in a metaphorical phrase refers to “pure faith” and “heartily attention.” 2. in a metaphorical phrase refers to “the presence of god.” 3. is a metaphorical reference to “kiblah”; or “direction”, “goal”, “method”, or “religion.” 4. is a metaphorical reference to “the pleasure [of god].” seyyed ali keshvari & razieh eslamieh translation analysis of body-related metaphors in the holy koran by yusuf ali, marmaduke pickthal, and thomas irving 50 5. is a metaphorical reference to “at the beginning.” 6. in a metaphorical phrase refers to “truly” or “in its true shape.” 7. is a metaphorical reference to “love”, “favor”, and “attention.” 8. in a metaphorical phrase refers to “extreme anger.” 9. in a metaphorical sentence refers to the “apostate (murtadd).” 10. in a metaphorical phrase refers to “the believers” or “the disbelievers.” 11. in a metaphorical phrase refers to “misguidance.” 12. in a metaphorical phrase refers to “sadness.” 4. metaphors of hand in the holy koran, the arabic term for “hand”, ‘the part of your body at the end of your arm, including your fingers and thumb, that you use to hold things’, is “َيد” which means: “ َوالَعْیَناِن الَجْبَهُة َوِفیِه الرaْأِس ِمَن ُيَقاِبُلَك َما َوالَفُم َواَلْنُف َوالَخدaاِن ”. the term “َيد” is the single form of “hand”, and the terms “ ”, َأْيٍد اَلَياِدي”, “َأَياٍد”, “اَلْيِدي“ ” and “َيَداِن” are the plural forms of “hand”. according to pars quran website, the word “َيد” is mentioned 83 times as a noun in the holy koran. although the word “hand”, as a noun (simple or plural), is mentioned 83 times in the holy koran, it is used only 51 times as a metaphor. as a metaphor in the holy koran, the word “hand”: 1. in a metaphorical sentence refers to “the deeds (good or bad).” 2. in a metaphorical phrase refers to the “willpower.” 3. in a metaphorical phrase refers to “guardian (wali).” 4. in a metaphorical phrase refers to the “power and authority.” 5. in a metaphorical phrase refers to “fighting.” 6. in a metaphorical sentence refers to “stinginess” or “generosity.” 7. in a metaphorical sentence refers to “deep regret.” 8. in a metaphorical phrase refers to “sword.” 9. in a metaphorical phrase refers to “submission.” 10. in a metaphorical phrase refers to “unwillingness.” 11. in a metaphorical sentence refers to “objection” or “anger.” 12. in a metaphorical sentence refers to “swearing allegiance.” 13. in a metaphorical sentence refers to “the peace treaty of hudaybiya.” 14. in a metaphorical phrase refers to “unlawful children.” this section linked theory of metaphor translation procedure with practice and examined detailed theoretical analysis of the sl and tl metaphors of the 107 examples. the result of the analysis of 107 bodyrelated metaphor samples is presented in six tables. from seven metaphors translation procedures proposed by newmark, there are 5 procedures used by the three translators in translating body-related metaphors (ear, eye, face, and hand) of the holy koran. to gain the percentage of each number, the number is multiplied by 100 and is divided by the number of ear, eye, face, or hand metaphor. to calculate the sum, the number is multiplied by 100 and is divided by ear, eye, face, or hand metaphor number multiplied by 3. example: (1*100)/ 10 = 10% example: (4*100)/ (10*3) = 13.33% the table below shows the frequency of 10 ear metaphors’ translation procedures. table 2. frequency of ear metaphor translation procedures procedures yusuf ali pickthal irving sum 1 reproducing the same image in the tl 1 (10%) 1 (10%) 2 (20%) 4 (13.33%) 2 replacing the image in the sl with a standard tl image 1 (10%) 0 3 (30%) 4 (13.33%) 3 translating metaphor by simile, retaining the image 0 0 0 0 4 translation of metaphor (or simile) by simile plus sense 0 0 0 0 indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 51 5 conversion of metaphor to sense 7 (70%) 8 (80%) 5 (50%) 20 (66.66%) 6 deletion of metaphor 0 0 0 0 7 same metaphor combined with sense 1 (10%) 1 (10%) 0 2 (6.66%) the table below shows the frequency of 13 eye metaphors’ translation procedures. table 3. frequency of eye metaphor translation procedures procedures yusuf ali pickthal irving sum 1 reproducing the same image in the tl 3 (23.07%) 1 (7.69%) 0 4 (10.24%) 2 replacing the image in the sl with a standard tl image 4 (30.76%) 5 (38.46%) 8 (61.53%) 17 (43.54%) 3 translating metaphor by simile, retaining the image 0 0 0 0 4 translation of metaphor (or simile) by simile plus sense 0 0 0 0 5 conversion of metaphor to sense 5 (38.46%) 7 (53.84%) 5 (38.46%) 17 (43.54%) 6 deletion of metaphor 0 0 0 0 7 same metaphor combined with sense 1 (7.69%) 0 0 1 (2.56%) the table below shows the frequency of 33 face metaphors’ translation procedures. table 4. frequency of face metaphor translation procedures procedures yusuf ali pickthal irving sum 1 reproducing the same image in the tl 23 (69.69%) 18 (54.54%) 21 (63.63) 62 (62.62%) 2 replacing the image in the sl with a standard tl image 2 (6.06%) 3 (9.09%) 3 (9.09%) 8 (8.08%) 3 translating metaphor by simile, retaining the image 0 0 0 0 4 translation of metaphor (or simile) by simile plus sense 0 0 0 0 5 conversion of metaphor to sense 8 (24.24%) 12 (36.36%) 9 (27.27%) 29 (29.29%) 6 deletion of metaphor 0 0 0 0 7 same metaphor combined with sense 0 0 0 0 the table below shows the frequency of 51 hand metaphors’ translation procedures. table 5. frequency of hand metaphor translation procedures procedures yusuf ali pickthal irving sum 1 reproducing the same image in the tl 31 (60.78%) 40 (78.43%) 45 (88.23%) 116 (75.81%) 2 replacing the image in the sl with a standard tl image 1 (1.96%) 2 (3.92%) 1 (1.96%) 4 (2.61%) 3 translating metaphor by simile, retaining the image 1 (1.96%) 0 0 1 (0.65%) 4 translation of metaphor (or simile) by simile plus sense 0 0 0 0 5 conversion of metaphor to sense 7 (13.72%) 7 (13.72%) 5 (9.80%) 19 (12.41%) 6 deletion of metaphor 0 0 0 0 7 same metaphor combined with sense 11 (21.56%) 2 (3.92%) 0 13 (8.49%) seyyed ali keshvari & razieh eslamieh translation analysis of body-related metaphors in the holy koran by yusuf ali, marmaduke pickthal, and thomas irving 52 the table below shows the frequency of metaphor translation procedures. these metaphors include 107 body-related metaphors of ear, eye, face, and hand. table 6. frequency of metaphor translation procedures procedures yusuf ali pickthal irving sum 1 reproducing the same image in the tl 58 (54.20%) 60 (56.07%) 68 (63.55%) 186 (57.94%) 2 replacing the image in the sl with a standard tl image 8 (7.47%) 10 (9.34%) 15 (14.01%) 33 (10.28%) 3 translating metaphor by simile, retaining the image 1 (0.93%) 0 0 1 (0.31%) 4 translation of metaphor (or simile) by simile plus sense 0 0 0 0 5 conversion of metaphor to sense 27 (25.23%) 34 (31.77%) 24 (22.42%) 85 (26.47%) 6 deletion of metaphor 0 0 0 0 7 same metaphor combined with sense 13 (12.14%) 3 (2.80%) 0 16 (4.98%) the table below shows the number of the same metaphor translation procedures applied by the three translators. to calculate the sum, the number is multiplied by 100 and is divided by 107. table 7. the number of same metaphor translation procedures translators ear eye face hand sum 1 yusuf ali & pickthal 5 1 5 2 13 (12.14%) 2 yusuf ali & irving 1 1 6 5 13 (12.14%) 3 pickthal & irving 0 2 0 12 14 (13.08%) 4 yusuf ali & pickthal & irving 4 8 22 32 68 (63.55%) 5 different 0 1 0 0 1 (0.93%) in brief, out of the seven procedures proposed by newmark for translating metaphors, yusuf ali applied five procedures, pickthal applied four procedures, and irving applied three procedures in the translation of the body-related metaphors in which none of the translators applied newmark’s forth or sixth procedure. pickthal and irving did not apply newmark’s third procedure, and irving did not apply newmark’s seventh procedure. then, the third procedure was applied once, only by yusuf ali in the translation of hand metaphor and no new procedure was observed in the three translators’ metaphor translations. from the tables above, it can be seen that table 2 reveals that in translation of ear metaphor there is tendency (66.66%) towards converting metaphor to sense (newmark’s fifth procedure); table 3 shows that in translation of eye metaphor, there are tendencies towards replacing the image in the sl with a standard tl image (43.54%) (newmark’s second procedure) and converting metaphor to sense (43.54%) (newmark’s fifth procedure); table 4 shows that in translation of face metaphor, there is tendency (62.62%) towards reproducing the same image in the tl (newmark’s first procedure); and table 5 shows that in translation of hand, metaphor there is tendency (75.81%) towards reproducing the same image in the tl (newmark’s first procedure). table 6 which includes 107 bodyrelated metaphors of ear, eye, face, and hand shows that there is a general tendency (57.94%) towards reproducing the same indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 53 image in the tl (newmark’s first procedure). this tendency is highest in irving’s translation. of 107 body-related metaphor samples, yusuf ali, pickthal and irving translated 68 metaphors (63.55%) using similar procedures (in more than half of their translations they applied the same procedures). yusuf ali and pickthal translated 13 metaphors (12.14%) using the same procedure. yusuf ali and irving translated 13 metaphors (12.14%) using the same procedure. pickthal and irving translated 14 metaphors (13.08%) using the same procedure (table 7). further, only in 1 metaphor (0.93%), the three translators had different metaphor translations procedure. the three or two of the translators almost always come with the same metaphor translation procedures in the same verse. the three translators likely prefer metaphor translation procedures that reproduce the same image in the tl (57.94%) and convert metaphor to sense (26.47%) (table 6). by reproducing the same image in the tl in more than half of their translations (57.94%), the three translators have shown that they did not want to challenge and attack the metaphorical meaning of the holy koran and left it to the reader to uncover the inner meaning. conclusion considering the fact that many people (muslims and non-muslims) throughout the world are learning the holy koran through its english translations, the analysis some problematic issues would be useful and beneficial. one of these problematic issues in the process of the translation of the meanings of the holy koran is the translation of the figures of speech. the deep meanings of some verses in the holy koran are expressed through delicate figures of speech like metaphor. the purpose of this study has been to analyze and review some of the body-related metaphor in the holy koran. the analysis of sample of 107 words and phrases functioning as body-related metaphors in the holy koran have led to the following conclusions. applying different procedures by different translators to translate the same metaphor shows that the holy koran cannot be reproduced. to convey the meaning, the translators sometimes have to replace the image in the sl with a standard tl image, or to convert metaphor to sense, or at least combine the same metaphor with sense.this study has shown that the translation of metaphors in the holy koran requires the translators to have some exegetical and commentarial knowledge. lack of exegetical and commentarial knowledge may result in wrong or misleading translation. in case of any disagreement in translating, analysing and interpreting the koranic verses, translators should resort to authentic hadith which is acceptable by all the muslim community. without using dictionaries, commentaries and exegeses, and without knowing the context and occasion of the revelation of some verses, it is really difficult and to some extent impossible to understand and translate some koranic metaphors. for example, in chapter 9, verse 61, regarding the occasion of the revelation of this verse, sadr-'ameli (1383sh) says that “some of the hypocrites said that the prophet (p. b. u. h.), was a simple and whimsical person, and he accepts whatever everybody says” (vol.2, p. 650). in analyzing the word “ُأُذن” in this verse, khorramdel (1384sh) says that “by the word “ُأُذن” we mean someone who believes in everything we tell him; a credulous (over trusting) and whimsical person” (vol.1, p. 371). without knowing the occasion of the revelation of this verse, it is almost impossible to associate the word “ُأُذن”, which is expected to be associated with part of the body used for hearing, with a credulous and whimsical person. the most frequent procedure for translating metaphor in the holy koran is to reproduce the same image in the tl (to preserve and keep the beauty of the source arabic metaphor) by applying newmark’s first procedure of metaphor translation. the translators tried to reproduce the same aesthetic and stylistic effect of the original metaphor (the metaphor is original in the sl and is translated and kept as original in the tl). the beauty of metaphor is often lost when it is translated into literal meaning seyyed ali keshvari & razieh eslamieh translation analysis of body-related metaphors in the holy koran by yusuf ali, marmaduke pickthal, and thomas irving 54 (converting metaphor to sense), but it can simplify and clarify the meaning and give the reader clear view of the hidden meaning. by replacing the image in the sl with a standard tl image, the beauty of the source arabic metaphor is substituted in the tl culture and the reader easily understands the inner meaning of the metaphor and a readeroriented translation is created. finally, the likely and the most frequent metaphor translation procedures are: first, to reproduce the same image in the tl; and second, to convert metaphor to sense. references almisned, o, a. (2001). metaphor in the qur'an: an assessment of three english translations of suurat al-hajj. durham theses. durham university. available at durham e-theses online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/1663/ cuddon, j, a. (2013). a dictionary of literary terms and literary theory (5th ed.). uk: blackwell publishers ltd. fez-barringten, b. (2012). architecture: the making of metaphors. cambridge: cambridge scholars publishing. hassan zadeh, m, m., lashkarian, a., & sadegh zadeh, m. (2015). translating the holy quran: a comparative analysis of al-fatiha verse from arabic to english. iranian journal of social sciences and humanities research. lakoff, g., & johnson, m. (1980). metaphors we live by. chicago: university of chicago press. larson, m. l. (1998). meaning-based translation: a guide to cross-language equivalence. new york: university press of america. longman dictionary of contemporary english: http://www.ldoceonline.com/ maula, a. (2011). a metaphor translation of the holy qur'an: a comparative analytical study. uin syarif hidayatullah. jakarta. merriam-webster dictionary. retrieved from: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ mohaghegh, a., & dabaghi, a. (2013). a comparative study of figurative language and metaphor in english, arabic, and persian with a focus on the role of context in translation of qur’anic metaphors. textroad publication, 3(4), 275-282. mohaghegh, a., & ketabi, s. (2013). qur’anic metaphors and their english and persian translations dead or alive. iranian journal of applied language studies, 5(2). newmark, p. (1988a). approaches to translation. london: prentice hall. newmark, p. (1988b). a textbook of translation. london: prentice hall. oxford advance learner’s dictionary (7th ed.). (2006). new york: oxford university press. pars quran. retrieved from: http://www.parsquran.com/ sadr-'ameli, s, a. (1383sh). an enlightening commentary into the light of the holy qur'an. isfahan: imam ali foundation. indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 55 golf ball two golfers were approaching the first tee. the first guy goes into his golf bag to get a ball and says to his friend "hey, why don't you try this ball." he draws a green golf ball out of his bag. "use this one you can't lose it!" his friend replies, "what do you mean you can't lose it?!!" the first man replies, "i'm serious, you can't lose it. if you hit it into the woods, it makes a beeping sound, if you hit it into the water it produces bubbles, and if you hit it on the fairway, smoke comes up in order for you to find it." obviously, his friend doesn't believe him, but he shows him all the possibilities until he is convinced. the friend says, "wow! that's incredible! where did you get that ball?" the man replies, "i found it." (source: http://www.study-express.ru/humour/funny-stories.shtml, picture: www.google.co.id) seyyed ali keshvari & razieh eslamieh translation analysis of body-related metaphors in the holy koran by yusuf ali, marmaduke pickthal, and thomas irving seyyed ali keshvari & razieh eslamieh translation analysis of body-related metaphors in the holy koran by yusuf ali, marmaduke pickthal, and thomas irving 56 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 83 students’ perspective on foreign teacher’s online teaching skills in intercultural communication class yoga prihatin english education, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas pancaskati tegal, indonesia email: yogaprihatin92@gmail.com apa citation: prihatin, y. (2022). students’ perspective on foreign teacher’s online teaching skills in intercultural communication class. indonesian efl journal, 8(1), pp. 83-90. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v8i1.5591 received: 26-09-2021 accepted: 27-11-2021 published: 30-01-2022 introduction internationalization in post covid 19 era changes the form of visiting scholar in universitas pancasakti tegal. english department of universitas pancasakti tegal invited a morrocan scholar to teach intercultural communication and global englishes. the reason of inviting moroccon scholar is first it is the implementation of mou (memorandum of understanding) between universitas pancasakti tegal and hasan first university morocco. the second reason is intercultural communication crucial to bridge the communication among different countries with different cultural background. it is involving the diversity of at least two different cultures. third, the goal of intercultural communication course is also referred to as the base for international communication in business, health. education, and politics therefore inviting a teacher from different country to teach will develop a better communication skill for the students. learning intercultural communication course to develop intercultural communication skill virtually by using zoom platform taught by a moroccon teacher is very challenging for the second semester students of english department of universitas pancasakti tegal. this is the first time for them having a foreign teacher during their study. they are very excited to welcome the teacher as well as to adapt themselves with their first foreign teacher in distance learning. the purpose of this study was to investigate second semester students’ perspective towards a morroccan teacher’s online skills and competencies, the difficulties and barriers of learning intercultural communication materials taught by a moroccan teacher. it focused on university efl learners’ persepectives, challenges and obstacles during the learning process with a moroccan teacher in the current global pandemic and the possible facilities and solutions that can be delivered to overcome problem findings in the abstract: internationalization in post covid-19 era changes the form of visiting scholar in universitas pancasakti tegal. english education of universitas pancasakti tegal invites a morrocan scholar to teach intercultural communication. the reason of inviting moroccon scholar is first it is the implementation of mou (memorandum of understanding) between universitas pancasakti tegal and hasan first university morocco. the second reason is intercultural communication crucial to bridge the communication among different countries with different cultural background. it is involving the diversity of at least two different cultures. it has created adjustment toward new learning environment for the students. the study investigates students’ perceptions on their first moroccon teacher. the study used 45 second semester students of english education who experienced the first foreign teacher in their study. the findings showed positive perceptions of students on their moroccan teacher’s competencies in online teaching and the learning environment. the teacher has a good capability in technological skills, social and communication skills, design skills, content knowledge skills, pedagogical skills, and management and institutional skills. however, the problem of slow internet connectivity and lack of internet access for some of the students outside the university campus hindered the effectiveness of the online learning environment for a few students. improvement in ict infrastructure and capacity building for lecturers to adopt online learning approach were recommended. keywords: online teaching competences; intercultural communication; students’ perceptions https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i2.4564 yoga prihatin students’ perspective on foreign teacher’s online teaching skills in intercultural communication class 84 future. the significance of the present study is to explore the influence of a foreign teacher online competencies in the covid-19 pandemic on the efl learning process. culture has heavily influenced language teaching and has become the most fundamental document in the teaching of foreign language. teacher’s cultural background difference creates challenges for efl learners in understanding the course such as ethnocentrism, stereotyping, psychological barriers, language barriers, geographical distance, and conflicting values (https://declicinternational.com/6-barriers-to-crosscultural-communications/). having online moroccan teacher for foreign language learners such as english education students of universitas pancasakti tegal need intercultural communication skill to overcome a misunderstanding, conflict, and dissapointment. in order to maintain the communication run well in multicultural classes with diferent cultural background, students need to be intercullturally communicative competent. (tran & duong, 2018) on the other hand, a well established teachers’ competence is crucial in managing the class in exposing students to express their ideas in communication. teacher’s teaching strategies is assumed to influence students’ competence in learning english as a foreign language. studies on teaching strategies have been widely found in the context of teaching english as a foreign language (takac, 2008; mehrgan, 2013; daddi & haq 2014; lubis, 2017) as cited in (zaim, refnaldi, & rahmiyanti, 2019). teachers’ online skills and competencies are classified into six categories: (a) pedagogical skills, (b) content skills, (c) design skills, (d) technological skills, (e) management and institutional skills, and (f) social and communication skills (albrahim, 2020). those skills are used to overcome the problems and challenges faced by students in a multicultural virtual class. sucessful online teaching requires teachers’ collaboration with the students in communication. to know the influences of teachers’ online skills and competencies, it very important to know students’ point of view as the feedback for future improvement in online teaching especially when they are taught by a foreign teacher. the student perspective is especially important when new teaching approaches are used and when new technologies are being introduced (arthur, 2009; crews & butterfield, 2014; van wart, ni, ready, shayo, & court, 2020) cited in (van wart et al., 2020). pedagogical skills a teacher needs pedagogical skills to teach students, those skills involve teaching method, classroom management, designing appropriate lesson plan, and the assessment of the students (rahman, tambi, & anny, 2020). to achieve the goals of learning, a teacher uses their pedagogical skills to improve the quality of learning process in an online and off line classroom. it is indeed very challenging for a teacher to maintain students’ motivation, to understand materials especially in online learning, to keep them interested in learning is also a hard task for teacher during online class. pedagogical skills help teachers to manage the class, to use the appropriate teaching method, to arrange the lesson plan, and to have effective interaction with students. smith et al. (2016) cited in (rahman et al., 2020) pedagogical skills contribute to make pupils believe in their individual competency, capability to complete their coursework magnificently, ability to judge themselves and overcome challenges successfully. content skills content skills or content knowledge skills are necessary for teachers to achieve the learning objectives, as by having those skills teacher will determine approach, learning model and teaching method used during the learning process. teachers’ decisions will impact on effective classroom. it is immensely important to teaching and its improvement. instead of taking pedagogical content knowledge as given (loewenberg ball, thames, & phelps, 2008). when teachers have good content knowledge, it makes them easier to minimize the failure of achieving learning objectives. content knowledge contributes a lot in work of teaching as it is the basic professional knowledge that teachers must have. it has significant implications in understanding teaching and improving learning quality for students in virtual or non-virtual classroom. design skills teachers are demanded to have design skills, in this case is designing syllabus and lesson plan to meet indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 85 the students need in intercultural communication subject. online teachers must be able to understanding and applying instructional design principles, models, and theories (albrahim, 2020). teachers use syllabus and lesson plan to guide them to achieve the learning objectives in intercultural communication class. the documents have many benefits such as providing guidance to teachers, clarifying the learning objectives for teachers, improving the quality of lessons, enabling visualization of the entire teaching process and making learning easier for students. a properly designed lesson plan also helps teacher to teach properly. teacher is able to manage the class and to use the time effectively to know students’ comprehension toward learning materials. technological skills the pandemic all over the world changes traditional teaching, off line teaching into online teaching which requires teachers’ technological competence in learning process. teachers encounter many issues due to technological knowledge and use during online teaching. the problem of better-preparing teacher education students to use digital technologies effectively and productively in schools is an enduring issue (guzman and nussbaum 2009; otero et al. 2005; sutton 2011) cited in (falloon, 2020). teachers have some issues regarding their technological skills especially teachers in remote area. they have been struggling in handling these issues. management and institutional skills a teacher is a manager of his class therefore management skill is essential in planning, organizing and running the class well. decision making is included in classroom management in which it is used for not only maintaining a well run classroom but also building a successful interaction turn taking to understand students comprehension toward learning materials. educational management is as the process concerned with using methods, principles and practices to establish, develop and execute the goals, policies, plans and procedures necessary to attain the objectives of education (akpan, 2020). classroom management is a part of educational management in general. organizing and running an on line classroom skill is a significant role of a teacher, how they manage the classroom for successful and meaningful learning process. learning objectives can be achieved well when a teacher is able to maintain best and enjoyable teaching environment. an online teacher needs to promote students’ motivation and interest during the class therefore teacher will be able to engage students to be active in the classroom. the ability of teachers to organize classrooms and manage the behavior of their students is critical to achieving positive educational outcomes (oliver & reschly, 2007). social and communication skills social and communication skills are very crucial for teachers in transferring the information to students need. both verbal and nonverbal communication are used by teachers to convey and understand the messages to the students as well as to the school policy makers and parents. teachers need to communicate well especially during in the classroom. it is teachers’ social and communication skills that greatly determine the successful learning process. effective teaching depends upon the teachers’ knowledge, method, and style of teacher communication skills (khan, khan, zia-ul-islam, & khan, 2017). a good communication skill affects classroom interaction as good communication skill brings comfortable and meaningful learning process. students teachers collaboration is vital in determining the successful and valuable classroom context to dig students critical thinking toward materials understanding or comprehending. challenges faced by students in online learning online learning encounters several problems in the implementation. both students and teacher face the difficulties and challenges in online learning. the problems are slowing down the successful learning process and the desired outcomes. there are various problems including support system, time management, and independent learning (barcenas, j.m. & bibon, 2020). support system is closely related to parental support at home of physiological needs to the academic requirements of students; time management is managing time between non academics and academic matters; and independent learning is cognitive level of students to understand learning materials independently. the better is students’ cognitive level, the better is his understanding but it is supported by infrastructure or equipment needed. the infrastructure at home yoga prihatin students’ perspective on foreign teacher’s online teaching skills in intercultural communication class 86 owned by students determine well run online learning, mobile phone, personal computer, and internet connection must be owned by the students for online class. students in low poverty level family will find difficult in providing personal infrastructure. this is the biggest problem in online learning. method the aim of the study was to students of english education experiences of online classes during covid-19 pandemic with a moroccan teacher in intercultural communication class. a qualitative case study was adopted to help exploring an indepth online learning process investigation in particular context. data collection semi-structured interviews with open ended were used to collect data from 45 students of english education during the january-may 2021 period. the question prompts for the semi-structured interviews were originally composed in english and later translated into bahasa indonesia to make students understand well. seven (7) main interview questions were developed in line with the research objectives to explore teachers’ online skills and competencies. the six main interview question explored a teacher’s competencies on (a) pedagogical skills, (b) content skills, (c) design skills, (d) technological skills, (e) management and institutional skills, and (f) social and communication skills, whereas one question was used to investigate to challenges faced by students in online learning. each interview took 15 minutes for 7 questions using zoom in 12 (twelve) meetings. it was recorded under students’ permission. in answering the questions, students were free to use both languages, bahasa indonesia and english. data analysis the interview data were transcribed then read and cross-checked for accuracy. the data were coded, categorised and analysed based on the six categories of teacher’s competencies mentioned above. to maintain anonymity, the participants were coded as s1 to s45. results and discussion pedagogical skill the findings reveal that most of students have positive attitude or perspectives towards a moroccan teacher’s competences in online teaching. most of the students state that teacher’s competence on pedagogical skill meets their expectation. only 2 students out of 45 students stated that the assessment needs to be improved by using presentation rubrics. q: “what do you think of teacher’s pedagogical skills in intercultural communication class in terms of teaching method, classroom management, designing appropriate lesson plan, and the assessment of the students?” s2: “i love his pedagogical skills especially they way he teaches us. it is fun and enjoyable for online learning class.” s10: “oh he is good in teaching us. i can understand well. he manages the class so good...” s16: “we study online but it is ok. he is good in explaining. he listen and explain us patiently when we don’t understand. we like him!” s32: “i like having interaction with the teacher. he is very patiently listening to our idea.” s33: “he is on time, very well management. i can uderstand the materials that is the point.” the pedagogical skills include the management of classroom, knowledge regarding different theories of learning, and motivating the students (rahman et al., 2020). moroccan teacher’s pedagogical skill or in other words instructional method skill impacts the class to run well especially his ability in engaging students in meaningful interaction, and managing classroom is very important as the students need to focus to the learning in virtual classroom. teacher is aptitude to plan, initiate, lead and develop teaching in both general and subject-specific knowledge of student learning that it finds very challenging condition in a virtual room. content knowledge skills teacher’s content knowledge skill has a significant influence in creating successful learning process. successful learning process means it is successfully achieving the learning objectives stated in the lesson plan of a virtual intercultural communication classroom. all students believe that their moroccan teacher has good content knowledge. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 87 q: “please state your point of view of teacher’s content knowledge clearly, do you think that your teacher explains the topic materials well? is it comprehensible for you?” s6: “yes, i can understand well. it is easy enough for me. he explained well.” s10: “i ask him very often and he always patiently explains until i get the point of the lesson.” s15: “i love when he explains what the students need to do. excellent! it is easy for me.” s20: “he is open minded and he has good knowledge of the topic given.” there are aspects of teachers content knowledge that predict student achievement more than others (loewenberg ball et al., 2008). when the students understand well the materials in learning process, it is very relevant to their achievement. in other words, when teacher’s knowledge is good, it will be easier for students to have interaction in expressing their ideas in the classroom. design skills design skill has important impact in the classroom as the whole activities must be based on the lesson plan to achieve the learning objectives therefore the assessment made for the students also designed based on the learning objectives. designing a lesson plan for online teacher is not an easy task since the interaction in the learning process is not in person interaction. in designing an online class, teacher needs to consider the learning model, learning approach and strategies used in the learning process. q: “do you think that teacher is able organizing and presenting the learning materials in different formats; understanding and applying instructional design principles, models, and theories in teaching the subject?” s5: “he is good enough in teaching as he presented the easy materials that we can understand.” s6: “i think the teacher has designed the class well.” s19: “i like the way he teaches us especially when we have questions about the learning materials.” s29: “yes, he is so nice teacher. i love him. that’s it.” s45: “yeaa, i think he has applied a good learning model for us. i like it and it is enjoyable class or may be because this is the first time for us to have a foreign teacher. we are so excited. he listened well what we needed in the classroom.” the findings show that a moroccan teacher hold a proper design skills. he also used students feedback by listening their needs to improve the quality of his online teaching and to make students felt comfortable to comprehend the materials as stated by (albrahim, 2020) using students’ previous feedback to develop and design courses and assess the course design quality is necessary for every online teacher. technological skills mastering the use of various technological advances is like an obligation for online teacher since he relies on the technology in teaching the students. teacher needs to keep updating with the use of diverse teaching tools and platforms. q: “how do you tell your teacher’s technological skills?” s3: “he is so good in technological skill.” s6: “he is great using technological tool for teaching. i think he master it.” s7: “amazing teacher! so far there is no technological problem but my internet connection is not good sometimes.” s15: “he is better and well prepared for using any platforms.” s29: “i like him, he is good for handling technological matters in teaching us.” s30: “he is best for using teaching tools. great!” the findings show that a moroccan teacher has a good quality in digital competence. a successful online class requires teacher’s digital competences since the class heavily depends on those competences in using learning tools and platforms related to technological advances. a qualified teacher must be able to make use all various learning tool to predict the problems not only internet connection but students problem in using the platform and learning tools during the online learning process. a broadly-based teacher digital competence framework is introduced, which teacher educators have an important part to play in implementing through modelling and deliberate planning and teaching (falloon, 2020). management and institutional skills yoga prihatin students’ perspective on foreign teacher’s online teaching skills in intercultural communication class 88 classroom management is critical to establish an efficient and effective online teaching learning process. it influences students’ behavior during the class. a good classroom management will benefit for keeping students’ motivation and interest throughout the learning process. q: “how does teacher manage the classroom? do you feel interested and motivated during the learning process?” s6: “i am very motivated to learn when he teaches me.” s8: “enjoy the class and i learn a lot how to communicate with people from different cultural background.” s17: “yea, such a nice class! i want to him to teach me the whole semester!” s19: “i love the interaction part, it is lovely and fun. he manages the class well.” s24: “i have fun and it is very challenging and interesting class.” s35: “i don’t feel bored and i enjoy it. i know many new things about intercultural communication because i learn a lot the materials.” the finding shows that a moroccan teacher has the capability in classroom management since most of the students enjoy and have a good motivation and interest during the learning process. when students are motivated well, the outcomes will be better attained. this is very critical to create fruitful classroom environment because a bad classroom management has huge impacts on students’ behavior. improved teacher preparation and professional development in classroom management are critical parts of the solution (oliver & reschly, 2007). social and communication skills the following are students’ responses regarding their teacher’s communication competences. q: “how does your teacher communicate with you in the classroom?” s6: “we communicate well; he helps me a lot when i fail to understand the materials.” s7: “i ask a lot and he answers me well.” s10: “he talks to me in nice intonation and explain well when i ask him.” s18: “questions and answers run well. amazing!” s35: “it is easy to know the idea of his talks.” s40: “i grasp his message well when he speaks to me. nice conversation….” the findings show that a moroccan teacher has a good communication skills. all the students stated that their teacher would listen to them patiently and solve their difficulties in learning by explaining and creating enjoyable interaction between students and teacher. effective communication occurs only when both sides understand well the idea of the message conveyed by the speaker and the listener. teacher’s communication skills determine efficacious learning activities. teacher communication skills are important for a teacher in delivery of education to students (khan, khan, zia-ul-islam, & khan, 2017). problems faced by students in online learning the last question is about problems faced by students in intercultural communication class. the purpose to find out what kind of difficulties that they mostly met. q: “what are your problems in online intercultural communication class?” s9: “my internet connection is on and off and that makes me difficult to join the class.” s15: “i live in suburb so i must get the place with good internet connections.” s18: “i don’t have pc at home so i use my cell phone and it is difficult to get the signal. i don’t know what happens. it could be my cell phone or something else.” s30: “well yaaaa, when it rains heavily, my connection is bad.” s35: “i think i will be able to join the class the whole semester if the signal of my internet is good enough.” the findings show that problem met by the student is mostly internet connection. they state the most important thing for them in online class is a stable internet connection. they even coping the problem by finding best place to get good connection for their class. bad internet connection interruption creates a very bad influential factor on the learning process and the results since the class heavily relies on the internet connection, internetbased technology now plays a significant role in education (hui, pan, & tan, 2001). conclusion the findings of the study revealed that students’ perceptions on teacher’s online teaching competences was generally positive. students percieved teacher’s pedagogical skills to plan, indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 89 initiate, lead and develop teaching was well established. his proficient competence of content knowledge helped students comprehending teaching materials. the online intercultural class was enjoyable and fun since teacher’s online skills on design skills and classroom management was good. the teacher was able to design the lesson plan based on the students’ needs. in designing skill, students viewed their moroccan teacher showed good performance making all the activites in online class were in line with lesson plan therefore it was easier to create the assessment for the students. teacher’s technological skills reflected well in using information technology for teaching, he managed the class effectively involving his capablity well to do social and communication in online classroom. references akpan, c. (2020). educational management. in-patient child psychiatry, (january 2016), 154–164. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203194195-24 albrahim, f. a. (2020). online teaching skills and competencies. tojet: the turkish online journal of educational technology, 19(1), 9–20. barcenas, j.m. & bibon, m. (2020). coping mechanism of island school students on the problems encountered in modular distance learning. paper knowledge . toward a media history of documents, (2). falloon, g. (2020). from digital literacy to digital competence: the teacher digital competency (tdc) framework. educational technology research and development, 68(5), 2449–2472. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-020-09767-4 hui, k.-l., pan, s., & tan, b. (2001). the impact of internet on education: towards an emerging paradigm. pacific asia conference on information systems(pacis 2001 proceedings), (october), 19. khan, a., khan, s., zia-ul-islam, s., & khan, m. (2017). communication skills of a teacher and its role in the development of the students’ academic success. journal of education and practice, 8(1), 18–21. loewenberg ball, d., thames, m. h., & phelps, g. (2008). content knowledge for teaching: what makes it special? journal of teacher education, 59(5), 389–407. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487108324554 oliver, r. m., & reschly, d. j. (2007). effective classroom management: teacher preparation and professional development. national comprehensive center for teacher quality, 1–24. retrieved from http://tqcenter.learningpt.org/topics/effectiveclassr oommanagement.pdf rahman, m. s., tambi, f., & anny, n. z. (2020). the importance of enhancing pedagogical skills through continuing professional development. international journal of research in business and social science (21474478), 9(4), 121–129. https://doi.org/10.20525/ijrbs.v9i4.757 tran, t. q., & duong, t. m. (2018). the effectiveness of the intercultural language communicative teaching model for efl learners. asian-pacific journal of second and foreign language education, 3(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40862-018-0048-0 van wart, m., ni, a., medina, p., canelon, j., kordrostami, m., zhang, j., & liu, y. (2020). integrating students’ perspectives about online learning: a hierarchy of factors. international journal of educational technology in higher education, 17(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41239020-00229-8 zaim, m., refnaldi, r., & rahmiyanti, r. (2019). students’ perceptions on teachers’ teaching strategy and their effects towards students’ achievement. international journal of research in counseling and education, 4(1), 28. https://doi.org/10.24036/00207za0002 yoga prihatin students’ perspective on foreign teacher’s online teaching skills in intercultural communication class 90 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 53 a critical review of english essay writing in studies of critical thinking, reading habits, and sentence structure mastery ikhfi imaniah universitas muhammadiyah tangerang email: ikhfiimaniah@umt.ac.id apa citation: imaniah, i. (2022). a critical review of english essay writing in studies of critical thinking, reading habits, and sentence structure mastery. indonesian efl journal, 8(1), pp. 53-62. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v8i1.5588 received: 25-09-2021 accepted: 22-11-2021 published: 30-01-2022 introduction writing skills are the most important part of academic life for students because writing skills require students to be able to think critically and develop the contents of their academic writing (al mubarak, 2017). however, academic writing is considered as a difficult activity for students, because the subject matter that will be reviewed by students is related to current issues. in this case, students need to understand the concepts, goals and processes of academic writing so they can see different contexts in academic writing. based on the results of preliminary observations on the fifth semester students of the english education study program faculty of teacher training and education, university of muhammadiyah tangerang on essay writing subject, students’ academic writing skills in this semester are writing essays that require students to be able to think critically and develop their writing ideas supported by evidence or facts so that the writing they make can be justified (rohayati, 2017). based on observations, there are still many fifth semester students unable to develop their main ideas and support their writing with evidence and facts, so this problem is the basis of this research. researcher sees that they cannot develop written ideas because their critical thinking is still not optimal, whereas academic writing besides requiring good writing skills must also maximize their critical thinking (lin & lin, 2018). if students can think critically, then they will be able to develop issues, provide responses, reasons, data, evidence and their opinions about the writing that they develop into an essay (rohayati, 2017). another aspect of critical thinking that influences student’s essay writing is clarity in providing arguments, logic and accuracy in providing evidence and examples relevant to the topic, as well as details to explain an issue (rohayati, 2017). fifth semester students of english education study programs are still poor in providing data, giving examples and explaining in detail about the issues of a particular topic. they still do not realize the importance of giving an appropriate argument, developing ideas and analyzing the topics they develop into an essay. this is certainly very related to the reading habits of students, because their reading habits have an influence on academic success that will be achieved and become the basic abstract: in academic life, writing skill is the most important part for students because writing skill requires students to be able to think critically and develop the contents of their academic writing. academic writing skill at university level usually develop essay writing skill which is focus on analyzing, developing ideas, and opinion in a way that is by providing examples and evidence which can support the essay writing. however, in reality there are still many students unable to develop their main ideas and support their essay writing with evidence and facts. in this study, the samples tested were 64 semester v students using quantitative causality survey methods with path analysis to test each variable. tests and questionnaires are included in this research. findings show that essay writing skill simultaneously can be influenced by critical thinking, reading habits and sentence structure mastery. these correlations have implications for the research designs and measures used, and how data were collected. many studies describe the correlation in global way but none describe the reflection of essay writing rubric on student’s critical thinking. recommendation for future research is provided. keywords: essay writing skills; critical thinking; reading habits; and mastery of sentence structure. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i2.4564 ikhfi imaniah a critical review of english essay writing in studies of critical thinking, reading habits, and sentence structure mastery 54 goal of an education (wenr, 2019; tegegne, 2017). the level of education at the university, which is the most intense stage of formal education, is the period when students are required to frequently do reading activities (wenr, 2019). during reading activities require students to develop their critical language skills in writing, reading and speaking (fatiloro, et.al 2017) when reading is the basis for getting information and transforming it into a habit, this is called reading habit. reading habit is the act of reading that is carried out throughout life in a constant, orderly and critical manner so that this becomes a need and source of pleasure for individuals (gorvett, 2019). if students are accustomed to reading, it will enhance their experience and knowledge (fatiloro, et al., 2017). so, it can be concluded that reading habits affect the results of student’s essay writing, as has been explained that writing essays requires students to be able to think critically, develop issues, provide responses, reasons, data, evidence and their opinions; it is the result of their knowledge of the topic obtained through reading habits. so, the results in this study can see the effect of critical thinking directly on student reading habits that have an impact on the results of their essay writing. however, to be able to produce good essay writing not only develop ideas, there is also a need for sentence structure mastery because if the sentence structure developed in student’s essay writing does not have good coherence and cohesion then the meaning received by the reader will be biased (faradhibah & nur, 2017). so, the mastery of sentence structure is very influential on improving students’ essay writing skills. this is reinforced by the essay writing assessment used by lecturers supporting the essay writing course; include: 1) organization; 2) voice; 3) word choice; 4) sentence structure, grammar, mechanics & spelling; 5) argument & originality (mayuni, et.al. 2020; imaniah, 2021). based on the 5 essay writing criteria for sentence structure, grammar, writing mechanism and spelling, it becomes an important element to produce an english essay because if students make mistakes in preparing english sentence structure, ideas or opinions developed will not produce good messages (unsw, 2020). therefore, this study tests the path analysis in order to explain the effect of critical thinking, reading habits, and mastery of the sentence structure on student’s essay writing skill. common european framework of reference (cefr) for languages level of student’s english essay writing the researcher used cefr to measure the level of english language proficiency of the fifth semester students of the english education study program at the faculty of teacher and training education, especially in developing essay writing. the advantage of cefr is that it can determine the level of language proficiency and help colleague to describe the level of proficiency required by existing standards, test, and examinations in order to facilitate comparisons between different qualification system (imaniah, 2021). based on the results of the validation instrument test conducted on students in writing english essays and refer to table 1. regarding the level of students’ essay writing skills (council of europe, nd), the researcher concluded that the level of english essay writing was at b1 level as a beginner level. table 1. level of essay writing skills (council of europe, nd.) level of proficiency explanation c2 can produce essays complex, clear, either , article or essay that generated present case, or give critical appreciation of proposals or literary works. can provides a logical structure appropriate and effective which helps readers find important points. c1 can write exposition complex subject and a clear, structured, underlined the important issues that are relevant. can broaden and support a broad perspective with additional points, reasons and examples that are relevant. b2 can write essays or reports that develop arguments systematically by highlighting key points and relevant supporting details precisely. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 55 level of proficiency explanation can evaluate various ideas or solutions to a problem . can write essays or reports that develop arguments, give reasons to support or oppose certain points of view and explain the advantages and disadvantages of various choices. can synthesize information and arguments from a number of source. b1 can write short and simple essays on interesting topics. can summarize, report, and give his opinion on the accumulation of factual information about routine and non-routine matters that are prevalent in his field with confidence. can write an essay very brief, reporting and give factual information and state the reasons for what has been described. a2 no descriptor available a1 no descriptor available at level b1, fifth semester students can write simple short essays on selected topics by giving their opinions based on information obtained but have not been able to develop strong arguments to support or oppose certain points of view and they have been able to synthesize information and arguments from a number of sources. after knowing the level of proficiency in writing english essays of students, the researcher then determined the criteria for the assessment of essay writing skills in accordance with the level of proficiency and variable criteria in this study. assessing english essay writing by developing student’s critical thinking in developing an english essay, students eager to get the best result, so they need to make sure everything is right: the way they write, the use of evidence, and critical analysis. students also need to change and edit their essay writing to ensure there are no mistakes. so, to get the best result there are several things that must be considered, they are: 1) organization, 2) voice, 3) word choice, 4) sentence structure, grammar, mechanics & spelling, 5) argument & originality (mayuni, et.al. 2020; imaniah, 2021). in developing an essay, knowledge of the structure of its composition is needed, yet the results of the writing are expressed into interesting writings that are readable and relevant to the existence of examples, evidence and strong arguments (imaniah, 2021). when describing the contents of essay writing, it can be seen the writer’s knowledge or experience in providing examples and elaborating between the knowledge and experience provided with the evidence contained. evidence must be strong and reliable, because evidence is used as a reference to strengthen the essay developed. furthermore, in developing an essay, the preparation of sentence structure, grammar, writing and spelling mechanisms are important points in producing good messages because essays are developed using english. so, the choice of words in developing an essay must be precise, natural and not biased, and provide good variations of writing in accordance with the knowledge and experience of the author. based on the presentation on the essay writing skills assessment, the researcher concluded those five essay writing skills assessment criteria are in accordance with the process and structure of a good essay writing so that it can be used as a reference criterion for writing english essays. in addition, the essay writing assessment also includes 8 criteria, namely: 1) understanding the audience; 2) introduction; 3) thesis / arrangement of main ideas; 4) contents / evidence and examples; 5) closing paragraph; 6) structuring sentences; 7) connecting language; 8) grammar and spelling (beare, 2018). in understanding the audience, the writer must be able to demonstrate a keen understanding of the target audience and use appropriate vocabulary and language. anticipate the possibility of questions and overcome this problem with evidence related to the likelihood of readers’ assumption. so, in presenting the introductory paragraph, the writer starts with statements that are both of interest to the reader and appropriate for the audience. the introductory paragraph should contain the main idea clear about the main idea with clear suggestions on how the content of the essay will support the main idea of this. in short, the researcher concludes writing essays means the rules that systematically use a reference book as a reference the idea of writing so that in the ikhfi imaniah a critical review of english essay writing in studies of critical thinking, reading habits, and sentence structure mastery 56 process of writing an essay is not based on the writer’s description, but a synthesis of various quotations theory and any relevant examples. however, the essay evaluation described by staffaroni only covers 4 aspects of assessment, namely: 1) ideas / analysis; 2) development of essay content; 3) preparation of essays; and 4) use of language (staffaroni, 2018). the details can be described as follows: idea / analysis. the writer produces arguments that critically involve various perspectives on a given problem. this thesis of argument reflects nuance and accuracy in thought and purpose. this argument establishes and uses insightful contexts for the analysis of problems and their perspectives. this analysis examines the implications, complexities and tensions, and / or the underlying values and assumptions. development of essay content. the development of ideas deepens insight and broadens context. this is integrated with skilled thinking and illustrations that effectively convey the importance of arguments. qualifications and complications enrich and support the ideas and analysis of an essay. preparation of essay. the response shows a skillful essay preparation strategy. the response was unified by an idea or purpose control, and the development of logical idea to increase the effectiveness argument by the author. transitions between and within paragraphs strengthen the relationship of a writer’s ideas. use of language. the use of language increases the quality of an argument. the structure of sentences varies consistently and clearly. style and list choices, including sound and tone, are strategic and effective. while some minor errors in grammar, usage, and mechanics may be present, they do not change the reader’s understanding. idea and arguments are needed in developing an essay, the student needs to refer to a variety of books, journals, and other materials to support the ideas and arguments that will they develop in an essay. not just developing an idea and argument, but they also have to understand the rules of writing an essay as a guide so that their essay is more directed. the essay grading rubric becomes necessary to ensure that students write and develop essays within their limits. so, things that must be considered in compiling an essay are: 1) focus / detail, 2) content, 3) ideas, 4) word choice, 5) sentence structure, grammar, writing & spelling mechanism. assessing critical thinking measuring students’ critical thinking becomes the most important part of knowing their literacy skills. besides identifying the factors that influence the development of students’ critical thinking, it also needs to be done to prepare students to become graduates who are superior and ready to compete with other universities (indah, 2017). however, it is not sufficient for the students to know that critical thinking is the key skills of reading and writing, they also need to know why and how to think critically useful for their general development as a great student. in this way, students do not necessarily adopt the academic conventions of a western university, but consciously results of tests of critical thinking provide the greatest benefit from their learning outcomes. because critical thinking tests assess the ability of students to make conclusions and assumptions and require them to think logically by giving strong arguments (glaser & watson, 2015). the critical thinking test adopted from glaser and watson consists of five aspects: 1) interpreting information; 2) assumptions; 3) deduction; 4) argumentation; and 5) conclusions. in interpreting information, questions consist of an information section, followed by a series of conclusions. students are instructed to assume all information in that section is true. the task is to assess whether each of the conclusions proposed logically provide reasonable information provided in the paragraph or not. while the assumption is something that is assumed or taken for granted. each statement will be followed by a series of assumptions put forward and students must decide which assumptions are logically justified based on the evidence in the statement. furthermore, in the measurement of critical thinking, students must be able to draw conclusions from general conditions; inference from general to special, this is called deduction. a statement is followed by a series of conclusions suggested. here, students must assume that statement is true. after reading each conclusion below the statement, the students must decide whether they think that the specific conclusion follows from the statement given or not. then students are also able to provide indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 57 arguments when making important decisions, it will be useful to be able to distinguish between strong arguments and weak arguments. strong arguments will be directly related to questions, while weak arguments are not directly related to questions, or not very important. weak arguments might also be related to small aspects of the question, or correlations with causation (incorrectly assuming that because two things are related, they cause each other to occur). the last point is making conclusions drawn from observed or suspected facts. the questions in this part of the test begin with a statement of fact that must be assumed to be true. after each statement, will be presented with conclusions that may be drawn from the facts in the statement. analyze each conclusion separately and decide on the level of truth. in this series of questions, each question is followed by a series of arguments. for this section students must determine whether the statements submitted are strong arguments or weak arguments (glaser & watson, 2015). based on five aspects of the critical thinking test developed by glaser & watson, the researcher concluded that the measurement of critical thinking trains students to be able to interpret information, analyze and provide assumptions and arguments according to the level of critical thinking possessed by students. this is in accordance with the process of critical thinking, namely: 1) interpretation, 2) evaluation, 3) analysis, 4) synthesis, and 5) reasoning. it can be concluded that critical thinking is the ability or skill in selecting, evaluating, analyzing, and reflecting questions, conclusions and assessments. critical thinking is demonstrated through the ability of students to identify problems and assumptions, recognize important relationships, make correct conclusions, evaluate evidence or authority, and draw conclusions. in short, critical thinking is the ability to review a situation or problem by interpreting information, giving assumptions, formulating something, describing arguments, and generating conclusions on what is analyzed systematically. assessing reading habits there are four aspects that can measure the scale of individual habits in reading, namely: (1) the frequency of reading, this greatly determines the tendency of one’s reading activities (loan & shah, 2017; ukoha, 2018). (2) book ownership, individuals who have the habit of reading tend to have a large collection of personal books according to their reading interest (erdem, 2015). (3). enjoy reading activities will be fun if someone likes to read and has become a thing that is often done in everyday life. (4) the selection of reading themes becomes an important component in reading activities, for examples politics, academics, or reading for fun things like comics or novels (davidovitch et al., 2016). reading habits measurement can be explained through four aspects of reading habit criteria including; reading frequency, book ownership, enjoying reading activities, and selection of reading themes. furthermore, aspects of measuring reading habits can also be seen in four criteria, namely: 1) student behavior in reading activities, 2) free time provided for reading, 3) the language they choose in reading activities, 4) the purpose of reading activities (loan, 2017) student behavior towards reading activities is very necessary to form a habit, they must take time to read by choosing the theme of reading they like. this explains that reading habits shape the personality of students and help them develop and create new ideas. reading activities need to be directed into fun activities so that students can get used to reading. besides reading habits can also be measured to explain the extent to which students are accustomed to reading by measuring the frequency of their reading activities, see the ownership of books they have, whether they enjoy the reading activities, as well as the reading themes they read. indicator of sentence structure mastery when writing in a foreign language, it is important to know and review the order of words in the sentences made. often students translate directly from their mother tongue and don’t notice that the arrangement of the elements doesn’t have to be the same. for example, in english sentence structure, subjects and verbs must coexist, because if not it will be possible to not be able to understand the meaning of sentences (palazon & aleson, nd). this explains that not all grammar in grammatical aspects is universal. a clear way to determine what aspects of sentence are mastered from students’ english is by measuring their mastery of sentence by giving a test. sentence mastery indicators consist of: 1) sentence ambiguity, 2) preparation of the sentence ikhfi imaniah a critical review of english essay writing in studies of critical thinking, reading habits, and sentence structure mastery 58 movement, 3) knowledge of phrases, 4) identify phrases or clauses in sentences, 5) identify the sentence structure, 6) working with other languages, 7) complete sentences (fabb, nd; lincoln university, 2018). based on the indicators of sentence structure mastery, it is necessary to have knowledge about the ambiguity of sentence structure, the preparation of good sentence structure, knowledge of phrases, being able to identify phrases or clauses in sentences, identifying the composition of good sentence structure, distinguishing the arrangement of english with indonesia, and completing sentence structure well. as for the grammar assessment sentence rubric, which need to be considered in mastering sentence structure are: 1) capital letters, sentences must begin with capital letters and have no capitalization errors; 2) spelling, all words spelled correctly; 3) punctuation, sentences have the correct end punctuation (commas and other punctuation are used correctly); 4) grammar; grammatically correct sentences without errors; 5) conjunctions, compound sentence used with appropriate conjunctions and correct punctuation as well as complex sentence used correctly with the appropriate dependent and independent clause (rcampus, nd). so, this gives an understanding that a sentence has a grammatical rule that must be understood. in linguistics, grammar is called syntax or sentence structure. if students master the rules of english sentences, students can arrange english sentences well. in composing a sentence in english, students need to pay attention to the indicators of mastery of sentence structure, among others: 1) ambiguity of sentence structure, sentences that are compiled are correct and do not have ambiguity so that the meaning contained in the sentence can be interpreted properly, 2) arrangement of sentences, students use appropriate conjunctions so that in composing a sentence there is cohesion and coherence between paragraphs that are developed, 3) knowledge of phrases, students are not confused between phrases and clauses in preparing a sentence, and 4) identify phrases or clauses in sentences. method the method used in this study is the quantitative survey method of causality. causality assumes that the value of an interdependent variable is the reason for the value of a dependent variable (allen, 2017). this study examines and analyzes the relationship between research variables and measures one variable with another variable. the research variables consisted of four variables: (1) critical thinking, (2) reading habits, (3) mastery of sentence structure, and (4) english essay writing skills. findings and discussion the following results are the selection of data through research instruments that have been tested. the results of the full descriptive analysis are presented in the following table: table 2. summary of statistical calculation description variable n descriptive statistic min max mean sd y 64 25 90 70,09 12,833 x1 64 13 50 22,48 5,451 x2 64 49 88 67,19 7,831 x3 64 15 90 52,89 18,366 student’s performance on english essay writing, critical thinking, reading habits, and sentence structure mastery indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 59 figure 1. student’s performance on english essay writing, critical thinking, reading habits, and sentence structure mastery hypothesis testing table 3. summary of hypothesis testing result with spss direct effect between variable path coefficient (pij) tcount pvalue conclusion x1 to y (py1) 0,111 2,207 0,023 sig. x2 to y (py2) 0,130 2,113 0,027 sig. x3 to y (py3) 0,364 3,301 0,002 sig. x1 to x3 (p31) 0,455 2,115 0,027 sig. x2 to x3 (p32) 0,650 2,419 0,007 sig. x1 to x2 (p21) 0,815 2,644 0,005 sig. based on the data of hypothesis testing, critical thinking is closely related to the essay writing process, because when students write they must use ideas and be able to solve problems by combining their linguistic knowledge and abilities (rn indah & kusuma, 2016). critical thinking will provide opportunities for students to interpret their opinions by developing ideas, testing the information obtained, and concluding and evaluating their arguments. in this study found that critical thinking had a direct positive effect on english essay writing skills. this supports the first hypothesis proposed in this study which proves that there is a direct influence of critical thinking on english essay writing skills. thus, the higher critical thinking skills of students the better their english essay writing skills. it can be concluded that critical thinking is very closely related to the essay writing process, because when students write they must use ideas and be able to solve problems by combining their linguistic knowledge and abilities). at the same time of writing an essay, they are also required to think critically by providing strong and logical argumentation and analysis (lin & lin, 2018). the influence of critical thinking on essay writing skills is very significant because if students are able to think critically then the essay writing produced will have clarity in argumentation, logical and relevant to the topic as well as details in providing examples and evidence as references. moreover, reading habits had a direct positive effect on english essay writing skills and supported the second hypothesis proposed in this study, which was to prove that there was a direct effect of reading habits on english essay writing skills. thus, students must be accustomed to reading to be able to improve their essay writing skills. the findings of this study refuse the results of research conducted by lestari, sofendi, and petrus that reading habits negatively affect writing skills. when students’ reading habits improve, their writing skills will decrease and vice versa (lestari et al., 2018). however, current research supports the results of khoirunnisa and safitri’s research that reading habits have a positive effect on improving students’ academic writing skills (khoirunnisa & safitri, 2018). thus, as students’ reading habits improve, ikhfi imaniah a critical review of english essay writing in studies of critical thinking, reading habits, and sentence structure mastery 60 their writing skills will increase and vice versa. writing activities at the university level usually write essays that are discursive and analytical. they need to write essays according to the correct process and to refer carefully and accurately by looking for sources of reading through the internet, campus libraries or academic databases. looking for references is much related to reading activities because this is the basis for consideration to get information. if students are accustomed to reading, it will enhance their experience and knowledge. so that if students are more accustomed to reading, then they will be able to develop ideas and ideas as well as their knowledge and experience in the essay. the third hypothesis proposed in this study which proves that there is a positive direct effect on the mastery of sentence structure on english essay writing skills. thus, mastering the sentence structure, the better their english essay writing skills. in improving the quality of essay writing, good mastery of sentence is needed, because if the sentence structure developed in student essay writing does not have good coherence and cohesion, the message received by the reader will be biased (faradhibah & nur, 2017). when writing essays in english, it is important to know and review the order of the words in the sentence that was made; otherwise it will be possible to not be able to understand the meaning of the sentence. so there needs to be an understanding of the type of sentence structure. therefore, the current research supports the results of research conducted by pao that knowledge of sentence structure greatly influences writing skills (pao, 2016). the arrangement of english sentences, the subject and verb must coexist, because if not then it will be possible to not be able to understand the meaning of the sentence that has been compiled. this explains that not all grammar in grammatical aspects is universal. a clear way to determine what aspects of sentence are mastered from students’ english is by measuring their mastery of sentence by giving a test. measurement of mastery of english sentence structure requires students to understand the rules of sentence structure in english because the arrangement of elements is different from mother tongue. this gives an understanding that in carrying out the test of mastery of sentence structure requires the ability to think critically, because critical thinking is the key to reading and writing skills that are useful for their general development as students. the fifth hypothesis proposed in this study which proves that there is a direct influence of reading habits on mastery of sentence structure. thus, the more students accustomed to reading, their mastery of sentence structure will increase. the students’ grammar mastery is a result of their reading habits. if students are accustomed to reading, their vocabulary and mastery of sentence structure increases (celik, 2017). in addition, reading activities in english discourse requires students to carry out two activities at the same time, formulating words and sentence structure and constructing combined meanings in the sentence. the sixth hypothesis proposed in this study which proves that there is a direct influence of critical thinking on reading habits. as a skill, critical thinking is not instant knowledge to get someone but sometimes unconsciously everyday life requires a critical thinking process. by training students to be able to think critically will help them in the learning process, improve and consolidate students’ understanding of a subject and give them the opportunity to control their own learning which leads to increased self-confidence. one of the factors increasing student confidence is to have experience and knowledge in a variety of things obtained by reading activities. reading activities and reading habits are the same thing, meaning that there is a need for habituation from an early age to recognize reading activities so that an individual can get used to reading. reading habits possessed by students must be able to improve their critical thinking, because reading activities at the university level are reading activities that criticize a discourse. in this case, teachers are required to help students develop the way their critical thinking, because a number of the issues discussed in class demands critical thinking, students are encouraged to express their views, experience, and knowledge openly and it is obtained by reading habits they have. in addition to provide extensive and deep experience and knowledge, reading habits also support students to achieve their academic success. based on the elaboration of the results, there has been no previous research that has tested the hypothesis of path analysis regarding the influence of critical thinking, reading habits and mastery of indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 61 sentence structure on essay writing skills. so that the results obtained in this study are purely as original studies that provide a thorough and detailed explanation that describes the effect between each variable. conclusion based on the results of research and discussion, it can be concluded the following conclusions of the study: (1) there is a positive direct effect of critical thinking on student’s english essay writing skills which means that the higher student’s critical thinking, the better their english essay writing skills will be. (2) there is a positive direct effect of reading habits on student’s english essay writing skills which gives an understanding that if students are accustomed to reading then their english essay writing skills will increase. (3) there is a positive direct effect on sentence grammar mastery on student’s english essay writing skills, which means that the higher student’s sentence structure mastery, the higher their english essay writing skills. (4) there is a positive direct effect of critical thinking on the mastery of student’s sentence structure, thus providing an understanding that if the student’s critical thinking score is high then they have high score on sentence structure mastery. (5) there is a positive direct effect on reading habits on student’s sentence mastery; this means that the higher student’s reading habits, the higher their sentence mastery will be. (6) there is a positive direct effect on the reading habits of critical thinking of students, it means the higher score of critical thinking of students, the higher their reading habits will be. references abdulkarim, m., haliru, r., & mohammed, a. d. (2015). an assessment of reading habit among secondary school students in kaduna metropolis. iosr journal of humanities and social science ver. ii, 20(10), 12–17. https://doi.org/10.9790/0837-201021217 al mubarak, a. a. (2017). an investigation of academic writing problems level faced by undergraduate students at al imam al mahdi university sudan. english review: journal of english education, 5(2), 175–188. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v5i2.533 allen, mike. (2017). causality. london: sage publications ltd. beare, k. (2018). esl essay writing rubric. retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/esl-essaywriting-rubric-1212374 cambridge university. 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(2017). essay structure (pp. 1–4). pp. 1–4. sydney, australia. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 295 efl student teachers’ perceived knowledge on integrating ict sarlita d. matra english language education, teachers’ training and education faculty, universitas pekalongan, pekalongan central java, indonesia salsabila fitriana english language education, teachers’ training and education faculty, universitas pekalongan, pekalongan central java, indonesia apa citation: matra, s. d., & fitriana, s. (2022). efl student teachers’ perceived knowledge on integrating ict. indonesian efl journal, 8(2), 295-306. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v8i2.6492 received: 15-03-2022 accepted: 19-05-2022 published: 31-07-2022 introduction information and communication technology, in this article we would call it simply as ict, is one of the important tools to decrease the digital divide in the country. ict is used as an umbrella term that includes any communication device or application, encompassing: radio, television, cellular phones, computer and network hardware and software, satellite systems, as well as the various services and applications associated with them, such as video conferencing and distance learning. when technology is integrated into instruction in conjunction with effective teaching practices, it can enrich and enhance teaching and learning processes. with the changes in the nature of education wrought by advances in technology, teachers’ key role in the successful integration of technology into the classroom has gained further significance. therefore, it has become critical to understand the factors affecting teachers’ technology integration. önalan, & gökçe (2020) shows that the present case study conducted with 70 university-level turkish efl teachers still focuses on the factors affecting teachers’ technology integration practices and specifically explores teachers’ knowledge about computer software programs, personal computeruse habits, attitudes toward and self-confidence in integrating computer-based technologies into teaching, and their views about school climate and support. the findings of the study have implications regarding technology integration in the classroom in that teachers need to be provided with ample technology, along with administrative and technical support as well as continuous training specifically designed to address their identified needs in technology use and integration. the transformation from face-to-face teaching to online teaching in this covid-19 pandemic makes abstract: the integration of ict in education forces teachers to be competent in using ict instantly. teachers are required to have qualified in ict competencies. especially in this pandemic era, teachers must have competencies in utilizing technology resource and skill to provide learning effectively both in real and virtual classroom. the purposes of this research are: 1) to find out whether efl student teachers have perceived knowledge on integrating ict after they study ict in elt course or not. 2) to explore how efl student teachers’ perceived knowledge on integrating ict after they study ict in elt course. the participants of this research were thirty-seven (37) student teachers of 5th semester english education department 2021/2022 unikal. the data was collected by giving online questionnaire to the participants. the questionnaire measured the six variables of interests: student teachers’ knowledge on basic ict tools and application, student teachers’ knowledge on theories, skills, strategies of ict tools and application, student teachers’ knowledge on ict online application, student teachers’ knowledge on ethics of using digital information, student teachers’ knowledge on class management skills and student teachers’ knowledge on solving the problem in implementation of ict in elt. in short, the result showed that most of student teachers were able to integrate ict in the classroom, so it can be concluded that student teachers who have a good perceived knowledge can apply the use of ict in a classroom. regardless, the students’ teachers still need to empower themselves to be adaptable in using ict tools in the future. keywords: ict; perceived knowledge; student teacher. sarlita d. matra & salsabila fitriana efl student teachers’ perceived knowledge on integrating ict 296 teachers have no excuse to integrate ict in their teaching. thus, ict becomes the most important tool in educational setting currently. however, fitri (2021) in her research found that only 10% is known about how efl teachers perceived the effectiveness of ict integration in their teaching during this pandemic in indonesia. the results revealed that the majority of efl teachers had positive perception in integrating ict due to its effectiveness. however, it was also reported that lack of internet access, few technical supports from schools, and limited knowledge and training of ict discouraged them in using ict. this study indicated the importance of stakeholders and government supports to promote ict-based teaching and learning by providing adequate technology access and technical supports for efl teachers. technology is an important part in societies (allen, 2019). all countries are effort to implement the technology in all segments, especially in education. technology in education really needs to improve the students’ performance at school. when there is a scarcity of educational resources, ict can provide a medium and a path that bypasses the bottleneck of textbooks production, distribution and updating (unesco, 2014). ict requires the use of teaching and learning process which is student centered can against teacher centered learning. the students are more involved in teaching and learning process as it is more interactive and the students can take part in teaching and learning process. ict is the important tools in enabling students and teachers to learn more effectively. the integration of ict in education makes teachers to be competent in using ict. teachers are required to have qualified in ict competencies. especially in this pandemic era, teachers must have competencies in technology resource and skill to provide learning effectively both in real and virtual classroom. the effective integration of ict into education can be thought to enable effective citizens and workers to acquire functional and critical thinking skills such as information literacy, media literacy, and ict literacy in the 21st century. hence, student teachers should acquire the skills and knowledge essential for ict use in their teaching and learning process, and apply them in their education period and in their professional life. student teachers must have knowledge of ict for their supplies when they face student needs in the next century. as a teacher, they also must be media and information literate to critically assess media texts and information sources. durriyah & zuhdi (2018) found that many student teachers are active users of digital technologies yet they are reluctant to make use of digital technologies for literacy teaching purposes. efforts to prepare student teachers for technology integration are pressingly needed. the reason of pedagogical is to ensure the students have access to imitate teachers, be able to see laboratory demonstration, are taught simple and complex concepts and receive simultaneous education in their location. even though the government plan was appreciable, ict is changing radically. therefore, it is important to assess student teachers’ perceived knowledge in integrating ict. the urge to use ict in teaching and learning builds an effective learning environment, thus transforming the overall teaching and learning process, where, the students deal with knowledge actively, in a self-directed and constructive way. moreover, the students will be more interested when the teaching and learning process using ict which keep up with the times. teachers must have knowledge in integrating ict so that the gap with students not too much differ in how they way to learn in this time. besides that, teachers must be able to have knowledge in other areas, especially in technology. they can deliver their knowledge to students successfully. the ict integration can help students and teachers to improve their quality in education. using ict in right condition, it can useful for teaching and learning process. one of factors influencing learning success is not only the availability of technology, but also the design of pedagogical for effectiveness in using ict. based on park, gardner & thukral as cited in ghaffar (2021) the term of perceived knowledge is used to refer to one’s self-assessment or feeling of knowing the information needed to evaluate knowledge in a class. perceived knowledge can lead to greater feelings of efficacy. unesco (as cited in gandhi & lynch, 2016) aforementioned that teachers’ pedagogical approaches are determined by their knowledge of their own subject. some teachers may choose in integrating ict in their teaching and learning process without having a direct link to the lesson being taught. there is a direct effect of using ict on students when the indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 297 teachers use their knowledge of the subject and how the students understand the subject. the researcher in this case is also believed that it is necessary for the teachers to have a positive perception towards ict which in return, prove as an advantage in the implementation of ict. they also believed that the teachers’ positive perception towards ict will help them to improve their skills and would allow them to impart the knowledge to students easier. it means that teachers must have knowledge and positive perception towards ict so that the students can more understand the materials that have been given to them. moreover, the students enjoy in joining learning process in class using ict. by using ict, teachers can motivate students and grow their interest in learning. it also can help the teachers to provide feedback. moreover, nowadays students have competitive mind, so the teachers must have the knowledge of the subject, which is can be done through ict. teachers’ and students’ perceptions of their own knowledge have an important role in shaping their perceptivity. the greater one’s feeling of knowing an issue, the more time one wants to spend working on that issue. perceived knowledge also is involved for behavior. attitudes are more predictive for behavior when they are associated with high rather than low levels of perceived knowledge of a topic. student teachers’ perceived knowledge on integrating ict can divided into six main issues, namely: student teachers’ knowledge on basic ict tools and application, student teachers’ knowledge on theories, skills, strategies of ict tools and application, student teachers’ knowledge on ict online application, student teachers’ knowledge on ethics of using digital information, student teachers’ knowledge on class management skills and student teachers’ knowledge on solving the problem in implementation of ict in elt. method this study is classified into qualitative research. qualitative research is effective in obtaining culturally specific information about the values, opinions, behaviors, and social contexts in particular populations. to be more specific, the type of this research is case study. qualitative case study is a research methodology that helps in exploration of a phenomenon within some particular context through various data sources, and it undertakes the exploration through variety of lenses in order to reveal multiple facets of the phenomenon baxter & jack (as cited in lucas, fleming & bhosale, 2018). researcher investigates student teachers perceive knowledge in ict after they study about ict in elt. this research was conducted at english education department pekalongan university. the researcher only focused in 5th semester student teacher of english education department 2021/2022. even though, the data was conducted at 5th semester, the analyzing of the data conduct around april 2022. in order to collect the primary data, the researcher gave the link of questionnaire to the student teachers. by using this technique, the researcher conducted the data from their perception about topic to support the data. the researcher prepared some questions related to their perceived knowledge on integrating ict. to collect the secondary data, the researcher contacts some participants to ask them related their answer in the questionnaire. results and discussion results the results of this research are focused on student teachers’ perceived knowledge on integrating ict in elt. student teachers’ perceived knowledge on integrating ict in this research is classified into six main issues, namely: student teachers’ knowledge on basic ict tools and application, student teachers’ knowledge on theories, skills, strategies of ict tools and application, student teachers’ knowledge on ict online application, student teachers’ knowledge on ethics of using digital information, student teachers’ knowledge on class management skills and student teachers’ knowledge on solving the problem in implementation of ict in elt. student teachers’ knowledge on basic ict tools and applications statement: i know basic computer application programs such as word processing, excel, ppt, and pdf sarlita d. matra & salsabila fitriana efl student teachers’ perceived knowledge on integrating ict 298 figure 1. the chart of student teachers’ knowledge on basic computer application program the result of the first statement is 43% excellent, 54% good and 3% fair. from the result it’s indicate that majority of the respondents have good knowledge (good and excellent) at the basic computer application program such as word processing, pdf, excel and ppt and just 3% from 100% have fair knowledge. statement 2: i know ict tools such as computers, laptops, and lcd projectors figure 2. the chart of student teachers’ knowledge on ict tools the result of the second statement is 54% excellent, 41% good and 5% fair. from the result it’s indicate that majority of the respondents have good knowledge (good and excellent) at the ict tools such as computers, laptops and lcd projectors and just 5% from 100% have fair knowledge. statement: i know portable ict tools such as smartphones, tablets, and digital camera figure 3. the chart of student teachers’ knowledge on portable ict the result of the third statement is 51% excellent, 49% good. from the result it’s indicate that all of the respondents have good knowledge (good and excellent) at the portable ict tools such as smartphones, tablets, and digital camera. statement: i know ict applications such as internet, search engines, websites and social media figure 4. the chart of student teachers’ knowledge on ict applications the result of the fourth statement is 60% excellent, 35% good. from the result it’s indicate that majority of the respondents have good knowledge (good and excellent) at the ict applications such as internet, search engines, websites and social media, and just 5% from 100% have fair knowledge. based on the result of the analysis of student teachers’ response, it is found that student teachers at english department unikal had an excellent knowledge in ict basic tools and portable ict tools, such as computer, laptop, lcd projector, smart phone, tablet and digital camera. they had an excellent knowledge in ict applications such as internet, search engine, website and social media. they also had a good knowledge in basic computer applications such as word processing, excel, ppt and pdf. so that student teachers can apply their knowledge in teaching and learning process. as cited in singh & chan, 2014, it said that using ict in teaching and learning builds an effective learning environment, thus transforming the overall teaching and learning process, where, the students deal with knowledge actively. moreover, the students will be more interested. student teachers’ knowledge on theories, skills, strategies of ict tools and applications indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 299 statement: i know and understand approaches of ict for language teaching such as call, lms, tell, mall, blended learning, massive open online course figure 5. the chart of student teachers’ knowledge on approaches of ict for language teaching the result of the fifth statement is 3% excellent, 73% good. from the result it’s indicate that majority of the respondents have good knowledge (good and excellent) at the approaches of ict for language teaching such as call, lms, tell, mall, blended learning, massive open online course, and 24% have fair knowledge. statement: i know and understand various forms of ict tools and applications which are accessible for use in teaching english figure 6. the chart of student teachers’ knowledge on various forms of ict tools and applications in teaching english the result of the sixth statement is 24% excellent, 76% good. from the result it’s indicate that all of the respondents have good knowledge (good and excellent) at various forms of ict tools and applications which are accessible for use in teaching english. statement: i know how to use common ict tools such as computer, laptop, and lcd projector for teaching english figure 7. the chart of student teachers’ knowledge on how to use ict tools the result of the seventh statement is 43% excellent, 51% good. from the result it’s indicate that majority of the respondents have good knowledge (good and excellent) at how to use common ict tools such as computer, laptop, and lcd projector for teaching english, and just 6% have fair knowledge. statement: i know some theories and instructional models of ict integration in elt figure 8. the chart of student teachers’ knowledge on theories and instructional model of ict integration in elt the result of the eighth statement is 8% excellent, 73% good. from the result it’s indicate that majority of the respondents have good knowledge (good and excellent) at some theories and instructional models of ict integration in elt, and 19% have fair knowledge. statement: i have the skills and strategies to make use of mobile devices (e.g. smartphones, tablets, etc) and their applications for teaching english sarlita d. matra & salsabila fitriana efl student teachers’ perceived knowledge on integrating ict 300 figure 9. the chart of student teachers’ knowledge on skills and strategies to make use of mobile device and their applications for teaching english the result of the ninth statement is 32% excellent, 60% good. from the result it’s indicate that majority of the respondents have good knowledge (good and excellent) at skills and strategies to make use of mobile devices (e.g. smartphones, tablets, etc) and their applications for teaching english, and 8% have fair knowledge. based on the result o the chart above, it is found that student teachers had good knowledge in approaches ict in language and teaching english, various forms of ict tools and applications which are accessible for use in teaching english, how to use ict tools, theories and instructional models of ict integration, skills and strategies to make use mobile devices for teaching english. so that student teachers can make teaching and learning process more effective. as cited in singh & chan, 2014, it was explained that using ict in teaching and learning builds an effective learning environment, thus transforming the overall teaching and learning process, where, the students deal with knowledge actively, in a self-directed and constructive way. moreover, the students can be more interested in joining the class. student teachers’ knowledge on ict online applications statement: i know how to conduct online learning using an online learning platform or lms (learning management system) such as moodle, edmodo, schoology, backboard canvas, gclassroom, and quipper. figure 10. the chart of student teachers’ knowledge on how to conduct online learning using an online learning platform or lms the result of the tenth statement is 43% excellent, 54% good. from the result it’s indicate that majority of the respondents have good knowledge (good and excellent) at how to conduct online learning using an online learning platform or lms (learning management system) such as moodle, edmodo, schoology, backboard canvas, g-classroom, and quipper, and just 3% have fair knowledge. statement: i know how to use more sophisticated ict tools such as interactive whiteboard, robotic appliances, and virtual reality glasses for teaching english figure 11. the chart of student teachers’ knowledge on how to use more sophisticated ict tools the result of the eleventh statement is 11% excellent, 43% good. from the result it’s indicate that majority of the respondents have good knowledge (good and excellent) at how to use more sophisticated ict tools such as interactive whiteboard, robotic appliances, and virtual reality glasses for teaching english, and 46% respondents have fair knowledge. statement: i know how to use some educational applications/games for teaching, such as cartoon movie maker, kahoot it, photo-story, utell-story, voki, toondo, etc. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 301 figure 12. the chart of student teachers’ knowledge on how to use some educational applications/games for teaching the result of the twelfth statement is 5% excellent, 57% good. from the result it’s indicate that majority of the respondents have good knowledge (good and excellent) at how to use some educational applications/games for teaching such as cartoon movie maker, kahoot it, photo-story, utellstory, voki, toondo, etc., and 38% respondents have fair knowledge. statement: i know how to use social media applications (instagram, facebook, youtube, messenger, whatsapp) for language teaching and learning purposes figure 13. the chart of student teachers’ knowledge on how to use social media applications for language teaching and learning purposes the result of the thirteenth statement is 70% excellent, 30% good. from the result it’s indicate that all of the respondents have good knowledge (good and excellent) at how to use social media applications (instagram, facebook, youtube, messenger, whatsapp) for language teaching and learning purposes. statement: i know how to use ict applications for online discussion board (brainstorm, realtime board, padlet, popplet, etc) and video conferencing (skype, google hangouts, net meeting, etc.) figure 14. the chart of student teachers’ knowledge on how to use ict applications for online discussion board and video conferencing the result of the fourteenth statement is 16% excellent, 65% good. from the result it’s indicate that majority of the respondents have good knowledge (good and excellent) at how to use ict applications for online discussion board (brainstorm, realtime board, padlet, popplet, etc) and video conferencing (skype, google hangouts, net meeting, etc), and 19% respondents have fair knowledge. statement: i know some ict applications that i can use to give online assignment to my students (google doc, emails, blogs, canva, storyboard, screencastify, etc) figure 15. the chart of student teachers’ knowledge on ict applications that can use to give online assignment to the students the result of the fifteenth statement is 40% excellent, 57% good. from the result it’s indicate that majority of the respondents have good knowledge (good and excellent) at ict applications that i can use to give online assignment to my students (google doc, emails, blogs, canva, storyboard, screencastify, etc), and just 3% respondents have fair knowledge. sarlita d. matra & salsabila fitriana efl student teachers’ perceived knowledge on integrating ict 302 statement: i know how to use some ict tools and applications for doing assessment and evaluation of the students' progress (ed-puzzle, quizlet, socrative, forallrubrics, etc.) figure 16. the chart of student teachers’ knowledge on how to use ict tools and applications for doing assessment and evaluation of the students' progress the result of the sixteenth statement is 3% excellent, 48% good. from the result it’s indicate that majority of the respondents have good knowledge (good and excellent) at how to use some ict tools and applications for doing assessment and evaluation of the students' progress (ed-puzzle, quizlet, socrative, for all rubrics, etc.), and 49% respondents have fair knowledge. based on the chart above, it is found that student teachers had good knowledge in how to conduct online learning using digital platform, how to use education games for teaching, how to use ict applications for online discussion board and video conference, and knowledge of ict applications to give assignment. they had an excellent knowledge in how to use social media applications for language teaching and learning purposes. they had fair knowledge in how to use more sophisticated ict tools and how to use some ict tools and applications for doing assessment and evaluation of the students' progress. the student teachers can integrate the online learning using digital platform. they also can engage the students to join the games before the learning process started. it can be used as a beginning activity to inspire students motivate in learning process. student teachers’ ethics of using digital information statement: i know the ethics of using digital information in various language teaching and learning context figure 17. the chart of student teachers’ knowledge on the ethics of using digital information in various language teaching and learning context the result of the seventeenth statement is 27% excellent, 73% good. from the result it’s indicate that all of the respondents have good knowledge (good and excellent) at the ethics of using digital information in various language teaching and learning context. based on the chart above, student teachers at english department unikal had a good ethics of using digital information in various language teaching and learning context. student teachers’ knowledge on class management skills statement: i know the right and proper time of using ict in language teaching and learning context figure 18. the chart of student teachers’ knowledge on right and proper time of using ict in language teaching and learning context the result of the eighteenth statement is 32% excellent, 68% good. from the result it’s indicate that all of the respondents have good knowledge (good and excellent) at the right and proper time of using ict in language teaching and learning context. statement: i know how to lead or give instructions to my students in using ict tools and applications during the teaching and learning process indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 303 figure 19. the chart of student teachers’ knowledge on how to lead or give instructions to my students in using ict tools and applications during the teaching and learning process the result of the nineteenth statement is 19% excellent, 78% good. from the result it’s indicate that majority of the respondents have good knowledge (good and excellent) at how to lead or give instructions to my students in using ict tools and applications during the teaching and learning process, and just 3% have fair knowledge. based on the chart above, it is found that the student teachers had a good knowledge on class management skills. student teachers’ knowledge on solving the problem in implementation of ict in elt statement: i know how to solve technical problems related to implementation of ict tools and applications in elt figure 20. the chart of student teachers’ knowledge on how to solve technical problems related to implementation of ict tools and applications in elt the result of the twentieth statement is 6% excellent, 62% good. from the result it’s indicate that majority of the respondents have good knowledge (good and excellent) at how to solve technical problems related to implementation of ict tools and applications in elt, and 32% have fair knowledge. statement: i know how to make use of ict to solve teachers' problem in teaching language figure 21. the chart of student teachers’ knowledge on how to make use of ict to solve teachers' problem in teaching language the result of the twenty first statement is 16% excellent, 73% good. from the result it’s indicate that majority of the respondents have good knowledge (good and excellent) at how to make use of ict to solve teachers' problem in teaching language, and 11% have fair knowledge statement: i know how to make use of ict to solve students' problem in teaching language figure 22. the chart of student teachers’ knowledge on how to make use of ict to solve students' problem in teaching language the result of the twenty second statement is 24% excellent, 68% good. from the result it’s indicate that majority of the respondents have good knowledge (good and excellent) at how to make use of ict to solve students' problem in teaching language, and 8% have fair knowledge based on the chart above, it is found that student teachers in english education department unikal had good knowledge in how to solve technical problems related implementation of ict tools and applications, how to make use of ict to solve teachers and students’ problem in teaching language. discussion from the finding above, the researcher believes that the greater the year of study, the more positive were their perceptions. it is in line with the study conducted by niokolopoulou (2019) whereas the sarlita d. matra & salsabila fitriana efl student teachers’ perceived knowledge on integrating ict 304 skills and strategies most reported were that they will use computers (high percentage of agreement, over 70%) in their classrooms for the extension of children’s vocabulary and the motivation of children to read and to like reading. students perceived as major barriers the technical support and the availability of resources. based on findings above, the similar tpack framework would be discussed partially as fathi amnd yousefifard (2019); aniq and drajati (2019) and also inderawati (2021) obtained from the survey indicated that most efl students perceived that their efl teachers excelled in four components of tpack such as technological knowledge (tk), pedagogical knowledge (pk), content knowledge (ck), and pedagogical content knowledge (pck), but the teachers were perceived to be relatively less proficient in the other three components of the scale such as technological content knowledge (tck), technological pedagogical knowledge (tpk), and tpack. the results suggest that iranian efl teachers may require further training in these latter elements of the tpack to gain the required proficiency to integrate technology more effectively into their language classrooms. this research would discuss further as follows. technology knowledge (tk) it shows in student teachers’ knowledge of basic ict tools and applications issue. this issue under this domain received result “excellent” from the respondents. it can be implied that student teachers’ perceived knowledge of basic ict tools and applications was proficient. content knowledge (ck) it shows in student teachers’ knowledge of ict online application issue. this issue under this domain received result “good” from the respondents. these finding suggested that student teachers had sufficient perceived knowledge in various lesson contents. pedagogical knowledge (pk) it shows in student teachers’ knowledge of theories, skills, strategies of ict tools applications, ethics of using digital applications and class management skills issues. all issues under this domain received result “good” from the respondents. it can be implied that student teachers had sufficient knowledge on those issues. pedagogical content knowledge (pck) the result from the respondents in theories, skills, and strategies of ict tools and applications issue is “good”. these findings implied that respondents’ perceived knowledge of the pedagogies and teaching practices was sufficient. technological content knowledge (tck) respondents suggested that their knowledge in this domain was sufficient, with basic knowledge in ict basic tools and online applications issues. most of the student teachers had possession of mobile phones and computers which can be used to gather and analyze data or information about a specific content. regarding the issues related to facilities and technical expertise they sometimes encountered, they either asked for help from technicians or colleagues. many of them also agreed with the importance of attending training to enhance their skills in using ict in learning and teaching pardede (2020). technological pedagogical knowledge (tpk) on the aspect of tpk, student teachers revealed that they had sufficient understanding of how teaching and learning changed when particular technologies were used. this domain covered student teachers’ knowledge of theories, skills and strategies of ict tools and applications and student teachers’ knowledge of solving problem related implementation of ict in teaching and learning process with “good” description. this entailed that student teachers had knowledge on the use of technologies to improve teaching and learning using online platform. technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpck) this domain was seen as the intersection of all three bodies of knowledge. understanding of this knowledge could go above and beyond understanding technology, content, or pedagogy in isolation, but rather as an emergent form that understands how these forms of knowledge interact with each other (koehler and mishra, 2008). most of the issues under this domain also got a descriptive rating of “good” which revealed that respondents had sufficient in this domain. the way student teachers viewed the interrelationship of content, pedagogy and technology result to their confidence in choosing and utilizing technologies indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 305 that would enhance their teaching and learning of a specific content or topic. conclusion based on the findings and discussion in previous chapter, the researcher puts forward the following conclusion: the student teachers had perceived knowledge on integrating ict in terms of the student teachers’ knowledge on basic ict tools and applications, student teachers’ knowledge on theories, skills, strategies of ict tools and applications, student teachers’ knowledge on ict online applications, student teachers’ knowledge on ethics of using digital information, student teachers’ knowledge on class management skills and student teachers’ knowledge on solving the problem in implementation of ict in elt. this can be associated with their learning experiences while they are attending classes in college and when they practice in ict in elt course in class. the student teachers had good perceived knowledge on integrating ict. they not only knowing the theories of the integrating ict, but also, they can implement it to the teaching and learning process. the student teachers had sufficient knowledge related integrating ict which they have experienced when they practice to use ict tools and applications in classroom. the highest indicator is knowledge on right and proper time of using ict in language teaching and learning context. the poorest indicator is knowledge on how to conduct online learning using digital platform, how to use education games for teaching, how to use ict applications for online discussion board and video conference, and knowledge of ict applications to give assignment. acknowledgement i would say my gratitude to all my beloved students who were kindly supportive as the participants of this research, their fully commitment during the online learning. my co-author salsa who is very fast response in finishing the drafting and analyzing the data into the comprehensive research results which may give another significance in our education. references allen, m. (2019, november 7). technological influence on society. https://www.bctv.org/2019/11/07/technologicalinfluence-on-society. aniq, l. n., & drajati, n. a. (2019). investigating efl teachers’ perceptions on their tpack development: how efl teachers view seven domains on tpack framework. leksika: jurnal bahasa, sastra dan pengajarannya, 13(2), 95101. durriyah, t. l., & zuhdi, m. (2018). digital literacy with efl student teachers: exploring indonesian student teachers' initial perception about integrating digital technologies into a teaching unit. international journal of education and literacy studies, 6(3), 53-60. fathi, j., & yousefifard, s. (2019). assessing language teachers’ technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack): efl students’ perspectives. research in english language pedagogy, 7(2), 255-282. fitri, y., & putro, n. h. p. s. (2021, march). efl teachers’ perception of the effectiveness of ictelt integration during the covid-19 pandemic. in international conference on educational sciences and teacher profession (icetep 2020) (pp. 502-508). atlantis press. gandhi, h. k., & lynch, r. (2016). a comparative study of teachers’ knowledge of common ict software, their perceptions towards using ict and their perceived self confidence in integrating ict in their classes according to gender in two international schools in thailand. scholar: human science , 8 no. 2. inderawati, r., & vianty, m. (2021). technology use and technology-related learning experiences as perceived by indonesian tertiary efl students. international journal of applied linguistics and english literature, 10(3), 33-40. nikolopoulou, k., akriotou, d., & gialamas, v. (2019). early reading skills in english as a foreign language via ict in greece: early childhood student teachers’ perceptions. early childhood education journal, 47(5), 597-606. önalan, o., & gökçe, k. u. r. t. (2020). exploring turkish efl teachers’ perceptions of the factors affecting technology integration: a case study. journal of language and linguistic studies, 16(2), 626-646. pardede, p. (2020). secondary school efl teachers’ perception of ict use in learning and teaching: a case study in greater jakarta. journal of english teaching, 6(2), 144-157. singh, t. k. r., & chan, s. (2014). teacher readiness on ict integration in teaching-learning: a malaysian case study. international journal of asian social science, 4, 874-885. sarlita d. matra & salsabila fitriana efl student teachers’ perceived knowledge on integrating ict 306 exploring sudanese efl university learners" discourse competence indonesian efl journal, volume1(1) january2015issn2252-7427 exploring sudanese efl university learners' discourse competence ali ahmed osman zakaria department of english language & linguistics, university of kassala, sudane-mail: haddad_31970@hotmail.com abdel rahim hamid mugaddam institute of african & asian studies, university of khartoum, sudane-mail: sudan_98@hotmail.comapacitation: zakaria,a.a.o.&muqaddam,a.r.h. (2015).exploringsudaneseefluniversity learners'discoursecompetence. indonesian efl journal, 1(1), 27-33received:03-09-2014 accepted:13-11-2014 published:01-01-2015 abstract: this paper investigates the discourse competence of the sudanese efl university learners.the main objective is to evaluate and assess the students’ ability to produce unified and meaningfultexts. 98 sudaneseeflstudents fromfaculty of different sudaneseuniversities served as subjects forthe study. two instruments were employed for data collection: a questionnaire and audio-recordedconversations. results revealed that the students had some difficulties in producing coherent andmeaningful texts. the linguistic forms they used were very limited, which did not show anysophisticated use of language. results also revealed that the students were not well-acquainted withturn-taking rules during conversation. in their responses to the questionnaires, they reported a verygood command of cohesive devices in the process of producing coherent discourse events, whichappeared to be incorrect. however, they were able to use simple language to expand certain pointsinto meaningful stretches of language. in addition, some students were able to demonstrate an abilityto engage into the production and interpretation of unified and meaningful discourse. nevertheless,the analysis suggests that the students under study are still far from being competent as far asdiscoursecompetence is concerned. keywords: discourse competence, turn taking, conversational norm, communicative intentions, transition-relevance principle introductiontheability tocommunicateeffectively inenglish isoneof the factors thatarehighlyappreciated inworkplace.beinggoodcommunicator inenglish is an indicator forthesuccess in the tasksperformedbyemployees.that iswhy inmany jobannouncements fluency in theenglishlanguage is regardedasoneof the factorsthatareused forratingapplicants.morrealeetal. (2000)state thatas individualsbecomematureandworkingadults, communicationcompetencecontinues tobeessential.communicationskillsare required inmostoccupations.employers identifycommunicationasoneof thebasiccompetencieseverygraduateshouldhave,asserting that theability tocommunicate isvaluable forobtainingemploymentand maintainingsuccessful jobperformance.tobegivena job, theapplicantsmustbewithoral andwritingcompetenceso that theyperformwellanddemonstrate success inteamwork.this situationdoesalsoexist insudan. inmany instances, speakingandwriting inenglish fluently is consideredasagatekeeper for successandemployment. sodevelopingstudents'discoursecompetence isvery important. studentsareexpectedtobewithgoodskills incommunicating inenglishby the time theyhave finishedtheiruniversityeducation.theywillnotmanage todosounless theyhaveagoodknowledgeofthe features thatcontribute to theproductionofeffectiveand interpretablediscourse.hymes(1972)proposes thatdiscoursecompetenceaccounts for students'knowledgeof thewaysdiscourse is 27 ali ahmed osman zakaria & abdel rahim hamid mugaddam exploring sudanese efluniversity learners' discourse competence sequencedandtheability tostructurediscourseeffectively. so it is theknowledgeofrules regarding thecohesionandcoherenceofvarious typesofdiscourse.canaleandswain(1980)emphasize that rulesofdiscoursearecrucial in interpretingutterances forsocialmeaning,particularlywhenthe literalmeaningofanutterancedoesnot lead to the speaker’s intentioneasily.discoursecompetenceentailsknowledgeofhowlanguage isused insocial settings toperformdifferent communicative functions.further,discoursecompetencedealswithhowutterancesareused inmorecoherentandunified fashion toperformdifferentcommunicative functions indifferent socialcontexts.therefore, it is themasteryofhowtocombinegrammatical formsandmeaningstoachievecertaincommunicativepurposesinsomesocial situations.discoursecompetencecanbeseenas theability tounderstand, createanddevelop formsof thelanguage thatare longer thansentenceswiththeappropriatecohesion, coherenceandrhetoricalorganization tocombine ideas.turn taking isavery important factor inthe instancesofanydiscourseevent. sacksetal. (1974)state thatpeople take turnswhentheyareselectedornominatedby thecurrentspeaker, or ifnoone is selected, theyspeakoftheirownaccord("self-selection"). ifneitherof theseconditionsapplies, thepersonwhoiscurrently speakingmaycontinue. sacksetalalsosuggest thata turncanbe takenatanypointof theconversation,yetasmooth turnshiftoccursata transition-relevanceplace,whenaspeakerexpects toyield the floorandthe listener is ready toaccept thenewrole.violating the transition-relevanceprinciplewill disrupt thediscourse throughinterruptions. itmustbenoted thateven ifthey can indeedmaterialize throughoverlaps,interruptionsshouldbedistinguished fromnaturaloverlapping.asnotedbyfreemanandmcelhinny (1996) “tounderstandanyoverlapasan interruption is toargue that theconversationalnorm isonespeakerat a time”.studentsneedtobe taughtwhenandhowtheycan intervenewhenbeing involved inaconversation. cohesion isconcernedwithrelationshipbothwithinandbeyondthesentence.cohesivecategoriesare functional categories,thoughof courserealized in lexical,grammatical andother forms(wingard,1981).formartin (1992)cohesion isoneofthe textproperties that contribute to theorganisationofdiscourse.thesameviewheldbyhoey(1991),whonotes thatcohesionmaybecrudelydefinedas thewaycertainwordsorgrammatical featuresofasentencecanbeused tocreateconnectedsentenceswithinasequence.hallidayandhasan(1976)note that cohesionresearchfocusesonacomprehensiveexaminationofsystematicdevicesused toconnect thesurface formof texts. it is thesurfacemanifestationof theunderlyingrelations thatbinda text.whilecohesiondoesnotprovidea full accountof the textual interpretationofa text, it isan important indicator. forhallidayandhasan, theorganisationof text isrealized(in largepart) in therelationsamongsemanticandgrammatical items inthe text.these itemsarereferredtoascohesive ties.cohesivedevicesaredivided into fivebroadclasses: conjunction; reference; substitution;ellipsis; and lexical cohesion. cohesivedevicesplayacrucial role inholdinga texttogether.theyprovidemeans for linking thesurface text structure.grabeandkaplan(1996)argue that cohesivedevicesreflectboth thecommunicative intentionsandthechoicesmadebytheauthor instructuresusedand in the linearorderingof the text.coherence is thequalityof creatingaunifiedandsolid textwhichmakesunderstandingand interpretationeasy fortheaudience.thornbury(2005)pointsoutthat coherence is thecapacityofa text tomakesense.an incoherent textdoesnotmakesense,howevercloselyconnected itsindividualutterancesmightbe.coherence isthequality that the listener/readerderivesfromtext.becketal. (1991)argue thatcoherenceasa theoretical construct in textstructurerefers to theunderlyingrelationsthatholdbetweenassertions (orpropositions)andhowtheseassertionscontribute to theoveralldiscourse theme(ormacro-structure).this setof relations 28 indonesian efl journal, volume1(1) january2015issn2252-7427 assumes thatcoherent textwill beunifiedbyoneoverarching theme,whetherstatedorimplicit. it is coherence in text structurewhichallowsthe listener/reader tobuildamodelof comprehension(garnham1991,singer1990).thus it is theresponsibilityofthespeaker toattach theaspectof coherenceto the texthe/she iscreating inorder toconvey themessage inawaythatmeets theaudienceexpectations.thespeakerwhowishes tocommunicatehis/her thoughts totheiraudiencesuccessfullymustproduceacoherentpieceofdiscourse.thornbury(2005)pointsout thatcoherence isusuallyapproached fromtwolevels: microandthemacro.at themicro-level, theaudiencehavecertainexpectationsofhowtheproposition(themeaning)ofanutteranceorasentence is likely tobedeveloped.whentheseexpectationsaremet,theemerging textwill seemtobecoherent.at themacro-level coherence isenhanced if: a)theaudiencecaneasilydiscernwhat the textisabout, b) the text isorganised inawaythatanswers listener/reader's likelyquestionsandc) the text isorganised inawaythat isfamiliar to theaudience.brownandyule(1983) followingwiddowson(1973)suggestthat coherence is theresultofconventionalizedknowledgeandsequenceswhichareader/hearerwillbeable tocalluponto imposeacoherent frameontoamessage.yuleandbrowncontinue thatcoherence isessentially thecreationof thereader/listenerrather thanaproductof thetext. so, it isnot created inthe text itself, butin thereader/listener's ability tocalluponcertainsharedconventionalizedknowledge. method participantstheparticipants in this study included98sudaneseeflstudentswhoare takingenglishas theirmajorat threesudaneseuniversities -sudanuniversityofscienceandtechnology,alneelainuniversityandkassalauniversity.thestudentscome fromdifferentregionsofsudan.thismeans theycanbetakenasasample for thesudaneseefluniversity learners' community.thestudentsarebelieve touseenglish effectivelyby the time theyhave finished theiruniversityeducation.theyareexpected tocontribute tothedevelopmentof their local communitieswhich leads to thedevelopmentof thecountryasawhole.thecourses theparticipants tookatuniversityarebelieved toequip themwith theknowledgenecessary toperformsuccessfullyall thesortof the jobsthat requirecommandofenglish.however,someresearchersbelieve that theparticipantsarenot competent to theextentthat theycanprovidedatareliable forresearchwork.english insudan isnotpractisedby thestudentsoutside lecturerooms. it isnotusedby thestudents in theirdaily social life. english isonlyauniversitysubject that is taughtandpractised in thelectureroom. instrumentstwotoolswereusedtocollect thedata forthispaper:aquestionnaire, andanaudio-recorded interview.adopting twodifferentinstruments fordatacollectionhelps theresearchersgetacomprehensiveviewontheresponsesprovidedbytherespondents.observingstudents' actualperformancewillreveal the facts thatcannotbeobtainedthrough thequestionnaire. so, thereasonbehindhaving these twotools fordatacollection is tohavereliabledata that canyield reasonable results. the questionnairethequestionnairedesignedtocollectthedata for this studywasbasedbasicallyonthecommoneuropeanframeworkofreference forlanguages (2001).thisemergesasaserioussteptoconductanefficientanduseful study.thequestionnairewasdesigned tocollect informationabouthowsudaneseuniversity learnersevaluateandassess theirdiscoursecompetence. it isalso to let studentsconsider thesortof thefactors that theyneed inorder toproduceandunderstandmeaningful andcommunicativediscourse.thequestionnairealsorepresentsa tool tocollect informationaboutstudents' ability toproduceandinterpretunifiedandmeaningfuldiscourse.thequestionnairecomprises foursections. 29 ali ahmed osman zakaria & abdel rahim hamid mugaddam exploring sudanese efluniversity learners' discourse competence sectionone isaboutstudents' flexibility inconstructing fluentandcomprehensivediscourse.thesecondsection tacklesstudents' competence in turnstaking. sectionthreedealswithstudents' capacity todevelopandelaborateaparticular themeintomeaningful stretchesof language.the fourthsection involvesstudents'knowledgeof textcohesionandcoherence. the audio-recorded interviewthe interviewwasconductedwith theparticipants tocompareandcontrast thefactsaboutstudents'discoursecompetenceandthe facts that couldbedrawnfromtheiractualdiscourse.this is tobecertain that thedataused for thepaper ismorereliableandrealistic. findings & discussion flexibility table1.students' own appraisal of their ability to engage into a meaningful and comprehensive discourse mediannoyesitemno 117.2%82.8%icanshowgreat flexibility reformulating ideas clearlyaccording todifferent situationsofuse.1 1781 125.5%74.5%ihave theability toadjustwhat i sayand themeansofexpressing it to the situationandtherecipient.2 2573 141.5%58.5%icannormally adjust to the changesofdirection, style andemphasis found inconversation.3 4157 223.4%76.6%iamable tovary formulationofwhat iwant to say.4 2375 241.5%58.5%icanadaptmyexpression todealwith less routine, evendifficult, situations.5 4157 232.8%67.2%it isnotdifficult formetoexploitawiderangeof simplelanguage flexibly toexpressmuchofwhat iwant.6 3266 241.4%59.6%icanexpand learnedphrases throughsimple recombinationoftheir elements.7 4058mostof thestudents claimedthat theyhad theability to formulate their ideasaccording to thesituations.theyheld thattheywereable tomodify theirexpressionsdue to thesituationsandrecipients. studentsassumedtheycouldadjust tochangesaccording to thedirections, styleandemphasis found in theconversation.thesubjectsof thestudyreported that theycouldvary in thesortof theexpressions theyproduced inorder toconvey theirmessage.further, thestudents stated that theyhad theability toadapt theirexpressions todealwiththedifficult situations. so itwaseasy forthemtousesimple languagewithgreatflexibility toexpressmuchofwhat theywanted tosay.thesubjectsalsoreportedthat theycoulduse the language theyhadalready learned innewdifferent situations.analyzing theaudio-recordeddiscourseofthestudentsmade itobvious that thestudentsdidnot showany flexibility in theirdiscourse formulationandreformulation. theycouldnot showanyability toadjust tothechanges thatoccursduringconversation. turn takingtable2reveals that thestudentswereable to take the floor inaconversationeffectively.the tablealsoshowsthat thestudents couldselect thesuitablephrasefromtheir linguistic repertoire tosignal thatthey intended to takepart in theconversation.thestudentsbelieved that theywereable toappropriately intervene inadiscussion.theyasserted that theycouldselect theproperlanguage inorder todoso.thesubjectsstated that theywerecompetent tobeginaconversation.theycouldkeepontalking inasubtle fashion;and that theycouldendthediscourseappropriately.moreover, the tablealsoreveals thatmostof thestudentswereable to initiate,maintainandendthediscoursewhentheywish todoso.results inthe table showthat theparticipantsdependedoncertainstrategies togain timeandkeeptheir turn intheconversationwhile 30 indonesian efl journal, volume1(1) january2015issn2252-7427 thinkingofhowtoproceed.theyusedcertain linguisticexpressions inorder toachieve this.results alsoshowthatmostoftherespondents took turnandparticipated inthe instancesofdiscussing familiar topicsusingsimpleexpressions.theywereable toengage intoa face-to-faceconversationconcerning topics thatare familiarand thatofpersonal interest. studying the table, onecanguess that thestudentswereable toadoptsimple techniques tobegin, keeporenda short conversation.onecanalsosee that theresults indicate thesubjects' ability toasktheiraudience forattention.thestudentsreported that theyweregoodat turn takingbut thisappeared tobenot truewhentheirdiscoursewasstudiedandanalysed.theydidnotchooseappropriateexpressions tointervene.furthermore, theydidnot leavethecurrent speakerendhis/her turnandthenthey interveneandbegantalking. table2.students' statement about their ability in turn taking mediannoyeasitemn o 234.5%65.9%it is easy forme to select a suitable phrase froma readily available rangeofdiscourse functions to preface my remarks appropriately in order to getthe floor.8 3464 230.8%69.2%i can intervene appropriately in discussion, exploiting appropriatelanguagetodoso.9 3068 234.5%65.9%it is not difficult for me to initiate, maintain and end discourseappropriatelywitheffective turn taking.10 3464 119.2%80.8%i can initiate discourse, take my turn when appropriate and endconversationwhenineed.11 1979 242.5%57.5%i can use stock phrases (e.g. ‘that’s a difficult question to answer’) to gaintimeandkeep the turnwhilst formulatingwhat to say.12 4256 231.9%68.1i have the ability to intervene in a discussion on a familiar topic, using asuitablephrase toget the floor.13 3167 230.8%69.2%i can initiate,maintain and close simple face-to-face conversationon topicsthatare familiarorofpersonal interest.14 3068 123.4%76.6%i am able to use simple techniques to start, maintain, or end a shortconversation.15 2375 227.7%72.3%icanappropriatelyask forattention.16 2771 thematic development table3.students appraisal of their own ability to develop a topic into meaningful discourse. mediannoyeasitemno 236.8%63.2%i can give elaborate descriptions and narratives, integrating sub-themes, developingparticularpoints.17 3662 236.8%63.2%i can develop a clear description expanding and supporting my mainpoints with relevant supportingdetail andexamples.18 3662 243.6%56.4%i can fluently relate a straightforward description as a linear sequenceofpoints.19 4355 120.2%79.8%ihave theability todescribesomething inasimple list ofpoints.20 2078thetableabovereveals that thestudentscoulddescribeandnarrateanyeventsveryappropriately.theycoulddiscussanddevelopverycomplicatedthemes andsub-themes.theyhadtheabilitydevelopandelaborateany topic intoaverysuccessfulcommunicativeevent. further, the tableshows that theparticipantswereable to support theclaimtheymadewithcomprehensiveanddetaileddata.thesubjectscouldmovesmoothlydeveloping thediscourse inwhich theywereengaged.theycouldelaborate itbysmoothlymoving frompoint toanother.analysisof thestudents'actualdiscourseshowsthat thestudentswerenotable todevelopaparticular theme 31 ali ahmed osman zakaria & abdel rahim hamid mugaddam exploring sudanese efluniversity learners' discourse competence intoameaningful thought.they found itverydifficult toexpresswhat they felt aboutaparticular topic.however, thestudentsreported that theyhad theability tousesimple language toexpandcertainpoints intomeaningful stretchesof language. cohesion and coherencetable4 reveals that thestudents couldusecohesivedevices toproducewellconnectedpieceofdiscourse.the tablealsoshows that thestudentshadtheability toproduceunifiedandcoherent stretchesoflanguage.theycouldconnect thesestretchestoproduce interpretableandmeaningfuldiscourse.thetablealsoreveals that therespondentscouldusediscoursemakers todemonstrate thedifferent relations thatholdamongdifferent ideas.the tablemakes it clear that thestudentshad theability tousealimitedsetof cohesivedevices toconnect theideas theyweave in theirdiscoursewhichresults inaclearandcoherentdiscourse.thetablealsoshowsthat thesubjects could linkaseriesof short,discrete, simpleelements intoaconnected, linearsequenceofpoints.further, the tablereports that theparticipantswereable tousecoordinatingconjunctions inorder toproduceeffectivediscourse. students'discourseseemedto lackinanysortof cohesivedevices. in theirresponse to thequestionnaire, therespondentsclaimedthat theycouldmakeaverygooduseofcohesivedevices inorder tolinkwordsandphrases intoacoherentandunifieddiscourse.but theiractualdiscoursedidnot reveal suchaclaim. table 4. students evaluation of their own ability to produce a coherent and unified discourse. mediannoyesitemno 236.8%63.2%i can create coherent and cohesive text making full and appropriateuseofawiderangeof cohesivedevices.21 3662 348.9%51.1%i canproduce clear, smoothly flowing,well-structured speech, showingcontrolled use of organisational patterns, connectors and cohesivedevices.22 4850 119.2%80.8%i am able to use a variety of linking words efficiently to mark clearlytherelationshipsbetweenideas.23 1979 227.7%72.3%i have the ability to use a limited number of cohesive devices to linkmyutterances intoclear, coherentdiscourse.24 2771 233.1%66.9%ican linka seriesof shorter, discrete simpleelements intoaconnected,linearsequenceofpoints.25 3365 226.6%73.4%i am able to use the most frequently occurring connectors to linksimple sentences in order to describe something as a simple list ofpoints.26 2672 118.1%81.9%ihaveability to linkgroupsofwordswithsimple connectors like ‘and’,‘but’ and ‘because’.27 1880 conclusionanalysing theaudio-recordeddiscourseof thestudentsmade itobvious that thestudentsdidnot showany flexibility in theirdiscourse formulationandreformulation.theycouldnotdemonstrate theirability toadjust to thechanges thatoccursduringconversation.the linguistic formstheyusedwerevery limitedwhichdidnot showanysophisticateduseof language.thestudentsreported that theyweregoodat turn takingbut thisappeared tobenot truewhentheirdiscoursewasstudiedandanalysed.theparticipantsdidnotchooseappropriate expressions to intervene.furthermore, thesubjects ignored the techniquesnecessary forturn taking; theydidnot leave thecurrentspeakerendhis/her turnbefore theyintervenedandbegan talking.analysisof thestudents' actualdiscoursealsoshowedthatthestudentswerenotable todevelopaparticular theme intoameaningful thought.they found itverydifficult toexpresswhatthey feltaboutaparticular topic.however, thestudents reported thattheyhadtheability tousesimple langue toexpandcertainpoints intomeaningfulstretchesof language. students'discourse 32 indonesian efl journal, volume1(1) january2015issn2252-7427 seemedto lack inany sortof cohesivedevices.in their response to thequestionnaire, therespondentsclaimedthat theycouldmakeaverygooduseofcohesivedevices inorder tolinkwordsandphrases intoacoherentandunifieddiscourse.but theiractualdiscoursedidnot reveal suchaclaim.teachersneedtoprovideexerciseswhichhelpstudentsdeveloptheir communicativecompetencesothat theycouldproduceeffectivediscourse.theyshould train thestudentsonhowtodevelopaparticular topic intoameaningfulthought. studentsneed tobelieve that theskillsnecessary toengage intoasuccessfulcommunication dictatebeing involved inmoreseriousanddeliberateuseof language.teachersalsoneed toplaysomeimportantrole inclearingawaystudents' apprehensioninrespectofusing language forcommunicativepurposes. somestudentsreported that theyhadvery limitedknowledgeofenglish; and that theycouldnotspeakenglish.however, thestudentsreported this inenglishwhichmeans thestudents canperformwell if theyareencouragedandmotivatedby the teacher. soteachersshould tell thestudents that theycanachieve the tasks theyareasked toperform. referencesbrown, j.,&yule,g. (1983).discourse analysis.cambridge,uk:cambridgeuniversitypress.canale,m.,&swain,m. (1980)theoreticalbasesofcommunicativeapproaches to second languageteachingand testing. applied linguistics 1, 1-47. freeman.r.&mcelhinny,b.1996.languageandgender. ins.mckay&n.h.hornberger(eds) sociolinguistics and language teaching. cambridge:cup.218 -80garnham,a. (1991).wheredoescoherencecome from?apsycholinguistic perspective.occasional papers in systemic linguistics, 5, 131-141.grabe,w.,&kaplan,r. (1996). theory and practice of writing. londonandnewyork:longman.halliday,m.a.k. andhasan,r. (1976). cohesion in english. as a social-semiotic perspective. oxford:oxforduniversitypress.hatch, e. (1992).discourse and language education.cambridge:cambridgeuniversitypress.hoey,m. (1991).patterns of lexis in texts. oxford:oxforduniversitypress.hymes,d. (1972).oncommunicativecompetence. inprideandholmes (eds). sociolinguistics: selected readings. harmondsworth:penguin.martin, j. (1992).english text: system and structure.amsterdam:benjamins.morreale, s., osborn,m.,&pearson, j. (2000).whycommunication is important: a rationale for thecentralityof the studyofcommunication. journal of the association for communication administration, 29,125sacks,h., schegloff e.a.&jeffersong. (1974) .astmplest systemattcs for theorganisatronof turn-takmg forconversatton' language50:696735repr~nted in(ed.) j. schenkeln ('978)singer,m. (1990).psychology of language: an introduction to sentence and discourse processes.hillsdale,nj: lawerenceerlbaum.thornbury, s. (2005).beyond the sentence introducing discourse analysis. oxford:macmillianeducation.widdowson,h. (1973). direction in the teaching of discourse. incorderandroulet (eds.)1973and inbrumfit and johnson (eds.)1979.wingard,p. (1981).the teaching of english as an international language: a practical guide (eds).jermyabbott andpeterwingard.london:collins.139-170. 33 thematic progression analysis in indonesian efl students’ thesis abstracts indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427 thematic progression analysis in indonesian efl students’ thesis abstracts rika vennia rahmawati department of english education, indonesia university of education, indonesiaemail: venniarika@gmail.com eri kurniawan department of english education, indonesia university of education, indonesiaemail: eri_kurniawan@upi.eduapa citation: rahmawati, r. v. & kurniawan, e. (2015). thematic progression analysis in students’thesis abstracts. indonesian efl journal, 1(1). 81-87received: 10-09-2014 accepted: 13-11-2014 published: 01-01-2015 abstract: this study examines thematic progression in thesis abstracts written by english students inindonesia university of education. this study employs a descriptive qualitative method since itattempts to describe and analyze textual data accurately. the data for this study come from repository.upi.edu. five undergraduate students’ thesis abstracts were downloaded from the websitepublished in 2014. after gathering the data, a thematic progression theory proposed by fries (2002) isemployed to analyze the data. findings show that constant theme is the type of thematic progressionthat is mostly used the thesis abstracts by 52.64%. the linear theme and split rheme thematicprogression pattern are also found in the abstracts. however, split rheme is found only once. amongthe problems the students have probably encountered are how to write a coherent abstract and tocreate an appropriate logical relation among sentences in their writing. this study concludes that thestudents’ thesis abstracts mostly use constant theme pattern, which suggests their writing is not quitewell-arranged. since an abstract should be written in more or less 200 words and it should representthe important information of the research, students may be confused as to how to summarize theirresearch into 200 words. keywords: thesis abstracts, thematic progression, english students introductionsuccessful communication must revolvearound transferring meanings, which are tiedin grammatical structure. grammar can bedefined as a combination of linguistics unit,which produces sentences in the language(richards and schmidt, 2002). grammar doesnot only focus on grammatical selection butalso on patterns of grammar and vocabularythat are combined to tie meanings in the textto make it cohesive and coherent. the way inwhich cohesive and coherent texts arecreated through resources such as patterns ofcohesion is understood as unity of texture(paltridge, 2006). among the elements thatcontribute to the texture of a text is thematicstructure. thematic structure deals with theorganization of a clause or an utterance whichconsists of theme and rheme to form amessage (sharndarma and panamah, 2013). the theme and rheme relationshipcontributes to the flow of information in thetext. theme can be understood as the elementwhich serves as point of departure of themessage and rheme as the remainder of themessage in which the theme is developed(halliday and mathiesssen, 2004). theme canbe identified as the elements which come firstin a clause (gerot and wignell, 1994). themeindicates what the text is about. there arethree catagories of theme; ideational ortopical theme, textual theme, andinterpersonal theme (gerot and wignell,1994).the idea of theme and rhemefurthermore leads to the analysis of thematicprogression or method of development oftexts (fries, 2002, cited in paltridge, 2006).according to paltridge (2006), thematic 81 mailto:eri_kurniawan@upi.edu rika vennia rahmawati& eri kurniawan thematic progression analysis in indonesian efl students’ thesis abstracts progression refers to “the way in which thetheme of a clause may pick up, or repeat, ameaning from a preceding theme or rheme”.the thematic progression is the key way tocreate information flow in a text. according tofries (2002 as cited in paltridge, 2006), thereare three forms of thematic progression;constant theme or theme reiteration, zig-zag or linear theme, and multiple theme or splitrheme.the first pattern of thematic progressionis constant theme. constant theme or themereiteration refers to the patterns in whichtheme 1 is repeated in the beginning of nextclause. it indicates that each clause hasinformation to discuss. for example: table 1. theme and rheme: constant theme (based on cornbleet and carter, 2001 as cited in paltridge, 2006) theme rhemetext can be used for both spoken and written language.it usually refers to a stretch, an extract or complete piece of writing or speech. figure 1 thematic progression: constant theme based on table 1 (paltridge, 2006).theme 1 rheme 1theme 1 rheme 2the second pattern of thematicprogression is linear theme. linear themeor zig-zag theme refers to the rheme 1 which is repeated as the theme 2 in thenext clause. for example: table 2 theme and rheme : zig-zag/linear theme (based on knapp and walkins, 2005, as cited in paltridge, 2006) theme rhemethe term ‘modality’ describes a range of grammatical resources used to express probability or obligation.generally, obligation is used in speech, speech, especially when wanting to get things done such as ‘you shouldkeep your room tidy’. figure 2 thematic progression: zig-zag/linear theme based on table 2 (paltridge, 2006).theme 1 rheme 1theme 2 rheme 2the last pattern of thematicprogression is split rheme or multipletheme. in split rheme or multiple theme, arheme may include some different information which may be taken up astheme in some subsequent clauses(paltridge, 2006). for example: table 3 theme and rheme: a multiple / split rheme pattern (based on nesbitt et al, 1990, cited in paltridge, 2006). theme rhemewhen japanese people write their language,they use a combination of two separate alphabets as well as ideograms borrowed fromchinese.the two alphabets are called hiragana and katakana.the chinese ideograms are called kanji.hiragana represents the 46 basic sounds that are made in the japanese language.katakana represents the same sounds as hiragana. 82 indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427 figure 3 thematic progression: multiple theme / split rheme based on table 3 (paltridge, 2006).theme 1 rheme 1theme 2 rheme 2theme 3 rheme 3theme 4 rheme 4theme 5 rheme 5theme 6 rheme 6thematic progression theory is mostlyemployed to analyze texts in academic field.by employing thematic progression theory,arunsirot’s (2013) study reveals that thereare five problems of theme found in students’writing which are the problem of emptytheme, the problem of the brand new theme,the problem of overuse of constantprogression, the problem of empty rheme,and the problem of confusing selection oftextual theme. to improve students’ writingskills, thematic progression analysis can beemployed in teaching writing (yang, 2008).besides, textual theme and its types can beeffectively applied in classrooms to helpstudents in writings (ebrahimi & ebrahimi,2012). students’ knowledge background alsoinfluences their writings. according to a studyconducted by north (2005), students witharts backgrounds obtained higher marks fortheir assignments than students with sciencebackgrounds. moreover, a study conducted bykhedri (2012) which analyzes thematicprogression in english and persian academictexts reveals that there are significantdifferences between the languages in focusconcerning how information are introducedin texts especially in case of linear andconstant patterns.the purpose of thematic progression isto create a well-structured text. a well-structured text is indicated through the unityand connectedness between individualsentences that relate to each other. therefore,this present study primarily examinesthematic progression pattern in thesisabstracts written by english students inindonesia university of education byemploying the thematic progression theory proposed by fries (2002) to explore howtheir ideas are constructed in writing theirabstracts. methodthis study employs a descriptivequalitative methodology by using thematicprogression theory proposed by fries (2002,as cited in paltridge, 2006) since this studyattempts to investigate the thematicprogression patterns found in five thesisabstracts written by undergraduate studentswhose major is english education inindonesia university of education in order tosee how their ideas are constructed. however,the study also employs some quantitativemeasurement in calculating the number ofeach occurrence of thematic progressionpattern found in the students’ thesis abstracts.the abstracts are collected from onlinelibrary of indonesia university of education, repository.upi.edu. five abstracts are chosenrandomly which were published in 2014.after gathering the data, thematicprogression theory proposed by fries (2002,as cited in paltridge, 2006) is employed toanalyze the data by:1. close-reading the downloaded abstracts.2. breaking down the abstracts into clauses3. placing the clauses into table format tomake the process of the analysis easier andclearer4. determining the theme and rheme5. classifying the thematic progressionpattern, whether it is constant, linear, ormultiple theme.6. calculating the occurence of each type ofthematic progression patterns found in theabstracts. 83 rika vennia rahmawati& eri kurniawan thematic progression analysis in indonesian efl students’ thesis abstracts 7. interpreting the findings to draw aconclusion of how english students’ ofindonesia university of education presenttheir ideas in their thesis abstracts. findings and discussionthe following tables show thedistribution of thematic progression patternsfound in students’ thesis abstract and itspercentage as well. table 4. the distribution of thematic progression pattern. tp pattern/samples a b c d econstant theme 3 2 1 2 2linear theme 1 3 1 1 2multiple theme 1 0 0 0 0 table 5. the percentage of thematic progression pattern. tp patterns total percentageconstant theme 10 52.64%linear theme 8 42.10%multiple theme 1 5.26%from the tables above, it can be seen thatthesis abstracts written by five englishstudents in indonesia university of educationmostly use constant theme by 52.64%. eightlinear themes are also found in the abstractsand there is only one multiple theme found. the use of constant theme and linear themepattern in most of the abstracts used as thesamples in this study may indicate thediscontinuity of information in the texts.the samples of data are presented below: table 6. theme and rheme based on data c theme rhemethis study presents the analysis of how the national mass media deliver their ideologicalpoint of view to the readers in their online articles regarding a political issue injoko widodo and basuki tjahja purnama first 100 days of office.it was aimed at investigating the way social actors are represented in the textand to uncover the ideologies underlying the representation.the data were obtained from ten online articles from different nationwide mediapublished in 22 january 2013.a qualitative method was employed to analyse the selected data.the data were analysed based on the sociosemantic approach proposed by van leeuwen(2008).the findings showedthat jokowi as the governor ofjakarta was dominated the occurrences as an active participant.moreover, different impression was shownwhere the active roles were always associated with jokowiand the passive roles were always associated with jakarta.the findings also revealed that the possible ideologies that can be inferred from the representationwere democracy and jokowi as the “city rescuer.” thematic progression pattern based on table 6 theme 1 rheme 1theme 2 rheme 2theme 3 rheme 3theme 4 rheme 4 84 indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427 theme 5 rheme 5theme 6 rheme 6theme 7 rheme 7theme 8 rheme 8theme 9 rheme 9theme 10 rheme 10theme 11 rheme 11theme 12 rheme 12from the analysis above, it can beseen that the student uses one constanttheme and one linear theme in the abstract.the progress from theme 1 to theme 2 iscalled constant theme because theme 1 isrepeated in theme 2. what is being told fromrheme 5 is repeated in theme 6, which makes this progress called linear theme. however,most of the themes in the text have no pattern.it means that the relation between themes isnot actually found. this condition may bebecause the student wants to add newinformation in the text and has no idea howto make a relation between the clauses. table 7. another example of theme and rheme analysis theme rhemethis paper entitled “a semiotic analysis: the severity of mount merapi eruption portrayedon kemal jufri’s photos as the 2nd prize stories winner of world press photo”.it is aimed to uncover the meaning behind the photographs and to discoversymbols, indexes and modes that appear in the photo stories.the study is qualitative which utilizes eco’s (1994) hermetic drift theory.the theory mainly focuses on the meaning of a symbol which not only has one meaning, buttwo or more meaningif the symbol is put in a different context.the main data are 12 photographswhich were used in the photo stories taken from www.wordpressphoto.orgthe study revealed the juffri’s photo stories about the disaster of mt. merapi eruption.the symbols, indexes andmodes in the photo stories signify the damages, losses, death, and suffering of the people near mt. merapi,which directly got the worst effect of the disaster.the photo story also portrays collectiveness of indonesian people to help the victims of the disaster.figure 5. thematic progression pattern based on table 7.theme 1 rheme 1theme 2 rheme 2theme 3 rheme 3theme 4 rheme 4theme 5 rheme 5theme 6 rheme 6theme 7 rheme 7theme 8 rheme 8theme 9 rheme 9theme 10 rheme 10 85 rika vennia rahmawati& eri kurniawan thematic progression analysis in indonesian efl students’ thesis abstracts in the sample data presented above,there are two constant themes and one lineartheme. theme 1 is related to theme 2 whichmeans that it has a contant theme pattern.theme 9 is related to theme 10 whichindicates the constant theme pattern as well.besides, what is written in rheme 3 is used in theme 4 which means it has a linear theme.just like the analysis in data c, most of thetheme in the abstract has no pattern. it meansthat this abstract is not really hang together.however, there is one sample in which amultiple theme or split rheme is found. thesample is presented below.table 8. theme and rheme based on data a theme rhemethis paper entitled an analysis of themes in “the magic”and its indonesian translation (a systemic functional grammar approach) aims to find out the types of theme andthematic progression in the original version and the translated version of the magic and themes realization in the indonesian translated version.this study employed a descriptive qualitative method especially textual analysis.the present study adopted halliday’s (1994) theory of systemic functional grammar as a tool toanalyze the themes used in the texts and also eggins’ (2004) theory of thematicprogression.the study foundthat in the source text and inthe target text, there are three types of theme found out.those are topical theme, textual theme and interpersonal theme.moreover, the types ofthematic progression in sourcetext and target text show the same pattern.the finding also showsthat there are four pattern of theme realization in translation text.the first pattern, the themes are translated like the original.the second pattern, part oftheme is ellipted.the third pattern, there rheme are some words from translated as theme.the last is the themes are shifted in the process of translation.the realization of theme also does not affect the thematic progression.figure 6. thematic progression pattern based on table 7theme 1 rheme 1theme 2 rheme 2theme 3 rheme 3theme 4 rheme 4theme 5 rheme 5theme 6 rheme 6theme 7 rheme 7theme 8 rheme 8theme 9 rheme 9theme 10 rheme 10theme 11 rheme 11theme 12 rheme 12theme 13 rheme 13theme 14 rheme 14 86 indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427 from the analysis above, it can be seenthat rheme 9 presents information in thesubsequent themes, in theme 10, theme 11,theme 12, and theme 13.since most of the samples seem notreally well arranged due to their lack ofthematic patterns, it may indicate thedifficulties that they face in writing abstracts.the problem that they probably find is thathow to write a coherent abstract and tocreate an appropriate logical relationbetween sentences in their writing. thestudents may also find the problem in writingabstract because of the constraint in terms ofnumbers of words in writing an abstract. anabstract generally should be written in moreor less 200 words and it should represent theimportant information or key elements of theresearch. in light of that, students may beconfused as to how to summarize orcondense their research into 200 words sothat their abstract appears to lack integration. conclusionthe study has found that constant themeis the type of thematic progression patternthat mostly used by the students in writingtheir abstracts (52.64%). linear theme(42.10%) and multiple theme (5.26%) arealso found in the abstracts. the overuse of constant theme and lack of linear andmultiple theme used in the abstracts mayindicate that the abstracts are not really hangtogether. this problem could be attributed tothe fact that the students may find it difficultto condense their research into a 200hundred word-kind of abstract. referencesarunsirot, s. (2013). an analysis of textual metafunctionin thai efl. novitas-royal (research on youth and language). 7(2), 160-174.ebrahimi, s. f., & ebrahimi, s. j. (2012). factuality inundergraduate students’ writings. international journal of english and education.gerot, l., & wignell, p. (1994). making sense of functional grammar. an introductory work book.sydney: gerd stabler.halliday, m.a.k., mathiessen, c.m.i.m. (2004). an introduction to functional grammar. (3rd ed).london: edward arnoldkhedri, m. (2012). the flow of information in englishand persian academic texts. journal of language teaching and research, 3(6), 1175-1179.north, s (2005). disciplinary variation in the use oftheme in undergraduate essays. journal of applied linguistics, 26(3), 431-452.paltridge, b. (2006). discourse analysis. an introduction.london: continuum.richards, j. c. & schmidt, r. (2002). longman dictionary of language teaching and applied linguistics (3rded.). harlow: longman.yang, x. (2008). thematic progression analysis inteaching explanation writing. ccse english language teaching, 1(1), 29-33. 87 using picture books to enhance motivation arisa kochiyama using picture books to enhance motivation and language learning of remedial efllearners using picture books to enhance motivation and language learning of remedial efl learners arisa kochiyama associate professor/ wayo women’s university, japanemail: kochiyama@wayo.ac.jpapa citation: kochiyama, a. (2015). using picture books to enhance motivation and language learning ofremedial efl learners. indonesian efl journal, 1(1), 10-16received: 04-3-2014 accepted: 20-05-2014 published: 01-01-2015 abstract: according to studies done by the japanese ministry of education, culture, sports, scienceand technology, many secondary schools across the nation aren’t adequately preparing students toexcel at college. universities are stepping in to fill the gap by offering remedial college courses insubjects such as japanese and english. the purpose of the present study is to explore how an efl classfor college freshmen can help the students develop the critical thinking skills as well as language skillssuch as pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar necessary to read at the college level.picture books are often overlooked by adult esl/efl instructors as many of them feeluncomfortable reading books designed for children. however, if chosen with consideration for theinterests of the students and used in ways that are appropriate for adult learners, picture books canprovide valuable opportunities of language-rich experiences and interactions. in fact a number ofstudies in western cultures have shown that picture books provide a wealth of possibilities forteaching english topics as well as various vocabulary sets such as family, food, clothes, and so on. theycan also motivate learners to read more and learn more as the students are more likely to find readinga manageable challenge.given these functions of picture books, the main objectives of the study are (1) to discuss themerits of using picture books in remedial english classes from the viewpoint of english languagelearning, (2) to investigate the effect of using picture books on the learners’ motivation and emotionaldevelopment, and (3) to give a report about the students’ reactions towards an adoption of a picturebook in an efl class. keywords: intercultural communication, english as a second language, efl classroom, language and gender, children’s literature in efl learning introduction remedial studentsthe education rebuilding implementationcouncil, an expert panel under prime ministershinzo abe, has suggested that thegovernment lower the grade when primaryschool students start studying english fromthe fourth year and make it a regular subjectfor fourth, fifth and sixth graders. since the2011 academic year, a “foreign languageactivity” has become a required course atprimary schools and now, fifthandsixth-graders take english classes once a week,which has guaranteed 8 years of englisheducation. despite these national efforts tostrengthen the early english education, manystudents have difficulty in learning english asa school year rises. according to the surveyconducted on ninth-graders by education,culture, sports, science and technology in 2009, 18.6% of the students feel they “havesomehow fallen behind” in their english class,and 9.6 % feel they “have completely fallenbehind” in their english class (kiyota 2009). inaddition, the results of the survey conductedby benesse education research anddevelopment center show that 60% of thejunior high school students feel “they are notgood at english” (kiyota 2009). in fact, theacademic skill level of college students hasbecome a problem and many universities havealready adopted remedial classes for thoseunderprepared students to ensure a basicunderstanding of the subjects. learning environment of japanese efl studentsone of the biggest issues whichaccompanies learning english in the eflenvironment is that learners have limited 10 indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(1) january 2015issn 2252-7427exposure to english in daily life. littleopportunity to use english makes it hard forlearners to find a reason to study the language;in other words, they are not motivated tostudy the target language (otsuki and takase2012). additionally, with the grammar-translation method, the most commonapproach adopted at secondary schoolsacross japan, learners are easy to losemotivation for studying english. in thismethod the emphasis is put on translatingenglish text into japanese word by word,rather than appreciating the content of thetext (otsuki and takase 2012). moreover, themain goal of english education is for studentsto succeed in passing the entranceexamination to higher education, whichmainly consists of grammar-orientedquestions and comprehension questions ofshort difficult passages (otsuki and takase2012). many of the underprepared collagestudents have failed in learning efl in theirintroductory stage in junior high schools andhad english phobia for a long period of timeas a school year rises and grammar andvocabulary become more complicated anddifficult. the results of the survey conductedby benesse education research anddevelopment center show that 78.6% of thejunior high school students who fall behind intheir english class have found “studyingenglish grammar too difficult” and 72.2%have found “studying english toostressful”(kiyota 2009). it is evident that thesocial and education circumstancessurrounding english education in japan havegenerated unmotivated and reluctantstudents. picture booksin recent years a number of researcherssuggest authentic children’s literature as analternative to the traditional bottom-upapproach to efl. for example, ghosn (2002)offers the following good reasons for usingauthentic children’s literature; first, children’sliterature provides a motivating context forlanguage learning since learners are naturallydrawn to stories; second, literature cancontribute to language learning as it presentsnatural language, language as its finest, andcan thus foster vocabulary development incontext; third, literature can function as a change agent; good literature deals with someaspects of the human condition, and can thuscontribute to the emotional development ofthe learners and foster positive interpersonaland intercultural attitudes. similarly ellis andbrewster (2002) suggest that using children’sliterature can help develop positive attitudetowards the foreign language, culture andlanguage learning; using stories allows theteachers to introduce or revise newvocabulary and sentence structures byexposing the children to language in varied,memorable and familiar contexts, which willenrich their thinking and gradually enter theirown speech. they also emphasize theimportance of reading aloud by pointing outthat listening to stories helps learners becomeaware of the rhythm, intonation andpronunciation of language.given the above findings, the purpose of thestudy is to investigate the merits of usingpicture books in remedial english classes interms of enhancing learners’ languagelearning, motivation to learn english andimprove their emotional development. methodto address the questions regarding themerits of using picture books in a classroom,the following investigations will be made: (1)a picture book titled the paper bag princesswill be investigated in terms of theintroduction of particular grammaticalfeatures and vocabulary. (2) a pilot study willbe conducted to investigate the effect of usingpicture books on the learners’ motivation andemotional development. and (3) the students’reactions towards an adoption of the picturebook in an efl class will be analyzed. results and discussion selecting an appropriate picture book: input hypothesis and picture booksit has been widely accepted in the eflteaching context that input plays moreimportant role than output. according tokrashan’s (1981) input hypothesis, anessential factor for language acquisition isinput that is comprehensible but that alsocontains language structures beyond thelearner’s current proficiency level. in addition,he claims that the input hypothesis has been 11 arisa kochiyama using picture books to enhance motivation and language learning of remedial efl learnerssuccessfully applied in the area of reading.muranoi (2006) discusses four points tofacilitate learners’ second language learning:(a) comprehensible input; second languagelearners acquire the language by hearing andunderstanding messages that are slightlyabove their current target language level. (b)relevance; texts should contain languageforms and cultures relevant to learners tomatch the learners’ interest. (c) authenticity;input should be culturally and linguisticallyauthentic, which provides the natural use ofcertain essential grammatical feature incommunication. (d) aural-written input;written and aural input should be wellcombined.keeping in mind the length and the level ofdifficulty as well as the students’ interest inthe context, a picture book titled the paper back princess is used in the present study. thebook has been selected because (1) it iswritten in simplified beginning-level english,which is parallels the language competence ofa local junior high school graduate, (2) it tellsinteresting, sophisticated and critical storythat learners of all ages can enjoy, (3) itcontains colorful illustrations, which can begreat motivators for struggling or reluctantreaders, (4) it is available at many bookstoresand public libraries, and (5) it can be used asalternative reading. in fact, the paper bag princess written by a canadian author robertmunsch is a children’s book whose storyreverses the prince and princess stereotypeand has won critical acclaim from feminists.although children’s literature such as picturebooks, chapter books and fairy tales iscommonly used in the reading practices inesl/efl classrooms, many researchers pointout that gender bias is still prevalent incontemporary children’s and young adultliterature (kuo 2005). as a result, teachersneed to be sensitive to their materials or theywill easily fall in to a passive acceptance ofeverything literature presents to us (fox1993). reading the paper bag princess islikely to empower students with criticalthinking and alternative reading whileimproving their literacy.in terms of the level of difficulty of the paper bag princess, the learners need 150words to read the text. since japanese junior high school students have learned 900english words, junior high school graduatescan understand the overall meanings of thetext using the twenty percent of theknowledge of english vocabulary. in terms ofthe grammatical features, the text includes themajority of grammatical items that aresuggested for junior high school students tobe learned, which are stated in the guidelinemade by the japanese ministry of education,culture, sports, science and technology. thetenses used in the text include present tense,present progressive, past tense, pastprogressive, and present perfect. sentencestructures used in the text include affirmativesentences, negative sentences, interrogativesentences, imperative sentences andcomparison. to-infinitives and passive voicesare used as well. examples of eachgrammatical items appeared in the text are asfollows: presenti am a very busy dragon.present progressiveyou smell like ashes, your hair is all tangled and you arewearing a dirty old paper bag.pastelizabeth was a beautiful princess.she lived in a castle and had expensive princess clothes.past progressiveshe was going to marry a prince named ronald.present perfectwell, a princess! i love to eat princesses, but i havealready eaten a whole castle today.negative (past)they didn’t get married after all.interrogativeis it true that you are the smartest and fiercest dragon inthe whole world?imperative“wait,” shouted elizabeth.comparisonis it true that you are the smartest and fiercest dragon inthe whole world?she shouted as loud as she could, “hey, dragon!”to-infinitivewhen he got back he was too tired to talk, and he laydown and went straight to sleep.. 12 indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(1) january 2015issn 2252-7427passive voicecome back when you are dressed like a real princess.in the text, a variety of vocabulary, idioms, andexpressions repeat themselves, which enableslearners to read similar or same words andgrammatical structures over and over withoutnoticing it and develop both grammatical andcommunicative competence. rivers (1968)points out the effectiveness of pattern drills onforeign language learning discussing thathabits are strengthened by reinforcement andanalogy provides a better foundation forforeign language learning than analysis.repetition (1) a. the dragon stuck his nose out of the door andsaid, “well, a princess! i love to eat princesses,but i have already eaten a whole castle today. iam a very busy dragon. come back tomorrow.”b. the dragon stuck his nose out of the door andsaid, “go away. i love to eat princesses, but i havealready eaten a whole castle today. i am a verybusy dragon. come back tomorrow.”(2) a. “is it true,” said elizabeth, “that you can burn upten forests with your fiery breath?”b. elizabeth said, “dragon, is it true that you can flyaround the world in just ten seconds?”examples a and b in sentences (1) whichappear in a page apart illustrate the repetitionof the same phrases and sentences. examplesa and b in sentence (2) appear in two pagesapart. the same sentence structures are usedin this examples but not the same vocabulary.it should be noticed, however, that a word“ten” is used repeatedly in the sentences,which helps learners to acquire the wordnaturally. according to gannon (1987) whohas investigated the merits of picture books inenglish education, repetition is one of themost familiar features of children’s literature.repetition not only adds rhythm and themysterious charm of ritual to the simplestverbal formulas but clarifies the structure ofnarrative for young readers and helps them toremember what they have read.given the above findings, it is likely that the paper bag princess may serve as analternative to efl textbooks and have theeffect on remedial learners’ efl learning fromthe viewpoint of input hypothesis. emotional development: pilot studysince the 1960’s, language educators inthe united states have made it a priority toincorporate the study of culture into theirclassroom curricula. through the study ofother languages, learners gain a knowledgeand understanding of culture that uses thelanguage. in fact, learners cannot truly masterthe language until they have also masteredthe cultural contexts in which the languageoccurs (peterson and coltrane 2003). brooks(1964) proposes five meanings of culture tobe combined in language teaching: growth,refinement, fine arts, patterns of living, and atotal way of life. the fourth meaning refers tothe role of the individual in life situations ofevery kind and his conformity to the rules andmodels for attitude and conduct in them.according to brooks, this meaning is the mostimmediately useful in instruction. literarytexts are often replete with culturalinformation and evoke memorable reactionsfor readers. texts that are carefully selectedfor a given group of students and with specificgoals in mind can be very helpful in allowingstudents to acquire insight into a culture(peterson and coltrane 2003). one studycompared the level and quality of recollectionwhen two different groups of students learnedabout cote d’ivoire (scott and huntington2000). one group studied a fact sheet and asecond studied a poem about colonialism incote d’ivoire. the researchers found that thegroup that read the poem showed a capacityto empathize with the personal history of thecote d’ivoire people. thus, culture must befully incorporated as a vital component oflanguage learning. second language teachersshould identify key cultural items in everyaspect of the language that they teach.given these findings, a pilot study wasconducted to investigate the effect of using apicture book on the learners’ motivation andemotional development. the subjects of thestudy consist of 28 japanese high beginningefl learners with japanese as their firstlanguage. they are either sophomores orjuniors majoring english communication in aprivate women’s university located in thecenter of japan. reading tasks of reading aloud,translation, and students’ written feedbackand semi-structured interviews developed by 13 arisa kochiyama using picture books to enhance motivation and language learning of remedial efl learnersbc teacher’s federation were provided forthree consecutive 90 minute classes. thepurpose of the reading tasks is to allowstudents not only to learn the target languagebut also to think critically about how men andwomen are portrayed and compare theseportrayals to their own lives. it is hoped thatthe discussion of such a controversial issuelead by the discussion questions can stimulatestudents to foster critical thinking and literacyand empower them with a futureunderstanding of gender notions in their lives(kuo 2005). kuo (2005) claims the importanceof teacher’s role by pointing out that teachersneed to be extremely aware of the fact thatdominant reading practices will make studentsaccustomed to mainstream texts and as aresult students will passively identifythemselves with the characters in the stories.kuo suggests that teachers should equipstudents with a certain stance that deliberatelychallenges the text and help students uncoverthe gender inequalities present in the text, indoing so, it is useful for teachers to adoptresistant or oppositional reading practicesrather than dominant and conventionalreading practices. according to the bcteacher’s federation, a familiar starting pointfor students would be to read traditional fairytales and identify the elements that make itdifferent from a non-fiction story by askingopen-ended questions as in the following: 1) how are princesses usually portrayed at the start ofa story?2) is she waiting around for something or someone tocome to her rescue or make her happy? if so,whom?3) towards the end of a story what makes cinderellaand snow white happy? why do you think thatmight be?after reading a variety of traditional andmodernized fairy tales and analyzingcomponents of each style of fairy tale,teachers can ask students:4) in you world, who is a more realistic character?why do you think that? who does each princessremind you of in real life?5) can a prince or princess be single and live happilyever after? why or why not? do you know anyonewho is single and happy?as for the possible extensions, bc teacher’s federation suggests the followingstrategies:6) have students take a traditional fairy tale and worktogether in small groups to write a new ending forit. ask them to create one where the princess andprince live in a more realistic and independentmanner.(bc teacher’s federation)questions 1) to 3) help students to be awareof stereotyped representations embedded inthe traditional fairy tales such as snow white, cinderella, sleeping beauty, and so on.questions 4) to 6) help students to rethinkabout gender notions of the characters in the paper bag princess and foster critical thinkingand literacy. the students’ answers are shownas follows:1)poor 22beautiful, pretty 21bullied, life-threatened、facing hardship 10kind, gentle 8unhappy 8doing housework／cleaning 4cheerful 1quiet 1single-minded 12)being saved by the prince 25being happy 14being rich 5nothing particular 33)getting married with a prince 25being saved by a prince 19being rich／living in plenty 11being without a villain 84)elizabeth 26traditional princesses 2reasons for elizabethshe didn’t get married after all 9she is a person of action 6she is strong／brave 6she is not pretty 4she looks at the prince’s personality 25)yes 22reasonsi know those are single and happy 15marriage does not always lead to happiness 12 14 indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(1) january 2015issn 2252-7427different plot is more interesting 2no 6reasonsmarriage is the happy ending 3happy marriage is a dream 3the above report shows that the alternative readingconducted in the classes was successful in helpingstudents become aware of gender bias prevalent intraditional fairy tales and approach the text frommultiple perspectives and with alternative attitudes. motivationin order to investigate the effects of the useof picture books on the learners’ motivationfor learning english, the students’ reactionstowards reading the paper bag princess in theclasses have been analyzed with 4 questions(see graphs 3.3.1~2.2.4.). the scale is stronglyagree = 1, agree = 2, neither agree nor disagree= 3, disagree = 4, strongly disagree = 5. the pie charts above show the positivereactions of the students towards reading the paper bag princess in their efl classes as77% of the students enjoyed the classes and75% of them have become more interested inthe target culture than before. as for thedifficulty of the text, 66% of the studentsthink the text has matched the students’proficiency level. in addition, 56% of thestudents think that the continuous reading ofpicture books in the future will enhance theirenglish proficiency. thus the above resultsshow that reading children’s picture book hasmotivated the efl learners to study the targetlanguage. conclusionthe present study have investigated themerits of using picture books in remedialenglish classes in terms of enhancinglearners’ language learning, motivating tolearn the language and improving theiremotional development. the results of thestudy have suggested that the text should becarefully selected in terms of the level ofdifficulty such as vocabulary and grammaruse and the story should be interestingenough for adult learners. the carefullyselected literature may serve as a viablealternative to efl textbooks in readingclasses because they give studentsopportunities to learn not only language skillsbut also to be sensitive to different cultures. 15 arisa kochiyama using picture books to enhance motivation and language learning of remedial efl learnersquality literature and activities can also helplearners gain insight into human behavior,and it can stimulate students to foster criticalthinking and literacy and empower them witha future understanding of gender notions intheir lives (kuo 2005).in order to better understand the effect ofusing picture books on learners’ emotionaldevelopment, further analysis on thestudents’ report about the paper bag princessis required. with increased importanceplaced on remedial classes in universities, itwould seem beneficial for additional researchto be conducted in quantitative study as wellas qualitative one to determine the effects ofpicture books presented in class. referenceshttp://bctf.ca/uploadedfiles/public/socialjoustice/issues/lgbtq/fairytalesgender.pdf. (retrieve may 20, 2014)brooks, n. (1964). language and language learning.new york: brace and world.ellis, g. & brewster, j. (2002). tell it again! the new storytelling handbook for primary teachers.harlow: pearson education.fox, m. (1993). men who weep, boys who dance: thegender agenda between the lines in children’sliterature. language arts 70, 84-88.ghosn, i. k. (2002). four good reasons to use literaturein primary school elt. elt journal. 56 (2),172-179. gannon, s. r. (1987). one more time: approaches torepetition in children’s literature. children’s literature association quarterly 12 (1), 2-5.kiyota, y. 2009. motivation of remedial efl learners: acase study of japanese collage efl learners. education research on remedial education 4 (2),41-47.krashan, s. (1981). second language acquisition and second language learning. oxford: pergamon.kuo, j. (2005). teaching esl/efl student to recognizegender bias in children’s literature. the internet tesl journal.http://iteslj.org/articles/kou-genderbias.html.lazar, g. (1993). literature and language teaching: a guide for teachers and trainers. cambridge:cambridge university press.munsch, r. 2011. the paper bag princess. toronto:annick press.muranoi, h. (2006). effective english teaching and learning methods from the viewpoint of second language acquisition studies. tokyo. taishukan.otsuki, k., & takase, a. (2012). comparison ofpedagogical grammar in picture books and englishtextbooks. extensive reading world congress proceedings 1, 116-119.peterson, e. & coltrane, b. (2003). culture in secondlanguage teaching. cal digest. washington,dc: center for applied linguistics. retrieve may 20,2014, fromhttp://www.cal.org/resources/digest/0309peterson.htmlrivers, w. (1968). teaching foreign language skills.chicago: university of chicago press.scott, m., & huntington, a. (2000). reading culture:using literature to develop c2 competence. foreign language annals, 35 (6), 622-631. 16 the need of english at higher education yulia hapsari english language education, universitas brawijaya, indonesia email: yulia_hap@yahoo.com esti junining english language education, universitas brawijaya, indonesia email: esti_junining@yahoo.com devinta puspita ratri english language education, universitas brawijaya, indonesia email: devinta@ub.ac.id apa citation: hapsari, y., junining, e., & ratri, d. p. (2017). the need of english at higher education. indonesian efl journal, 3(1), 31-38 received: 12-11-2016 accepted: 16-12-2016 published: 01-01-2017 abstract: issues related to the need of english at higher education continue to be a discussion among scholars. many believe that there is a positive relationship between english language skills of university students and their academic performance, and that english language skills are highly valued as a graduate attribute for employability. however, there are still few actions taken to gain information regarding which specific english language skills needed by educators and academic support staff. universitas brawijaya (ub) as one of the prominent higher education institutions in indonesia is continuously taking actions to keep improving the quality of its graduates. one of the actions is to help its students to have a decent level of english language skills in order to help them to be ready to compete in work market that is going global. to reveal english language skills needed by bachelor graduates of the university as well as the reasons behind the need, sets of questionnaire were distributed to the educators in this case represented by the deans and academic support staff and the heads of academic support units both in the faculty and university level. the data from the questionnaires were then analyzed qualitatively. the findings of this study demonstrated that the educators need reading and writing skills more than the other two skills. this finding supports the idea that reading and writing skills are desperately needed to increase the number of publication in ub. different from this result, the academic support staff perception on the need of english for the employees is on speaking skills. they think that speaking skills are the most needed skills for the employees to be able to handle the guest, and as a speaker of the units. keyword: need of english, english language skills, higher education introduction the status of english today sets it apart from other foreign languages. in developing countries, english is often tied to development goals, expansion of the service sector, and increased connectivity to the rest of the world. in indonesia, many efforts have been done to increase students’ english proficiency level, nevertheless students of higher education. universitas brawijaya (ub) as one of the prominent higher education institutions in indonesia is also continuously taking actions to keep improving the quality of its graduates. a qualified university graduate is a must in order to make them ready to win competition in the world market that is going global. it is not only the graduates’ personal and interpersonal quality that matter, but the inevitable requirement to be internationally recognized includes their decent english proficiency. english proficiency index (epi) of english first (ef), an international english language institution, put indonesia in 'moderate' category or having intermediate english proficiency level. however, in relation to english fluency, indonesia remains positioned below its neighboring countries; indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 31 namely, singapore, malaysia, and even vietnam. issues related to english proficiency in academic life especially in higher education have also been a discussion among scholars and professionals. a study conducted on the impact of ielts scores on performance at an australian university has reported a significant and positive relationship between language proficiency of international university students and their overall academic performance as measured by their gpa (feast, 2002). in 2012, wilson and komba pointed out that there is a significant weak positive relationship between english language proficiency and students’ academic achievement. it means that the english language proficiency is positively connected with academic success. similar findings were also revealed by ghenghesh (2015) who indicated that there is a significant but moderate positive relation between the students’ proficiency in english and their overall academic success. specifically, the higher the english proficiency of students on entry to the university, the better they performed in their degree area courses as well as in their english levels. aina et al. (2013) also came with evidence that students of technical education who pass their english subject performed better than those who failed. the positive relationship between english proficiency and academic performance is also seen from a research by martirosyan et al. (2015) stating that the highest mean gpa was evident among students who had reported high levels of selfperceived english language proficiency. there are some strategies that higher education can do in making english language development becomes a central element of their learning and teaching. strategies include institutional strategic plans; monitoring and evaluating english language entry requirements; diagnostic testing; and integrating communication skills as learning outcomes within disciplinary teaching (arkoudis, et.al, 2014). centre for the study of higher education, the university of melbourne, australia set english language proficiency (elp) and employability framework in 2014. this framework has been designed to inform and support higher education institutions’ (heis) policies and practices on elp and graduate employability. linking elp and employability together in the framework was supported by the general agreement in the literature that communication skills are highly valued as a graduate attribute for employability. nevertheless, there is limited study – if any that shows any evidence of any relation between english language proficiency and work performance. accordingly, it is evident that english plays an important part in the life of university education in that english is offered as a subject that is obligatory to be taken by the students. it is believed that a good proficiency of english will help the students to progress with their education. on the contrary, students who have low competency of english might suffer from difficulties when they have to engage in classroom activities involving english as the medium of instruction. it is so as nowadays numorous references used are written or available in english. without a good mastery of reading skills, undestanding the references will be challenging. besides, publication of journal, in which the abstract is necessary to be written in english, upon completing the study is one of the requirements the students have to fulfill. that indicates that writing skills in english is another skill to master. in addition, many classes in many faculties now are designed or opened as international classes in which english serves as the medium of instruction. consequently, students wanting to be enrolled in such a class must be fluent in english orally and in written form. hence, it is apparent that english proficiency plays an important role in the academic world. english proficiency is the students’ aptitude in using english in communicating both orally and in written form during their study at the university (deewr) as cited in (ghenghes, 2015). it indicates that students are forced to have good skills of listening, speaking, reading, as well as writing. universities, as one of educational institutions, have always tried to find ways in ensuring the quality of their inputs and yulia hapsari, esti junining, & devinta puspita ratri the need of english at higher education 32 outputs. in doing so, one of the ways taken is by setting some requirements to fulfill by the applicants as well as by the graduate-to-be. requiring the inputs or output to pass a certain passing grade of an english standardized test is one of the ways. curiosity of what english proficiency should be mastered by university graduates underlies this study. ub is chosen as the place to conduct the study because it is one of the prominent universities in indonesia that has very large numbers of students coming from all over indonesia and even some countries in asia. in order to get a vivid picture of the need of english proficiency for bachelor graduates, educators and academic support staff from faculties in ub were involved to respond to a set of questionnaire revealing their expectation of what english proficiency should be mastered by bachelor graduates and the reasons underlying their answers. this study is considered important to be conducted as the result should be beneficial for the english teaching in the university so that its graduate’s quality, especially in english, is improved. based on the elaboration of the background, this current study aims to describe the educators’ perception on the need of english for bachelor graduates at ub, and describe the academic support staff’s perception on the need of english for bachelor graduates at ub. method the study was conducted around three months from august to october 2016, at ub, a public university in malang, indonesia by involving deans and head of administrative staff from different faculties in the university. the choice of the aforementioned university was based on the consideration that it is one of the best universities in indonesia and many of its faculties have international standard proven by international accreditation certification. not only students, but lectureres and volunteers from other countries also come to ub for their study and their career. as all faculties in ub are improving their quality required to be a world class university, the need of english proficiency is a must, both for its students and employees many of them are ub graduates. since this study intends to describe the need of english expected to be mastered by bachelor graduated from ub seen from the educators and academic support perspectives, qualitative research was conducted. qualitative research is a study which seeks to understand a phenomenon by focusing on the total picture rather than breaking it down into variables (ary et al., 2006). data were gained from distributing questionnaire to dean of all faculties to uncover the need of english from academic perspective and to head of administrative staff of all faculties in ub to reveal the need of english from academic support. subsequently, the data gained from the questionnaire were analyzed to map the english proficiency needed seen from educators and academic support perspective. the result of this analysis will be elaborated descriptively. prior to collecting data needed in this research, the instrument employed to collect the data on english proficiency needed by bachelor graduates was designed. the questionnaire was developed both in a closeended and open-ended question to inquire as much information as possible. due to limited and less reliable previous studies which discuss the same topic as this study, the instruments were developed through some steps. prior to developing the questionnaire, blue print is composed as the principle in developing the items in the questionnaire. the blue print of the questionnaire comprises english proficiency needed. the english proficiency test refers to the four language skills; reading, listening, writing, and speaking with proficiency descriptions. each description represents different proficiency level. this description is a result of wrapping up english proficiency level of each language skill in toefl, toeic, and ielts test. two sets of questionnaire were developed based on the blue print. one set was given to the deans to get data needed from academic perspective, and the other set was given to head of academic support staff indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 33 such as the head of administrative unit both in the faculty and university level to get the data needed from academic support perspective. there were two kinds of data obtained from the questionnaire. the first was in the form of percentage of the result of the questionnaire. some of the items distributed to the respondents were presented using likert scale in terms that the respondents were provided five options on the answer ranging from the lowest to the highest scale. in processing this type of data, the researchers processed it in simple statistical way to finally come to the percentage result. having finished with the calculation, the researchers were able to see the respondents’ opinion regarding the issue raised in the questionnaire. the second data was descriptive. it is from this type of data that the researchers were able to get further additional information. the items presented with options in likert scales were also accompanied with spaces where the respondents could state their reasons. the researchers then analyze their reasons descriptively. besides, the questionnaire also contained some items that were presented in open-ended questions. the answers of which were descriptively analyzed. the procedures in doing the analysis were by listing, selecting or sorting out, and interpreting the data. listing the data refers to the process where the researchers noted down all of the answers as what they were. the second process was sorting out the data. this process was aimed at avoiding data overlapping. there might be possibilities that different respondents have similar ideas. it was in this process that same opinions were grouped. the last stage was interpreting the data. this means that the researchers decode the information obtained from the respondents in regards to the issues raised. results and discussion educators’ perception on the need of english the educators’ perspectives which are represented by the deans of nine faculties in ub agree that undergraduate students should master the four language skills namely speaking, listening, writing, and reading adequately with the emphasis on reading skill. the detailed explanation is described in table 1 to 4. 1. the need of speaking skills speaking skill is the first skill asked in the questionnaire. the result of speaking skill analysis is shown in the following table. table 1. educator’s perception on the need of speaking skills speaking 1 2 3 4 5 a. graduates are able to deliver message orally 44% 22% 11% 11% 11% b. graduates are able to use good grammar in oral communication. 33% 33% 11% 11% 11% c. graduates are able to use english orally in all of different occasion. 33% 44% 1% 11% 11% from the table, it can be seen that 44% of the educators who are represented by the deans expect that ub students are able to communicate by using english in all of different occasions. they prefer students who have good speaking ability and have confidence to deliver message in english. there is a reason that underlies the respondents to consider speaking skills as one of the language skills that the graduates have to master. it is simply because this skill is ultimately needed for communication, especially in international context and setting. speaking ability will help the graduates to be able to compete internationally. in point of fact, this idea is in line with the goal set by the university that is to be a world class university. however, some of the repondents believe that the skill of speaking in english is not the most important among others. their view is based on the conviction that oral mastery of english is not the only requirement for communication to take place. as long as the message is delivered in communication, speaking skills can be put aside. furthermore, not all graduates will have to interact with english-speaking people in their yulia hapsari, esti junining, & devinta puspita ratri the need of english at higher education 34 future jobs. only 40% of the total graduates continue their study abroad or work in multinational companies. while the rest 60% of the total have their carreer in indonesia and even use local language for communication. 2. the need of listening skills as one of the receptive skills, listening should be mastered by undergraduate students. the need of listening can be seen in table 2. table 2. educators’ perception on the need of listening skills listening 1 2 3 4 5 a. graduates are able to recognize the main idea of short spoken text presented in audio recording and direct spoken english. 45% 33% 11% 11% b. graduates are able to classify specific information in dialog or short spoken text. 56% 22% 22% c. graduates are able to identify the implied and stated meaning of conversation. 56% 22% 11% 11% d. graduates are able to discover ideas with minimum repetition. 33% 45% 11% 11% e. graduates are able to pinpoint ideas correctly and use grammar appropriately. 33% 45% 11% 11% table 2 describes the need of listening to understand oral communication. most of the deans share ideas that undergraduate students should be able to recognize main ideas, classify specific information, identify both implied and stated information, discover ideas with minimum repetition, and pinpoint ideas correctly using appropriate grammar. listening skill is required to help the graduates to be able to grab the ideas of spoken english. in turn, the graduates will be able to communicate with foreigners without obstacles. 3. the need of reading skills reading skills take place as the most frequent skills needed by the undergraduate. it is figured out in table 3. table 3. educators’ perception on the need of reading skills reading 1 2 3 4 5 a. graduates are able to identify stated main idea of the text in english. 67% 11% 22% b. graduates are able to distinguish implied main idea of the text in english. 67% 11% 22% c. graduates are able to pinpoint vocabulary in various english texts. 34% 33% 11% 22% d. graduates are able to recognize grammar in various english texts. 33% 45% 11% 11% from table 3, it can be stated that most of the deans need undergraduate students who are able to have high skills in reading especially in distinguishing between stated and implied main ideas of the text (67%). this table shows the highest need of reading skills among the other skills. there are several reasons that are used as the basis why the respondents consider reading skill as the most needed aspect of language to be mastered by the graduates. one of the reasons is because good skill of reading helps the graduates understand the content of the materials when they were still studying at the university. it is so as many journals used for classes are presented in english. the updated world-wide information can also be accessed by reading. besides, reading skill will help the graduates to avoid misinterpreting the information made available for them. 4. the need of writing skills similar to reading skill, writing skill also takes place as the most required skills in higher education. the explanation is shown in table 4. indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 35 table 4. educators’ perception on the need of writing skills writing 1 2 3 4 5 a. graduates are able to write reports in english. 56% 33% 11% b. graduates are able to design a slide show presentation in english. 22% 56% 11% 11% c. graduates are able to write various documents in english. 56% 33% 11% d. graduates are able to produce a written form using a good english grammar. 66% 12% 11% 11% table 4 indicates the need of writing skill involving the ability to write in a good english grammar (66%) followed by writing a report, designing a slide show for presentation, and writing various documents needed in working places respectively. all respondents believe that writing skill needs to be improved. it is so as writing skills of undergraduate students are still low. writing is needed to deliver and get ideas acrossed. however, it is quite obvious that writing is bothersome, moreover to students of non-english department. upon realizing this, the respondents think that the teaching of writing is needed to help the students to be able to write an abstract for their final report. academic support staff perception on the need of english the respondents of the academic support staff involves the personnel in charge of the five different academic support units such as 1) the head of administrative staff in the faculty of cultural studies, 2) the head of student affairs in the faculty of engineering, 3) the head of financial affairs in the faculty of administrative sciences, 4) the head of personnel bureau in ub, and 5) the head of information and technology unit in ub. 1. the need of speaking skills for employees table 5 describes the need of speaking skills among the employees. table 5. the academic support staff perception on the need of speaking skills speaking 1 2 3 4 5 a. graduates are able to deliver message orally. 60% 20% 20% b. graduates are able to use good grammar in oral communication. 80% 20% c. graduates are able to use english orally in all of different occasion. 60% 20% 20% from table 5, it is clearly seen that most of the academic support staff prefer to have employees who are able to speak in a good english grammar. besides, the employees should have other speaking skills such as delivering message orally in a different occasion. 2. the need of listening skills for employees the need of listening skills for employees is described in table 6. table 6. the academic support staff perception on the need of speaking skills listening 1 2 3 4 5 a. graduates are able to recognize the main idea of short spoken text presented in audio recording and direct spoken english. 40% 20% 40% b. graduates are able to classify specific information in dialog or short spoken text. 20% 60% 20% c. graduates are able to identify the implied and stated meaning of conversation. 60% 20% 20% d. graduates are able to discover ideas with minimum repetition. 20% 60% 20% e. graduates are able to pinpoint ideas correctly and use grammar appropriately. 20% 60% 20% yulia hapsari, esti junining, & devinta puspita ratri the need of english at higher education 36 table 6 describes the need of listening skill for employees under the respondents’ responsibility. among the five statements, classifying specific information, identifying implied and stated meaning, discovering ideas, and pinpointing ideas are considered as the important skills needed to be mastered by employees working in a particular unit. 3. the need of reading skills for employees the need of reading skills for employees is illustrated in table 7. table 7. academic support staff perception on the need of reading skills reading 1 2 3 4 5 a. graduates are able to identify stated main idea of the text in english.. 40% 40% 20% b. graduates are able to distinguish implied main idea of the text in english. 40% 40% 20% c. graduates are able to pinpoint vocabulary in various english texts. 20% 40% 20% 20% d. graduates are able to recognize grammar in various english texts.. 60% 20% 20% among the four reading skills, recognizing grammar in various english texts is the most needed skill of reading for the employees. the respondents think that this skill effectively helps to understand an english text. 4. the need of writing skills for employees the explanation of the need of writing skills for employees is stated in table 8. table 8. academic support perception on the need of writing skills writing 1 2 3 4 5 a. graduates are able to write reports in english. 40% 40% 20% b. graduates are able to design a slide show presentation in english. 40% 40% 20% c. graduates are able to write various documents in english. 40% 40% 20% d. graduates are able to produce a written form using a good english grammar. 40% 40% 20% table 8 describes that ability to write reports in english, design slide show presentation in english, write various documents in english, and produce a written form using good english grammar takes equal importance among the employees. the respondents believed that a good writing skill is an indication of succesful working performance. comparison on the need of english between educators and academic staff the explanation of the comparison on the need of writing skills for employees is stated in table 9. table 9. comparison on the need of english between the educators and the academic staff writing speaking % listening % writing % reading % a. educators’ need of the four language skills 10 20 30 40 b. academic staff‘ need of the four language skills 70 10 10 10 table 9 shows the comparison on the need of the four language skills between the educators and the academic staff. from the table, it can be concluded that the educators emphasize reading and writing skills more than listening and speaking skills. they expect that undergraduate students could master reading and writing skills more than listening and speaking skills. different from educators’ perspective, the academic supports staff prefer to have employees who are fluent in speaking more than listening, reading and writing. to summarize, undergraduate students should master reading equally to writing in order to finish the bachelor degree, and employees need to have high communication skills more than the other skills in order to be a good employees who are able to handle the guests and other relation activities. briefly, it can be inferred that in order to be able to finish the study successfully, indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 37 undergraduate students should have skills in reading and writing more than the ability to listen and to speak. this statement is in line with richards (1990) who states that english for academic purposes in higher education should emphasize on reading more than the other skills to increase students’ schemata for a new knowledge. this finding seems to be relevant to the nature of english for specific purposes (esp) that reading skills should be exposed more than the other language skills. regarding the second finding related to the need of english for communication skills among academic support staff, the results are in line with some studies related to this field. as nunan (2002) states that communication is crucially needed in an administrative field. therefore, it is needed to prepare the graduates with english skills needed in their professional world. different from the educator’s perspectives, it is true that a skillful academic support staff should have a good communication skill which is important to deliver a message orally in front of either the customers or clients. conclusion from the finding of the study, there are two conclusions that can be taken into consideration in terms of the roles and functions. firstly, different roles maintain different needs of english. it means that the need of english for educators is different from the need of english for academic support staff. this may be caused by the fact that educators need more exposures in reading for new information and writing for publication than those of the administrative staff. secondly, administrative staff requires more communication skills than those of academic staff. these communication skills are mainly needed for handling the guests and making relationship with other customers or clients. references ghenghes, p. (2015). the relationship between english language proficiency and academic performance of university students – should academic institutions really be concerned?. international journal of applied linguistics, 4(2). wilson, j., & komba, s. c. (2012). the link between english language proficiency and academic performance: a pedagogical perspective in tanzanian secondary schools. world journal of english language, 2(4). yulia hapsari, esti junining, & devinta puspita ratri the need of english at higher education 38 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 2, july 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 131 the utilization of digital platforms in online learning: efl students’ perspectives ira irzawati department of english language education, faculty of humanities and education musi charitas catholic university, palembang e-mail: irairzawati@gmail.com apa citation: irzawati, i. (2021). the utilization of digital platforms in online learning: efl students’ perspectives. indonesian efl journal. 7(2), pp.131-138. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i2.4566 received: 17-03-2020 accepted: 16-05-2021 published:15-07-2021 introduction the outbreak of covid-19 has brought massive impacts on the education system across the globe. the pandemic forces closures of schools and universities to support the social distancing protocol proposed by world health organization (who). this leads to the shift of the education system from face-to-face learning to online learning to halt the spread of the pandemic (tadesse & muluye, 2020). in indonesia, the ministry of education and culture (moec) is encouraging online learning in educational institutions of all levels (abidah, hidayatullah, simamora, fehabutar, & mutakinati, 2020). this type of system is considered as one of the best solutions to continue the education system without exposing students, teachers, and other related individuals to the risk of being infected by covid-19. online learning is viewed as a proper learning system during the pandemic. this type of learning system promotes social distancing that reduces exposure risk to covid-19. it is a distance education form that provides a learning experience for adults and children, gives learning access to students living in various areas, and offers a learning opportunity for those that are not able to attend school for any reasons including due to covid-19 (kim, 2020). it requires adjustments of instructors and students to support online learning success (ya ni, 2013). according to kim (2020), online learning brought benefits and limitations. for instance, it doesn’t need a physical location that leads to a higher participation rate and it offers effective cost due to travel cost decrease. however, it highly depends on the ability of instructors or students, and it is possibly hindered by technical problems. during the pandemic covid-19, online learning is one of the most realistic and potential learning types used to continue the education process. therefore, both advantages and disadvantages of online learning need to be taken into account to realize online learning success and progress. to support the success of online learning, the utilization of proper digital platforms is highly required. utilizing digital platforms in efl learning is inevitable since the development of technology has exposed the students to digitalization. millennials are digital natives that actively using technological tools. hence, the integration of digital abstract: the purpose of this research was to investigate the efl students’ perspectives toward the utilization of digital platforms in online learning. learning management system, whatsapp, and google meet are the digital platforms used in the online learning of this research. this descriptive research involved 79 students from three different faculties of a private university in palembang that selected through purposive sampling technique. the data were collected by administrating questionnaires and interviews to the participants via google form and whatsapp chat. collecting, classifying, and describing were a set of data analysis procedures used by the researcher. the results revealed that the students perceived the use of the digital platforms in efl learning positively. the students believed that learning through utilizing the digital platforms had brought positive impacts that lead to the enhancement of their english achievement. using multi-digital platforms provided an opportunity to experience a more dynamic learning atmosphere that boosts their skill progress and motivation. keywords: digital platforms; online learning; efl; students’ perspective https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i2.4566 ira irzawati the utilization of digital platforms in online learning: efl students’ perspectives 132 platforms into efl learning is potentially beneficial for millennial students. in addition, various digital platforms are possibly integrated into online learning, such as learning management system (lms), social networking applications, and video conferencing. learning management system (lms) is a digital platform commonly used to facilitate teaching and learning activities, especially at the tertiary level. it is employed to support both online and blended learning and functions as a bridge between instructors and learners through providing a wellorganized learning medium (basal, 2016). edmodo, moodle, and quipper are among lms that widely used by teachers and students all over the world. another type of digital platform used as a means of learning is the social networking application. whatsapp is a popular mobile phone application and web-based social network that integrates various features to communicate among users (nihayati & indriani, 2021). it facilitates the users to exchange text messages, voice notes, video, or any other type of data and information. the features of whatsapp are highly fruitful to promote online teaching and learning activities that require intensive communication and discussion. thus, it is included as one of mostly used digital platforms in efl learning. direct interaction in form of face-to-face discussion or communication between teachers and students is unavoidable in efl learning. video conferencing is a digital platform that accommodates the necessity. google meet is one of the video conferencing that is more widely known and used during this pandemic. it facilitates people to conduct online discussions, meetings, and seminars (hazairin, 2020). many studies revealed positive impacts of digital platform utilization on efl learning. tumskiy (2019) mentions several benefits of digital platform use, namely free space and time barriers, flexible use, various assessment, and modern design. digital platforms eliminated space and time barriers. the platform facilitates students to learn anytime and anywhere. furthermore, the platforms enable the teacher to adjust the setting and content of the platform. it is a friendly user and adaptable. moreover, it provides various assessment forms that facilitate the teachers to create many types of assessments. at last, the platform has a modern design. thus, the students are fond of using it. dealing with it, research conducted by cakrawati in 2017 showed that the students had positive perceptions towards the implementation of edmodo and quipper in efl learning. the students believed that the platforms contributed to effective and efficient efl learning. the students also stated that the platforms facilitated language skill progress, vocabulary acquisition, and understanding development of the lesson. in line with it, ahmed (2019) investigated the effectiveness of whatsapp use to enhance efl learners’ reading and writing skills. based on findings, the use of whatsapp in efl learning assisted the learners to improve reading and writing skills. whatsapp was also perceived as a motivating pedagogical tool that helps the learner to experience an enjoyable learning atmosphere. concerning it, the result of research conducted by lawson and comber in 2014 indicated that the use of videoconferencing in teaching and learning activities promoted independent learning. the learning platform encouraged students’ center learning. more various studies have been conducted regarding the utilization of lms in efl online learning (basal, 2016; putri & sari, 2020; tumskiy, 2019; wulandari & budiyanto, 2017). moreover, many researchers have investigated issues on the implementation of whatsapp in efl online learning (ahmed, 2019; ayuningtyas, 2018; hamad, 2017; nilhayati & indriani, 2021; suadi 2021). furthermore, several studies also examined the application of video conferencing in efl online learning (lawson & comber, 2014; putra, 2021; setyawan, aznam, paidi, citrawati, & kusdianto, 2020). the previous research mostly focused on the investigations of a single digital platform use in english learning. however, students generally have different learning interests, needs, and challenges that are frequently unable to be accommodated by a single digital platform use. therefore, this research investigated students' perspectives toward the utilization of multiple digital platforms, namely moodle-based lms, whatsapp, and google meet in efl online learning. this information brings fruitful insights that potentially contribute to the effective utilization of multiple digital platforms in efl learning that leads to students’ greater learning success. for instance, the students' perspectives help instructors to indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 2, july 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 133 consider, select, and apply suitable multiple digital platforms in efl learning. the proper consideration, selection, and application of digital platforms support effective teaching and learning activities and facilitate students to gain better understanding and achievement. method a qualitative approach in terms of descriptive design was employed in this research. the purpose of descriptive design is to explain the phenomena with the features. it therefore mostly focuses on responding to questions “what” (nassaji, 2015). this type of descriptive study enables the researcher to describe students’ perspectives on the utilization of digital platforms in efl learning. the total number of seventy-nine secondsemester students of business and accounting, science and technology, humanities and education faculties of a private university in palembang were involved as participants of this study. the participants were selected through the purposive sampling technique. to select the participants by using this sampling technique, the researcher relied on judgments with certain considerations and for specific purposes (cohen, manion, & morrison, 2000). the participants of this research were chosen based on several criteria. first, the participants were second-semester students taking an online english mkwu course. next, the participants were taught by the same lecturer and discussed the same materials. at last, the participants were using the same digital platforms in learning english that comprised moodle based lms, whatsapp, and google meet. the students used the three digital platforms in learning english during one semester. the teaching and learning activities were generally conducted through three phases with similar strategies and digital platforms. in the beginning, the lecturer asked the students to record their attendance and download the material provided on lms. next, the lecturer and students discussed the material on the whatsapp group. question and answer were the main strategies used in this phase. the lecturer activated students’ prior knowledge and introduced the topic of the lesson through discussion on the whatsapp group. finally, the lecturer explained the material and conducted a deep discussion with the students on google meet. for instance, conducting role play, conversation, and presentation was sort of speaking activities normally facilitated by utilizing google meet. the first instrument used by the researcher to collect the data of the study was a questionnaire. the researcher adapted the questionnaire composed by cakrawati in 2017. the questionnaire of this research consists of three parts. each part has ten items used to investigate students’ perspectives towards the utilization of digital platforms (lms, whatsapp, and google meet) in efl learning. the items cover ten components namely task, material, motivation, skill progress, ideal learning, easy learning, fun learning, communication, discussion, and access. to respond to the questionnaire, four alternative options that comprise strongly agree (sa), agree (a), disagree (d), and strongly disagree (sd) were provided for the participants. the questionnaire was distributed to the participants through google form. the interview was the second instrument employed to collect the data. the result of the interview provided more comprehensive information and strengthened the data of the questionnaire. out of 79, 17 students were selected to join the interview. in the interview, the participants were required to answer questions dealing with the general idea, essential benefits, and frequent challenges of learning english by making use of the digital platforms. collecting, classifying, and describing are procedures of the data analysis process conducted by the researcher. the procedures were modified from corder’s steps cited in ellis (1994). based on the procedure, the researcher analyzed the data through the following three main steps. first, the researcher collected the data by using the questionnaire and interview. second, the responses to the questionnaire and interview were classified into several categories to see the percentage rate of each item. third, the data were analyzed and described comprehensively by referring to the percentage rate of each category. results and discussion the results of questionnaire the results of the questionnaire related to the students’ responses towards the utilization of a moodle-based lms in efl online learning revealed that 67.1% of the participants expressed their strong agreement with the statement that lms facilitated the effective submission of tasks. next, ira irzawati the utilization of digital platforms in online learning: efl students’ perspectives 134 around 50% of the students agreed that lms accommodated the provision of various learning materials and facilitated fun learning. then, 70.9% of the students stated that the use of lms in elf learning had motivated them to learn better. after that, about 60% of the students agreed that the application of lms promoted their english skill development, created an ideal learning atmosphere, and eased learning activities. meanwhile, various responses were found in items dealing with communication, discussion, and access. around 45.6% of the students agreed that the use of lms supported communication and discussion. vice versa, 39.2% and 40.5% of the students expressed their disagreement with the statements that lms utilization facilitated communication and discussion. at last, 36.7% of the students strongly agreed that lms was easy to access from a mobile phone. however, 21.5% disagreed as it was quite difficult for them to access it. in line with it, the students' responses towards the use of whatsapp in efl learning showed that over 40% of the students believed that the implementation of whatsapp in efl online learning had facilitated task submission, and supported an ideal learning atmosphere. in conjunction with it, around 50% of the students highly agreed that whatsapp was an effective medium for facilitating material sharing, easing learning, conducting discussion, and providing easy mobile access. in agreement with it, 59.5% of the students expressed their agreement with the statement that whatsapp helped them to develop their english skills. more than 60% of the students also agreed that using whatsapp in efl learning motivated them to learn more and made them enjoy studying english. in addition, 69.6% of the students showed their high agreement with the statement that the use of whatsapp in learning activities had facilitated communication with lecturers or other students effectively. in addition, students' responses towards the implementation of google meet in efl learning revealed that over 46.8% of the students admitted that google meet was an effective medium for task submission. furthermore, over 50% of the students agreed that google meet supported the material provision, motivation progress, english skill improvement, ideal, easy, and fun learning atmosphere, communication facility, and discussion opportunity. in addition, even though 35.4% of the students agreed that google meet was easily accessed via mobile phone, 20.7% and 11% of the students showed their disagreement and highly disagreement on the easy access of google meet. the detailed responses of students are presented in the following table 1, 2, and 3. table 1. students’ responses on lms utilization no statement sa a d sd 1 task 67.1% 27.8% 5.1% 0% 2 material 46.8% 51.9% 1.3% 0% 3 motivation 20.3% 70.9% 8.8% 0% 4 skill progress 21.5% 63.3% 15.2% 0% 5 ideal learning 25.3% 60.8% 13.9% 0% 6 easy learning 27.8% 60.8% 11.4% 0% 7 fun learning 24.1% 58.2% 17.7% 0% 8 communication 13.9% 45.6% 39.2% 1.3% 9 discussion 13.9% 45.6% 40.5% 0% 10 access 36.7% 36.7% 21.5% 5.1% table 2. students’ responses on whatsapp utilization no statement sa a d sd 1 task 43% 46.8% 8.9% 1.3% 2 material 55.7% 43% 1.3% 0% 3 motivation 29.1% 62% 8.9% 0% 4 skill progress 35.4% 59.5% 5.1% 0% 5 ideal learning 44.3% 48.1% 7.6% 0% 6 easy learning 50.6% 46.8% 2.6% 0% 7 fun learning 32.9% 60.8% 6.3% 0% 8 communication 69.6% 29.1% 1.3% 0% indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 2, july 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 135 9 discussion 59.5% 40.5% 0% 0% 10 access 59.5% 31.6% 8.9% 0% table 3. students’ responses on google meet utilization no statement sa a d sd 1 task 21.1% 46.8% 26.6% 5.5% 2 material 39.2% 54.4% 6.4% 0% 3 motivation 39.2% 55.7% 5.1% 0% 4 skill progress 44.3% 50.6% 5.1% 0% 5 ideal learning 41.8% 50.6% 7.6% 0% 6 easy learning 38% 54.4% 7.6% 0% 7 fun learning 35.4% 57% 7.6% 0% 8 communication 44.3% 53.2% 2.5% 0% 9 discussion 36.7% 55.7% 7.6% 0% 10 access 32.9% 35.4% 20.7% 11% the results of interview the researcher asked three questions to the 17 participants in the interview. the first question was " what do you think about the utilization of the digital platform in efl online learning?". in responding to the question, all students agreed that the use of digital platforms in efl learning was beneficial and important to facilitate teaching and learning activities. in detail, three students stated that "digital platforms are very important to support communication between students and lecturer and also interaction among students." next, three students said that "we can improve our skills and knowledge through using digital platforms in learning activities". then, six students described that "the use of digital platforms help us to learn english well.". at last, five students mentioned that "digital platforms are very useful. we can understand the material from lecturer better by using the platforms." the second question of the interview was "what are the essential benefits of utilizing lms, whatsapp, and google meet in efl online learning?". dealing with the use of lms, 12 students mentioned that "lms is the main medium that provides a lot of materials and organizes attendance list, exercise, quiz, and task submission". furthermore, two students added that "lms is a good learning medium. we can learn well by using it". in addition, three students stated that "we can see our exercise, quiz, test, and task scores from lms. so, we can do kind of reflection through it and lms also helped us to remember doing our task through its reminder." in answering questions about the important benefits of using whatsapp in efl online learning. nine students stated that "we can communicate well with the lecturer and one another through whatsapp. we usually chat with our lecturer if we have some questions about the material." moreover, four students said that "we use whatsapp group for sharing material and information. it's very effective because we usually check our whatsapp." likewise, three students mentioned that "whatsapp is a good medium for doing discussion and q & a session." finally, a student added that "i think that whatsapp has many useful features. i can share data, and discuss tasks with my friends by using it." the students expressed various opinions related to the implementation of google meet in efl online learning. eight students said that "google meet helps us to communicate face-to-face with our lecturers and friends. it's nice to see each other since we never meet directly during this pandemic." next, seven students stated that "we can understand our lecturer explanation better through google meet. we also can discuss together by using it." at last, one student added that "in my opinion, google meet makes learning more fun and enjoyable although i am shy to talk directly to my lecturer." the last question of the interview was "what is the frequent challenge of utilizing the digital platforms in efl online learning?". fourteen students responded to this question by saying "unstable internet connection is the biggest problem when we are studying by using digital platform especially lms and google meet but we can use whatsapp when lms and google meet are not accessible. whatsapp doesn't need a lot of mobile data or strong connection." in addition, three other students stated that "during this pandemic, we learn by using digital platforms like lms, whatsapp, and google meet but we can't interact freely by using the platforms. it's different from classroom learning." the utilization of multiple digital platforms in efl online learning the findings of the research indicated that the efl students had positive perspectives toward the utilization of digital platforms in online learning. the results of the questionnaire revealed that most of the students believed that the use of lms, whatsapp, and google meet was beneficial to support teaching and learning. regarding the task, the students believed that lms, whatsapp, and google meet facilitated the submission of the task. lms enabled the lecturer to set task submission deadlines and provided sufficient file space for task submission. meanwhile, whatsapp offered practicality in submitting any file forms to the class ira irzawati the utilization of digital platforms in online learning: efl students’ perspectives 136 group. in addition, google meet facilitated task reports in form of presentations both individual and group. the findings indicated that the students showed solid positive responses toward this category. it implied that the utilization of the digital learning platforms had effectively supported task submission. in terms of material, most of the students agreed that lms, whatsapp, and google meet had been properly used to share the materials related to the lesson. it was easy to access the material through the digital learning platforms. the easy access enabled students to study each topic of the lesson well and understand it better. greater understanding finally led to the improvement of learning outcomes. dealing with motivation, the use of digital platforms in efl learning was perceived by the students positively. using the digital platforms helped students to elevate their motivation. for instance, intensive discussion via whatsapp, direct interaction through google meet and various material exposure related to the lesson made the students were getting more motivated to explore deeper to gain a better understanding and higher achievement. pertaining to skill progress, the students confirmed that learning through lms, whatsapp, and google meet assisted them to develop their language skills. lms provided material resources that are beneficial for reading skill improvement. meanwhile, whatsapp enabled students’ interactions and communications and helped them to sharpen their writing skills. in addition, students were able to enhance their listening and speaking skills during studying by using google meet. in conjunction with the learning atmosphere, the students admitted that learning through lms, whatsapp, and google meet provided them an experience of having an ideal learning atmosphere where the learning was easy and fun. the students were exposed to various materials through lms that made it easy to explore the topics easily. the students were also able to interact with one another and with the lecturer without any barrier by making use of whatsapp. in addition, the students were able to conduct role-play as an alternative fun learning activity through google meet. concerning communication and discussion, the students agreed that the digital platforms supported interactive and communicative activities. the features of lms, whatsapp, and google meet allowed students to communicate and discussed with the lecturer and each other among the students about the topic related to the lesson. the students added that it was more effective to use whatsapp for written discussion and google meet for oral discussion. meanwhile, lms was not their main alternative communication and discussion means. unstable internet access was one of the most frequent challenges encountered by the students. limited access to wi-fi, bad weather, and lack of mobile data were reasons that contributed to the emergence of the challenge. the integration of multiple digital platforms is one of the potential alternative solutions for anticipating this challenge. as stated by students in the interview session, when it was hard for them to access digital platforms that require a stable internet network, alternative media were required. whatsapp was one of the best choices as it does not spend a lot of mobile data and a strong network to access it. conclusion the students’ perspectives towards the utilization of digital platforms (lms, whatsapp, and google meet) in efl online learning were positive. both the results of the questionnaire and interview revealed similar results. the students believed that the integration of multiple digital platforms had facilitated teaching and learning activities well. the students believed that learning through making use of lms helped them to be more discipline through the remainder of the task submission deadline. lms also provided various materials that can be accessed by the students easily, thus it helped them to understand the material better and motivated them to learn more. furthermore, the integration of whatsapp and google meet into efl learning provided interactive communication and discussion between students and lecturers and with one another. moreover, the implementation of the digital platforms also supported an ideal learning atmosphere that was enjoyable for students. even though it was frequently challenging to access the platforms, the use of multiple platforms potentially provided useful alternatives that accommodate students with different challenges, necessities, and interests. in short, utilizing digital platforms in efl learning properly helped students to understand the material well, therefore it leads to better achievement. this research only focused on investigating students’ perspectives. it is suggested that future researchers examine instructors’ perspectives dealing with this topic to gain fruitful insight for better application of the digital platforms in efl learning. in addition, it is also recommended to conduct quantitative research in terms of experimental design to figure out the effectiveness of using digital platforms to improve students’ english achievements. acknowledgement the researcher would like to express her profound gratitude to the ukmc community for the support and high appreciation to these research participants for their participation and cooperation. references abidah, a., hidayatullah, h. n., simamora, r. m., fehabutar, d., & mutakinati, l. (2020). the indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 2, july 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 137 impact of covid-19 to indonesian education and its relation to the philosophy of “merdeka belajar”. studies in philosophy of science and education, 1(1), 38-49. ahmed, s., t., s. (2019). chat and learn: effectiveness of using whatsapp as a pedagogical tool to enhance efl learners’ reading and writing skills. international journal of english language and literature studies, 8(2), 61-68. basal, a. (2016). extending the functionality of lms for english language teaching. proceedings of ict for language learning conference, 142-145. cakrawati, l., m. (2017). students’ perceptions on the use of online learning platforms in efl classroom. english language teaching and technology journal, 1(1), 22-30. cohen, l., manion, l., & morrison, k. (2000). research methods in education (5th ed.). london, england: routledge falmer. ellis, r. (1994). the study of second language acquisition. new york: oxford university press. hazairin. (2020). the use of zoom cloud meeting as an innovative english learning media. proceedings of 1st international conference on the teaching of english and literature, 1(1), 249-256. kim, j. (2020). learning and teaching online during covid-19: experiences of student teachers in an early childhood education practicum. international journal of early childhood, 52, 145-158. lawson, t., & comber, c. (2014). videoconferencing and learning in the classroom: the effects of being an orphan technology? the international journal of technologies in learning, 20. nassaji, h. (2015). qualitative and descriptive research: data type versus data analysis. language teaching research, 19(2), 129-132. nihayati, a., & indriani, l. (2021). efl students’ perspective on whatsapp as media of online teaching and learning in covid-19 pandemic. journal of research on language education, 2(1). 44-52. putra, r., w., p. (2021). improving students’ motivation in learning english through google meet during the online learning. english learning motivation, 2(1), 35-42. putri, e., & sari, f., m. (2020). indonesian efl students’ perspectives towards learning management system software. journal of english language teaching and learning, 1(1), 20-24. setyawan, aznam, n., paidi., citrawati, t., & kusdianto, (2020). effects of the google meet assisted method of learning on building student knowledge and learning outcomes. universal journal of educational research, 8(9), 3924-3936. suadi. (2021). students’ perceptions of the use of zoom and whatsapp in elt amidst covid-19 pandemic. study of applied linguistics and english education, 2(1), 51-64. tadesse, s., & muluye, w. (2020). the impact of covid19 pandemic on education system in developing countries: a review. open journal of social sciences, 8, 159-170. tumskiy, s. (2019). the use of learning management systems in the teaching of english to high-level learners at tertiary level. proceeding of inted2019, 3530-3533. wulandari, p., & budiyanto, c., w. (2017). improving foreign language learning by the mean of learning management system: review the literature. advanced in social sciences education and humanities research, 158, 514-528. ya ni, a. (2013). comparing the effectiveness of classroom and online learning: teaching research methods. journal of public affairs education, 19(2), 199-215. ira irzawati the utilization of digital platforms in online learning: efl students’ perspectives 138 indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 139 sociolinguistic reflections in the use of determiners in esl and efl: the educated nigerian english (ene) examples omowumi bode steve ekundayo department of english and literature, university of benin, benin city, nigeria e-mail: ekuns20@yahoo.com apa citation: ekundayo, o. b. s. (2017). sociolinguistic reflections in the use of determiners in esl and efl: the educated nigerian english (ene) examples. indonesian efl journal, 3(2), 139-146. received: 27-05-2017 accepted: 28-06-2017 published: 01-07-2017 abstract: this paper examines the use of english articles and some determiners in english as second language (esl) with a view to establish the differences between esl and native english use of determiners and the sociolinguistic factors that inform their use. examples were drawn from educated nigerian english (ene) and standard british english (sbe). the paper is based on the concepts of linguistic interference and intraference. observation and recording of spontaneous speeches, secondary sources, the internet and questionnaire were used to gather data from 2005 to 2014 across nigeria to establish how determiners are deployed and the currency and ubiquity of the patterns observed in ene. the responses to the questionnaire and interviews were analyzed and presented in simple percentile, frequency tables and charts, and discussed thereafter. the study discovered that there are clear differences in the patterns of the use of articles in esl, as the ene examples show. as a result of interference and intraference, educated nigerians tend to overgeneralize the use of articles and determiners with noun phrases, applying them superfluously or omitting them where necessary and even sometimes using ‘the’ as a possessive determiner for ‘his,’ ‘her’ and ‘their.’ they also often yoke similar and exclusive determiners together in nominal structures. the paper concludes that these patterns should be treated as some of the features that characterize nigerian english syntax. keywords: sociolinguistics, articles, ene, sbe, interference, intraference introduction articles, particularly the definite ‘the’, are the most commonly used of all the groups of words in english. a writer/speaker may manage to construct a sentence without using an article, but he/she will find it impossible or difficult to compose a cohesive paragraph of many sentences without using an article. in ene, the highest variety of nigerian english also called standard nigerian english (sne), the use of the ubiquitous articles a, an and the as well as the determiners this, that and some reflect certain sociolinguistic patterns. sociolinguistics is a term in linguistics which denotes the (study of the) nexus between language and society and several other issues of language and the people that use it. crystal (2009) says that sociolinguistics and sociolinguists study such issues as “the linguistic identity of groups, social attitudes to language, standard and nonstandard forms of language, the patterns and needs of national language use, social varieties and levels of language, the social basis of multilingualism, and so on” (p. 441). accordingly, this paper argues that the patterns of the use of some determiners which characterize ene are reflections of the sociolinguistic omowumi bode steve ekundayo sociolinguistic reflections in the use of determiners in esl and efl: the educated nigerian english (ene) examples 140 dynamics of nigeria as a nonnative english setting and educated nigerians as nonnative english users. the paper is a fleshed out extract from a major nation-wide survey of intraference variants in ene (ekundayo, 2006, 2014). the linguistic markers of a user’s performance invariably reflect who he/she is, his/her level of education and his/her provenance, accent and dialect. nigeria, with a population going 200 million people, is the leading english-asa-secondlanguage (esl) community in the world at present, if india is pushed to an efl society with hindi as its indigenous national language and english as its foreign official language. nigeria is a heterogeneous and multilingual society where english “coexist with more than 400 hundred indigenous languages which serve as the mother-tongues of speakers from diverse ethnic groups, and also some foreign languages such as french, arabic and german, which are studied in schools” (adegbite, 2010, p. 8). the nearest native english communities to nigeria are white south africa and england, which are thousands of miles away from nigeria. consequently, nigerians speak and write english in the way they have been taught formally in schools, the information they get from grammar textbooks, standard dictionaries and naturally in the way they use their languages. hence, interference features abound in nigerian english varieties. quirk, greenbaum, leech and svartvik (1985) say that esl variations emanate from interference and that some of the “interference varieties are so widespread in a community and of such long standing that some believe them stable and adequate enough to be institutionalized and hence to be regarded as varieties of english in their own right…” (pp. 27-28). several classifications of nigerian english (nige) have been made; the most popular one being banjo’s (1971) and (1996) typology of nigerian english. banjo used grammatical features and educational levels to establish varieties i, ii, iii, and iv of nigerian english. variety i is associated with primary school leavers and nigerians with half-baked education. this variety reflects vulgar errors of grammar and broken structures. variety ii is associated with secondary school students and school certificate holders. it has less vulgar errors and broken features of english than variety i and more than 70% of english-speaking nigerians use this variety. variety iii is spoken by highly educated people, graduates, teachers, lecturers, professors, writers, broadcasters, etc. his variety iii is often referred to as standard nigerian english (sne) or educated nigerian english (ene). lastly, variety iv of banjo is like native english standard spoken by few nigerians who were born in native english-speaking countries or have a parent of english origin and consequently acquired english as their first language. however, the fourth variety is seen as too foreign and affected. based on sociolinguistic and regional parameters, nigerian linguists have proposed many regional varieties such as hausa, igbo, yoruba, edo, efik, etc. and several (socio) lects such as basilect, mesolect and acrolect (igene, 1992; ogbulogo, 2005). the mesolect is the lowest variety similar to banjo’s variety i. the basilect is the most popular and widely used in nigeria by junior civil servants, secondary school students and not-so-educated nigerians. the acrolect is used by few very highly educated nigerians. it has the greatest prestige and international intelligibility. banjo’s variety iii, which is also the acrolect on the sociolinguistic pyramid, is often indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 141 recommended or preferred as the nigerian standard. the patterns of the use of determiners examined in this paper abound in all the varieties of nigerian english (nige). however, examples in this paper were gathered from ene, the most standardized variety of nigerian english. specifically, the paper set out to answer these questions: 1) which concrete examples of the use of determiners can be cited from esl/ene? 2) what patterns of the use of determiners are entrenched in educated nigerian english? 3) how does interference and intraference, on the other hand, account for the use of determiners in educated nigerian english as second language? 4) is the use of determiners in ene/esl different from their use in native english, sbe for example? the paper shows how and why interference and intraference constitute the extenuating sociolinguistic backgrounds in which educated nigerians produce patterns of the use of articles different from sbe and native english patterns. method the study is both qualitative and quantitative. methods data gathering were questionnaires, the internet, recording of spontaneous speech used from 2005 to 2014 to gather data from tertiary institution students and academic staff to establish the patterns of the use of determiners in ene. the questionnaire used consists of many syntactic structures cast in multiple choice questions with options a and b or a to d. option a contains the sbe or native english pattern and meaning while option b contains ene pattern. the questions in the questionnaire and structured interview were validated by two professors of english and literature and two professors of measurement and evaluation of the university of benin, benin city, nigeria, before they were administered to fifty thousand (50,000) educated nigerians in ten federal government universities. although nigeria is divided into six geo-political zones, the researcher expediently divided the country into five zones: the yoruba south-west, the multi-lingual south-south, the multi-lingual north, the igbo south-east and the multi-lingual middle-belt. the universities visited are ahmadu bello university, zaria, bayero university, kano (north); university of lagos, lagos, federal university of technology, akure (south-west); university of nigeria, enugu campus, nnamdi azikiwe university, awka (south-east); university of ilorin, ilorin, university of abuja, federal capital territory (middle-belt); university of benin, benin city, edo state, and the university of port harcourt, port harcourt (south-south); four federal government owned polytechnic: federal polytechnic, auchi (south-south), federal polytechnic, ede (south-west), federal polytechnic offa (middle-belt), kaduna polytechnic, kaduna (north), federal polytechnic, oko(east); four state government owned polytechnics: kogi state polytechnic, lokoja (middlebelt), rufus giwa polytechnic, owo, lagos state polytechnic, isolo(west) and delta state polytechnic, oghara (southsouth); four government owned colleges of education: college of education, ekiadolor, benin city, adeniran ogunsanya, lagos, federal college of education, okene, kwara state college of education, ilorin. the selection of these higher institutions was informed by their strategic locations across nigeria and the fact that they use a nigerian federal government policy called ‘quota system’ or ‘federal character,’ to admit students omowumi bode steve ekundayo sociolinguistic reflections in the use of determiners in esl and efl: the educated nigerian english (ene) examples 142 from ‘catchment areas’ and all the regions of nigeria. the ‘federal character’ or ‘quota system’ policy stipulates that admission to and employment in federal governmentowned schools and ministries be equally spread to all the federating units, not necessarily on merit or standard. this ensures that all federating units are equally represented. subjects aged between 19 and 70 years were tested among professors, lecturers and mainly final year students of english and literature, linguistics, communication and other departments. these groups of nigerians are considered to be, or should be, models of english use and usage in nigeria. twenty thousand pieces of the questionnaire were analyzed for this paper because the researcher had financial and logistic difficulties collating all of them across nigeria and thereafter analyzing them manually. the remainder of thirty thousand was gleaned from interviews and direct interaction by the researcher or in proxy. focus was on widespread usage, frequency and educational class, not on age, sex and individual ranks of the educated people surveyed. where 30 to 44% of the respondents chose an option, it was classified as an emerging variant. less than 30% is treated as isolated cases in ene. where options a and b shared 45-50%, they were categorized as free variants in ene. 51-59% were tagged common, 60-79% widespread and 80100% entrenched or institutionalized. the ordinal data are presented in simple percentile counts and frequency tables and charts while the linguistic texts are annotated alongside the sbe patterns. results and discussion the data are treated under three categories: omission, addition, replacement of determiners and mixed extracts from published works and spontaneous speech recordings. omission of determiners (articles) twenty cases were tested in this category with twenty thousand informants. the table below shows the percentage of responses for each variant. table 1. the omission of determiners in ene s/ n ene variants percentage over 20,000 informants sbe variants percentag e of sbe comment 1 “group raises ^ alarm…” (ebere, 2014, p. 68) 15,000/75% “group raises an alarm…” (ebere, 2014, p. 68). 5,000/25% widespread 2 on^empty stomach 17,000/85% on an empty stomach. 3,000/15% entrenched 3 on ^one hand and on the other hand 16,000/80% on the one hand and on the other hand. 4,000/20% entrenched 4 all is in ^shambles 18,000/90% all is in a shambles. 2,000/10% widespread 5 i am in^ hurry 16,000/80% i am in a hurry. 4,000/20% entrenched 6 it is a fight to ^finish 18,000/90% it is a fight to the finish. 2,000/10% entrenched 7 he had ^accident 12,000/60% he had an accident. 8,000/40% widespread 8 …in ^sahara desert 15,000/75% …in the sahara desert. 5,000/25% entrenched 9 he tendered ^ apology to him. 17,000/85% he tendered an apology to him. 3,000/15% entrenched 10 “i had stroke” (olabayo, 2013, p.58). 16,000/80% “i had a stroke” (olabayo, 2013, p.58). 4,000/20% entrenched indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 143 11 …^benefit of ^doubt 19,000/95% …the benefit of the doubt. 1,000/5% entrenched 12 ^emergency has arisen. 17,000/85% an emergency has arisen. 3,000/15% entrenched 13 i can’t take such ^injustice 18,000/90% i can’t take such an injustice. 2,000/10% entrenched 14 he is having ^ temperature. 19,000/95% he is having a temperature. 1,000/5% entrenched 15 i made ^ effort to see him. 18,000/90% i made an effort to see him. 2,000/10% entrenched 16 what is on ^ ground… 19,000/95% what is on the ground… 1,000/5% entrenched 17 without a shadow of ^doubt. 19,000/95% without a shadow of the doubt 1,000/5% entrenched 18 indeed, they are ^nuisance on this street. 19,000/95% indeed, they are a nuisance. 1,000/5% entrenched 19 i am at ^crossroads 18,000/90% i am at the crossroad. 2,000/10% entrenched 20 ^majority of them are here. 19,000/95% a majority of them are here. 1,000/5% entrenched addition of unnecessary articles in this category, determiners are redeployed in contexts where they are not used in sbe, as a result of the intraference of articles and other determiners, which then leads to what may be termed ‘the singularisation of mass and abstract nouns,’ as in the table below. table 2. the addition of determiners in ene s/ n ene variant percentage over 20,000 sbe variants percentag e comment 21 i have an information for you. 13,000/65% i have information for you. 7,000/35% widespread 22 this is a good advice… 13,000/65% this is good advice… 7,000/35% widespread 23 this is a good furniture. 12,000/60% this is good furniture. 8,000/40% widespread 24 i am a staff. 19,000/95% i am a staff member/a member of staff. 1,000/5% entrenched 25 he is a military personnel. 17,000/85% he is one of the military personnel. 3,000/15% entrenched 26 start from the scratch. 19,000/95% start from scratch. 1,000/5% entrenched 27 i am around for the now. 8,000/40% i am around for now. 12,000/60% entrenched 28 how is that your friend? 16,000/80% how is that friend of yours? / how is your friend? 4,000/20% entrenched 29 this our issue is somehow. 15,000/75% this issue of ours is somehow/this issue is somehow.. 5,000/25% entrenched 30 that my boyfriend is here. 16,000/80% that boyfriend of mine is here/my boyfriend is here. 4,000/20% entrenched replacement/substitution of determiners educated nigerians also substitute one preposition with another. few examples of replacement, a context where a similar determiner is used instead of another, are presented in the table 3. omowumi bode steve ekundayo sociolinguistic reflections in the use of determiners in esl and efl: the educated nigerian english (ene) examples 144 table 3. examples of replacement category s/ n ene variant comment sbe variants 31 …all things being equal. entrenched …other things being equal. 32 one thing led to the other. entrenched one thing led to another. 33 “we met the wife and the family. the son spoke to us …and one of the daughters. the son also shared in our view that the death be investigated….” entrenched “we met his wife and family. his son spoke to us …and one of his daughters. his son also shared in our view that his death be investigated….” 34 they have turned themselves to some nuisance here. widespread they have turned themselves to a nuisance here. 35 one man came to look for you. entrenched a man came to look for you. 36 one man came to look for you. entrenched a man came to look for you. sundry examples from published works and spontaneous speech recordings the ones below are gathered from published works and spontaneous speeches. although they were not tested as the ones in tables 1 and 2, the researcher, being an esl user and teacher, and based on his keen observation of the patterns of english use in nigeria for several decades, has tagged them accordingly as common, widespread and institutionalised/entrenched. the caret shows the position of the omitted determiner, which is indicated above it. the 37. a lesson to nigerians on ^ duty of care (guardian editorial, 2013, p.12), common. the 38. “…most graduates from our higher institutions are being rejected by companies on ^ grounds of inadequate knowledge of their subject areas…” (owoyemi, 2013, p.22), entrenched. an 39. “after 14 years in prison, tearful hamza al-mustapha declares: ‘i met ^ empty home’ (almustapha, 2013, p.37), common. a 40. “i am not in ^ hurry to get married.” (uranta, 2013, p.52), entrenched. the 41. “i was born on ^ 1st of october, 1990” entrenched. table 4. the variant examined s/n range degree of spread frequency percentage 1 80-100% entrenched 30 75% 2 60-79% widespread 07 17.5 % 3 50-59% common 02 5% 4 40-49% eariant 01 2.5% 5 30-39% emerging 0 0% total 40 100% as shown in the table, the cases examined are entrenched and widespread in ene. the entrenched or institutionalized cases are by far the largest. the chart below clearly shows this. indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 145 figure 1. frequency and percentile pie chart the results, as presented in the tables and chart, clearly show that the habit of redeploying determiners in patterns different from native english users’ patterns is institutionalized in ene. the use of an extra determiner as in 28 to 30 is an anaphoric reference to shared knowledge and understanding between the speaker and hearer in ene. it is also used for emphasis. ‘that my boyfriend’ is different from ‘my boyfriend’ in ene. the former is often used in a context where something is already known or has been said about the boyfriend earlier. hence the reference ‘that my boyfriend’, meaning ‘my boyfriend in question’, ‘my boyfriend that you know’, ‘my boyfriend we’ve been talking about,’ etc. it is a case of interference because similar and identical expressions abound in nigerian languages. example 33 asterisked has become institutionalized. ‘the’ is used in this sense to denote possession. this example was taken from a spontaneous report by a university lecturer on the 14th of november, 2013, two days after professor festus iyayi, the famous nigerian novelist and lecturers’ union leader, was killed in a road accident. number 27 is an emerging pattern popular with youths. one often hears expressions like ‘i am going solo for the now,’ meaning ‘i want to efface myself or be on my own for now.’ on the whole, linguistic interference and intraference form the extenuating sociolinguistic background in which educated esl users redeploy determiners in the ways that they do. many of the examples of omission may be traced to interference because most nigerian languages, unlike english, lack several articles and many determiners. so, educated nigeria users of english impose the zero-article patterns of their languages on english structures. however, some cases of omission may be traced to intraference, not interference. in a structure like ‘in a shambles’, nonnative speakers view ‘shambles’ as a plural formation which ought not to be modified with a. hence they will rather say ‘in shambles’ or ‘in a shamble’ which sounds better in accordance with the english rules that they know, as against ‘in a shambles,’ which is a fixed idiomatic expression in native english. examples of addition and replacement come mainly from intraference, i.e. the redeployment of language items, and the conscious efforts to apply the rules of the language appropriately. ‘i have an advice for you’ is an attempt to differentiate between the plural ‘advice’ and singular ‘advice’. the same thing applies to ‘a staff’, ‘an entrenched, 75% widespread, 17.50% common, 5% variant, 2.50% entrenched widespread common variant omowumi bode steve ekundayo sociolinguistic reflections in the use of determiners in esl and efl: the educated nigerian english (ene) examples 146 information’, etc. the use of ‘the’ for the possessive determiners his, her, your, their etc. is an overgeneralization of ‘how is the wife?’, the masculine style of speech in sbe. by extension, educated nigerians will say ‘how are the children?’ ‘how is the family?’ ‘how is the husband doing?’ ‘we spoke to the grandfather at home.’ the interesting fact is that no matter how well entrenched a pattern may be in ene, there are yet educated nigerians who use the sbe variants. the big question, therefore, is how do we (as linguists, esl teachers and grammarians) view them? should they be treated or taught as errors or variations? some grammar purists and fanatical lovers of absolute sbe in nonnative settings (who, ironically, do not, or cannot, use sbe/rp precisely) may insist that they are errors because they deviate from sbe patterns. however, it should be acknowledged that heterogeneity is the spice of language (o’donell & todd, 1991). once some variants and patterns by whatever name (errors, deviations, coinage, variation, etc.) are widespread and institutionalized in a variety, the best and expedient position to take is to treat the entrenched features as the characteristic determinants of the variety. in the process of dialectalization, features that may be strange to variety a, may be entrenched variants in variety b of the same language. features of interference and intraference are inevitable in a second language situation. when such features become generally accepted and institutionalized in esl, then they become its defining features. conclusion the paper examined the way educated nigerian users of english as a second language redeploy some determiners, particularly articles. it demonstrated that certain extenuating sociolinguistic factors like interference, intraference, the reality and the dynamics of a second language setting constrain educated esl users to use determiners in the ways presented in this paper. these patterns distinguish the syntax of ene from that of sbe, particularly in the use of articles. although there are few highly educated nigerians who use the sbe variants, the examples here are so widespread and entrenched that one can aver that they are the characteristic features of ene and other lower varieties of nigerian english. references adegbite, w. b. (2010). english language usage, uses and misuses in a non-host second language context, nigeria. ile-ife: obafemi awolowo university press. al-mustapha, h. (2013). i met empty home. sunday vanguard, 37-38. banjo, a. (1971). the english language and the nigerian environment. journal of nigeria english studies association, 4(1), 51-60. banjo, a. (1996). making a virtue of necessity: an overview of the english language in nigeria. ibadan: ibadan university press. crystal, d. (2009). a dictionary of linguistics and phonetics (6th ed.). oxford: blackwell. ebere, w. (2014). wordsworth. the nation on sunday, 68. ekundayo, b. s. (2006). the concept of ‘intraference’ in english: the morphemic examples in nigerian english as second language. (master’s thesis). university of benin, benin city, nigeria. ekundayo, b. s (2014). intraference in educated nigerian english. (doctoral dissertation). university of benin, benin city, nigeria. igene, s. o. (1992). lexis of nigerian english. (master’s thesis). university of maiduguri, maiduguri, nigeria. quirk, r., greenbaum, leech, & svartvik. (1985). a comprehensive grammar of the english language. london: longman. ogbulogo, c. (2005). another look at nigerian english. covenant university public lecture series, 11(5). olabayo, t. (2013). interview. the nation on sunday, 58. owoyemi, d. (2013). vice chairman, chief executive. the guardian, 22. indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 53 efl learners – faced problems in listening comperhension seli siti sa’diyah department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia e-mail: selli.sitisadiyah@gmail.com apa citation: sa’diyah, s. s. (2016). efl learners – faced problems in listening comprehension. indonesian efl journal, 2(1), 53-59 received: 18-11-2015 accepted: 22-12-2015 published: 01-01-2016 abstract: this research focuses on the efl learners’ problems in listening comprehension. the present research attempts to investigate listening problems encountered by a group of low level at seniors of a private university in kuningan. this qualitative case study involved 10 participants who took toefl course in 7th semester. the data was gathered by means of questionnaires and interviews. the result of the research showed that accent, pronunciation, speed of speech, insufficient vocabulary, different accent of speakers, lack of concentration, anxiety, and bad quality of recording were the major listening comprehension problems encountered by efl students. this research also found that most students (60%) used compensation strategy to overcome the problems by guessing the answer, while the others (30%) used memory strategy by using their knowledge or experiences, and the rest 10% of the students used affective strategy by motivating themselves to try answering the questions. knowing students’ learning difficulties may enable efl teachers to develop the effective learning strategies and ultimately improve their english listening abilities. suggestion is made for addressing problems regarding how students can help themselves and the teachers can help their students to overcome the listening comprehension problems encountered by the students. keywords: efl learner, listening comprehension, listening problem introduction listening has an important role in the process of getting main topic or information. therefore, listening foreign language is not as easy as we think especially in english which has inconsistent pronunciation. as stated by buck (2001, p. 247) that “listening is a complex process in which the listener takes the incoming data, an acoustic signal, and interprets it based on a wide variety of linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge.” the aim of listening comprehension is to understand the native conversation at normal rate in a spontaneous condition (chastain, 1971). without comprehending the listening skill, learners never learn to communicate or speak effectively. furthermore, mendelsohn (1994) as cited in gilakjani and ahmadi (2011) states that listening has an important role in communication in which listening takes up 40-50%; speaking, 25-30%; reading, 11-16%; and writing, about 9%. thus, it is important to give more attention to listening skill. it is supported by harmer (2007, p. 133) who states that “listening is good for our students’ pronunciation too, in that the more they hear and understand english being spoken, the more they absorb appropriate pitch and intonation, stress and the sounds of both individual words and those which blend together in connected speech.” then, richards (2008) states that understanding spoken discourse are bottom-up and top-down processing. two different kinds of processes are involved in understanding spoken discourse. bottom-up processing seli siti sa’diyah efl learners – faced problems in listening comperhension 54 refers to the use of the incoming input as the basis for understanding the message. meanwhile, top-down processing refers to the use of background knowledge in understanding the meaning of a message. whereas, bottom-up processing goes from language to meaning, top-down processing goes from meaning to language. listening problem is barrier to everyone who learnt languages because listening is the basic of language study. according to goh (2000) as cited in hamouda (2013, p. 115), “listening difficulties are defined as the internal and external characteristic that might interrupt text understanding and reallife processing problem directly related to cognitive procedures that take place at various stages of listening comprehension.” according to some experts as cited in hamouda (2013, p. 118) and essays (2013), there are some problems in listening comprehension: boyle (1984) classifies the factors influencing listening comprehension and directly related to efl listening into four inter-relating categories: listener, speaker, medium and environment factors. aside from these, chang, chang, and kuo (1995) discovered five major listening difficulties: speed, a cluster of sounds difficult for segmentation, obsession with the translation, association of sounds with words and meanings, and idiomatic expressions. yagang (1993) proposes that the sources of listening difficulties came mainly from the four aspects: the message, the speaker, the listener, and the physical setting. apart from those difficulties, there are some strategies proposed by some experts that can be applied to overcome the problems. according to oxford (1990), listening strategies are one of the ways which makes successful in listening comprehension. strategies will be thought as the ways in which a learner approaches and manages a task, and listeners can be taught effective ways of approaching and managing their listening. there are six strategies that can help efl learners effectively in doing listening comprehension, those are: 1) memory strategies, such as grouping or using imagery, have a highly specific function, such as helping students store and retrieve new information. 2) cognitive strategies, such as summarizing or reasoning deductively, enable learners to understand and produce new language by many different means. 3) compensation strategies, like guessing or using synonyms, allow learners to use the language despite their often large gaps in knowledge. 4) metacognitive strategies, which allow learners to control their own cognition-that is, to coordinate the learning process by using functions such as centering, arranging, planning, and evaluating. 5) affective strategies help to regulate emotions, motivations, and attitudes. 6) social strategies help students learning through interaction with others. based on the explanation above, this research intends to achieve these two following objectives; finding out the problems faced by efl learners in listening comprehension and finding the students’ strategies to overcome the problems faced in listening comprehension. method this research applied a qualitative method. creswell (2009, p. 4) states that “qualitative research is means for exploring and understanding the meaning individuals or groups ascribe to a social or human problem.” in line with indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 55 this, fraenkel and wallen (2009, p. 425) mention that “qualitative research is research studies that investigated the quality of relationships, activities, situations, or materials.” in more detail, the researcher used case study to make the research more focus on the exploration of phenomena that occur within individual. gay, mills, and airasian (2012, p. 444) stated that “a case study research is a qualitative research approach in which the researcher focuses on a unit of study known as bounded system.” the participants of this research were the seniors in a private university in kuningan. they were students who have been learning toefl course in 7th semester. students’ listening skill was analyzed by establishing the level of achievement of classes, and some students who have low level for listening comprehension in the paper of toefl test were chosen as participants in this research. in collecting the data, this research used questionnaire and interview. the questionnaire consisted of ten categories, including students’ general self-rating to listening proficiency, students’ perception to the importance of listening skill, using different means to enhance listening skills, listening problems related to the content of the listening text, listening problems related to linguistic features, problems caused by the failure to concentrate, learners’ perceptions of listening problems related to psychological characteristics, listening problems related to listener, listening problems related to the speaker, and listening problems related to the physical setting (hamouda, 2013). the answers were recorded on 4point likert scale (never, sometimes, often, and always). the data collected from questionnaire was calculated by using the following formula. fk rel = fk ∑f × 100% fk rel : percentage of each problem and strategy fk : total types frequency of sub-category ∑𝐹 : total of all categories 100% : percentage (subana in oktoma, 2013, p. 79) in addition, interview was also used to collect the data in this research. creswell (2012, p. 217) stated that “a qualitative interview was occur when researchers ask one or more participants general, open-ended questions and record their answers.” it was a process in collecting the data through asking some questions to only one participation and recorded it. this research chose one-onone interview and e-mail interview type in conducting the interview. the results of the interview were analyzed by using “meaning condensation” method. meaning condensation entails an abridgement of the meanings expressed by the interviewees into shorter formulations. long statements are compressed into briefer statements in which the main sense of what is said is rephrased in a few words (kvale, 1996). results and discussion students’ problems in listening comprehension the data regarding listening problems faced by students in listening comprehension in the toefl test were collected through questionnaire. the result of the questionnaire is presented in the following table. seli siti sa’diyah efl learners – faced problems in listening comperhension 56 table 1. data analysis of questionnaire no. items always often sometimes never result percent 1 item 1 3 4 3 10 1.90 % 2 item 2 10 14 26 10 60 11.32 % 3 item 3 5 12 26 7 50 9.43 % 4 item 4 9 41 30 80 15.09 % 5 item 5 8 27 24 1 60 11.32 % 6 item 6 6 36 18 60 11.32 % 7 item 7 7 21 20 2 50 9.43 % 8 item 8 11 20 39 70 13.21 % 9 item 9 13 29 27 1 70 13.21 % 10 item 10 11 6 3 20 3.77 % total 530 100 % table 1 showed the analysis of the questionnaire regarding the problem faced by the students in listening comprehension. the problems that was mostly found in the listening for toefl test was item 4, it was about listening problems related to the content of the listening text with result of 80 (15.09%), item 9 and 8 with same results of 70 (13.21%), item 2, 5 and 6 with the same results of 60 (11.32%), item 3 and 7 with the same result of 50 (9.43%), item 10 with result of 20 (3.77%), and item 1 with result 10 (1.90%). the first item was about students’ general self-rating to listening proficiency. most students felt pessimist in listening comprehension. this might be a reflection of their frustration caused by their previous failures or unhappy experiences in dealing with english. so, the students seemed unconfident when they rate themselves in listening comprehension. the second item was about students’ perception to the importance of listening skill. the students thought that listening skill was very important skill but sometimes it was boring and not interesting. they were bored because they have some difficulties when they faced listening test and they have poor knowledge regarding the listening strategy. the finding is supported by bremner and narayan (1998, p. 495) in hamouda (2013, p. 122) who state that “only by reaching a certain level will a students be likely to use a given strategy.” the third was about using different means to enhance listening skills. the students still depend on their class (lessons) in enhancing their listening skill than they learn by themselves. the percentage of the different meant to enhance listening skills, it was still in “mean and poor” to the students who enhance their listening skills by listening to the radio (english) and watching british/english channel tv, or the other activities. the fourth was about listening problems related to the content of the listening text. listening text itself can be the main source of listening comprehension problems. in particular, unfamiliar words, complex grammatical, long spoken text, complexity of sentences, and unfamiliar topic pose listening difficulties to efl learners. then fifth was about listening problems related to linguistic features. some difficulties in understanding and remembering information from speakers may be due to the lack of english language skill itself. most students faced that problems in listening comprehension test, they were confused to answer some questions because of those problems. the sixth was about problems caused by the failure to concentrate. indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 57 concentration is the important thing in listening comprehension. students need to focus and refresh their atmosphere and create good condition around them. concentration is barrier in listening comprehension. chen (2005, p. 102) stated that “habitual barrier is students often lost their concentration when listening to spoken question, though they always tried to listen carefully, but they still had trouble in understanding every word.” the seventh was about learners’ perceptions of listening problems related to psychological characteristics. most students have big problem related to psychological side. boredom and frustration may affect the extent to which attention was paid to listening. this occurs as a result of poor stimulation caused by disinterest in the topic, lack of motivation, failure in the part of the teacher to present meaningful material in a stimulating manner, or presenting the lecture in a monotone instigating sleep (hamouda, 2013). the eighth was about listening problems related to listener. listeners’ factors can interfere with students’ listening comprehension. the students’ inability to apply listening strategies, their inability to grasp pronunciation, inability to manage challenging tasks, and frustration interfered with their listening comprehension. the ninth was about listening problems related to the speaker. most of students faced all problems that have been mentioned above. the last item was about listening problems related to the physical setting. almost students faced the difficulties in listening comprehension were due to the bad recording quality/poor quality tapes or disks. for example, the cassette might be recorded, while there were noises around or the cassette was used for such a long time so the quality was worn out. unclear sounds are resulted from poor-quality equipment can also be interfered by the listener’s comprehension. emerging students’ strategies in listening comprehension one of the methods to make students actively involved in controlling their own learning is by using strategies. the strategies identified in this research are presented in the following table. table 2. the rank of listening strategies usage rank strategies percentage 1 compensation 60% 2 memory 30% 3 affective 10% total 100% from the interview analysis, it was found that the students used compensation, affective, and memory strategies in listening comprehension. the first listening strategy frequently used by the students was compensation strategy. in this strategy, the students comprehended and answered their questions by using the similar and understandable words, and guessing the unknown words in english. the second strategy used by students in listening comprehension was memory strategy. they used this strategy when they confused with the spoken text, topic, and the other problems that they faced in their listening test, so they answered the seli siti sa’diyah efl learners – faced problems in listening comperhension 58 question by using their own language and knowledge/experiences. affective strategy was the last common strategies used by the students in listening comprehension test. here, most students try to motivate themselves to finish their test. conclusion based on the data analysis, it can be concluded that the problems that are mostly found in the listening for the paper toefl test are about listening problems related to the content of the listening text with result of 80 (15.09%), listening problem related to the listener and speaker is 70 (13.21%), problems related to linguistic feature and problems caused by the failure to concentrate with same results of 60 (11.32%), item different means to enhance listening skill and learners’ perceptions of listening problems related to psychological characteristic with same result of 50 (9.43%), listening problems related to the physical setting with result of 20 (3.77%) and item students’ general self-rating to listening proficiency with result 10 (1.90%). from those problems, most students guessing the answer when they find the difficulties in listening comprehension for the paper toefl test. besides, this research shows that the most frequent strategy used by the students is the compensation strategy, with the percentage is 60%. references boyle, j.p. 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(1990). language learning strategies: what every teacher should know. boston: heinle & heinle publisher. richards, j. c. (2008). teaching listening and speaking. cambridge: cambridge university press. subana. (2000). statistik pendidikan. bandung: pustaka setia. yagang, f. (1993). listening: problems and solutions. english teaching forum, 31(2), 16-19. http://www.englishreview.web.id/ indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 123 exploring the use of jigsaw writing among esl writers: a classroom research noor hanim rahmat university technology mara, pasir gudang campus, johor bahru, malaysia e-mail: patanim@gmail.com apa citation: rahmat, n. h. (2015). exploring the use of jigsaw writing among esl writers: a classroom research. indonesian efl journal, 1(2), 123-134 received: 02-12-2014 accepted: 01-05-2015 published: 01-07-2015 abstract: the use of jigsaw classroom has been used by aronson (2015) since the 1970’s. it is a research based cooperative learning technique and has been successfully used in classrooms all over the world. out of the jigsaw classroom, comes jigsaw writing and its serves the same function as cooperative learning in the classroom. the benefits of cooperative learning goes beyond learning the contents of the lessons, students gain a new way of learning in groups. teachers teaching writing in the esl classrooms will agree that teaching the writing process is not an easy task. esl learners struggling with the learning of the language are faced with added difficulty of having to write essays in the esl classroom. according to elola (2010), collaborative writing can bring many benefits to learners in the esl classroom. this study is based on the theories of scaffolding and cooperative learning. it introduces yet another interesting teaching method to make esl writing a fun and interactive classroom activity. qualitative and quantitative data analyzed revealed interesting implications for future teaching esl writing. introduction tracing the development of teaching writing figure 1. development of teaching writing (rahmat, 2008) figure 1 above shows the summary of development of teaching writing over the years. initially in the in the 1960’s, writers were encouraged to be creative in their writing. the focus of teaching writing during that time was the finished product of the writing. the next stage was the cognitive orientation stage (1970’s). during that time, researchers began looking at what writers actually did when they wrote. the third stage was called the social orientation stage 1980’s where writers began to consider the social context of their writing. here the focus was writing for a purpose. after 1990’s and 2000’s, researchers (and writing teachers) took a turn in their focus. from social context, the focus in writing class changed to the audience-the reader expectation. following that, esl writing classroom began to focus on corrective feedback-self feedback, peer feedback and also teacher feedback. lately, many studies have been done to improve the teaching of writing in the esl classroom. according to the theory of principled eclecticism larsen-freeman (2000), teachers should consider the different trends and ideas that have occurred historically and then choose what fits the needs of their classroom setting. over the years the focus of the writing classroom has undergone a variety of changes. as a whole, the writing classroom the written text the writer the writer and the society the writing teacher writing acitivites mailto:patanim@gmail.com noor hanim rahmat exploring the use of jigsaw writing among esl writers: a classroom research 124 focus on many aspects such as (a) the written text, (b) the writer, (c) the writer and social context, (d) the writer and audience, (e) the writing teacher and (f) lately, the focus is on improving writing activities. the main objective of this research is to explore the use of jigsaw writing in the esl writing classroom. specifically, this research looks into whether there is any significant difference between the writing process and cooperative learning in the esl class. in addition to that, this research is also carried out to find out how jigsaw writing activities influence the writing process. it is also done to find out the influence of cooperative learning on esl learners’ writing process. the focus in an action research is usually on one question, followed by subquestions to support the main focus: hence the main research question in this study is: 1. what do the learners think of jigsaw writing? a. is there any significant difference between writing process and cooperative learning? b. how does jigsaw writing influence the learners’ writing process? c. how does cooperative learning influence jigsaw writing? teaching writing approaches over the years, teaching methods have evolved from teacher centred on one end to student centred on the other end. the product approach (tompkins, 1990) was reported to be mainly concerned about the structure of language and writing development is taught through the imitation of input. process approach (grabe and kaplan, 1996) allowed students to exercise their linguistic skills. writing development is seen as the unconscious process when the teacher facilitated the writing process. strategic approach (crawford, 2004) allowed students to maximize the use of prior knowledge, and graphic organizers. in this approach, writing is coached with partners doing the think aloud protocol. learners talked to their partners about writing and in doing so were prompted to use specific strategies to facilitate their writing process. the introduction of strategic approach also prompted teachers to focus on teaching writing for authentic purposes. besides strategic approach, crawford (2004) also introduced the cognitive approach. writing here is seen as recursive and learners use graphic organizers after retrieving information from various sources. learners were also trained to consider their potential audience before they begin to write. teachers guided and prompted learners with ideas and suggestions for revisions. instruction is focused on goals, and how to use the best strategies to achieve these goals. the genre approach (grabe and kaplan, 1996) is an approach that uses the product approach (knowledge of language) but focuses on the social purpose. the development of writing is seen as the analysis as an imitation of input. the pragmatic approach (grabe and kaplan, 1996) uses the process view as the foundation where it concentrates on how people use language meaningfully. however, it builds on the social aspects of writing. this approach also uses whole language approach where writing is taught across the curriculum through reading, listening, writing and speaking. the process genre approach (grabe and kaplan, 1996) uses model for imitation. it is concerned with the knowledge about the structure of language. it focuses on the social purposes of writing and allows students to learn the process of writing. finally, siti khadijah johari (2004) introduced the concept model. this model showed that writing is done through three stages: input, process and output. at the input stage, teachers encouraged students to participate in activities that enabled them to get information to write. the process stage made students practice the process of writing. the output stage enabled students to display their writing to their audience. the writing classroom in malaysia, the esl writing classes are seen as students attempting to write about ideas and issues students neither are vaguely aware of nor interested in a language they are almost unfamiliar with. teachers using the traditional-behavioural (crawford, 2004) approach in the classroom find writing difficult to teach and students find writing a indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 125 chore. hence, there ought to be a paradigm shift in the way writing is taught in the malaysian classroom. higher institutions of learning have focused the teaching to be fewer teachers centred and more students’ involvement. courses in higher institutions have made the necessary changesstudent teachers have gone through necessary training. however, are these teachers using their newly acquired knowledge in the writing classroom? how are the students in the esl writing classroom learning from teachers? many factors play different roles to make a writing classroom conducive. figure 2 shows the summary of vital components that make up a writing classroom. factors like teachers’ roles and responsibilities, teachers’ teaching methods, learners’ roles and responsibilities. in addition to that, materials used in the classroom also will make a difference in the classroom setting; hence the role of materials and how they are used. figure 2. components in a writing classroom the changing roles of writing teachers and materials they use the roles and responsibilities of writing teachers have undergone transformation in many areas. to begin with teachers are more non-authoritative, they provide support and environment as well as background knowledge to the students through various activities. for example, crawford (2004) felt that the teacher needs to support their teaching with scaffolding. in addition to that, there is also a need to teach meta-cognitive skills. specifically, this skill includes the use of goals and strategies in a writing class. grabe and kaplan (1996) felt that the writing teacher needs to guide and prompt learners with ideas and suggestions for revision. grabe and kaplan (1996) felt that the writing teacher needs to be a planner who plans the writing class. he or she also provides opportunities for students to practice writing extensively. the teacher also provides feedback; not merely evaluates. williams (1989) on the other hand, feels that the writing teacher needs to socialize writing and encourage students to write for social purposes. in the malaysian setting, siti khadijah (2004) feels that teacher needs to be nonauthoritative. she has to be a co-participant as well as a facilitator in the writing class. moreover, the writing teacher needs to provide an environment for students to learn about writing, engage in writing, become enthused by writing as well as receive help during writing. the teacher should provide background experience to the students. he or she should allow students to participate in decisions about topic, function, audience, and form. the teacher should also define writing projects clearly and specify how it will be assessed. he or she should provide opportunities for students to participate in idea gathering and organizing activities in the class. materials play a crucial role in making lessons successful. textbooks are still used in many writing classroom as part of the learning process. in addition to that, course books have also made lessons successful. some teachers also used film-related materials in the classroom to motivate students to think and write. home-made hand-outs are also used for group activities. when choosing materials, teachers should consider the cultural content. aspects like aesthetic sense (arts, literature, music, media, etc.), sociological sense, semantic sense as well as sociolinguistic sense need to be looked at. in writing classrooms, various materials are used in a variety of ways. firstly, the teacher can control the amount of help given. here, models are used but not for all students. students learn to get information from notes, substitution tables as well as stimuli such as maps, tables, and the writing classroom teachers' role teaching method learners' role learning materials how materals are used noor hanim rahmat exploring the use of jigsaw writing among esl writers: a classroom research 126 diagrams. next, the teacher can control the interactional mode. the good students can be allowed to work on their own while the remainder of the students is organized in groups. mixed ability interaction could take place and the harder tasks are given to the better students. the jigsaw classroom the concept of jigsaw classroom was first introduced by aronson (1978) in the 1970’s. the history of its use dated back to provide an avenue for segregated students to work together for a common goal in a classroom. it is a method of organizing classroom activity that makes students’ dependent on one another to succeed. it breaks the class into groups and breaks tasks into pieces and the groups later assemble to complete the puzzle. later, results of multiple studies on the benefits of jigsaw classroom. among them are; the activities in the jigsaw classroom allow authentic interaction among peers. this interaction can help scaffold the learners’ knowledge. this helps learners build both skills and strategies. according to vygotsky (mcleod, 2012), "the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance, or in collaboration with more capable peers." it is believed that working in groups allowed the learners to gain so much more than they would if they worked alone on the same task. theoretical framework figure 3. theoretical framework of the study; jigsaw writing figure 3 above reveals the theoretical framework of the study. jigsaw writing is a form of collaborative writing. each member of the group works on his/her part. the decision to break the essay into parts is done from the mind map at the initial stage and this kind map acts as the scaffold towards the forming of the whole essay. the end product of the work is a combination of the works of the members in the group. through cooperative learning, the group members learn to divide their tasks. the completed essay is actually the effort from group writing. students work individually to form their own paragraph. the ideas are then combined –each paragraph is arranged and joined physically in a long “scroll” to make it a complete essay. jigsaw writing the jigsaw technique is a method of organizing classroom activity that makes students dependent on each other to succeed. it breaks classes into groups and breaks assignments into pieces that the group assembles to complete the (jigsaw) puzzle. the idea of jigsaw activities is not competition among learners in the classroom, rather cooperating with one another to complete assigned tasks. jigsaw writing is also a form of collaborative writing. each member of the group works on his/her part. the decision to break the essay into parts is done from the mind map at the initial stage and this kind map acts as the scaffold towards the forming of the whole essay. the end product of the work is a combination of the works of the members in the group. through cooperative learning, the group members learn to divide indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 127 their tasks. the completed essay is actually the effort from group writing. students work individually to form their own paragraph. the ideas are then combined –each paragraph is arranged and joined physically in a long “scroll” to make it a complete essay. cooperative learning group writing the process of writing in a group can benefit learners in many ways. according to mulligan and garofalo (2011), group writing encourages peer interaction as well as raise learners’ awareness of important organizational and syntactical elements that they otherwise might not notice on their own. in addition to that, felder and brent (2009) reported that learners learn more by doing things rather than learn passively. scaffolding scaffolding is a concept introduced by vygotsky (mc leod, 2010). scaffolding is best achieved when the support is matched to the needs of the learner. combining ideas the study by elola and oskoz (2010) revealed when working in groups, the primary focus of learners would be the content and organization. learners work together to add on to one another’s existing ideas, and the combined effort can help develop a creative piece of work. scroll writing a scroll is a large roll of parchment, papyrus, paper, or another flexible writing material which is used to store and display printed information (wise geek, 2014). in this writing class, students used sections of the mahjong paper (a large piece of paper) to write their assigned paragraphs. when everyone has completed their paragraphs, the sections are joined together this forming a long essay in the form of a scroll. past research past research has revealed benefits of cooperative learning, and especially collaborative writing. the research by elola and oskoz (2010) looked at the differences between writing individually and writing collaboratively. the study explored esl learners’ collaborative interactions when discussion content, structure and other aspects related to elaboration of writing. although the data did not reveal significant differences in terms of fluency, accuracy and complexity when comparing individual and collaborative assignments, there were observable differences in terms of learners’ interactions with the text as well as differences in the written product as individual writers and group writers. their study revealed that when learners work collaboratively, they focus more on content and organization. the research also concluded that peer interaction is useful to encourage learning to take place. in addition to that, the research by mulligan and garofola (2011) looked at group writing at a private university in kyoto. the learners were divided into 4 groups. each group ranged from 20-35 students. each group was assigned writing tasks and allowed to interact to improve on their writing. the findings revealed that collaborative writing is a non-threatening approach for students. students enjoyed the sharing of ideas and found writing less stressful. method research design this action research is an exploratory study of the use of jigsaw writing (often called “the scroll essay” by students) in the esl classroom. the framework is shown in figure 4. this action research is carried out based on the four basic action research cycleplan, action, monitor and reflection. figure 4. research framework planning action monitoring reflection http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-papyrus.htm noor hanim rahmat exploring the use of jigsaw writing among esl writers: a classroom research 128 planning planning of the lesson is done. students are given the essay title to work on. each group has about 4-6 students. each group is responsible to complete an essay, and each student is responsible to write a paragraph. they end the planning by displaying their group’s mind map as a signal they are ready to proceed to the next stage. action each student in the group will write a paragraphfor a 5 paragraph essay-each person writes one paragraph on a paper. for example, an idea group is 5 people-one will write the introductory paragraph, another 3 persons will write a developmental paragraph each, and finally one person writes the concluding paragraph. after that, all the 5 paragraphs are combined (pasted into a long scroll) and thus become a complete essay. monitoring monitoring stage is done when the “scroll” pasted on the wall and the peers (and the teacher) make comments on the essay done. this stage is a “noisy” stage where writers defended their work, and readers made comments. reflection students reflect on the comments and made changes. students reflect on their favorite/least favorite stage of this “scroll” writing activity. the responded to the questionnaire provided. they also wrote their comments in their journal. respondents 30 diploma in business studies students enrolled in an esl academic writing class; 18 are female students and 12 are male students. instruments there are two major instruments used in this research – a questionnaire and students’ journal. the questionnaire is divided into three sections; section a is the demographic profile, section b looks at the writing process of the learners while section c elicits responses from learners about cooperative learning. method of data analysis quantitative-students’ responses to the questionnaire is analyzed using spss. qualitative-after going through a cycle of jigsaw writing, the students wrote in their journals about what they think of jigsaw writing. the entries are analyzed based on recurring patterns and the patterns are then analyzed according to percentage and frequency. results & discussion the discussion of findings is done based on the sub-research questions. the data collected was triangulated using instruments like questionnaire and students’ journal. the discussion in this section will thus be done to reveal both quantitative and qualitative analysis of data. the main research question for this action research is: 1. what do the learners think of jigsaw writing? this question will be answered by analyzing three (3) sub-components and they are: a. is there any significant difference between writing process and cooperative learning? b. how does jigsaw writing influence the learners’ writing process? c. how does cooperative learning influence jigsaw writing? answer to (a) is there any significant difference between writing process and cooperative learning? writing cooperative writing pearson correlation 1 .544* sig. (2-tailed) .011 n 21 21 cooperative pearson correlation .544* 1 sig. (2-tailed) .011 indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 129 n 21 21 figure 5. correlations between writing and cooperative learning to determine if there is a significant association in the mean scores between writing and cooperative, correlation coefficient was conducted. figure 5 shows that there is a moderate significant association between writing and cooperative learning (r=.544) and (p=.011). the correlation coefficient is significant at the 0.05 level. the coefficient of determination between the two variables has shown that only 29.6% of the rate of writing can be explained from the cooperative and vice versa. therefore, initial findings reveal that cooperative learning can positively influence students writing process. this finding is in accordance with the research by elola and oskoz (2010) who found observable difference between writing individually and in groups. the research also revealed that students writing in groups will focus on content and organization. answer to (b) how does jigsaw writing influence the learners’ writing process? this question will be analyzed into two (2) sections. the first section (i) reports quantitative findings from the questionnaire. the section (ii) reports findings using the action research cycle and reporting on students’ journal. (i) quantitative findings (questionnaire) figure 6. percentage for writing process according to flower and hayes (1981), the writing process is divided into three partsplanning, translating, reviewing and evaluating. both quantitative and qualitative findings will be discussed based on the four sub-categories. figure 6 reveals the percentage for writing process. during the planning stage, learners preferred to use their memory (38.1%), and mind maps (33.3%). during the translating stage, students reported that they will think about the ideas first before writing them down in sentences (42.9%). in addition to that, students reported that the reviewed the content (23.8%). group work has also been reported by elola and oskoz (2010) and mulligan and garafalo (2011) for helping students improve on their ideas some important organizational aspects of the essay. (ii) explaining the action research cycle (students’ journal) planning stage 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% never seldom some of the time most of the time noor hanim rahmat exploring the use of jigsaw writing among esl writers: a classroom research 130 for the planning, stage, students were taught the mind map. each group is required to prepare a mind map for presentation. table 7. planning stage comments frequency (%) attract students 3% share ideas 11% more information presented and saves time 2.4% 16.4% figure 7. planning stage table and figure 7 show the response for planning stage. 3% of the students felt that the planning activities attracted them towards the writing of the essay. comments like “strongly suggest”, and “i think it is good and kind of a new way to attract students in writing an essay”. 11% said that the planning stage activities allow them to share ideas. comments written were “i think the group sharing of mind map is good. student can share any ideas” and “can share idea” only 2.4% of the students said they could present more information and the activity saves their writing time. this finding is in accordance with the research by mulligan and garofalo (2011) who found that students enjoyed group activities because as they could share ideas and gain more information than they could when they are on their own. action stage table 8. action stage comments frequency (%) dividing by paragraph saves time 4.9% easier to write whole essay 8.6% learn about planning 1.8% focussed 1.8% 17.1% pasting parts combination of different sources 1.8% saves time 1.8% increase cooperation 0.6% improve comprehension 0.6% not complicated 1.2% understand the roles of paragraphs 0.6% fun 4.3% complete different task together 7.5% 18.3% grand total 35.4% 0% 5% 10% 15% attract students share ideas more information presented and saves time planning stage indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 131 figure 8. action stage table and figure 8 reveal the comments made about the action stage. this action stage is divided into two stages-the first part is when the students were given individual task of writing a paragraph on their own. the next stage is the part where the students compiled the group members’ paragraphs and paste into an essay. it is joined together using a tape and it looked like a long scroll. more comments were made for the “pasting part” 18.3%) compared to the “dividing into paragraph” (17.1%). students felt that the “dividing into paragraph” part made it easier for them to write the whole essay. they also felt that “pasting” and combining the paragraphs allowed them to “complete different tasks together” (7.5%). the concept of jigsaw classroom was first introduced by aronson (1979) and it involves combining smaller tasks by different people to form a complete task. one of the most obvious benefits is the sharing of ideas and sharing of responsibility by different members in a group. monitoring stage table 9. monitoring stage comments frequency (%) learn from mistakes 11% more information 4.9% see friends present 1.8% 17.7% 0.00% 5.00% 10.00% 15.00% 20.00% action stage 0% 2% 4% 6% 8% 10% 12% learn from mistakes more information see friends present monitoring stage noor hanim rahmat exploring the use of jigsaw writing among esl writers: a classroom research 132 figure 9. monitoring stage table and figure 7 show the comments for monitoring stage. 11% of the students felt they learnt from the mistakes they or their friends made. at this stage, students displayed their scrolls to be read and commented on by their friends (and teacher). they said that this stage “is useful because we can know what the wrong and right about the essay”. 4.9% felt that this stage enabled them to gain more information. reflection stage table 10. reflection stage comments frequency (%) like most first sentence 1.8% conclusion 4.3% introduction 6.1% pasting 0.6% explanation 1.2% mind map 0.6% 14.6% hate most introduction 4.9% conclusion 3.7% content 7.3% 15.9% grand total 30.5% figure 10. reflection stage table and figure 8 depict the comments made for the reflection stage. this stage is divided into 2 sectionsthe first section reveals what the students liked most and the second reveals what they hated most about this jigsaw writing activities. 6.1% and 4.3% said they loved the introduction and conclusion respectively. this is because these two paragraphs were not done alone; they did it as a group. however, 7.3% said they hated “content” part. this means the students were still struggling with what to write although they worked in groups. answer to (c) how does cooperative learning influence jigsaw writing? 0.00% 1.00% 2.00% 3.00% 4.00% 5.00% 6.00% 7.00% 8.00% reflection stage indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 133 figure 11. percentage for cooperative learning the percentage for cooperative learning is shown in figure 9 above. students were reported to have enjoyed (33.3%) the jigsaw activity and found that the cooperative learning helped save time (33.3%). the students also agreed that jigsaw writing activities allowed them to share ideas (47.6%) besides being able to understand (38.1%) how their friends did their work. cooperative learning has also taught them to communicate (42.9%) with their friends. studies by vygotsky (mc leaod, 2010), elola and oskoz (2010) and mulligan and garofola (2011) have proven how beneficial cooperative learning is in the classroom. besides gaining ideas from peers, students are also able to improve on their content skills, as well as communicative strategies as a result of the interaction. conclusion summary of findings this research has shown yet another benefit of jigsaw classroom by aronson (1979). what makes this research different is that the concept of jigsaw classroom is extended into the writing classroom. figure 12. summary of findings the summary of this research is shown in figure 12. although the results of this study cannot be generalized for all esl students learning how to write, the techniques used in the action research cycle can be used in the esl writing classroom. 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% never seldom some of the time most of the time writing process jigsaw writing cooperative learning write paste display noor hanim rahmat exploring the use of jigsaw writing among esl writers: a classroom research 134 figure 13. jigsaw writing stages throughout the action research, three prominent stages were identified. they are (1) write, (2) paste and (3) display. the first stage of this jigsaw writing was the writing stage where students were assigned their own individual parts to write-individual paragraphs. then they proceeded to combine all the individual efforts and paste the paragraphs into a long scroll –the complete essay. the final stage is the part where students display their scroll for the class to see and for it to undergo feedback and revision. pedagogical implications this has been a small, exploratory action research. it would be better if jigsaw writing be carried out to more students, mixed variety of courses and levels, age group as well as gender. references andrews, a. & caster. (2008). collaborative writing: an autoethnographic study of co-authorship. usc upstate undergraduate research journal, vol1, 1-6. aronson, e. & bridgeman, d. (1979). jigsaw groups and the desegregated classroom: in pursuit of common goals. personality and social psychology bulletin, 5(4), 438-446. retrieved from http://www.psychwiki.com/wiki/aronson,_e. ,_%26_bridgeman,_d._(1979)._jigsaw_groups_ and_the_desegregated_classroom:_in_pursuit_ of_common_goals._personality_and_social_psy chology_bulletin,_5(4),_438-446. aronson, e. (1978). the jigsaw classroom. retrieved from https://www.jigsaw.org/ crawford, l.w. (2004). strategies for writers’ researchbased program for writing success. retrieved from http:www.zaner.blosser.com/pdf/la151. elola, i. & oskoz, a. (2010). collaborative writing: fostering foreign language and writing conventions development, 14(3), 51-71, issn 1094-3501 felder, r. m. & brent, r. (2009). cooperative learning. retrieved from http://www4.ncsu.edu/unity/lockers/users/f /felder/public/student-centered.html grabe, w. & kaplan, r. b. (1996). theory and practice of writing – an applied linguistic. usa: addison, wesley, longman johari, s. k. (2004). second language writing: from knowledge to application. proceedings of the national seminar on english teaching. bangi: penerbitan ukm larsen & freeman, d. (2000). techniques and principles in language teaching (2nd edition). oxford: oxford university press. mcleoad, s. (2010). zone of proximal development. developmental psychology. retrieved form http://www.simply psychology.org/zone-ofproximal-development.html mulligan, c. & garofalo, r. (2011). a collaborative writing approach: methodology and student assessment. the language teacher. feature article, 35(3), 5-10. retrieved from http://jaltpublications.org/t/l rahmat, n. h. (2008). peer review in the writing classroom: a case study of written and oral stances on revision behaviour among esl writers. doctoral thesis dissertation. malaysia national university. retrieved from http://malrep.uum.edu.my/rep/record/uitm. eprints.4311 tompkins, g. e. (1990). the writing process in teaching writing: balancing process and product. ohio: merill publishing co. wac clearinghouse. (2015). why consider collaborative writing assignments? wac clearinghouse. rertrieved from http: //wac.colostate.edu/intro/pop21.cfm whitehead, j. (1985). an analysis of an individual’s educational development: the basis for personally oriented action research, in: shipman, m. (ed.) educational research: principles, policies and practices, lewes, falmer. wisegeek. (2014). what is a scroll? retrieved from http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-ascroll.htm https://www.jigsaw.org/ http://www.simply/ http://jalt-publications.org/t/l http://jalt-publications.org/t/l http://malrep.uum.edu.my/rep/record/uitm.eprints.4311 http://malrep.uum.edu.my/rep/record/uitm.eprints.4311 hery yufrizal, sudirman, basturi hasan the effect of learning styles and motivation on indonesian students’ english achievement 232 the effect of learning styles and motivation on indonesian students’ english achievement hery yufrizal department of english education, universitas of lampung, e-mail: heryyufrizal@gmail.com sudirman department of english education, university of lampung e-mail: sudirman@yahoo.comm basturi hasan department of english education, university of lampung e-mail: basturi_hasan@yahoo.com apa citation: yufrizal, h., sudirman, & hasan, b. (2015). the effect of learning styles and motivation on indonesian students’ english achievement. indonesian efl journal, 1(2), 232-241 received: 17-04-2015 accepted: 01-05-2015 published: 01-07-2015 abstract: this research aims to find out whether there is any significant interaction between motivation and learning style on students’ english achievement in bandar lampung. this research is a non-experimental study with variant analysis study. the research involves 430 students of science department, faculty of teaching and education, university of lampung, indonesia. data were taken by giving a set of test in which validity and reliability are tested. data for motivation and learning styles were taken from students’ reponses to multiple choice questionnaire each consisting of 40 questions. the results of the analysis show that there is no significant interaction between motivation and learning styles on students’ english achievement. this means that the combination of motivation and learning styles cannot distinguish between high achiever students and the lower ones. learning styles have significant influence on students’ english achievement. students with different learning styles have different english achievement. motivation does not have significant effect on students’ english achievement. students with different motivation did not have different result of english achievement. keywords: motivation, learning styles, english achievement. introduction in second and foreign language learning, there are three aspects that must mastered by the learners. the aspects are pronunciation, grammar and structure, and vocabulary. these aspects are blended in three four language skills: (listening skill, speaking skill), reading skill and writing skill. one can be called proficient when he/she can master these three aspects and skills. however, as bambang setiyadi confessed in his professorship inauguration on november 2009 that the teaching of english in indonesia has failed. this failure is proven by the facts that high school and even university graduates in indonesia use english for communication and other purposes. learning achievement can be used as an indicator for students’ language capability. djaali, 2008 states that the higher the learning ability, the higher the learning achievement will be. however, learning english as foreign or second language is not similar to the learning of other subjects. in learning general subjects, students’ success is measured by the mastery of the subject. learning language is much more complex, learning success is not only measured by the learning achievement but also by mastering the language as well as using the language as a complete skill. many factors influence the success of failure of second and foreign language learning. some of the factors are coming from indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 233 the external side of the learning called external factors, and some coming from the internal (internal factors (see brown, 2009). among the external factors are: school environment, teachers, learning facilities, etc. among the internal factors are: students’ age, motivation, attitude, learning style, learning strategies, and other affective factors. two factors among those factors are leaning styles and motivation. many studies have discussed the roles of learning styles and motivation on students’ achievement in foreign language learning and general subject. this research studies use different theoretical and research paradigms. in terms of the relationship between learning styles and general subjects, some studies have tried to find out this relationship. among others are arianti (2013), utami (2013), and bakri (2012), all seem to agree that there is a significant correlation between students’ learning styles and their achievement on their learning achievement of some content learning. in his research study, yufrizal (2010) stated that students of junior and senior high schools in tulang bawang regency have different achievement in english based on their learning styles. likewise panduwinata (2012) in an experiment of writing ability of students in lampung polytechnic found that students with concrete learning style produce better writing results than students with analytic learning styles. sadewo (2011), arianti (2013), utami (2013), and bakri (2012). these studies have shown that there is a significant correlation between students’ learning motivation and their learning achievement. the higher the level of motivation the students have, the better students would achieve in their learning effort. however, there are some difference in research and construct paradigms among those studies resulting in different results of studies. a more compact research on this matter will give us clearer idea on how learning style and motivation affect learning particularly the learning of english as a second/foreign language in indonesia. this present study attempts to find out whether there is any significant effect of learning style and students’ motivation on their achievement in learning english for the first year students of the university of lampung. students’ learning styles preferences have been a major concern of some research. reid (1987), for example, based on survey data, distinguished four perceptual learning modalities: 1. visual learning (for example, reading and studying charts); 2. auditory learning (for example, listening to lectures or audio tapes); 3. kinesthetic learning (involving physical responses); and 4. tactile learning (hands-on learning, as in building models). he then administered a questionnaire to 1,388 students of varying language backgrounds to investigate their preferred modalities. this revealed that the learners' preferences often differed significantly from those of native speakers of american english. they showed a general preference for kinesthetic and tactile learning styles, and for individual as opposed to group learning. willing (1987) investigated the learning styles of 517 adult esl learners in australia. based on their responses to a 30-item questionnaire, willing tried to identify how differences in cognitive learning styles affected learners' preferences in six different areas: 1. preferences for particular kinds of classroom activities; 2. preferences for particular types of teacher behavior; 3. preferences for particular grouping arrangements; 4. preferences for particular aspects of language which need emphasis; 5. preferences for particular sensory modes, such as visual, auditory, or tactile learning; and 6. preferences for particular modes of learning on one's own outside class. it was found that differences in cognitive styles affected learners' preferences for particular approaches to learning. for example, concrete learners tended to choose the following:  in class, i like to learn by games. hery yufrizal, sudirman, basturi hasan the effect of learning styles and motivation on indonesian students’ english achievement 234  i like to learn english by working in pairs. learners with analytical learning styles, however, reported the following preferences:  i like to study grammar.  i like the teacher to let me find my mistakes. [-2-] although richards and lockhart (1994) argue that such information can prove to be significant as to whether both teachers and learners approach learning in the same way, they still oppose the idea of putting "learners into boxes labeled according to cognitive styles" (pp. 62-63). nunan (1989) points out that accommodating learners' needs and preferences is vital in designing a learnercentered curriculum. such importance given to students' feelings has also been stressed in barkhuizen's (1998) study, in which he reports an investigation of high school esl learners' perceptions of the language teaching-learning activities presented in their classes. the outcome of such investigation surprised the teachers in those perceptions of teachers and students differed greatly from each other. a series of research by yufrizal (2000, 2001, 2009) also have shown that learning styles influence signifcantly on students’ english achievement in indonesia. he found that setudents with communicative learning styles tend to have higher achievement than students with other learning styles. method a non-experimental quantitative with variant analysis (gal et al. 1998) is used to achieve the objective of the study. the method used in the study is cross-sectional with a design of non-correlational ex-post de facto. (setiyadi, 144). in this case, the research examines phenomena exist during the research without giving any treatment to the subjects, in which samples were given tests and questionnaire to get the data for students’ achievement, learning styles, and motivation. population of the research is all grade 9 students at junior high schools in bandar lampung city. the sample was taken through purposive random sampling, i.e. by taking students from four kinds of schools: high rated public schools, high rated-private schools, lower rated public schools and lower rated private schools. data for students’ english achievement were gained by giving a set of english proficiency test (focusing on reading ability). data for students’ learning styles were taken by giving a set of questionnaire developed by willing (1988) and was modified and translated into bahasa indonesia by yufrizal (2000). the questionnaire comprises 40 items with alternative answers. for motivation data, a set of standardized questionnaire was given to the students. all data were then statistically analyzed using multivariate analysis of variance (manova) to see the interaction among the variables. in order to see the effect of learning and motivation toward students’ english achievement, one way analysis of variance (anova) was used. results and discussion the following table illustrates the distribution and frequency of students’ english achievement. table 1: students’ english achievement no. interval frequency percentage 1. <30 62 14,41 2. 31-40 96 22,3 3. 41-50 63 14,6 4. 51-60 61 14,18 5. 61-70 80 18,6 6 71-80 54 12,6 7 >80 24 5,56 total 430 100% the table shows that there was an evenly distributed students’ achievement in english. none of students are more superior to the others. indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 235 learning styles as previously mentioned, in order to identify students’ learning styles, a set of questionnaire consisting of 40 questions with multiple choice alternatives were given. the alternatives are: 1 strongly disagree, 2 disagree, 3 agree, and 4 strongly agree. all students’ answers were analyzed through data reduction factor analysis resulting four types of learning styles: a) communicative, b) concrete, c) authority oriented, and analytic learning styles. another style was added, that is 5) undecided or mixed styles referring to students with combination of style or nondominating style identified. the number and percentage of students’ learning styles and their english achievement is shown in the following table. table 2. students’ english achievement based on their learning styles. no. learning styles frequency percentage 1. communicative 190 44.2 2 concrete 85 19.8 3. authority oriented 49 11.4 4. gaya analytic 98 22.8 5. undecided 8 01.8 total 430 100% table 2 shows that the highest percentage is students with communicative learning style 190 students (44.2%). the second highest percentage is students with concrete learning styles with 98 students (19.8%), this is followed by students with authority-oriented (85 students/29%) and analytic learners (22.8%). the least percentage is students with undecided learning style (01.8%). learning motivation to measure the students’ motivation, a set of validated questionnaire consisting of 40 questions with four alternative: a = 1, b = 2, c=3 and d = 4. students’ motivation was accumulated resulting three categories of motivation: high, middle, and low motivation. the distribution of students’ motivation based on their english achievement is illustrated in the following table. table 3. distribution and frequency of students’ motivation no. learning motivation frequency percentage 1. < 100 low 67 15.6 2 101-110 middle 223 51.9 3. >111 high 140 31.5 total 430 100% table 3 shows that 223 people (51.9%) have middle range motivation, 140 (31.5%) students have high motivation, and 140 (15.6%) students have low motivation. the influence of learning styles on students english achievement the following table shows the descriptive statistic of students’ average score in english based on their learning styles. table 4. descriptive of learning styles and students english achievement score n mean std. deviation std. error minimum maximum comm 190 55.9368 18.03425 1.30834 22.00 87.00 conc 85 54.5647 16.39356 1.77813 25.00 85.00 auth 49 45.0816 14.85883 2.12269 20.00 80.00 anal 98 47.5204 17.58527 1.77638 20.00 90.00 undecided 8 56.1250 18.13786 6.41270 30.00 75.00 total 430 52.5140 17.72487 .85477 20.00 90.00 hery yufrizal, sudirman, basturi hasan the effect of learning styles and motivation on indonesian students’ english achievement 236 the table shows that 190 students have communicative learning style gained the average score of 55.93 (sd. 18.03). eighty five (85) students with concrete learning style had the average score of 54.56 (sd= 18.05. the number of students who have authority oriented is 49 with the average score of 45.08 (sd = 15.94). for students with analytic learning style, the average score was 47.52 (sd = 17.58). finally, 8 students who have undecided-learning style had an average score of 52.51 (sd = 18.13). in order to find out the difference of english average score of students with different styles, an anova test was executed. the result of the statistical analysis is shown in the following table. table 5: the result of anova test based students’ learning styles anova score sum of squares df mean square f sig. between groups 7838.272 4 1959.568 6.561 .000 within groups 126941.144 425 298.685 total 134779.416 429 the table shows that the f count of the statistical analysis is 6,561 which is higher than the f table. this means that there is a significant effect of the learning styles on students’ average score of english achievement. students with different learning styles gained different average score of english achievement at 0.001 significant levels. the effect of motivation on students english achievement students were found three levels of motivation: low, middle, and high. the descriptive statistic of students’ english score based on their level of motivation is presented in table 6. table 6 the average score of english based on students’ level of motivation descriptive score n mean std. deviation std. error minimum maximum 1 68 49.6471 18.21658 2.20908 20.00 87.00 2 221 53.0452 17.62379 1.18550 20.00 87.00 3 141 53.0638 17.63730 1.48533 22.00 90.00 total 430 52.5140 17.72487 .85477 20.00 90.00 note: 1 = students with low motivation 2 = students with middle motivation 3 = students with high motivation table 6 shows that students with low motivation have an english achievement average score of 46.64 (sd = 18.21). the number of students with middle motivation is 221 with an english achievement average score of 53.05 (sd= 17.62) and students with high motivation 141 with an english achievement average score of 52.51 (sd = 17.72). the result of anova test on motivation and students’ average score of english is shown in table 7. indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 237 table 7. the result of anova test on motivation and english achievement anova score sum of squares df mean square f sig. between groups 663.914 2 331.957 1.057 .348 within groups 134115.502 427 314.088 total 134779.416 429 the anova test on students’ motivation and their average score of english shows that the f count is 1,057 which is smaller than the f table for the number of sample. this means that there is no significant effect of motivation on students’ english achievement. students with different levels of motivation do not differ significantly in their achievement of english. interaction between learning styles and motivation in order to find out whether is a statistically significant interaction between learning styles and motivation on students’ achievement of english, a multivariate analysis of variant (manova) test was conducted. the result of the statistical analysis is iilustrated in table 8 tabel 8. manova test of motivation and learning styles on students’achievement source type iii sum of squares df mean square f sig. corrected model 11766.139a 14 840.438 2.835 .000 intercept 277592.194 1 277592.194 936.490 .000 gaya 9241.142 4 2310.285 7.794 .000 mot 540.669 2 270.334 .912 .403 style * mot 3479.690 8 434.961 1.467 .167 error 123013.277 415 296.418 total 1320597.000 430 corrected total 134779.416 429 a. r squared = .087 (adjusted r squared = .057) tabel 8 shows the results of manova test as follow: a) learning style have a significant effect on students’ anglish achievement (f=7.794) at the significant level of 0.005. b) motivation does not havea significant effect on students’ english achievement(f= 0.912) c) there is no significant interaction between learning styles and motivation on students’ english achievement. statistical analysis showed that there is a significant effect of learning styles and students’ english achievement at junior high schools in bandar lampung city. there are significan differences of students’ average score in english of students with different learning style (f=.561) at the significant level of 0.001. differences of students’ english achievement according their learning styles are illustrated in the following figure. hery yufrizal, sudirman, basturi hasan the effect of learning styles and motivation on indonesian students’ english achievement 238 figure 1. students’ average score of english based on their learning styles note: learning styles 1 = communicative, 2 = concrete, 3 = authority-oriented, 4= analytic, 5 = undecided figure 1 shows that students with communicative learnig style and undecided have the highest scores in english compared to students with other learning styles. students with concrete learning styles had the third highest average score, higher than students with analytic and authority oriented learners. the lowest average scores were gained by the students with authority oriented styles. this result of analysis confirms previous studies on the role of learning styles on students’ english achievement using the same model of learning style measurement (yufrizal, 2010; none tis’ah, 2011; panduwinata, 2012). in his research study, yufrizal (2010) stated that students of junior and senior high schools in tulang bawang regency have different achievement in english based on their learning styles. likewise panduwinata (2012) in an experiment of writing ability of students in lampung polytechnic found that students with concrete learning style produce better writing results than students with analytic learning styles. on the aspect of motivation, the statistical analysis of the current research has shown that motivation does not have a significant effect on students’ english achievement at junior high schools in bandar lampung city. students with different level of motivation do not differ in their english achievement. this can be illustrated from the following figure. indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 239 figure 2. means of students’ motivation on their english achievement note: students’ motivation 1 = low, 2 = middle, 3 = high figure 2 shows that students with high motivation have the average score relatively similar to students with middle level of motivation. the highest and the middle level motivation students have relatively higher average score of english achievement. this result seems to contradict other previous studies on the effect of motivation on students’ learning achievement. the higher the level of motivation the students have, the better students would achieve in their learning effort. in this case, we assume that differences in the result of analysis of the current research and other previous studies of motivation are due to the statistical analysis model. the current study looks at the motivation by comparing the students’ achievement according to their level of motivation using anova test paradigm, while other previous studies use correlational and regression test analysis. in terms of statistical relationship between the students learning styles and their level of motivation on english achievement, the current research has shown that the f value for the statistical interaction is 1,467 lower than the f table of the number of sample. this value means that there is no significant interaction between students’ learning styles and their level of motivation. relative interaction between learning styles and motivation on students’ english achievement can be illustrated by the following figure. hery yufrizal, sudirman, basturi hasan the effect of learning styles and motivation on indonesian students’ english achievement 240 figure 3. interaction between learning styles and motivation note: learning style 1 = communicative 2 = concrete 3 = authority oriented 4 = analytic 5 = undecided motivation 1= low 2 = mid 3 = high figure 3 shows that the highest score in english achievement was gained by students who have undecided learning styles with high level of motivation. the second highest score of english was gained by students with communicative learning style who have low motivation of learning. the third highest score of engish achievement was gained by students who have undecided style with low motivation followed by students with communicative learning style with middle level of motivation. this illustration shows that there is no logical correlation between learing style and motivation. however, there needs to be further clarification from this result. the random patterns of learning styles and motivation on students achievements also contradicts with previous studies on learning style and motivation. arianti (2013), utami (2013), and bakri (2012), all seem to agree that there is a significant correlation between students’ learning styles and their achievement on their learning achievement of some content learning. again, here the differences between the results of the current research and the previous studies are due to differences in formulating paradigm both in terms of selecting construct of learning style and motivation as well as the statistical analysis paradigm. in terms of construct, many research on learning style use senses of visual, audio, and kinesthetic as the basis for categorizing students’ learning style. meanwhile, the construct offered by willing (1988) was based on the combination of senses and other affective factor to categorize students who learn a second/foreign language. this has resulted in the category of learning styles into communicative, concrete, authority oriented, and analytical learning style to denote to preference one has in learning a second/foreign language. indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 241 conclusion from the analysis, it can be concluded that learning styles have a significant effect on the students’ english achievement at junior high schools in bandar lampung. students with different learning styles have different learning achievement. the highest score in english achievement was gained by students with communicative learning styles and undecided learners. a difference is found between the result of the current study and the previous studies in terms of construct paradigm. motivation does have a significant effect on students’ learning english achievement. students with high motivation do not have different english achievement from students with middle level of motivation but relatively differ from students with low level motivation. multivariate analysis of variant (manova) on the relationship between learning styles and motivation shows that there is no significant interaction between students’ learning styles and their motivation toward students’ english achievement. references anita, i. (2011). pengaruh gaya belajar dan motivasi belajar terhadap prestasi belajar pembelajaran melakukan instalasi perangkat jaringan lokal siswa smk muhammadiyah 3 yogyakarta. unpublished thesis. yogyakarta: uny. barkhuizen, g.p. (1998). discovering learners' perceptions of esl classroom teaching/learning activities in a south african context. tesol quarterly, 32, 85-108. nunan, d. (1989). hidden agendas: the role of the learner in programme implementation. in johnson. r. k. (ed.), the second language curriculum. cambridge: cambridge university press. panduwinata, y. 2012. gaya belajar dan strategi belajar menulis pada mata kuliah bahasa inggris di politeknik negeri lampung. unpublished tesis. lampung: universitas lampung reid, j. (1987). the learning style preferences of esl students. tesol quarterly, 21, 87-103. richards, j. and c. lockhart. (1994). reflective teaching in second language classrooms. cambridge: cambridge university press. sadewo, s. 2011. hubungan sikap siswa, motivasi belajar, dan pemanfaatan sumber belajar dengan kemampuan bahasa inggris siswa kelas xi man 1 metro. unpublished thesis. lampung: universitas lampung bakri, s. (2013). hubungan motivasi belajar dan gaya belajar dengan prestasi belajar mata pelajaran ekonomi siswa kelas xii program ips sma negeri 2 bae kudus. unpublished thesis. solo: universitas sebelas maret. sari, a. (2013). pengaruh gaya belajar dan motivasi berprestasi siswa terhadap prestasi belajar praktik instalasi listrik di smk negeri 2 yogyakarta. jakarta: universitas guna darma. setiyadi, a. b. 2006. metode penelitian untuk pengajaran bahasa asing. yogyakarta: graha ilmu. tis’ah, n. (2011). perbedaan gaya belajar siswa, gaya mengajar guru dan lama belajar siswa di luar sekolah terhadap kemampuan berbahasa inggris siswa kelas ix smp negeri 16 bandar lampung. unpublished tesis. lampung: universitas lampung utami, e. d. (2013). hubungan motivasi belajar dan gaya belajar terhadap hasil belajar mata ajar periodonsia pada fakultas kedokteran gigi univ. prof. dr. moestopo. digital library universitas sebelas maret solo willing, k. (1988). learning styles in adult migration education. adelaide: national curriculum resource center. yufrizal, h. (2000). negotiation of meaning in efl dyads in indonesia: the roles of gender, proficiency, and learning styles. unpublished doctoral thesis, la trobe university, australia. yufrizal, h. (2001). communicative task and learning styles: negotiation of meaning and second language development in indonesia. teflin yufrizal, h. (2009). gaya belajar dan gaya mengajar. bandung: pustaka reka cipta. yufrizal, h. (2007). negotiation of meaning by indonesian efl learners. bandung: pustaka reka cipta. http://anith-nithajie.blogspot.com/2013/06/pengaruh-gaya-belajar-dan-motivasi.html http://anith-nithajie.blogspot.com/2013/06/pengaruh-gaya-belajar-dan-motivasi.html http://anith-nithajie.blogspot.com/2013/06/pengaruh-gaya-belajar-dan-motivasi.html http://anith-nithajie.blogspot.com/2013/06/pengaruh-gaya-belajar-dan-motivasi.html self-directed feedback: an attempt tsara desiana akmilia, pupung purnawarman & rojab siti rodliyah self-directed feedback: an attempt towards learner autonomy in writing self-directed feedback: an attempt towards learner autonomy in writing tsara desiana akmilia english education department, indonesia university of education, indonesiae-mail: tsaradesiana@gmail.com pupung purnawarman english education department, indonesia university of education, indonesiae-mail: ppurnawarman@gmail.com rojab siti rodliyah english education department, indonesia university of education, indonesiae-mail: rojab.siti@gmail.comapa citation: akmilia, t. d., purnawarman, p. & rodliyah, r. s. (2015). self-directed feedback: an attempttowards learner autonomy in writing. indonesian efl journal, 1(1), 48-57received: 03-09-2014 accepted: 23-10-2014 published: 01-01-2015 abstract: this paper aims to investigate the application of self-directed feedback in a writingclassroom in terms of how it may affect their skills in writing and the students’ response to it. thestudy was conducted in one of public high schools in bandung, taking nine students of a science classas the participants. it employs a case study which is using interview and document analysis as thedata collection techniques. the findings show that after the inclusion of self-directed feedback in fourdrafts, the students managed to have a progress in terms of organization, vocabulary, mechanics, andgrammar in the process of writing a report text. the awareness of their own progress also indicates atrait of an autonomous learner. most of the students saw self-directed feedback as a worthytechnique to be used again in the subsequent lessons. as a conclusion, self-directed feedback isproven applicable in the writing classrooms as it functions as a step in making students acquirestrategies of learning autonomy. for further research, it is suggested that self-directed feedback isincluded in a set of a self-monitoring strategy rather than one exclusive technique. keywords: self-directed feedback, writing, learner autonomy introductionwithin the context of efl classrooms, it isquite common to find classes with a highnumber of students. for teachers who needto face about 40 students in one class—thecondition that is happening widely inindonesia—the job could be overwhelming.furthermore, in the writing classes when theprocess of editing and re-drafting is highlyendorsed, this condition is not beneficial. it ispossible that teachers skip the process forpracticality reasons. when we talk aboutwriting classes in particular, to be able tofacilitate students to write better, one of theways is to include feedback for revisionbefore writing assignment is collected.according to susanti (2013), in indonesia it is common to have feedback given byteachers seeing that “teachers are the peoplewho are educated to teach and correct theirstudents’ assignments while students arepeople who have to receive the correctionsand obey every instruction from theirteachers” (susanti, 2013, p 1-2). however, torely on teacher feedback in theaforementioned condition may result in nofeedback at all at worst. self-directedfeedback, which was chosen as anindependent variable in the study, could beone of the solutions. the technique iscarrying the value of learner autonomy, asstated by cresswell (2000, p. 235) that “thestudent self-monitoring technique increasesautonomy in the learning of writing by giving 48 indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(1) january 2015issn 2252-7427learners control over the initiation offeedback.” this way, the teacher does notneed to shoulder the burden of providingfeedback alone.at last, considering the importance ofhaving better practice in teaching writing inlarge classrooms through autonomouslearning, together with the fact that self-directed feedback may create theopportunities to raise students’ awarenesson writing, the study sought to design a studyconnecting both of the components to be putinto practice in an efl classroom.according to lin (2009, p. 61), the aim ofself-directed feedback is “to raise awarenessof the important elements and conventions inthe process of composing essays, and helpsstudents to acquire them in order to becomeindependent and competent writers.” it isalso recognized as self-feedback (see saito,1994; zhang, 1995; hattie and timperley,2007) or self-provided feedback (lamberg,1980), in which each term refers to the samedefinition—a feedback which is formulatedby the students themselves.in the process of self-feedback in writing,the writer is placed in the reader’s role.according to rijlaarsdam and van den bergh(2004), this is beneficial since the studentswill be exposed to text problems, or at leastto practice their reading skills. it was furtherstated that the experience replicates thedifficulties in the writing process, such asincorporating reader perspective in thecomposing, dealing with reader’s expectation,how to guide the readers to its writing, aswell as checking the final text based onreaders’ understanding (rijlaarsdam and vanden bergh, 2004).another support coming from ferris(2003), who stated that in writing, it isimportant to arm students with strategytraining to avoid errors and self-edit theirwork. that being said, it can be inferred thatstudents’ role in regulating themselves in theprocess of writing is vital and inevitable. thiscan be realized through self-directedfeedback.in terms of its significance to revision,paulus (as cited in ferris, 2003) in his studyfound that in terms of influence in the wholerevising process through three draftingstages, the “self/other” category outnumbered peer and teacher feedback.ferris (2003) then concluded that from thefindings, it can be argued that even rereadingand rewriting that does not involve peer orteacher may open an opportunity of studentshaving both substantive changes and a betterquality in writing.saito’s (1994) work focused on self-feedback in the form of self-correction inwhich she categorized self-feedback as one ofthe non-teacher feedback. her study,however, does not investigate as to whatextent the students went with their own self-correction. in her paper, saito (1994)mentioned that “students may be able to usesuch techniques to develop theircommunicative competence, skills to criticizetheir own writing by themselves, and to copewith errors without depending on a teacher”(saito, 1994, p. 65).a widely used definition of learnerautonomy came from holec (as cited inkumaravadivelu, 2003), who defined it as“the ability to take charge of one’s ownlearning.” another view came from benson(2006), who mentioned autonomy inlearning as a condition when people takemore control over their learning inside andoutside the classroom.although the ultimate goal in realizinglearner autonomy is to have learners whodoes not require teacher in their learning(lamb, 2008), this does not necessarily meanthat the role of teacher in the classroom isvanished at all. according to lamb (2008),the kind of learning expected is one that doesnot take place independently of the teacher,but one in which the teacher shifts his/herfocus in teaching to support the learners’development in autonomy. this can berealized by teachers introducing the learnersinto the strategies to become autonomouslearners.an autonomous learner, then, is not alearner who does not take any kind ofsupport into account. moore (1972)characterizes autonomous learners as theones who still turn to teacher to assist themin formulating problems, collectinginformation, and evaluating their progress.that is why the self-directed feedback issuggested not to be applied in an exclusionfrom the other types of feedback, but rather 49 tsara desiana akmilia, pupung purnawarman & rojab siti rodliyah self-directed feedback: an attempt towards learner autonomy in writingas a complement to teacher and peerfeedback as students are releasingthemselves from too much dependency toothers.according to cresswell (2000),autonomy in the learning of writing can beincreased through self-monitoring technique.this is in line with the process approach towriting that is also characterized with thepresence of help for the students to be awareof their own writing process (shih, as statedin brown, 2001). this implies that it is notthe teachers who should be the main actor inthe process of writing, but the students.therefore, to include learner autonomy inthe course of writing is a necessity since thestudents also need to be aware that they arethe one who give the direction to theprogress of their own writing. furthermore,self-feedback in this matter promotes theexact same thing, when the learners areacquired to be the first person to check ontheir own writing and if possible makecorrections for the mistakes. the importancefor having the self-monitoring technique isalso acknowledged by dickinson (as stated incresswell, 2000), who argued that it offers asense of self-direction, which refers to aprocess enabling learners to choose theirlearning focus as well as a recognition totheir own responsibility. the value ofresponsibility is also what is supported in thelearner autonomy. methodthe method used in this study isqualitative. it also employed the case studyas it was considered the best method toanswer the research questions.the data were taken in a qualitativeform through interviews and documentanalysis. this study was conducted in one ofpublic senior high schools in bandung. theparticipants were 9 eleventh graders of ascience class. throughout the study, thestudents were asked to write a report textunder six topics: chocolate, animation,greenhouse effect, bee, cactus, andmicroscope. the first meeting was used tohave a recap about report text only to remindthem about the generic structure, as well asthe nature of report text. the researcher,who acted as a teacher in this meeting, did this on purpose since the topic of report texthad been discussed in the class with theirteacher. after that, still in that meeting, theychose one topic out of six, and they wereexpected to make their first draft before thenext meeting. at the second meeting, as thestudents brought their first drafts to the class,the researcher asked them to formulate aself-directed feedback for their own texts.the researcher informed them about severalaspects that they could work on: genericstructure, punctuation, spelling, vocabulary,and grammar. in the next two meetings, theycontinued to work on their feedback andrevise the text. they had the chance to revisetheir writing until the fourth draft. thestudents were asked to work on their textsfrom september 9, 2013 to september 23,2013 or two weeks in total to finish until thefinal draft. after that, they were asked tocollect all of their drafts—from the first tothe fourth—to be analyzed. their texts wereanalyzed only in terms of the organization,mechanics, grammar, and vocabulary(adapted from the types of errors describedby thornbury, as cited in hernàndez, 2011).the researcher looked at their errors onthose parts and their attempt to fix them. if,for example, the students had mistakes ingrammar in their first draft, then theresearcher would look at the subsequentdrafts (second, third, and fourth) to seewhether changes were made in the placewhere the mistakes were seen before. if theymade correct changes, then it would beregarded as a progress in grammar. anotherscenario would be the students madechanges but they happened to be incorrect.in that case, the progress was not present.this also means that even if the studentshappened to be marking their mistakes bycircling or underlining it, as long as thecorrect changes were not seen in the nextdrafts, then they would not be counted as aprogress. the analogy applied to the otherthree aspects mentioned before.in-depth interviews were conductedafter the texts were submitted. five guidelinequestions were used to help giving an insighton what the students’ response towards theactivity is. question number five works as aconfirmation on the findings derived fromthe document analysis. the interviews were 50 indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(1) january 2015issn 2252-7427conducted individually in which the studentsare called one by one to have an informal talkwith the researcher. an informal setting isconsidered necessary in order to provide anease for the interviewee, so that real andauthentic answers can be derived. it was alsocarried out in bahasa indonesia to providecomfort for the interviewee during theconversation. the interviews weretranscribed and later analyzed using therelated literature. findings and discussionthe findings show that students hadprogress in their writing skills. most of themalso responded positively to the applicationof self-feedback, even though the presence ofnegative response is also unavoidable. theelaboration is as follows. students’ progress in their writing skillsin regards to the students’ writing skill,the findings show that they were able todetect errors in their writing and they werealso progressing in some aspects of thewriting skills. from the first until the finaldraft, all students made progress inorganization, mechanics, grammar, andvocabulary. it should be bear in mind, though,that not every student made progress in allfour aspects—some only improved in threeor two aspects only. the details will beexplained in the following points. organizationin this study, a student is consideredhaving a mistake in organization if they didnot use the structure in composing their text,and is said as progressing if they changed theincorrect structure to the one described bymacken-horarik (2002). out of nine students,only two students did not follow thestructure in organizing their ideas. the restof the subjects had used the structure fromthe very first draft, therefore their texts willnot be analyzed in this part. from the twostudents who made mistakes in organization,only one had a progress.the first student is student 8, whoprogresses during the time of his writing. hedid not follow the generic structure in hisfirst draft, but finally managed to organizehis ideas so that it fits to the generic structure in the information report text onlyin the last draft.awareness in organization, as was statedby starkey (2004), lets writers see howdeveloping ideas suita framework. sundemand pikiewicz (2006) mentionedthat logicalframework in writing shows careful planningand foresight. therefore,when students areaware of their issuein organizationandreviseit, it means thatthey made an attempt to guidethemselves to make a better writing in termsof developing the ideas. other than that,having a better organizationin ideasrepresents theirawareness of having a carefulplanning in writing.on the other hand, another student,student 6, did not make any revisionregarding her mistakes in organization. theideas did not follow the structure of aninformation report text because the text doesnot include qualities and functions of thetopic she got. according to the interview, shestated that she did not find much problem inher text.looking at the characteristic, this can becategorized as a mistake that occurscontinuously without any effort to correct it,which is defined as “the use of a linguisticitem in a way which a fluent or nativespeaker regards as showing faulty orincomplete learning” (richards and schmidt,2002, p. 184). from student 6’s case, itshows that she either has not acquiredknowledge on organization or is still havingan incomplete comprehension on it.from the two cases (student 8’s andstudent 6’s), it can be inferred that the self-regulatory proficiency is needed in order tomake self-feedback work. this is shown fromstudent 8’s awareness to make a carefulplanning of his writing after the self-feedback.other than that, it is also important forstudents to acquire the knowledge about thetext. this is shown from student 6’s case. mechanicsmechanics had been one of the thingsthat the students had focused on in theprocess of self-feedback. gentry, mcneal andwallace-nesler (2012) mentioned thatstudents need to have control over the use ofcapitalization, punctuation and spelling oftheir own writings. 51 tsara desiana akmilia, pupung purnawarman & rojab siti rodliyah self-directed feedback: an attempt towards learner autonomy in writingfirst, four students encounteredproblems in terms of spelling. all of themwere conscious of the misspelling of thewords they used and changed them to thecorrect form. the mistakes and correctionsfor the four students hold the similarpattern—they missed one letter or addedanother letter. from the first glance, thereaders will recognize the word theyintended to say, so the effect to meaning isnot major.starkey (2004) mentioned thatknowledge of the basic rules will help writersin giving a positive impression for readers.fry (2003) stated that glaring mistakes inspelling will make an impression of acareless and ignorant writer. by discoveringmistakes in spelling during the self-directedfeedback, it means that they get theimpression of their own writing.furthermore, by correcting it, they havemade an attempt to provide a betterimpression to their intended readers.second, out of nine students, only twostudents have issues in terms of punctuation.the indicator of mistake in punctuation iswhen they do not use punctuation marksaccording to its functions. the two studentswho made mistakes in punctuation are ableto detect their own errors, and havesuccessfully corrected them in their reviseddrafts. the issues are related to the use ofperiod and comma.according to starkey (2004), a writercan convey the voice of his/her writing moredirectly through proper punctuation. theeffective communication can be ensured bycorrect punctuation since it functions tosignal the relationship between words orideas as well as marking out the boundariesof meaning (perk and coyle, 2005). thecorrection in students’ punctuation, then,shows how they tried to voice their writingbetter, in terms of making long sentences tobe the more direct ones. furthermore, acorrection in punctuation also helps inmaking a positive impression to the writing.this means that they, as a writer, havebecome conscious about the impression thatreader may perceive from their writing.third, out of nine students, only twostudents made mistakes in terms ofcapitalization. one student made mistake in mentioning some proper nouns, and theother did not put capital letter for the firstwords of every sentence. langosch (1999)stated that the most important considerationin capitalization is to be consistent leaving aword with capital in a sentence andcapitalizing it in another would createproblem for the readers. kemper, meyer, vanryk and sebranek (2011) mentioned thatbecoming a reader and writer would be ofhelp in learning the unexpected changes incapitalization. as was seen in the students’writings, it is true that the inconsistencyhappens. however, they also solved it by re-reading the text in the process of having aself-directed feedback.furthermore, for students to be aware ofthe capitalization enables them to applysome writing strategies for proofreading andself-correction (gentry et al., 2012). as thestudents in this research became more awareof the capitalization, this also means thatthrough the process of self-directed feedback,the students have applied the strategies forproofreading as well as self-correction whichwill be beneficial for their writing in thefuture. grammareven though the students have differentlevel of proficiency, seven out of ninestudents are able to correct their own errors.this is limited only to the use of subject verbagreement, plural/singular nouns, and modalverbs. all of them circled or underlined theirmistakes and revised them in the subsequentdrafts.in general, the importance of havingperfection in grammatical form was admittedby brown (2001) as writing resulted inpermanence. therefore, he stated that afocus in grammar will be more effectivewhen it is taught for the writing skills ratherthan speaking, listening, or reading (brown,2001). from what can be seen in thestudents’ progress in grammar which doesnot cover all aspects, it shows that it stilldoes not ensure a full accuracy in students’writing. therefore, this progress is notenough for the text to be considered as anacceptable report text since it is included toformal text that demands accuracy ingrammar. however, for teaching purposes, 52 indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(1) january 2015issn 2252-7427the student’s inability to look at the otheraspects of grammar shows their level ofproficiency, and it can play a significant rolein informing teachers of what to focus on inthe following grammar teaching.since teacher should not force too muchgrammar on beginning level learners (brown,2001), this finding can benefit teachers toonly focus on grammar forms that thestudents had failed to correct but are alreadyaware of, providing an information that thestudent needs assistance in those parts.according to corder (as cited in erdogan,2005), knowing students’ error can notifyteachers about the learning gap left betweenthe learning goal and students’ progress,showing teachers the point that demandsfurther attention. on the other hand, the factthat some of the students are able to correcttheir own grammar mistakes supports thepolicy of not focusing too much on grammaras it may disturb fluency (brown, 2001). thewriting lesson still needs to maximizestudent’s self-correction instead of teachersspending more time in giving grammarcorrection to their students (brown, 2001).this was based on the justification that as thelearners starting to perform by his or herown, a support can be gradually removed inorder to support a step to autonomouslearning (zimmerman, 1990). vocabularyin terms of vocabulary, the problemfound from the students is that they includetechnical terms in their text, however theystill use the indonesian terms. from theirdrafts, five students still mistook the terms inthe first drafts but then corrected them in thefollowing drafts.it is a common sense that in writing, ademand in vocabulary is considerably higherthan speaking. especially when writing areport text, whose purpose is “to describe acharacteristic of something” (palmer, 2010),the writer is asked to find a richervocabulary in order to describe the topic well.this can be difficult for any writer. however,brown (2001) stated that the richness ofenglish vocabulary will in turn be anadvantage for good writers as they learnfrom it. one of the students initially gave upwith her limitation in vocabulary, but after given more time to re-check her writing andrevise it, she eventually found theappropriate technical terms suit to themeaning she intended. she, therefore, haspossessed the characteristic of a good writer.other than the results presented above,another finding shows the way the studentsuse the self-directed feedback to improvetheir writing. from the interview, most of thestudents said that they were focusing on oneor two particular matter whenever they areworking on a draft. as an example, student 6when was asked about what she wasworking on the first and following draftsanswered: …dibenerinnya… ya itu, grammarnya sih… terus kalo misalnya vocabnya kerasa aneh, baru diganti. yang secondnya, masih grammar… sampe third, third.. nah, waktu third teh ini… ngebaca lagi. nyambung nggak ini ceritanya… (i corrected mywriting in.. well, the grammar.. and then if thevocabularies felt weird, i changed it. [in] thesecond [draft], [i still] fixed the grammar.. untilthe third, well.. i read it again [if] the topic isconnected to each other…)some other students also give differentfocus in working on their feedback, such aspunctuation or spelling. this finding showsthat, in the study, self-feedback shares thetraits of teacher corrective feedback thatinclude focused and unfocused ones. thiswas based on the definition given by ferris(2011) who stated that focused feedbackessentially means targeting correction tospecific error types or patterns whileunfocused feedback refers to correcting anyand all problems observed in text without apreconceived feedback approach in mind. byfocusing the direction of the feedback, thismeans that the students have conceived whatthey want to work on first in mind. as thestudents monitor themselves, dickinson (asstated in cresswell, 2000) stated that theycan also self-direct themselves when theychoose their learning focus as well asrecognizing their own responsibility. takingcontrol of feedback allows learners to attendto important items in the context so that theycan have either an informed correction orpositive feedback in order to supportacquisition and set up the items in theirproductive inventory (cresswell, 2000).therefore, by having self-feedback, the 53 tsara desiana akmilia, pupung purnawarman & rojab siti rodliyah self-directed feedback: an attempt towards learner autonomy in writingprocess supports their language acquisitionfrom what they attend to while looking attheir own texts. the responsibility that theyshoulder also enables them to choose theirlearning focus. students’ responsein general, students’ response to theapplication of self feedback in their processof writing is mostly positive. still, thenegative drawbacks that the students feelduring the course are still present. positive responsefrom the interview, the students thinkthat first, self-feedback enables them to lookat their own progress in writing. somestudents mentioned that it is beneficial asthey can be aware of what to improve.secondly, the students also think that self-feedback is important in the writing process.they think that it is important to get rid oftheir mistakes that are resulted fromcarelessness, and they also think that it isimportant so that the teacher would look attheir progress thoroughly. thirdly, thestudents perceived self-feedback as analternative activity in writing, since they onlyexperienced limited techniques that teachersapply in the writing class. lastly, the studentsalso think that self-feedback changes theirperspective to writing and it makes theprocess of writing easier. the discussion is asfollows.out of nine students, four in the studymentioned that self-directed feedback can beutilized to track their own progress inwriting. for instance, student 2 in theinterview mentioned how she thinks thatself-feedback enables her to look at her ownwriting, enlightens her about the things sheneeds to improve. when the interviewerasked her about what she thinks about theself-feedback, her answer was as follows: … nggak malesin. malah bikin seneng, jadi kan kita tuh ngeliat dari tulisan kita sendiri.. kesalahan kita tuh apa.. ternyata waktu itu, fika tuh banyak banget salahnya.. ([it was] not boring.it makes me feel happy instead. as we look at ourown writing.. what our mistakes are.. apparentlyat that time, i had so many mistakes [in mywriting]..) as was stated by narayanan et al.,(2008), one of the factors that may bedependent to the successful second languageacquisition is on the learners’ views of thelearning situation. this positive attitude toself-directed feedback proves that this is alsowhat makes it works for them. moreover, byhaving students to monitor themselves givestwo benefits to learners--they are ablechoose their learning focus and a recognitionto their own responsibility (dickinson, asstated in cresswell, 2000).from the interview, all of the studentsalso think that self-directed feedback shouldbe included in the subsequent writinglessons. student 2 answered that she neededit because she was a rather careless person,while student 6 highlighted that she wantedthe teacher to look at her progress ratherthan just the final product. this proved thatself-feedback can be used to clear upmistakes, as mistakes was stated as a resultof carelessness (richard and schmidt, 2002).on the other hand, another statement fromstudent 6 represented students’ demand touse process approach in writing, since in theprocess approach, the process is also at leastas important as the product (harmer, 2007).other than being helpful, three studentsout of nine felt that the activity wasrefreshing and more beneficial for theirfurther progress.from the interview, one student—eventhough this is the first time for her toexperience self-feedback in class—hadalready welcomed the activity and prefer itto the other activities she usually did in herprevious classes. ideally, a writing lessonaccording to process approach would includeall stages of writing starting from pre-writingto producing the final version of students’work, even though it practically takes alonger time (harmer, 2007). theapplication of self-directed feedback in thewriting classroom, then, can encourage morestages in writing to be experienced by thestudents.another response coming from thestudents is even though the application ofself-feedback in this study lasted for only twoweeks, but two students confessed that itwas enough to make them feel morecomfortable with writing. 54 indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(1) january 2015issn 2252-7427one of the students, student 6, admittedthat she had been taking a private course athome. during the self-directed feedbackprocess, she could not meet her privateteacher, and so that is why she did it all byherself. she admitted that it wasunexpectedly easier than what she thought itwould, and she got more enthusiastic tofinish her writing. it shows that the studenthas gained the ability not to be dependent toexternal constraints, which shows a trait ofself-regulation. self-regulation, which is oneof the terms related to learning autonomy,initially derived from the interest in self-control that refers to an ability to have acontrol in one own’s actions withoutimmediate external constraints (thoresenand mahoney, as cited in zimmerman, 1990).from the interview, besides the affectivebenefits, it turned out that six students out ofnine also perceived self-feedback as anactivity that eases them in making the reporttext. student 2 reported that the writingprocess became easier with self-feedbackbecause she was given more time until thefinal draft to revise her own writing, andtherefore made her be more independent.she mentioned that writing became easierbecause they were given more time and shewas given the freedom to choose thedirection of her own writing. according torubin and thompson (as cited in brown,2001), one of the characteristics of goodlanguage learners is a learner who is able totake charge of their own learning, by findinghis/her own way in completing a task. brown(2001) mentioned that “the more yourclassroom activity can model the behaviorexhibited by successful language learners,the better and more efficient your studentswill be, especially in developing their ownautonomy as learners” (p. 210). therefore,self-directed feedback can encourage onetrait approaching learner anatomy as itenables the student to monitor his/her ownprogress. negative responsealbeit most of the students werehappy with having the self-directed feedback,some negative responses were also foundfrom the interview. some think that self-directed feedback resulted in a boredom, a trauma to write more, and to some extent itmakes writing gets harder.for example, student 7 thought thatworking on the same text over and overagain resulted in a boredom. from herstatement in the interview, she actuallypointed out on how keep checking for theexact same text is boring for her. however, inthe questions after that, she mentioned thatthe technique is still necessary for writing.she only suggested the decrease in theamount of drafts: … perlu… cuma kalo kata aku mah nggak usah sampe empat kali gitu, miss… jadi, gimana dua kali gitu… nggak usah banyak-banyak, nanti bosen… ([it is] necessary… i just think that itdoes not have to be four [drafts], miss… like,only twice… it doesn’t have to be that much, it’sgoing to be boring…)the mere reason the student gave forthe boredom was because she thought sheonly got little to correct. this was pointed outby starkey (2004) who mentioned that manywriters skip the re-checking process ofwriting because they feel intimated by thethought of reworking it, clinging to a hopethat their writing is “good enough”. hefurther mentioned that “there is no excusefor submitting an essay that is not the verybest writing you are capable of” (starkey,2004, p. 55). the student, then, were still inneed to acknowledge the principle in orderto see that in attempt to make the best of herwriting require more time in revising. thisfactor, unfortunately, was not the one thatseems to be able to be promoted by self-directed feedback in this research.on the other hand, student 4 felt thatfrom having self-directed feedback, he didnot want to write more in the future. fromhis statement in the interview, self-directedfeedback for him lessens his confidence. hefelt that no matter how much he fixed it, hestill could not make things right. harmer(2007) described this phenomenon as aresult of a less enthusiastic learner whosuffered from a low self-esteem. he statedthat it is unlikely for these students tocontinue studying on their own after thecourse had finished (harmer, 2007). it is theevidence that students’ low self-esteemmatters in performing self-directed feedback. 55 tsara desiana akmilia, pupung purnawarman & rojab siti rodliyah self-directed feedback: an attempt towards learner autonomy in writingmore than level of proficiency, students’readiness to accept their own mistakes ismore important in ensuring students’learning autonomy in the long run.lastly, despite the fact that six studentsactually felt that writing becomes easier withself-directed feedback, two studentshighlighted how it made writing get evenharder. from the interview, the studentsseemed to still worry a lot about makingmistakes in his writing. however, he did notmention that it was directly caused by theself-directed feedback. he pointed out thepossibility of keep having mistakes until thelast draft. this is caused by the lack ofconfidence and low self-esteem that makesthe student not dare to take risk in learning.brown (2001) mentioned that when learnersare already able to cope with their own egofragility and build a firm belief that they cando it, then they are ready to take thenecessary risks. this finding then, showshow risk-taking is important as a pre-requisite of the application of self-directedfeedback. conclusionthroughout the research, threeconclusions can be derived. firstly, regardingthe presence of self-directed feedback, eventhough it is not quite common in the teachingpractice—according to students’ experiences,that is—the demand of it to be applied wasthere. in the findings, it was proven that itgives benefits for students’ writing skills andthe students felt it as well.secondly, in relation to the ability ofself-directed feedback in promoting the valueof learner autonomy, from the findings it canbe seen that the students are able to witnesstheir own progress. to be able to see itbrings the sense of responsibility, as well asan encouragement to direct their goals inlearning.lastly, it can be concluded that self-directed feedback can spare teacher’sresponsibility in their students’ progress. inthe indonesian context when classesgenerally consist of 30 to 45 students, andteachers’ workload to teach more than threeclasses in a week, feedback in writing soundsimpractical. by having self-directed feedback,the teachers can focus on the things that the students do not acquire yet, and the studentswill still have a progress in learning evenwithout much help from the teacher. referencesbenson, p. (2007). autonomy in language teaching andlearning. language teaching, 40(1), 21-40.brown, h. d. (2001). teaching by principles: an interactive approach to language pedagogy, second edition. new york: addison wesleylongman, inc.cresswell, a. (2000). self-monitoring in student writing:developing learner responsibility. elt journal, 54(3), 235-244.erdoğan, v. (2005). contribution of error analysis toforeign language teaching. mersin university journal of the faculty of education, 1(2), 261-270.ferris, d. r. (2003). response to student writing: implication for second language students. mahwah:lawrence erlbaum associates.ferris, d. r. (2011). treatment of error in second language student writing, second edition.university of michigan press.fry, ron. (2003). last minute term papers. frankinlakes: the career press, inc.gentry, r., mcneal, j. & wallace-nesler, v. (2012). getting to the core of writing: essential lessons for every second grade student. huntington beach:shell education.harmer, j. (2007). the practice of english language teaching. harlow: pearson education limited.hattie, j. & timperley h. (2007). the power of feedback. review of educational research, 77(1), 81-112.doi: 10.3102/003465430298487hernàndez, m. s. (2011). raising student awarenessabout grammatical and lexical errors via email. revista de lenguas modernas no 14, 263-281.kemper, d., meyer, v., van rys, j., & sebranek, p. (2011). fusion: integrated reading and writing, book 1, 1st ed. boston: wadsworth.kumaravadivelu, b. (2003). beyond methods: macrostrategies for language teaching. newhaven: yale university press.lamb, t. (2008). learner autonomy and teacherautonomy: synthesizing an agenda. in lamb, t. &reinders, h. (eds.), learner and teacher autonomy: concepts, realities, and responses (pp.269-284). amsterdam: john benjaminspublishing company.lamberg, w. 1980. self-provided and peer-providedfeedback. college composition and communication, 31(1), 63-69.langosch, s. l. (1999). writing american style: an esl/efl handbook. hauppauge: barron'seducational series, inc.macken-horarik, m . (2002). 'something to shoot for': asystemic functional approach to teaching genre insecondary school science. in a m johns (ed.), genres in the classroom: applying theory and research to practice (pp. 17-42). mahwah, nj:lawrence elbaum associates, inc.moore, m. g. (1972). learner autonomy: the seconddimension of independent learning. convergence, 5(2), 76-88. 56 indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(1) january 2015issn 2252-7427 narayanan, r., nair, n. j., & iyyappan, s. (2008). somefactors affecting english learning at tertiary level. iranian journal of language studies (ijls), 2(4),485-512.palmer, s. (2010). how to teach writing across curriculum: ages 8-14. taylor & francis e-library.richards, j. c. & schmidt, r. (2002). longman dictionary of language teaching and applied linguistics.london: longman.rijlaarsdam, g., & van den bergh, h. (2004). effectivelearning and teaching of writing. in g.rijlaarsdam (series ed.), g. rijlaarsdam, h. vanden berg, & m. coizjan (vol. eds.), studies in writing. vol. 14‚ effective learning and teaching of writing‚ 2nd edition (pp. 1-16). boston: kluweracademic publishers.saito, h. (1994). teachers' practices and students'preferences for feedback on second languagewriting: a case study of adult esl learners. tesl canada journal/revue tesl du canada, 11(2),64-68.starkey, l. (2004). how to write great essays. new york:learningexpress.susanti, r. (2013). students’perceptions towards the effective feedback practices in the large efl writing class based on participants, gender, and english proficiency level (doctoral dissertation,indiana university of pennsylvania). retrievedfromhttps://dspace.iup.edu/bitstream/handle/2069/2002/rini%20susanti%20(thesis).pdf?sequence=1zhang, s. (1995). reexamining the affective advantageof peer feedback in the esl writing class. journal of second language writing, 4(3), 209-222.zimmerman, b. j. (1990). a social cognitive view of self-regulated academic learning. journal of educational psychology, 81(3), 329-339. 57 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 105 speaking performance and problems faced by english major students at a university in south sumatera hariswan putera jaya universitas sriwijaya email: hariswan@unsri.ac.id ismail petrus universitas sriwijaya email: ismailpetrus@yahoo.com nova lingga pitaloka universitas sriwijaya email: novalinggapitaloka@fkip.unsri.ac.id apa citation: jaya, h. p., petrus, i., & pitaloka, n. l. (2022). speaking performance and problems faced by english major students at a university in south sumatera. indonesian efl journal, 8(1), 105-112. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v8i1.5603 received: 27-09-2021 accepted: 28-11-2021 published: 30-01-2022 introduction there are four language skills that students learn in language education namely listening, speaking, writing, and reading. they must master the four skills in order to have good proficiency of the language. among the four language skills, speaking usually becomes the most preferred language skill that is used to see whether someone has succeeded in learning a language or not. that is why most students make good speaking performance their ultimate goal in language learning (richards & rendaya, 2002, rao, 2019). moreover, it is also widely known that in almost any language settings, speaking is the most frequently used language skill (trialoka, v.s, puspita, h.,sabarrudin, s., 2017. abdl el fattah, 2006). furthermore, rao (2018) argues that speaking serves a dominant role in a foreign or second language acquisition. speaking is usually focused by teachers in order to promote students’ good speaking skill as speaking is useful for developing people’s networking, personality, and characters. supriyadi (2005) adds that students will get social and professional advantages if they can use the language orally such as opportunities for students exchange, fast graduation, abstract: the objectives of this study were to discover the students’ speaking performance, speaking problems, and factors associated with the problems. the participants were the university students of an english education program in south sumatera. to collect the data, speaking performance test, questionnaire, and open-ended questions were used. the findings showed that 42% of the participants did well and 58% did not perform well in the speaking test. the speaking problems were categorized as affected-related problems (self-confidence and anxiety), socially related problems (difficulties to find opportunities to learn english and comprehension in speaking class), and linguistically related problems (fluency, grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation). the factors causing the speaking problems are lack of general knowledge, lack of speaking practice, fear of mistake, lack of words usage and grammar practice, low motivation, low participation, reading laziness, shyness, less dictionary usage, nervousness, fear of criticism, and unfamiliar words pronunciation. the data were calculated using chi-square association with p-value (603.508) which is greater than the critical value (70.003). therefore, there is a significant association between the speaking problems and the factors causing the problems. keywords: causes of problems; speaking performance; speaking problems https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i2.4564 hariswan putera jaya, ismail petrus, & nova lingga pitaloka speaking performance and problems faced by english major students at a university in south sumatera 106 scholarships, international employment, and further education. related to the importance of mastering english speaking skill, however, students tend to face many difficulties in speaking. shen and chiu (2019) in their study reported that difficulties in speaking english faced by students were psychological problems (e.g. nervousness, fear of making mistakes, and lack of confidence), linguistic problems (e.g. insufficient vocabulary, grammar, expressions, insufficient sentences organization, etc), and environmental problems (e.g. lack of learning context for english conversation). afshar & asakereh (2016) explain that the major problems faced by the students in speaking english could be divided into affective-related problems, socially-related problems, and linguistically-related problems. the affectiverelated problems include attitude, self-confidence, motivation, anxiety, duration of the exposure to the language, classroom conditions, environment, family background, and students and teachers’ competencies. the socially-related problems include comprehension to practice english outside the classroom, and comprehension in speaking class. the linguistically-related problems include vocabulary, fluency, grammar, and pronunciation. students tend to have affective-related problems in speaking due to some reasons, for instance anxiety, low confidence, and nervousness. they will likely speak slowly and less fluently as they hope not to make mistakes. they are also shy to speak in the classroom and like to make frequent pauses while speaking. they always try to avoid speaking by answering the questions from their lecturers with a yes, or a no answer only. in socially-related problems, students usually have difficulties comprehending conversation when speaking outside of their classroom. the english speaking activities are always over as soon as they finish the class. they use mother tongue or local dialect to speak with their friends and family. in addition, students also face linguistic problems due to their personal reasons such as laziness to reading book and rare practice to speak at home. certainly, achieving fluency in oral communication is everyone’s dream and motivation of most students in learning a language (ihsan, 2016). it is not easy. students are not only demanded to use grammar correctly, having good pronunciation and abundant vocabulary, but they also have to know how to use the language appropriately. alyan (2013) found that communication problems occur because students encounter a word they do not understand, a form of word they do not know how to use, or find that they are unable to express their intended meaning. other problems that appear in student’s speaking are lack of self-confidence and anxiety. they might be confronted with certain feelings that usually affect them when speaking english such as unconfident, shy, anxious, nervous, and worried. these for sure are big problems for the students. lawtie (2004s) states that speech difficulties can be affected by a person’s emotional state. speech is often clearer when a person is feeling confident and relaxed, and this is one of the most important factors to consider when communicating with people who have speech problems. the students who major in english at this study program are highly motivated to be able to speak english fluently and accurately. there are speaking courses the must take and english is the medium of communication that the teachers and students use. thus, they are highly exposed to actual practice of speaking. however, there are no current studies at the study program on the speaking conditions of the students. therefore, the objectives of this study were to discover the students’ speaking performance, speaking problems, and factors associated with the problems. method this was a survey study. the participants of this study were the fifth semester students of an english education study program at a university in south sumatera consisting of 67 students. in order to get the data of the students’ speaking performance, a speaking test was given. the solom (student oral language observation matrix) was used to score the test. this instrument was developed by california state department of education. there are 5 items to be assessed: comprehension, fluency, vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar. this test has 1-5 scoring system with the maximum score is 25. a questionnaire was also used to find the students problems in speaking. it was adapted from electronic journal of foreign language teaching 2016. the questionnaire consists of ten questions divided into three aspects: affective-related difficulties, socially-related difficulties, and indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 107 linguistically-related difficulties. it uses 5-likert scale: strongly agree (5), agree (4), neutral (3), disagree (2), and strongly disagree (1). open ended questions consisting of 18 structured questions were also used to find support the data from the questionnaire. the result of validity test showed that the level of difficulty of the speaking test was in moderate category, and for the level of the appropriateness, all topics were categorized appropriate. furthermore, the results of reliability test showed that that the pearson product moment p-value is 0.913. therefore, the test was reliable because its reliability was higher than 0.70. the speaking test was a 3 minute monologue test. the test was scored using solom rubric (student oral language observation matrix). the rubric had five indicators in speaking that needed to be analyzed. they were comprehension, fluency, vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar. every indicator was scored from one to five and calculated with the maximum score 25 and the minimum score is 4. the scores were converted to numeric score by multiplying the total score with 4 to make the maximum score 100. it is then categorized as excellent, good, fair, poor, and very poor. the data from the open ended questions were grouped and described. chi-square association test was used to find out whether or not there was a significant association between two variables. results and discussion the results of the speaking test the results of the speaking test showed that there were 2 students out of 67 or 3% who got the score between 86 and 100. there were 26 students out of 67 or 39% who got the score between 71 and 85. there were 35 students out of 67 or 52% who got the score between 56 and 70. there were 4 students out of 67 students or 6% who got between 40 and 55. chart 1. speaking test results the results of the questionnaire the questionnaire was given to the 39 students who got the speaking score below 71. it has three categories namely affected-related difficulties, socially-related difficulties. for the first category, there were 29 students or 74% who agreed that they have problems in self-confidence and there were 26 students or 67%, who agreed that they have anxiety when speaking. in socially-related difficulties, there are two kinds of difficulties which are students’ comprehension to find opportunities to learn english and students’ comprehension in speaking class. there were 20 students or 51%, who agreed that they don’t have comprehension to find opportunities to learn english, and there were 12 students or 31%, who agreed that they have no comprehension in their speaking class. in linguistically-related difficulties, there were four difficulties namely vocabulary, fluency, grammar, and pronunciation. there were 23 students or 59% agreed that they do not have enough vocabulary, 31 students or 79%, who agreed that they are not fluent enough in speaking, 30 students or 77% who agreed that they do not have sufficient grammar knowledge, and 21 students or 54% who agreed that they have poor pronunciation. the result of the questionnaire is shown in the chart 2 below. hariswan putera jaya, ismail petrus, & nova lingga pitaloka speaking performance and problems faced by english major students at a university in south sumatera 108 chart 2. the questionnaire results the results of the open-ended questions the open ended questions consisted of 18 questions to find out the difficulties and the factors of difficulties. for example student number 15 was asked why the student was having no confidence in speaking, and the answer is “hm i think i feel ... nervous but my knowledge about the topic that influence my speaking not very well.” from the answer of student number 15, it means the factors that make the difficulties in self-confidence are nervous and the lack of knowledge. however, the lack of knowledge is also the factor of poor in grammar as the answer of the question ‘why do you think your grammar is poor?’ is “and hmm my competence in grammar not really good.” therefore, one factor belongs to many of difficulties thus the responses are higher than the total number of the students. furthermore, there are five additional factors of difficulties that were found from the open ended questions result, which are nervousness, hard courses, lack of general knowledge, less of dictionary usage, and reading laziness. there are 33 responses of shyness, 67 responses for fear of mistake, 24 responses for fear of criticism, 42 responses for lack of grammatical usage practice, 48 responses for lack of unfamiliar words pronounciation practice by seeing the dictionary, 60 responses for low participation, 67 responses for low motivation, 55 responses for lack of new words usage and memorization, 22 responses for lack of speaking practice, 32 responses for nervousness, 50 responses for the hard courses, 59 responses for lack of general knowledge, 32 responses for less of dictionary usage, and 41 responses for reading laziness. table 1. the open ended questions results of the association between difficulties and factors of difficulties in speaking no factors freq. 1 shyness 33 2 fear of mistake 67 3 fear of criticism 24 4 low participation 42 5 low motivation 48 6 less of new words usage and memorization 60 7 lack of speaking practice 22 8 lack of grammatical usage pratice 55 9 lack of unfamiliar words pronounciation practice by seeing the dictionary 22 10 nervousness 32 11 hard courses 50 12 lack of general knowledge 59 13 less of dictionary usage 32 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 109 no factors freq. 14 reading laziness 41 in order to find out the significant association between the difficulties and the factors of difficulties in speaking, the chi-square association test was done. the result of the chi-square association test is shown in the table 2 below. no s fom foc lp lm rmu nw rps rpgu rppuw n tch lgk rod ltr 1 sc 20.762 2.0197 4.72494 2.66573 1.686 0.0186 1.0823 2.5029 0.75592 9.3247 3.47551 0.02083 3.38326 4.3348 2 a 0.2597 62.2412 17.1119 3.3143 0.12356 0.0646 7.2504 0.0131 1.0543 4.3098 4.258076 2.12705 3.90015 4.9971 3 sco 2.0352 1.14761 1.48018 15.8607 5.51244 1.9707 8.7846 0.5713 0.09384 0.5338 3.0837 0.00183 1.97357 2.5286 4 scs 0.4236 0.2328 3.34802 6.43647 1.63025 0.0474 0.0204 1.7579 1.39485 1.4407 0.1363 4.85619 4.46402 5.7195 5 v 5.185 3.02417 2.03611 0.3875 4.07222 40.636 1.9423 8.6417 3.45668 5.0279 0.438524 0.38429 19.7782 24.481 6 f 6.889 2.92818 0.47599 2.37898 0.03621 1.19 3.3982 2.8105 1.38366 0.4049 12.6539 4.06615 0.02414 3.7195 7 g 5.8634 5.40649 0.37485 0.03871 1.45994 10.661 0.5366 33.998 3.90896 5.6858 13.90879 1.10546 5.68576 8.1708 8 pn 0.5399 2.19613 0.07665 0.01534 0.00383 2.7373 0.2582 5.5727 52.0453 0.476 5.066079 0.41116 29.3659 0.8201 41.958 79.1963 29.6286 31.0977 14.5245 57.326 23.273 55.868 64.0935 27.204 43.02088 12.973 68.575 54.771total p-value 603.5085164 c d picture 1. screenshot of the result of chi-square association test most of the students did not perform well in the speaking test which indicated that the speaking performance of the fifth semester students is still considered low. the results also showed that they still have problems in speaking. nation and newton (2009) stated that time pressure, planning, the quality of performance, and the amount of support may affect speaking performance. baker and westrup (2003) support it by saying that it is very difficult for learners when they are asked to tell things in a foreign language because they have little opinions about what to say. it means that when students are given a speaking test with limited time preparation for them to think about the topic, it will make them under pressured which cause their speaking performance low. however, that is not the only cause why the students not performed well in the speaking test. some of the students in the open ended questions also said that they were not having confidence in speaking, have anxiety, lack of vocabulary, and grammar. according to mahripah (2014), efl learners’ speaking performance is affected by some linguistic components of language like phonology, syntax, vocabulary, and semantics, and according to bashir, azeem, and dogar (2011) the speaking performance is pertinent to some personality constructs such as anxiety, inhibition, and also risk taking. furthermore, extreme anxiety may lead to despondence the most difficulty that is faced by the students is self-confidence and anxiety. liu and jackson (2014) reported that l2 speaking anxiety was a major factor that hindered students’ willingness to communicate and led to their reticence in class. their speaking anxiety was due to insufficient oral english communication practice, insufficient linguistic mastery for efficient idea expressions, and poor english proficiency. tanveer (2007) indicated that the act of the learners’ feeling of stress and anxiety cause them to stop their language learning and performance hariswan putera jaya, ismail petrus, & nova lingga pitaloka speaking performance and problems faced by english major students at a university in south sumatera 110 abilities. to solve this problem is by strengthening the emotional building between the lecturers and the students. this emotional bond will then comfort the students that they will not be alone while facing their difficulties. the lecturer plays an important role towards the students’ emotional development (harganauer, hascher, and volet, 2015). the anxiety aspect can be solved by motivating the students more as extrinsic motivation plays an important role towards the students’ ability in speaking (bekai and harkouss, 2018). students also tend to stop speaking english after they finish their class due to several reasons such as sociocultural, peer pressure, cultural communication patterns, and so on (shvidko, 2012). most of the students also think that their speaking class is not supporting them enough to learn speaking as sometimes the lecturer does not give enough chance for students to speak up. another problems were linguistically-related difficulties such as fluency, grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. according to al-roud (2016), the linguistically-related difficulties are the most difficulties faced by the university students. evans and green (2007) also examined the language difficulties experienced by the students at a hong kong university. the results showed that the students’ difficulties centered on the academic speaking such as grammar, fluency, and pronunciation. the students said that they are lack of basic knowledge and do not participate well in their classroom either. tuan and mai (2015) added that inhibition, lack of topical knowledge, low participation, and mother-tongue use are the problems why students have difficulties in linguistic aspects. the results of the open ended questions showed that there are five more factors causing the speaking problems. they are nervousness, difficult course, lack of general knowledge, rarely open dictionary, and laziness to read. scrivener (2011) and hosni (2014) stated that sometimes, students cannot show their full knowledge when speaking, since they might be afraid of being laughed at when making mistakes or sounding ridiculous. however, fear of making mistake is not only the factor causing the anxiety. the students also said that the factor causing the low self-confidence was because of the fear of making mistake. logically, there must be association between the difficulties and the factors of difficulties as the factors contributed to the existence of these difficulties (hosni, 2014). based on the chi-square association test that was done before, the p-value is (603.508), and the critical value of 91 df is (70.003). therefore, as the p-value (603.508) is greater than the critical value (70.003), it means there is significant association between the difficulties in speaking and the factors of difficulties. conclusion to summarize, the major problems faced by the students in speaking english were divided into affective-related problems, socially-related problems, and linguistically-related problems. the affective-related problems include attitude, selfconfidence, motivation, anxiety, duration of the exposure to the language, classroom conditions, environment, family background, and students and teachers’ competencies. the socially-related problems include comprehension to practice english outside the classroom, and comprehension in speaking class. the linguistically-related problems include vocabulary, fluency, grammar, and pronunciation. students tend to have affectiverelated problems in speaking due to some reasons, for instance anxiety, low confidence, and nervousness. the factors causing the speaking problems are lack of general knowledge, lack of speaking practice, fear of mistake, lack of words usage and grammar practice, low motivation, low participation, reading laziness, shyness, less dictionary usage. nervousness, fear of criticism, and unfamiliar words pronunciation. the data were calculated using chi-square association with pvalue (603.508) which is greater than the critical value (70.003). therefore, there is a significant association between the speaking problems and the factors causing the problems. acknowledgment our appreciation goes to the dean, vice deans, students and all the colleagues who have participated in this study. the results of this study could be used by other researchers interested in developing speaking materials for english major students. future researchers can also use this study as preliminary information on current conditions of the students’ speaking performance. there should be more thorough and deeper studies about the students speaking difficulties and causes accounted to them. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 111 references afshar, h. s., & asakereh, a. (2016). speaking skills problems encountered by iranian efl freshmen and seniors from their own and their english instructors’ perspectives. electronic journal of foreign language teaching, 13(1), 112-130. retrieved from http://e-flt.nus.edu. al-roud, a. a. (2016). problems of english speaking skill that university students encounter from their perspectives. british journal of education, society & behavioural science. 18(3): 1-9. doi: 10.9734/bjesbs/2016/28404. retrieved from http://www.sciencedomain.org/reviewhistory/16679 alyan, a.a. 2013. oral communication problems encountering english major students: perspectives of learners and teachers in palestinian efl university context. arab world english journal. (4) 2, 226-238 baker, j., & westrup, h. (2003). essential speaking skills: a handbook for english language teachers. london, uk: continuum. bashir, m., azeem, m., & dogar, a. h. (2011). factor effecting students’ english speaking skills. british journal of arts and social sciences, 2(1), 34-50. bekai, w., & harkouss, s. (2018). the role of motivation in teaching speaking in esp: a case study of a lebanese private university. the journal of teaching english for specific and academic purposes. 6(1), 141150. https://doi.org/10.22190/jtesap1801141b buku pedoman akademik dan kemahasiswaan tahun akademik 2018/2019. (2018). retrieved from http://www.unsri.ac.id/download/pedoman%20akademi k%20dan%20kemahasiswaan%202018-2019.pdf california state department of education (1981). solom: student oral language observation glossary for the teacher: cooperative learning. greta journal, 14, 1/2, 80-84. retrieved from http://www.cal.org/twi/evaltoolkit/appendix/sol om.pdf hadijah, s. 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(2004). biodiesel and speech difficulties. available at: z.mortonjones@worc.ac.ukhttp:/www.scips.worc .ac.uk/subjects_and_challenges/biosciences/b iosci_speech. liu, m. & jackson, j. (2014). reticence and anxiety in oral english lessons: a case study in china. in l. jin, & m. cortazzi (eds.), research chinese learner: skills, perceptions, and intercultural adaptations (pp. 119-137). london, england: palgrave mcmillan. mahripah, s. (2014). exploring factors affecting efl learners’ speaking performance: from theories into practices. proceedings of the 3rd uad tefl international conference 2014 “materials development in asia and beyond: directions, issues, and challenges.” english education department, universitas ahmad dahlan, yogyakarta, indonesia. mufidah, h. (2017). factors affecting the speaking difficulties of the eleventh grade hotel accommodation students at smk negeri 6 palembang. (undergraduate thesis). islamic state university raden fatah palembang, palembang, indonesia. retrieved from http://eprints.radenfatah.ac.id/1395/1/hanum% 20mufidah%2013250031.pdf nation, i. s. p., & newton, j. (2009). teaching esl/efl listening and speaking. esl & applied linguistics professional series. milton park, uk: routledge taylor & francis group. rao, p.s. (2019). the importance od speaking english in english classrooms. alford council of international english & literature journal(acielj), 2(2), 6-18 rao, p.s. (2018). developing speaking skills in esl or efl settings. international journal of english language, literature and translation studies, 5(2), 286-293. richards, j.c., & renandya, w.a. (2002). methodology in language teaching. cambridge, uk: cambridge university press. shen, m., & chiu, t. (2019). efl learners’ english speaking difficulties and strategy use. education and linguistics research, 5(2), 88-102. shvidko, e. v. (2012). students' perspectives on language use outside the classroom in an http://www.sciencedomain.org/review-history/16679 http://www.sciencedomain.org/review-history/16679 hariswan putera jaya, ismail petrus, & nova lingga pitaloka speaking performance and problems faced by english major students at a university in south sumatera 112 intensive english program. all theses and dissertations. 3115. retrieved from: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/etd/3115, brigham young university scrivener, j. (2005). learning teaching. oxford, uk: macmillan publishers limited. scrivener, j. (2011). learning teaching: the essential guide to english language teaching (3rd ed.). oxford, uk: macmillan. tanveer, m. (2007). investigation of the factors that cause language anxiety for esl/efl learners in learning speaking skills and the influence it casts on communication in the target language. dissertation, university of glasgow. trialoka, v.s. puspita, h and sabbarudin, s. 2017. english learners. strategies in learning speaking spekaing skill (a study of undergraduate students of english education study program at universitas bengkulu in 2016/2017 accademic year. journal of english education and teaching (jeet) (1) 1. 9-20 verghese, p. c. (2009). teaching english as a second language (9th ed.). new delhi, india: new delhi sterlling publishers. indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 57 students’ motivations toward choosing english education choiril anwar english education department, faculty of language and communicaion science, universitas islam sultan agung, indonesia e-mail: choirilanwar@unissula.ac.id kurniawan yudhi nugroho english education department, faculty of language and communicaion science, universitas islam sultan agung, indonesia e-mail: kurniawan@unissula.ac.id apa citation: anwar, c., & nugroho, k. y. (2018). students’ motivations toward choosing english education. indonesian efl journal, 4(1), 57-64. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v4i1.799. received: 12-11-2017 accepted: 25-12-2017 published: 01-01-2018 abstract: motivation, almost at all aspects, gives a big impact for senior high school students to choose a major or study program at a university. the motivation itself can be both intrinsic and extrinsic. this study aims to investigate the motivation of students to choose english education department at university. the subjects of this research were 37 students majoring english education at sultan agung islamic university (unissula) semarang, indonesia. this is descriptive quantitative research. observations and questionnaires were used to collect the data needed. the data were then analyzed by using descriptive statistical analysis. as results, it was found that 81.1% of the students of english education have strong intrinsic motivation which leads them to choose english education as their major. this selection was due to students’ curiosity and passion to increase their potential and skills in english. keywords: english education, students’ motivation, university introduction english in this global era plays an important role in scientific development. any science will require a person’s english skills, more especially for students. to learn a certain theory, a student should seek references about it and most references use english as their introductory language. however, in fact, at sultan agung islamic university (unissula) semarang, the english department of education is still not as popular as other departments, such as medical department, nursing, dentistry, accounting, management, psychology, civil engineering, and so forth. most of the students in these departments argued that english can be learnt autodidactically or simply by taking a course, without having to go to english education department. moreover, they are not interested in becoming teachers. indeed, every student surely has a diverse motivation in choosing a major or course of study. students who choose the medical department in unissula may be motivated that someday they can become doctors at sultan agung islamic hospital (the same foundation as unissula). those who choose civil engineering department may be motivated that someday they can follow in the footsteps of their predecessors who won the world’s robotic championship. motivation, actually, is a change in the energy of a person characterized by the emergence of feelings (sardiman, 2007) and reaction (djamarah, 2008) to achieve the goal. while uno (2006) states that motivation is a psychological process that can explain a person’s behavior, the power that drives someone to do something. these forces are essentially stimulated by the existence of choiril anwar & kurniawan yudhi nugroho students’ motivations toward choosing english education 58 various needs, such as the desire to be fulfilled, behavior, purpose, and feedback. motivation and learning are two things that affect each other. motivation to learn can arise because of intrinsic factors, in the form of passion and willingness to succeed and the impulse of learning needs. while extrinsic factors can include awards, a conducive learning environment, and interesting learning activities (uno, 2006). most researchers would probably agree that motivational terms mean the direction and magnetism of human behavior, its relation to the choice of certain actions, persistence, and effort. in other words, motivation is very much about why people decide to do something, how long they will continue to do the activity, and how seriously they will pursue it. one’s motivation in choosing a study program or course of study is closely related to their motivation to learn a foreign language. according to gardner’s (1985) theory, one’s motivation in learning foreign language is based on three elements, namely: 1) motivational effort or intensity, 2) the desire to learn the language, and 3) his attitude in learning the language. both motivation and orientation are interconnected with each other. orientation exists before motivation. in relation to learning a foreign language, two terms of orientation are known as follows (dörnyei & ushioda, 2011): a. integrative orientation : gardner & lambert (1972) define intergrative orientation as “the willingness to be regarded equally in members of the language community.” in this orientation, a person really wants to learn a foreign language in order to improve his or her foreign language skills so that later he is considered the same as a particular language community. b. instrumental orientation : this orientation is more pragmatic. for example, one chooses to learn a foreign language because he wants to get a decent job or earn a higher salary. motivation which became the main concern of researchers was the motivation of the students choosing english education department since this department is now not so prestigious in the eyes of most high school graduates’ minds. in addition, since foreign language can be studied alone, they are not interested to become english teachers who are now increasingly limited since there has been no implementation of english as subjects in primary schools as other subjects. in fact, there are still high school graduates who have an interest into english education department in faculty of language and communication science unissula. this underlies the researchers to do research on how and what motivation of students choose english education study program. one of similar researches on motivation has been done by ying, suprayogi, & hurriyati (2013). in rheir study, the variables used were the motivation to learn mandarin as a second language. a total of 276 respondents were chosen by purposive sampling from three universities, namely students majoring in mandarin literature at bina nusantara university jakarta, darma persada university jakarta, and university of north sumatra medan. the research also involved the chinese language and literature faculty of huaqiau university of china as a partner in the preparation of research instruments. descriptive analysis was conducted to explore the main motivation underlying mandarin chinese students and then to do different test for knowing the difference of motivation between students of chinese descent and native students. the results showed that the motivation of respondents in learning mandarin was relatively low. there was no significant difference between integrative and instrumental motivation. the intensity motivation was relatively higher compared to the integrative and instrumental. likewise, there is no significant difference in motivation between chinese and non-chinese students in learning mandarin. lecturers, therefore, need to improve teaching methods to improve students’ learning motivation in learning mandarin. another related research was conducted by moskovsky & alrabai (2009). the paper presents an experimental study purposed to measure levels of intrinsic motivation in indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 59 learners of english as a foreign language in saudi arabia. data collected through the survey were subjected to some basic statistical analyses, such as mean and standard deviation. based on the results from the analysis, a number of generalizations and conclusions were made in relation to the role of motivation in the attainment of english as a foreign language in the saudi educational setting. in addition, some recommendations are offered, which may enable saudi teachers and learners of english as a foreign language to achieve better learning outcomes in an area widely associated by saudis with lack of success. therefore, the problems raised in this research are 1) what are the students’ motivations in batch 2015 and 2016 choose the english education department in faculty of language and communication science unissula? 2) what is the main motivation for students in batch 2015 and 2016 to choose english education at faculty of language and communication science unissula? specific targets to be achieved in this research is that by knowing the motivation of students to choose the english education department, then this result can be used as a reference for the faculty of language and communication science unissula and other universities in indonesia to improve service performance to students. in addition, the results of this study can also be a reference for ministry of research and higher education of indonesia (ristekdikti) to review the prospects and significance of this department for knowledge. last but not least, this research will be useful for wider range of society in indonesia. method this research used quantitative descriptive method. in descriptive research or survey research, in addition to trying to determine and describe something, the researchers also compared how the problems of sub-groups (airasian, 2000). in this study, the researchers conducted a survey by using questionnaires to students of english education study program class of 2015 and 2016 about their motivation to choose english education study program. from these results, the researcher then made a percentage of how much each item of the question gets a response and ultimately, among the motivations, what is the motivation that gets the highest percentage as the main motivation of the student. this research was conducted at the faculty of language and communication science of sultan agung islamic university (unissula) semarang. it was descriptive quantitative using survey method with observation and questionnaire, which means the survey results on the subject of research were analyzed with descriptive statistics. the population of this study were 206 undergraduate students of english education program at faculty of languages and communication science of sultan agung islamic university (unissula) semarang. from that number, the sample was taken as many as 37 students, especially batch 2015 and 2016 by using purposive sampling. it was in line with airasian (2000) stating that if researchers select the sample based on experience or knowledge of the group to be sampled, they are using purposive sampling technique. the instrument used in this study was an online questionnaire. the questionnaire was made by researchers online by using google forms. there were 17 items of questions: five items were kinds of introductory questions (students’ faculty, batch, name, information, and study program), while the rests were intrinsic motivation questions (2 items) and extrinsic motivation questions (10 items)—one of them was open ended question (j). the remarks were about the motivations underlying their choice of english education study program rather than other departments in unissula. the data collected from the questionnaire were then analyzed and interpreted in depth and then described in details by the researcher. the results of the analysis would be as a reference for the conclusion and its research report. results and discussion this section covers the research findings and the discussion. as stated above, there choiril anwar & kurniawan yudhi nugroho students’ motivations toward choosing english education 60 were 17 items of questions: five items were introductory questions (students’ faculty, batch, name, information, and study program) as written in a, b, c, d, and e, while the rests were intrinsic motivation questions (2 items) as seemed in f and g, and extrinsic motivation questions (10 items)—one of them was open ended question (j). a. respondent figure 1. respondents’ names the picture shows that the researchers gave freedom to the respondents (students) to type or not to type their names to keep their identity confidential. some students then used their nicknames or initials. b. study program figure 2. respondents’ study program the image has convinced the reader that all respondents in this study were students of english education study program. c. faculty figure 3. respondents’ faculty the picture shows that all respondents from this research were from faculty of languages and communication science, unissula. d. batch figure 4. respondents’ batch the picture shows that all respondents from this study were students of english education course of class of 2015 and 2016, except one from class of 2014 who re-take the class in the following batch. e. information on study program figure 5. information on study program (question: where did you get the information of pbi unissula?) indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 61 the picture describes the respondents’ response that the information about pbi unissula at most (54.1%) comes from friends or neighbors. f. students’ interest figure 6. students’ interest (question: did you choose pbi department because you had high interest in english?) from the figure, it can be concluded that there are 64% of respondents who stated that they choose english education study program because they have great interest in english. g. curiosity figure 7. curiosity (question: did you choose pbi because you are really curious on english (you really like to improve your english skills)?) meanwhile, the figure shows that 81.1% of respondents stated they chose english education course because they have great curiosity on english. they want to improve the potential and quality of their english. h. parents’ encouragment figure 8. parents’ encouragment (question: did you choose pbi because of your parents?) from the figure above it can be concluded that 45% of respondents chose pbi department because of the encouragement of their parents. i. friend’s encouragment figure 9. friend’s encouragment (question: did you choose pbi because of your college friends?) while being asked whether they chose pbi because of their schoolmates, as shown in figure 10, most of students answered “no” (73%). only 16.2% of respondents replied “yes”. j. institution’s appeals choiril anwar & kurniawan yudhi nugroho students’ motivations toward choosing english education 62 figure 10. institution’s appeal (question: what are good things you have heard about pbi unissula?) many good things that the respondent finds (both from ads etc.) before choosing pbi unissula. most of them chose pbi because the religious environment, "lure" eased them to follow the program abroad because many students in this program who have done it before. k. lecturer figure 11. lecturer (question: is unissula lecturer be your appeal to choose pbi?) most of the respondents were not sure if they chose pbi study program because of the pbi lecturers. as it can be seen on the figure that there was only 24.3% of respondents who answered “yes.” l. university environment figure 12. university environment (question: is the campus physical environment (building etc) be your appeal to choose pbi?) physical environment of the campus (building etc.) became the attractiveness of respondents in choosing pbi unissula, but not too many. it is because there was only 43.2% of respondents who answered “yes”. m. alumni figure 13. alumni (question: is the alumni be your appeal to choose pbi?) alumni pbi was less enough (40.5%) to attract respondents to choose pbi. n. student’s factor figure 14. student’s factor (question: is your friend in pbi be your appeal to choose pbi?) however, friends (who are still active college) does not attract them to choose the pbi study program. it was proved that there was only 18.9% responded "yes". indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 63 o. administration and teaching service figure 15. administration and teaching service (question: is the administration and teaching service be your appeal to choose pbi?) because respondents do not know how the actual administrative and teaching services are on campus, the respondents answered "yes", “no”, and “maybe”. each has almost the same percentage. p. institutional guarantee figure 16. institutional guarantee (question: is the institutional guarantee be your appeal to choose pbi?) likewise with the warranty informed in the ad, each has the same percentage of answers. q. tuition fee figure 17. tuition fee (question: is tuition fee in unisulla be your appeal to choose pbi?) tuition fees do not really affect their choice of pbi. it was poved by the results of two diagrams above stating that the costs listed are still affordable by them (their families. table 1. summary of students’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivation in choosing english education number /letter items kinds of motivation the response (%) yes no probably f did you choose pbi department because you had high interest to english? intrinsic motivation 64 5.9 29.7 g did you choose pbi because you are really curious with english (you really like to improve your english skills)? 81.1 5.4 13.5 h did you choose pbi because of your parents? extrinsic motivation 45.9 45.9 8.1 i did you choose pbi because of your college friends? j what are good things you have heard about pbi unissula? various responses (no dominant one) k is lecturer the appeal for you to choose pbi? 24.3 27 48.6 l is the campus physical environment (building etc) the appeal to choose pbi? 43.2 16.2 40.5 m is the alumni the appeal to choose pbi? 40.5 32.4 27 choiril anwar & kurniawan yudhi nugroho students’ motivations toward choosing english education 64 n is your friend in pbi the appeal for you to choose pbi? 18.9 48.6 32.4 o is the administration and teaching service the appeal for you to choose pbi? 35.1 29.7 35.1 p is the institutional guarantee the appeal for you to choose pbi? 37.8 27 35.1 q is tuition fee appeal for you to choose pbi (because of ots affordability)? 40.5 27 32.4 from the collection of data taken from 37 english department students of sultan agung islamic university, it was finally found that in terms of intrinsic motivation (written in f and g indicators), there were 64% students stated that they chose english education department (pbi) of unissula because they were really interested in english and most of students (81.1%) of pbi students had strong intrinsic motivation that they chose english education department due to their curiosity and a strong willingness to enhance their potential and skills in english. whereas, in terms of extrinsic motivations (building, tuition fee, parents, friends, lecturer, service, alumni, institutional guarantee, and so forth) were not so dominant in determining their choice when choosing pbi study program. they were vividly seen from the number of its percentage—no one reached 50%. in short, intrinsic motivation factors were higher than extrinsic ones. conclusion from analysis, it was finally found that 81.1% of the students of the pbi batch 2015 and 2016 had strong intrinsic motivation that they chose the pbi were due to curiosity and a strong willingness to increase their own potential and skills in english. it can be said, the motivation from “inside” (intrinsic) has a strong influence in the selection of courses. her or his extrinsic motivation just follows it. the researchers then recommend that this kind of motivational research can be further deepened into experimental research to find motivational effectiveness in student achievement and quality of student english skills. besides, the reserchers also plan to conduct another research on each kind of motivation (either intrinsic or extrinsic motivation). reference airasian, p. (2000). educational research: competencies for analysis and application (6th ed.). new jersey: prentice-hall, inc. djamarah, s. (2008). psikologi belajar (edisi 2). jakarta: rineka cipta. dörnyei, z., & ushioda, e. (2011). teaching and researching motivation (2nd ed.). great britain: pearson education limited. gardner, r. (1985). social psychology and second language learniing: the role of attitudes and motivation. london: edward arnold. gardner, r., & lambert, w. (1972). attitudes and motivation in second language learning. ma: newbury house. moskovsky, c., & alrabai, f. (2009). intrinsic motivation in saudi learners of english as a foreign language. the open applied linguistics journal, 2, 1-10. sardiman, a. (2007). interaksi dan motivasi belajar mengajar. jakarta: raja grafindo. uno, h. b. (2006). teori motivasi & pengukurannya: analisis di bidang pendidikan. jakarta: pt bumi aksara. ying, y., suprayogi, n., & hurriyati, e. (2013). motivasi belajar bahasa mandarin sebagai bahasa kedua. humaniora, 4(2), 1-10. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 9, issue 1, january 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 1 gamification-assisted flipped learning in efl reading classroom: a case of secondary school in indonesia riani noor yoshania english education department, universitas terbuka, indonesia email: rianiyoshaniar@gmail.com fazri nur yusuf english language education department, universitas pendidikan indonesia email: fazrinuryusuf@upi.edu hanna sundari english language eduaction department, universitas indraprasta pgri email:hanna.sundari@gmail.com apa citation: yoshania, r. n., yusuf, f. n., & sundari, h. (2023). gamification-assisted flipped learning in efl reading classroom: a case of secondary school in indonesia. indonesian efl journal, 9(1), 1-10. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v9i1.7265. received: 09-09-2022 accepted: 27-11-2022 published: 30-01-2023 introduction the impact of covid 19 on education include a loss of learning in students' reading skills; many students struggle to learn and comprehend it due to a variety of problems. for example, poor vocabulary knowledge or mastery is at the basis of all learners' difficulties in reading comprehension assessments (nurjanah, 2018), difficulties concentrating on reading english texts, poor grammar comprehension and reading habits, they mainly read in class and are not yet motivated to read and study outside of class according to suryawan et al. (2020), the majority of students had difficulties finding explicit information, literary meaning, and textual reference. this is due to a lack of reading comprehension skills on both the micro and macro levels. moreover, reading comprehension is one of the components of learning english. reading comprehension is frequently achieved in english tests, both at school and for college admission. reading comprehension is also frequently included in english tests such as the toefl. furthermore, some companies, particularly those on a global scale, include english reading comprehension as one of their entrance tests. this shows how important it is for students to learn and comprehend reading comprehension. another impact of covid 19 is learning methods have transformed away from conventional didactic classroom teaching and toward innovative and flexible learning alternatives such as fliped classrooms. according to ng & lo (2022), flipped classrooms can be used to ensure the continuation and sustainability of educational programs, particularly in the face of lockdowns during the abstract: world bank's report in program for international student assessment, found that during the first four years of school closures in indonesia due to the covid-19 pandemic, school students experienced an 11point decline in reading skills and learning outcomes. this research focused on gamification-assisted flipped classrooms and how they improved efl students' reading comprehension. a total of 20 third-year students from a secondary school were chosen purposefully as research participants, since they had the required characteristics. this research designed for qualitative data collection and analysis methodologies in a case study. the learning outcome scores obtained from tests that include questions about micro and macro reading comprehension skills revealed, the average score of pretest was 54, and the post-test was 87, this indicated that gamification assisted-flipped classrooms improved learning reading comprehension skills. according to findings of interviews, questionnaires and observation based on the technology acceptance model regarding students' perceptions of gamification-assisted flipped classrooms, has a relatively high acceptance scale in terms of perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, behavioral intention, and actual usage. the perceived usefulness has the highest scale, 85.82% of students believe that using gamification in a flipped classroom improved their performance in reading comprehension. further research is needed to determine the gamified flipped classrooms can be utilized to improve other english skills. keywords: efl students; flipped classroom; gamification; reading comprehension; technology acceptance model. riani noor yoshania, fazri nur yusuf, & hanna sundari gamification-assisted flipped learning in efl reading classroom: a case of secondary school in indonesia 2 covid-19 epidemic and gamification plays an important role in improving learner accomplishment and should thus be introduced into flipped classrooms by taking the learners' learning culture and styles into consideration. gamification is a new technology-based pedagogy that has been implemented in flipped classrooms to improve student achievement and engagement. gamification can be valuable tool for teachers at all levels of the educational system. according to mert and samur (2018), gamification is the use of game mechanics and dynamics to solve problems, engage people, and improve learning outcomes. gamification is defined by kibonggsong & johnnburton (2018), gamification is a set of activities and procedures to solve problems by exploiting or applying game element features. for the following reasons, understanding the exact meaning of gamification requires the following definition: (1) gamification is not a single activity, but rather a set of related activities and methodical procedures. (2) gamification should be utilized to address specific issues; merely adding game features like badges and points is not gamification. gamification should be based on the characteristics of game elements. in this research, game-based mechanics gamification factors, such as a point system, level system, students can earn badges in addition to collecting points and leveling up under the badges system and a leaderboard system that can show student rankings, had first been taught to students so that they understood the use of gamification learning. given the benefits of gamification in teaching reading comprehension and the fact that today's students are always connected to technology, this research used gamification as a media for teaching reading comprehension. flipped learning is a learning technique that evolved from the blended learning concept, wherein teaching and learning activities are carried out both in and out of the classroom, integrating face-to-face teaching with online instruction (stöhr et al., 2020). according to ramadhanty & puspitaloka (2020), using a flipped classroom provided beneficial experiences for students. the flipped class-based online teaching method is a two-part teaching strategy that includes learning outside of the classroom as well as learning for online class sessions. the lecturer first provides students homework to study out of the classroom or at home in the online-based flipped classroom learning technique. before beginning online classes, all students must first learn independently in offline groups (reflianto et al., 2021). in flipped classroom learning, students first study topics on their own, usually using video lessons developed by the teacher. students in flipped classroom learning study topics on their own first, typically using video lessons created by the teacher or shared by other educators; the teacher is not needed to create the learning videos themselves. students later in class attempt to apply their knowledge by solving problems and conducting practical tasks. flipped classroom learning entails more than just watching learning videos in class; it emphasizes making the most of class time in order to increase learning quality and broaden student understanding. later in class, students attempt to apply their knowledge by solving issues and performing practical tasks. during the covid-19 epidemic, one of the learning solutions for teachers is the implementation of the gamification-assisted flipped classroom method (lestari and noer, 2021). the gamification-assisted flipped classroom method, which combines gamification with flipped classroom pedagogies, may prove to be an innovation that improves students' twentyfirst-century learning skills (zainuddin et al., 2021). according to the result of the research, from alajaji & alshwiah (2021), gamification assisted learners in better understanding their lessons. this could be due to the opportunity to collaborate with their peers, discuss the learning material, seek for answers, receive feedback through the scoring system and leaderboards, complete tasks, overcome problems, and use technology in a competitive environment. the gamified flipped classroom refers to the incorporation of game-based elements (such as scores, points, badges, and leaderboards) into the flipped classroom practice via an online gamification quiz (zainuddin, 2018). gamification assisted flipped classroom is a form of online learning that integrates gamification techniques in one step. teachers have given each group a gaming test using the google forms platform to help students understand material in an online classroom. the fate of the group is determined by the average ability of the students in the group, not by any one student. prizes are awarded to the winning group to make the game more attractive. flipped learning techniques with gamification have been implemented in a variety of contexts in many nations (huang et al., 2019; zainuddin et al., 2021). huang et al. (2019) was investigated the impact of employing gamification to improve indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 9, issue 1, january 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 3 student behavioral and cognitive engagement in out-of-class flipped learning activities. the use of flipped classrooms, gamification, and self-learning methods improves students' intrinsic motivation, and the use of social media methods transitions into lifetime learning and improves creativity (safapour et al., 2019). gamification improved reading comprehension as stated by nitiasih & budiartha (2021), gamification based on balinese local stories as teaching media has a significant impact on fifth-grade students' reading comprehension. according to the findings of previous research above, the use of gamification has been proven to improve student behavioral and cognitive engagement in out-of-class flipped learning activities. language learners have employed games successfully to promote other skills such as speaking and reading (abdeen & albiladi, 2021). throughout this research, the gamified flipped classroom refers to the incorporation of game-based elements (such as scores, points, badges, and leaderboards) into the flipped classroom practice via an online gamification quiz. throughout this research, the gamified flipped classroom refers to the incorporation of game-based elements (such as scores, points, badges, and leaderboards) into the flipped classroom practice via an online gamification quiz. gamification based on balinese local stories as teaching media has a significant impact on fifth-grade students' reading comprehension. the use of social media methods transitions into lifetime learning and improves creativity. however, there is currently no information available regarding the use of gamification and flipped classrooms in efl reading. as a result, the current research used gamification in a flipped classroom to examine how it increases efl students' reading comprehension. this research aims to learn more about gamification-assisted flipped classrooms, specifically in online efl students' secondary school reading comprehension. the purpose of this research are to find the impact of the gamification-assisted flipped classroom learning model on efl students' reading comprehension and to examine efl students' opinions of gamification-assisted flipped classrooms. themes discussed in this chapter include gamification, which is a concept that employs game-based mechanics, aesthetics, and game thinking to engage people, motivate activities, increase learning, and solve problems. this research is important to be investigated and expected to contribute insight and knowledge regarding the usefulness of gamification-assisted flipped classrooms, as well as to be a means of conceptually learning knowledge in the classroom. method this research was primarily designed for qualitative data gathering and analytic approaches. a pandemic condition is described in the background section as a unique scenario that qualifies to be used as a case. because of its ability to provide detailed and contextual data, the case study design was chosen. as a result, it is suitable for supporting policymakers in developing and monitoring policies related to the use of the case study design during the covid-19 pandemic. case studies also reveal something unique, spectacular accomplishments are revealed, and in this research students' extraordinary achievements are unique in that students in rural places can use gamification in their learning to get better scores than students in urban schools. students in remote areas have also upgraded their technology, which is unique and should serve as an example. the research’s participants consist of third year students at a state secondary school. in case study research, purposeful sampling is commonly employed, a total of 20 students of grade ix were chosen to investigate the use of gamification assisted flipped classrooms. a teacher taught a class and was delivered for a total of 4 weeks. she delivered the lesson about report text using gamification assisted flipped classroom. the research used instruments such as tests, observations, questionnaires, interviews and documentation to collect data. the tests were used to assess efl students' ability to comprehend subject matter (report text) in the form of quiziz. the teacher gave report texts, and students were asked to identify the topic, detailed information, meaning details, synonyms, text structure, and goal of the report text concerning soil organisms. interviews are interactions in which an interviewer asks verbal questions in order to elicit verbal responses from an interviewee. the general goal of conducting semi structured interviews for data collection is to obtain information from key informants who have personal experiences, attitudes, perceptions, and beliefs about the issue of interest. semi-structured interviews can be used by researchers to gather new, exploratory data relevant to a research topic, triangulate other data sources, or confirm findings through member checking (respondent input on research results) (dejonckheere & vaughn, 2019). this research conducted semi-structural in-depth riani noor yoshania, fazri nur yusuf, & hanna sundari gamification-assisted flipped learning in efl reading classroom: a case of secondary school in indonesia 4 interviews with the students. the observation was conducted during the field study on 2nd june until 15th september 2022. observation was focused on the gamification assisted flipped classroom method used for teaching and learning english subjects in the classroom by the english teachers. from the 4 observations, 4 hours observation in class meeting and 2 hours out class observations, the researcher found that the facilities and infrastructure supported gamification learning, the teacher carried out gamification learning practices and assessment administration, and students were active in learning. this document in this research is utilized to address research question number one: "to what extent is the usability of gamification-assisted flipped classroom for efl students' reading comprehension in secondary school?" questionnaires are also used as a means of collecting data or information in this research, efl students as the participants for the questionnaires. the purpose of this instrument is in order to describe the students' perceptions in the implementation of the innovation gamification assisted flipped classroom. the type of questionnaire is a closed-ended questionnaire which consists of statements concerning efl students’ perception in gamification assisted flipped classroom method. the questionnaire used in this study is a likert scale questionnaire with 5 alternative answers. according to miles et al. (2014), analysis as three major concurrent activities: data condensation, data display, and conclusion drawing and verification. with this approach of data collection, the researcher mainly focused on data reduction and data display, as well as data report interpretation. the document is utilized in this research to answer research question number one: "to what extent is the usefulness of gamification-assisted flipped classroom for efl students' reading comprehension in secondary school?" the research employed triangulation and expert judgment for the instruments used to verify the data's validity.triangulation is a data collection strategy that involves using many methods or sources of data to solve the same question. themes are created by combining a variety of data sources or opinions from respondents who were thought to contribute to the validity of the research. findings derived from interviews, observations, and documentation are more reliable than those derived from just one or two of these sources. expert judgment is used to establish whether the instruments are appropriate based on the judgments of linguistics or english education specialists. these tools are used to collect information about how students’ perception to the use of gamification-asissted flipped classroom. results and discussion the result consists of two parts; learning outcomes using the gamification assisted flipped classroom learning model and student responses to the use of gamification assisted flipped classroom based on the tam model from davis (1989) and the modification questionnaire from chuttur (1996) and gahtani (2001) categorized into four parts; perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, behavioral intention to use, actual usage. the report on student learning outcomes from the pre-test and post-test the result from documention on student learning outcomes from the pre-test and post-test using the quizizz application showed on the chart below. figure 1. pre-test and post-test score from the figure 1 chart of the pre-test and posttest revealed that there was a significant increase in post test scores based on the pretest results. the pretest scores achieved an average of 54 and from the results of the pretest scores obtained an average value of 87. the test's results showed an increase in the usefulness of learning to understand report text. the results indicated that the students' posttest scores were much higher than their pre-test scores based on the learning report from google form. students increased their reading comprehension in micro and macro skills, as proven by the process of reading comprehension through gamification assisted flipped classroom. according to the documentation in the quiziz report, the comparison of the results on pre-test and post-test is shown in the table below. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 9, issue 1, january 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 5 table 1. students improvement in micro and macro reading comprehension’ skills skills question indicator time (second) accuracy (percentage) right answer (students) pretest posttest pretest posttest pretest posttest micro classified synonyms 9 5 38 83 4 16 macro find detailed informatio n 16-22 5-13 28-57 66-88 1-5 15-20 identified the structure of the text 14-17 5 30-45 77-88 4-7 18-20 identified the topic 5 10 42 72 6 19 classified meaning references 22 11 33 61 3 14 the table above illustrates an improvement in students' micro and macro reading comprehension skills. where the time taken to complete reading comprehension questions in the pretest has decreased, this implies that students were completing them faster. furthermore both the accuracy level and the number of students who responded increased. according to the findings of this research, gamification-assisted flipped classroom learning can improve micro and macro skills in reading comprehension. the process of reading comprehension through gamification assisted flipped classroom the result from the observation and documentation found that the post-test clearly showed that the gamification assisted flipped classroom in the reading comprehension class improved and, in the end, the students became effective readers who can easily understand the reading texts. students' reading skills increase as a result of a serious learning process, and reading becomes a joyful activity. this research implemented flipped classroom with gamification. the following are the gamified flipped classroom steps. (1) form a group by combining the highest and lowest rank. one class has 20 students, and the teacher has divided them into five groups. (2) collaborative learning, in which students utilized whatsapp to discuss the material and example questions provided online, group members were able to communicate without having to physically encounter each other. as a result, students who were having difficulties would be able to seek assistance from smarter classmates. furthermore, teachers provided several internet resources that they used collaboratively to increase mastery of the material or to provide examples of case solutions. (3) group representatives, a group representative was chosen from among the students, and a gamification tutorial was held. tutorials attended completely by group representatives allow the teacher to divide focus and discuss more in-depth materials about difficult-to-understand topics with the group. (4) gamification, by administering a game test to each group via the google forms platform. this strategy used peer pressure, such as group activities, to help students learn the content and encourage their classmates. the group's fate is determined by the average ability of the students in the group, not by any individual student. to make the game more appealing, prizes are provided to the winning group. table 2. the teacher's implementation of learning processes with gamification assisted-flipped classroom the steps the process preparation  design learning strategies for online and offline learning  gamifying learning text report material with googleform implementation  first online meeting: introduced the gamification asissted flipped classroom, gave some material of report text in form of video and pdf.  first offline meeting: held a pretest, disscussed about the material on report text.  second online meeting: gave the gamification test in the form of google form  second offline meeting: checked the result of gamification, conducted a posttest reflection  identified the teacher's class mastery and material delivery  knowing the students' needs enables teachers to develop more dynamic and creative learning designs, allowing for more effective subsequent learning.  evaluated the teacher's use of gamification-assisted flipped classroom to the level of success. students are excited to read the text report material because it was distributed during the first online meeting. they comprehend because they can talk about it with their peers. they are also enthusiastic when the teacher uses a gamificationassisted flipped classroom to discuss or introduce material. however, there were times when students called into question a learning process. riani noor yoshania, fazri nur yusuf, & hanna sundari gamification-assisted flipped learning in efl reading classroom: a case of secondary school in indonesia 6 for example, when they run into issues with the gamification-assisted flipped classroom. the teacher also discussed and solved the students' problems. the students accepted this explanation, and the learning process continued. when the material was presented in the form of games, rather than lectures, the teacher discovered that the students were more enthusiastic about receiving it. when they see examples of the subject in practice, they get a greater understanding of it. it's related to watching a video about soil organisms based on data from a text report. the use of gamification-assisted flipped classrooms as perceived by efl students from the result of questionnaires found that 85.22% of students believe that the use of gamification assisted flipped classroom can improve their performance in participating in learning to read text reports. 15% who feel doubtful by answering neutrally and 0% who do not believe that their performance is helped by using gamification. gamification with google forms help students to quickly complete tasks on reading comprehension. 81.99% of students feel that gamification assisted flipped classrooms is easy to use and does not require hard effort when using it, but there are 17% who feel that it is still hesitated in using gamification-assisted flipped classrooms. students' behavioral intentions can be determined based on their attention to motivation to continue using and their desire to motivate other users. and 61.6% of students have motivation to use and motivate others to participate in using gamification assisted flipped classroom technology, but 38.3% do not have the motivation to keep using it. according to the actual conditions of use, 81.46% of students were satisfied with the system, believing it was simple to use and improved their productivity. the results of this research is in line with research from zou (2020), students have very positive opinions about gamified classrooms. gamification assisted flipped classroom’ challenges by the students the result from interview stated that there were several problems or obstacles that students face, r#3 said that due to the google form error because of weak internet connections, r#12 commented that she ran out of credit , cellphone conditions and r#5 mentioned vocabulary that he didn't understand. but all these problems can be overcomed by trying to find a position to find a good signal, borrowing the cellphone of a sibling or parent and for vocabulary problems they look at an online dictionary. data resources: interview (extract 5) "the problem is that sometimes the google form application error, i don't know because the signal is bad, so when online learning i have to find a position that has a good signal" (#r3). "the problem is there are a lot of new vocabulary in the text report that i don't know the meaning, but solution is to look at the online dictionary” (#r5). “the problem is that if you are studying online at home, your quota runs out, so borrow your mom or sister's cellphone” (#r12). table 3. students perceptions of the use of gamification-assisted-flipped classroom core coding secondary coding axial coding (sub categories) process phenomenon  very easy to use  very flexible  comfortable  games adventure  like the game  easy to learn  easy to understand  fun causal conditions  understanding the text report  cannot stop reading  improving learning scores  chalenging strategies  click the link  follow the instructions  learning from home by cell phone  keep working on it until it is correct  if we make a mistake we have to start the game again from the beginning from the table above, found that efl students understood the text report, improved learning scores led to students experienced that gamification assisted-flipped classrooms were very easy to use, flexible, comfortable, easy to learn, easy to understand and fun, because it had games adventure, so it was challenging. there was some variety strategies to use the gamification assisted flipped classroom, students experienced by clicking the link of gamification and follow the instructions, that can be done by learning from home with the cell phone, they kept working on it until it is correct, if there is a mistake they have to start the game again from indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 9, issue 1, january 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 7 the beginning after participating in online flipped learning for about a month, the students had raised their reading test scores. this is consistent with earlier research that has suggested that online flipped learning may enhance learning outcomes (stöhr et al., 2020; swart & macleod, 2020). these findings are definitely in line with those of mohammadian et al. (2018), who found that the effective usage of technology as gamification can gain great teachers and instructors in promoting high school students' reading comprehension. according to previous research from purwandani and syamsiah (2020), revealed that based on some of the components in the technology acceptance model, it can be inferred that google classroom technology has a high enough acceptance scale in terms of perceived uses, easy use perceptions, attitudes towards use, and behavior interested in using. among the other components, the actual use component has had the highest acceptability scale. in this research, the perceived usefulness component received the highest acceptability scale among the other components, indicating that the majority of students believe that using gamification assisted flipped classrooms can improve their performance in engaging in learning to read text reports. meanwhile, the behavioral intention component has the lowest scale, indicating that some students are unmotivated to continue utilizing the gamification assisted flipped classroom method, which is consistent with the fact that they only utilize it to study text reports. from the theories about gamification, flipped classroom and reading, from mert & samur (2018). gamification is the use of game mechanics and dynamics to solve issues, engage people, and improve learning outcomes. and from kerr (2020) learning language skills such as listening, reading, writing, and vocabulary could be done by using flipped classroom techniques. also from azmuddin et al. (2020) stated that reading comprehension abilities refer to students' ability to conclude and comprehend the text and essential ideas for correct reading. all of the theories mentioned above support the findings of this research. conclusion gamification assisted flipped classroom employed in learning reading comprehension report text has a significant impact on the continuous learning process. to investigate the impact of the gamification-assisted flipped classroom learning model on efl students' reading comprehension, research showed that efl students were successful in improving learning outcomes in micro and macro reading skills.the gamification flipped classroom is well-designed for learning receptive skill. students have their own time to learn before the class meeting, so that they would have enough time to acquire and comprehend the learning materials. to analyze the perception of efl students in using gamification-assisted revealed that the selection of a basic gamification strategy that is basic and easy to adjust based on needs has advantages over complex gamification. students could completed the reading comprehension lesson in less time. they recognized that the gamification-assisted flipped classroom was simple to understand, access, and apply, allowing them to become effective in its use and comprehension of the text report reading comprehension information. students were motivated to utilize it again and would recommend the gamification-assisted flipped classroom. moreover addition, students reported feeling motivated and encouraged to continue reading after participating in a flipped classroom employing gamification. there were a number of issues or challenges that students had to deal with such as the google form error caused by unstable internet connections. further research is needed to see if gamification assisted flipped classrooms can be used to improve other english abilities such as speaking, listening, and writing. efl students have a number of issues or challenges because of poor internet connections, running out of credit, and cellular circumstances regarding the vocabulary they didn't comprehend. teachers must create clear instructions, including video, to explain how to play the game in the classrooms. acknowledgement we would like to thank the supervisors and reviewers for their comments and suggestions to improve the quality of this research paper, the head of the english language education masters program of fkip-ut. references abdeen, f. h., & albiladi, w. 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(2021). synchronous online flip learning with formative gamification quiz: instruction during covid-19. interactive https://www.cambridge.org/elt/blog/2020/07/01/how-to-get-your-flipped-classroom-started/ https://www.cambridge.org/elt/blog/2020/07/01/how-to-get-your-flipped-classroom-started/ https://doi.org/10.3390/su14095428 https://www.atlantis/ https://doi.org/10.17569/tojqi.364130 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 9, issue 1, january 2023 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 9 technology and smart education, 19(2), 236– 259. https://doi.org/10.1108/itse-01-2021 zainuddin, z. (2018). students’ learning performance and perceived motivation in gamified flippedclass instruction. computers and education, 126, 75–88. zou, d. (2020). gamified flipped efl classroom for primary education: student and teacher perceptions. journal of computers in education, 7(2), 213–228. https://doi.org/10.1108/itse-01-2021riani noor yoshania, fazri nur yusuf, & hanna sundari gamification-assisted flipped learning in efl reading classroom: a case of secondary school in indonesia 10 communicative language teaching as conceptualized by bhutanese english as second language teachers jigme dorji pakshikha central school, ministry of education, bhutan email: bongopjigmee83@gmail.com apa citation: dorji, j. (2017). communicative language teaching as conceptualized by bhutanese english as second language teachers. indonesian efl journal, 3(1), 1-10 received: 14-11-2016 accepted: 22-12-2016 published: 01-01-2017 abstract: the purpose of this qualitative study was to examine the conceptualization of communicative language teaching (clt) by the english as second language (esl) teachers in chukha district in bhutan. four esl teachers were selected as the participants for the semistructured interview through purposive sampling technique. a set of 15 predetermined openended questions on clt were framed and asked based on savignon’s (1983) foreign language attitude survey test (flast). the content validity of interview questions was ensured by consulting three experts and computing item object congruence (ioc) in accordance with lynn’s (1986) item acceptability criteria. the data were analyzed using content analysis technique. the results revealed teachers’ conceptualization under two categories; in compliance with and deviance from clt principles. under first category, the results showed that the participants believed clt as a language teaching approach that focuses on developing communicative competence, teaching language for real life, child-centered teaching, and teaching culture in the second language classroom. under the second category, the results indicated that the participants believed clt as not using mother tongue in teaching english and only teaching listening and speaking skills. in addition, the study also uncovered the fact that esl teachers are not aware of clt approach. the article concludes with the discussion on the areas of training particularly relevant to this group of bhutanese esl teachers and recommendations for future studies. keywords: communicative competence, communicative language teaching, conceptualization introduction communicative language teaching (clt) approach has become popular in the recent years as one of the most effective approaches to english as foreign and second language (efl/esl) teaching (anderson, 1993; chang, 2011). it is implemented in many efl and esl countries to enhance learners’ communication skills in english. the approach emphasizes on developing communicative competence through the use of language in authentic context (savignon, 1997). despite its fame, implementation of clt has confronted diverse challenges in efl and esl countries (chang, 2011; mangubhai, marland, dashwood & son, 2007; savignon, 1997; wu, 2008). in bhutan, english is used as an official language alongside dzongkha, the national language. it is also taught as a major subject in schools besides using it as a medium of instruction for other subjects (dorji, 2005; laprairie, 2013). children learn english from pre-primary (pp) until college. despite being exposed to the language from the early age, researchers have reported that children graduating from the schools and colleges have poor communicative competence in english (dorji, 2005; laprairie, 2013; royal education council [rec], 2012). in order to counter this issue, in 2006, a major english curriculum reformation came forward with incorporation of communicative components alongside the literature content (curriculum and professional support division [capsd], 2006; laprairie, 2013). however, it has been reported that, like in other contexts, communicative components are inadequately emphasized and the language teaching practice has largely remained traditional (kirkpatrick & gyem, 2012; laprairie, 2013; rec, 2012). then, ineffective implementation of clt has been partially indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 1 attributed to teachers’ unfulfilled aspiration in grasping the concept of communicative competence (asassfeh, khwaileh, al-shaboul & alshaboual, 2012). in this regard, several studies are conducted to identify teachers’ conceptualization of clt in many nations within the framework of communicative competence (feryok, 2008; li, 1998, 2004; mangubhai et al., 2007; sato & kleinsasser, 1999). however, except for laprairie’s (2013) study that concluded bhutanese esl teachers have lack theoretical knowledge about language enriching approaches, the teachers’ conceptualization of a specific language teaching approach underscoring communicative competence such as clt has scarcely been undertaken. understanding teachers’ conceptualization of the approach would provide an input for training and coaching for teachers’ preparation and development in the area of clt implementation. thus, this study explored bhutanese esl teachers’ conceptualization of clt. hymes (1972) proposed the concept of communicative competence as ability to use language in a social context, observing sociolinguistic norms of appropriateness, feasibility, and possibility. canale and swain (1980) compounded different views from various disciplines to develop the communicative competence theory. according to canale and swain (1980), communicative competence refers to the knowledge and skills necessary for communication. it comprises of four components; grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence, and strategic competence. their theory has become an established theoretical framework for second language teaching and later became the fundamental principle of clt. characteristics and principles of clt communicative language teaching is a learner-centered and experience-based view of second language teaching that develops learners’ communicative competence (richard & rodgers, 1986). in addition, richard (2006, p. 2) offers a more comprehensive definition “communicative language teaching is a set of principles about the goals of language teaching, how learners learn a language, the kinds of classroom activities that best facilitate learning, and the roles of teachers and learners in the classroom.” clt as a language teaching approach emphasizes on the development of communication skills. the unique characteristics and principles of clt distinguish it from the traditional teaching approaches. according to larssen-freeman (2000), the most salient characteristic of clt is to make the classroom interactive and communicative through activities such as information gathering, discussions, role plays, simulation, and problem solving. these activities help students communicate in different contexts and roles offering them the opportunities to get exposed to authentic language use (richard, 2006; savignon, 1982). this learner-centered approach emphasizes social relationship between the teacher and learner. the approach has been designed to give students a sense of “ownership” of their learning and enhance their motivation (brown, 1994). in addition, clt aims at fostering sociolinguistic competence by making the students aware of the target language culture and appropriate norms of target language use, verbal as well as non-verbal. it is observed that sociolinguistic competence is instrumental in shaping learners’ communicative competence besides language rules (carnale & swain, 1983; savignon, 1980). clt prepares learners to use the target language beyond classroom (savignon, 1982). it engages students in conversation making through classroom activities, which engenders confidence in students to use language in everyday communication. the approach encourages students to use language in real-life context outside classroom. finally, clt also seeks to develop learners’ communicative competence by integrating grammar in context (carnale & swain, 1980; richards, 2006; savignon, 1983) and asking the students to carry out the task with reviews on relevant grammatical points. in short, grammar knowledge needs to be jigme dorji communicative language teaching as conceptualized by bhutanese english as second language teachers 2 developed along with students’ communicative ability. conceptualization is an analytical process to examine a concept. in the process of conceptualization, first it takes to identify dimensions of the concept under examination, which gives basis to establish conceptualization of the concept under investigation by interacting with the beliefs, views, and assumptions concerning language teaching. in this study, clt principles proposed in esl literature (canale & swain, 1980; canale, 1983; hyme, 1972; savignon, 1983, 1997, 2000) formed the basis of bhutanese esl teachers’ clt conceptualization. communicative language teaching approach has come in vogue as many esl and efl contexts adopted it as potential approach in augmenting students’ communicative competence. however, in many context, implementing the approach has been found challenging. one of the encumbrances in adopting clt studies revealed was that teachers face difficulties in both understanding and adopting clt, and implying a mismatch between the theory and teachers’ understanding (chang, 2011; mangubhai et al., 2004, 2005; thompson, 1996; wu, 2008). personal beliefs, experiences, and cultural differences in perceiving the concept of communicative competence were seen to influence the teachers’ conceptualization of clt. teachers’ lack of knowledge about tested communicative competence components such as linguistic, sociolinguistic, pragmatic, and discourse (canale & swain, 1980, canale, 1983) are reflected in studies. for example, nazari (2007) studied iranian efl teachers’ understanding of communicative competence. he made a distinction between a socio-cultural tenet and linguistic competence, the broader and narrow view respectively of communicative competence. the findings indicated that the teachers remain unaware of the distinction. they had a narrower view both in defining the notion of communicative competence and organizing classroom activities which focuses more on linguistic competence. the researcher suggests that the teachers’ lack of awareness about this distinction, for instance, is the cause for teachers’ inclination towards linguistic competence, thus adhering to traditional method like grammar translation approach. this finding seems to reflect the case of bhutan as well. la prairie (2013) interviewed policy makers, teachers, and students and observed the classroom teaching of bhutanese esl teachers to examine how facilitative is english language teaching in developing communicative competence of the bhutanese students. he found that the classroom teaching was mostly focused on teaching grammar explicitly, and dominantly teacher-centered, where teachers give lecture and students listen passively. he concluded that bhutanese teachers have lack knowledge of theoretical framework that supports language enrichment. however, the study does not account to how teachers conceptualize any particular language enriching theoretical framework like communicative competence (hyme, 1972; canale & swain, 1980). likewise, sato and kleinsasser (1999) examined the problems of australian teachers who taught japanese as a foreign language in using clt. they found inconsistency between teachers’ perceptions of clt and classroom practices. the study suggested that the teachers’ understanding about clt was mostly influenced by their experience and teaching context. concurrently, mangubhai et al. (2005) investigated clt practices by six language other than english (lote) teachers in japan and observed that the teachers basically developed conceptualization of clt in two ways: from their work experience and the existing clt theories. from what la prairie (2013) has claimed about bhutanese teachers’ lack of knowledge on language teaching theoretical framework, the findings reflected by sato and kleinsasser, and mangubhai et al. might also depict the state of bhutanese esl teachers’ situation. on the other hand, studies have also empirically recorded the misconception that the teachers have about clt. these misconceptions are often attributed to esl and efl teachers’ digression from clt practice and adherence to traditional language teaching approaches. thompson indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 3 (1996) and wu (2008) reviewed papers exploring the misconception about clt held by the foreign language and second language teachers. they observed that teachers believed that clt means not teaching grammar, not developing skills other than speaking, mainly use of pair-work and role play, increase in teachers’ workload, not providing timely corrective feedback on learners’ errors, and avoidance of l1 use in the classroom. they maintained that these mis-conceptualizations have potentially effected clt implementation in many contexts. the empirical studies reviewed above suggest that teachers’ beliefs, views and assumptions about clt are among the factors preventing effective clt implementation. in bhutan, there is no record of studies except the one reviewed above, la prairie’s (2013) study which explored the esl teachers’ awareness about the language teaching theoretical framework such as clt. however, la prairie does not account to ctl framework, which this study intent to explore specifically. thus, this study explored the conceptualization of clt by the bhutanese esl teachers. the research question “what are the conceptualizations of clt by the bhutanese esl teachers?” guided this study. method to understand the clt conceptualization of bhutanese esl teachers, a mixed method study was conducted. however, only the qualitative data obtained from semi-structured interviews and class room observations are reported in this paper. in this study, the researcher conducted semi-structured interview to elicit participants’ beliefs, views, and assumptions about language teaching and clt practice. burns (2000) stated that a semi-structured interview is one that, “rather than having a specific interview schedule or none all, an interview guide may be developed…” (p. 424). the researcher used this technique because it had potential to provide a direction without fixed wording or ordering. this permitted flexibility for the researcher to provoke responses for clarity and elaboration when necessary (burns, 2000). it provided more information and insight on participants’ understanding about clt and their classroom practice. in order to gain the primary data about the instructional practice of esl teachers, the researcher observed classroom teaching. this enabled the researcher to obtain a clear picture about the english language class, and an insight into the association between teachers’ conceptualization of clt and their classroom practice. kane, sandretto and heath (2002) contended that in studying teachers’ beliefs and practice in teaching, a study that depends only on what teachers say about their classroom practice obtains incomplete story. so, they recommended direct observation as affective method to apprehend the teachers’ classroom practice. thus, it is employed in this study. the study was conducted in chukha district. of 519 government schools in bhutan, 41 were in chukha (moe, 2014). the participants for the semi-structured interviews were four esl teachers. they were selected by following purposive sampling technique which allows the researcher to recruit potential participants based on their time limitation, logistic convenience, and subject relevance. in selecting interview informants, the researcher followed patton’s “maximum variation sampling” (in li, 1999, p. 684) that allowed for maximum variation in participants’ sex, school level, qualification, teaching experience, and teaching setting (see table 1). however, for classroom observation, only two participants consented the researcher to observe their classes. table 1. demographic information of the interviewees participants sex school level education qualification work experience teaching setting respondent1 female middle m.a in literature 11 years urban respondent2 male primary ptc 13 years rural respondent3 male higher m.a in literature 9 years semi-urban respondent4 female lower b. ed 6 years urban jigme dorji communicative language teaching as conceptualized by bhutanese english as second language teachers 4 regarding the interview questions, a set of 15 predetermined open-ended questions were asked. the questions were determined to expand and delve deeper understanding on participants’ conceptualization of clt in bhutan. whenever necessary, additional questions were asked to get deeper and elaborated response. the content validity of an interview questions was ensured by consulting three experts and computing item object congruence (ioc) in accordance with lynn’s (1986) item acceptability criteria. foreign language classroom observation protocol (flcop) developed by hongboontri (2008) was adapted for observing the classroom teaching. before collecting the data, the researcher sought a formal permission from the ministry of education (moe), district education office, chukha, and the concerned principals of the participating schools. after permission was granted, the teachers were invited to take part in the study. the interviews were conducted during the free time with participants’ consent. classes were observed with consent from the participants. each participant’s lesson was observed at least thrice each. the data collected from semistructured interviews and classroom observation was analyzed employing the concept of content analysis. the data were analyzed within the theoretical notion of clt proposed by language scholars (canale & swain, 1980; hyme, 1972; lasser-freeman 2000; savignon, 1983, 1997, 2002). according to fraenkel, wallen and hyun (2012), content analysis is a technique by which peoples’ behavior can be studied by analyzing their communication. results and discussion this section reports the results from the semi-structured interviews and classroom observation to answer the research question about what the conceptualizations of clt by the bhutanese esl teachers are and what are the relation between the teachers’ conceptualization and their classroom practices. conceptualization complying clt principle the results are presented under three categories; (i) conceptualization complying with clt principles, (ii) conceptualization deviating clt notion, and (iii) conceptualization depicting limited knowledge of clt. the findings from this study revealed wide range of beliefs, views, and assumptions the respondents held about language teaching, matching the notion of clt advocated in the literature. four specific conceptualizations of clt stated by respondents that comply with clt notions were: 1) focus on developing communicative competence, (2) learning to use language for real life, (3) child-centered classroom, and (4) teaching of culture in language class. focusing on developing communicative competence all the respondents believed that the goal of language teaching should be in developing learners’ communicative competence in english. respondent#3, remarked, “the approach focuses on developing learners’ communicative competence.’’ the respondent added that communicative classroom in bhutan must enable the students to communicate in english without any challenge. supporting this view, respondent#1 maintained that the main focus of teaching english was to make the students competent in both speaking and writing. the respondent remarked: the goal of my language teaching is to make my learners competent in using english. i encourage them to speak in the class. i do it by engaging them in various activities. i believe, with the interaction they make in the class they become more comfortable speaking in english, eventually making good in english. similarly, respondent#4, also shared that the main goal of language teaching was to develop learners’ communicative competence. however, unlike others, it was observed during the classroom observation that the respondent used reading, which was explained that it was done as means to develop learners’ communicative competence believing that reading makes learners more indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 5 confident not only with the language but with ideas and knowledge. from the analysis, it can be ascertained that the respondents hold a belief that clt is a language teaching approach that focuses on developing learners’ communicative competence. this belief upholds the principle of communicative language teaching, which depicts the respondents having right view about clt. learning to use language in every-day life learning to use language in real-life was one of the conceptions that the respondents had of clt. three respondents (respondent#1, 3 and 4) maintained that the main function of language is to communicate in real-life, and english language teaching in bhutan should prepare students to use english in their daily life. in this regard, respondent#4 noted, “i think, if students cannot use english in day-to-day life, i don’t see any reason why they have to learn it. clt certainly helps students to communicate better.” similarly, respondent#3 described how the students, despite knowing the rules of language, fail to communicate well in english: even when the students know the rule of grammar, they still fail to speak. it is due to the lack of practice. it is same with writing; they cannot write what they know. to make them used to use english, i make my class interactive. it is done to make them comfortable in using english outside the classroom. in this light, respondent#4 described how he makes classroom communicative to make students enhance authentic communication skills in english: most of the time i make my classroom communicative. i use many activities that gives opportunities for the students to interact. some of the activities i use often are role plays, group discussions, pair work, and of course, even whole class discussion. i also use presentation and question-answer techniques. however, during the classroom observation, it was observed that respondents mostly explained the text strictly, and rarely engaged children in interaction. it was seen that classroom interaction was mostly stuck to teacher asking questions which demand yes/no answer, and student responding yes or no in chorus. this was common across all lessons observed with both teachers. thus, from the above responses it can be construed that the respondents viewed clt as a language teaching approach that develops language learners’ ability to use english in real life. however, in real teaching time, they tend to digress from their beliefs, depriving students from having authentic conversation in the classroom. this shows though they have rightly view on clt as emphasizing use of authentic language, they provide inadequate time to the students to practice language. student-centered teaching approach respondents unanimously believed that clt is a student-centered language teaching approach. the respondents contended that building communicative competence needs adopting interactive and activity-based teaching techniques to provide students with opportunities for active involvement in learning. this is well asserted in respondent#1’s statement: if a teacher does all the talks and not let the students practice, there is hardly any chances of teaching the students how to use language. i think, classroom is a place where they practice by doing, not just listen to their teacher passively. we cannot expect the students learn just from listening to teachers and understanding the text used in the classroom. involving the students in classroom activities not only makes them learn english in context, but also build confidence to use it in their daily life. communicative class, in my view, should make the students use english most of the time. the respondents portrayed awareness of various communicative activities that make their language classes student-centered and activity-based. for instance, respondent#3 illustrated how english class is made student-centered as below: i conduct various activities to make my classroom student-centered. usually, i provide them with some information on the lesson topic and then engage them in the activities. i feel like trying different activities based on the nature of topic i am teaching. for example, in my last class, i made my students design jigme dorji communicative language teaching as conceptualized by bhutanese english as second language teachers 6 ‘comic stripes’ in groups. students developed comic from a story of their choice. other than that, i also make students do presentation, group works, and pair works too. the respondents’ description of their practices indicates their beliefs on teaching of english concurs clt principles. however, as mentioned in earlier result, from the classroom observation, it was viewed that their classroom practices least represented their beliefs. the result shows despite the teachers’ intention to make child-centered classroom; the classroom teaching remain largely teacher dominated. teaching culture in language class from the sociolinguist’s perspective, teaching culture in language class enhances students’ knowledge on using the language appropriate to context and situation (hyme, 1972; savignon, 1983, 1997, 2000). affirmatively, all respondents stated that bhutanese children need to be introduced to foreign cultures in order to develop appropriate communicative behavior. compounding rest of the respondents’ view, respondent#2 stated that “language comes with culture, so we must understand the culture of native speakers. otherwise, what we think is right here would not be right there.” this was best illustrated by respondent#3: we need to teach the differences in expressing ourselves. here we consider polite when somebody puts his/her eyes down and speak in lower voice when talking to someone elder or higher rank. but that would be a sign of low confidence in english culture. in their culture, looking straight and speaking loud and clear is right behavior; this might be considered disrespectful here. on the other hand, respondent#3 showed hesitation in teaching second language culture in bhutan. teaching foreign culture was viewed to be demeaning the local culture. language comes with culture and if we are not careful about teaching language culture, which means introducing foreign culture, it could undermine our own culture. though, i agree it needs to be taught up to some extent, i would not like to make it dominant culture just to develop english language education in bhutan. overall, the respondents hold beliefs that comply with clt principles in four areas. they believed that the main goal of clt as to teach communication skills, clt as teaching language for real life use, children-centered teaching methods, and teaching of culture in the classroom. however, their classroom teaching deviate to their beliefs. this also show that although the teachers have certain right conceptualization about clt, their practice still adhere to traditional teaching method. conceptualization deviating from clt notion the interviews revealed two beliefs, views, and assumptions that the respondents held about clt, those are disparate to clt principles professed in the clt literatures (canale & swain, 1980; hyme, 1972; savignon, 1983, 1997). they were: (1) zero use of mother tongue, and (2) teaching only listening and speaking. not using mother tongue all respondents responded that clt means not using mother tongue in english language class. the techniques like code switching and code mixing are viewed as impediment in language learning process. this is described by respondent#2: “using mother tongue in classroom only encourages students to communicate in their local language.” respondent#4 reiterated a similar view: since my students are poor in english, they feel more comfortable using their mother tongue. so, if they are allowed to use mother tongue in the class, they will not bother to use english. likewise, if the teacher uses mother tongue students imitate the teacher. even with senior students, given a chance, they would not use english. so, i feel that teacher and students should refrain from using mother tongue in english classroom. although the respondents said that they use mother tongue to overcome challenges to convince the learners with some abstract concepts, they maintained that as far as possible they try not to use the mother tongue. the respondents’ conviction was that by abstaining mother tongue in classroom language, they could influence indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 7 students develop habit of using english. respondent#1’s statement bears the view: the english teachers should not use the students’ mother tongue in the classroom. since teachers are the model of language user in the class, if the teachers use the first language so often, the students will be rather confused and pick up the habit of using their mother tongue hand in hand with english, which i think is not good. correspondingly, the teacher was observed not using any of the local languages at all in the classroom. teaching only listening and speaking the results indicated that respondents viewed clt as focusing mostly on listening and speaking skills, while neglecting reading and writing. though the respondents maintained that their main focus of teaching english is to develop students’ communicative competence, their conceptions of communicative competence were bound to language accuracy and fluency. when asked to define communicative competence, three respondents (respondent#2, 3 and 4) defined it as the ability to speak fluently and accurately. respondent#2 stated, “my focus in teaching english is to develop students’ ability to speak fluently with correct grammar and pronunciation.” generally, the participants held two conceptions that deviate from clt principles. they believed clt means not using mother tongue and it means teaching only listening and speaking. lack of awareness about clt results revealed that participants lacked awareness about clt. three respondents (respondent#1, 2, and 3) admitted that they never heard of clt. nevertheless, respondent#1 acknowledged that the respondent has heard about it, but has little knowledge about it. respondent conceded, “i came across this word (clt) somewhere, but i did not take the trouble of going through it in detail.” further, when asked to define clt, it was defined with hesitation: “maybe an approach to enhance communicative language; the ability to speak fluently, correctly, and write well.” other respondents defined clt based on the term and their understandings. respondent#3 defined it: “it must be about how to communicate effectively, how to understand others, how to make others understand what you are saying, so it must be something like that”. similarly, respondent#2 described: i am not sure; i am hearing the term for the first time. but i think, as language teachers, we have been teaching our students to communicate in english. maybe i was partially fulfilling the aspects of communicative language teaching though i didn’t hear the term clt before. because communication skills by any means come in the central of teaching english language. so, i think, it is an approach to teach how to communicate fluently and correctly. overall, the results of this study revealed that clt conceptualization held by bhutanese esl teachers largely complied with the notion of clt proposed by the scholars. they were clt as a language teaching approach that focuses on developing communicative competence, teaching language for real life, child-centered teaching, and teaching culture in the second language classroom. however, two notions deviating from clt concepts were found: clt as not using mother tongue in teaching english, and teaching only listening and speaking skills. finally, the study also uncovered the fact that the esl teachers are not aware of clt approach. the results found that the respondents believed clt as teaching for developing communicative competence which was in consistent to the goal of clt posited by larser-freeman (2000). respondent pointed out that everything done in clt classroom is driven by a communicative intention. similarly, clt emphasizes on preparing the students for communication beyond the classroom (savignon, 1983, 1997). this study found that the respondents focused on enabling the learners to communicate in real life situation as well. clt treats teaching of culture essential for developing communicative skill (guilherme, 2000). this notion has engendered the idea of jigme dorji communicative language teaching as conceptualized by bhutanese english as second language teachers 8 intercultural communicative competence, the knowledge, motivation and skills to interact effectively and appropriately with members of different cultures (wiseman, 2002). corresponding to this notion, the respondents viewed teaching culture in the classroom as essential to develop intercultural sensitivity. furthermore, the results revealed that the respondents viewed clt as student-centered teaching in compliance with richardson’s (2006) definition of clt as child-friendly and interactive approach. on the other hand, the results also revealed respondents’ view of clt as not using mother tongue in teaching english. wu (2008) and thomson (1996) reported these notions as common misconceptions the teachers held about clt in china and other contexts. wu maintained that the notion of zero-mother-tongue emerged from traditional method such as audio-visual and direct methods. in task-based learning (one form of clt), mother tongue can be used to suit the situations, such as explaining complex ideas or concepts (turnbull 2001 as cited in wu, 2008). however, the issue of overusing mother tongue merits discussion in bhutanese context where children have a common first language (dzongkha). this was found as an issue in monolingual country like thailand, china, and taiwan (wanchai, 2011, chang, 2011; nazary, 2008). wanchai found that thai esl teachers used l1 exceedingly in the classroom which limited opportunity for the students to practice target language in the class. therefore, wu warned the language teachers that “a teachers’ goal needs to be to find the right balance between the use of l1 and l2, which makes sure students understand and that the same time maximizes the use of the target language” (p. 52). thomson (1996) and wu (2008) also pointed that another common misconceptualization the teachers have about clt is, teachers think clt focuses only on listening and speaking, and ignores the need of developing writing and reading skills. unfortunately, the respondents in this study held identical views too. though clt proposes oral instructions as effective means to teach language, savignon (1983, 1991, 1997) and lasser-freeman (2000) reaffirmed that clt balances its emphasis on all traditional language skills. finally, the study found that esl teachers were either unaware of existence of clt approach or had limited knowledge about the approach. three respondents admitted that they never heard about clt, and one conceded of knowing little about it. furthermore, the concept of communicative competence as conceived by the four respondents was strictly bound to fluency and accuracy, not accounting to sociolinguistic, discourse and pragmatic dimensions of competence. the findings, therefore, endorses la prairie’s (2013) study which concluded that bhutanese esl teachers have lack awareness about theoretical framework of language sensitive teaching approaches. inadequacy in grasping the concepts of communicative competence could be, therefore, one of the reasons for teachers’ inhibition in practicing communicative approach. mangubhai et al. (2007) offered a clear explanation to the phenomenon observed in this study. they suggested that teacher might have two conceptualizations: a theoretical one based on study, and a practical one based on classroom experiences. conclusion from the findings of this study, it can be concluded that the clt conceptualization that bhutanese esl teachers hold are constructed based on their teaching experiences rather than from theoretical knowledge. the study suggests that the inadequacy of theoretical knowledge of bhutanese esl teachers about clt may be affecting in translating the emphasis on incorporating communicative dimensions the national curriculum makes. however, as anderson (1993) noted that the clt approach found based on western context may not be directly applicable in esl and efl contexts. to enhance their practical knowledge, thus, input on theories of communication competence and communicative teaching frameworks would offer clear information regarding the process in localizing the concept and developing indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 9 effective methods and techniques in teaching communication skills. reference asassfeh, s. m. khwaileh, al-shaboul & alshaboual. 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(2012). the national education framework: shaping bhutan’s future. thimphu: royal education council. sato & kleinssaser (1999). communicative language teaching (clt): practical understanding. the modern language journal, 8(3), 494-517. savignon, j. s. (1983). communicative competence: theory and classroom practice. reading, ma: addison-wesley. _____________. (1997). communicative competence: theory and classroom practice. reading, ma: addisonwesley. _____________. (1991). communicative language teaching: state of the art. tesol quarterly, 25(2), 261-277. _____________. (2006). beyond communicative language teaching: what’s ahead? journal of pragmatics, 39, 207-220. swain, m. (1980). a critical look at the communicative approach. elt journal, 39(1), 2-12. thomson, g. (1996). some misunderstanding about communicative language teaching. elt journal, 50(1), 9-15. wanchai, p. (2011). teachers’ conceptualizations of clt approaches and their practice: a closer look into thai efl classrooms. unpublished thesis, master degree, faculty of liberal arts, mahidol university. wu, w. (2008). misunderstandings of communicative language teaching. english language teaching, 1(1), 50-53. jigme dorji communicative language teaching as conceptualized by bhutanese english as second language teachers 10 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 2, july 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 105 translanguaging a tool for igniting ethnic sensitivities in multi-ethnic sindh, pakistan ameer ali university of sindh, jamshoro, pakistan email: ameer7037@gmail.com maya khemlani david university of malaya, kuala lumpur, malaysia email: mayadavid@yahoo.com syed abdul manan graduate school of education, nazarbayev university nur-sultan, kazakhstan email: syed.manan@nu.edu.kz apa citation: ali, a., david, m. k., manan, s. a. (2021). translanguaging – a tool for igniting ethnic sensitivities in multi-ethnic sindh, pakistan. indonesian efl journal, 7(2), pp. 105-120. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i2.4564 received: 19-03-2020 accepted: 18-05-2021 published:15-07-2021 introduction translanguaging, as a pedagogical tool, originates from the welsh, bilingual education system (lewis, jones, and baker, 2012). cen williams, a welsh educationist, introduced the idea of translanguaging in 1980s (lewis, jones, and baker, 2012) and produced a welsh word ‘trwasieithu’ that is an english equivalent of the term ‘translanguaging’ (conteh, 2019). scholars define ‘translanguaging’ as multilingual, verbal intercourse and use of different, written languages (garcía, 2009). “translanguaging is the act performed by bilinguals of accessing different linguistic features or various modes of what are described as autonomous languages, in order to maximize communicative potential” (garcía, 2009, p.140). translanguaging was purposefully developed as a cross-curricular strategy for simultaneous, systematic teaching and learning of the same lesson. (conteh, 2019). nowadays, educationists have begun to recognize the pedagogic value of translanguaging in manners that is also advantageous for other language users (wei, 2018). additionally, translanguaging has become an effective way of understanding multilingual practices (beiler, 2020). according to vogel and garcía (2017), bilinguals/multilinguals use translanguaging to make meaning and negotiate communicative contexts. however, in multilingual contexts where language activists are calling for mother tongue education and where languages are playing an influential role in construction of ethnic identities, translanguaging has become a political tool of igniting ethnolinguistic sensitivities. similarly, in sindh, which is a multilingual province of pakistan, translanguaging has been exploited by politicians to achieve their goals and perpetuate their interests. since there is much support for sindhi language in sindh, politicians make use of translanguaging in their speeches to abstract: this study examines translanguaging as a political tool in pakistan used to exploit ethnic sensitivities of speech communities. building upon the grounded theory, concept of translanguaging was reconsidered to examine the politicized use of codes. the modified concept has been used to analyse the discourse of politicians and to demonstrate that such a mixed code has generated three tactical outcomes: politicization of language use, manipulation of general will, and exploitation of electoral support. the data comes from speeches of pakistani politicians in sindh, pakistan between 2018 to 2020. this study demonstrates the politics of translanguaging, that is, the exploitation of language use for political purposes and argues that language policy experts should be made aware of such ramifications of the use of translanguaging as a political tool. keywords: ethnic sensitivities; exploitation; language policy; pakistan; sindh; translanguaging. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i2.4564 ameer ali, maya khemlani david, & syed abdul manan translanguaging – a tool for igniting ethnic sensitivities in multi-ethnic sindh, pakistan 106 provoke sindhis and thereby win political support within the province. therefore, it is argued in this research that the politics of translanguaging produces the effects of exploiting electoral results and general will of sindhis and other ethnic communities in sindh. since sindh is a multilingual province where languages are associated with ethnic identity, it is common that politicians exploit its multilingual reality through translanguaging. the use of translanguaging incites the ethnic sensitivities of sindhis, because the sindhis have been advocating for the official status of the sindhi language (for more details see ali and david, 2021). sindh, a province of pakistan, was the cradle of the indus valley civilization in the third millennium bc (mukherjee, 2020) and represented the glorious past of sindh (solangi, laghari, and kabooro, 2017). over centuries, sindh bore the brunt of foreign invasions which brought different faiths, and ways of life to sindh (syed, 2010). according to pathan (1978), buddhism and hinduism were religions of many sindhis in sindh before the muslims came to sindh in the seventh century ad. in 1947, when the subcontinent was divided into pakistan and india, sindh became a part of pakistan where many sindhis lived. the sindhi language, that has been considered as an indo-aryan language, has evolved over a period of two millennia (mukherjee, 2020) and is now an official language of sindh. sindh is a multilingual province where sindhi, urdu, baluchi, brahui, seraiki, punjabi, and many other languages are spoken. although the sindhi language is native to sindhis of sindh, the urdu language is spoken by the muslim migrants who fled to sindh during the partition of the subcontinent in 1947. therefore, sindh is a highly mobile province characterized by historical displacements and contemporary mobilities. in the wake of increasing diversity, mobility and negotiation of complex attachments and affiliations emerge a conventional form of politics that is known as politics of conviviality (williams and stroud, 2013). consequently, the politics of language is and has been central to pakistan’s sindh province where misguided language policies have often resulted in ethnic riots between urdu speaking muhajirs and sindhi speaking natives (for details see ali and david, 2021). according to malik (1997), politicians have exploited language and ethnic issues resulting in ethnic conflicts in sindh. ethnic clashes among urdu speaking muhajirs, pashto speaking pashtuns, punjabis and sindhis have claimed the lives of about 2000 people in the province (kennedy, 1991). different language communities in sindh are divided over ethnic lines and their ethnic identities are misused by politicians using a number of linguistic strategies. given this background it is the aim of this research to determine the play on languages used by politicians in sindh and their use of translanguaging as a political tool to divide and rule the people of sindh. speeches from leaders belonging to pakistan’s different political parties have been critically analyzed. these political parties include pakistan people’s party, pakistan muslim league nawaz, pakistan muslim league functional, and baluchistan national party (mengal). pakistan people’s party and pakistan muslim league functional have the majority of sindhi followers who are based in sindh. baluchistan national party is based in the baluchistan province of pakistan and is mostly supported by brahui and baluchi speaking people in the province. the pakistan muslim league nawaz has its followers in the punjab province of pakistan. in the national assembly, pakistan people’s party and pakistan muslim league nawaz are in opposition, while pakistan muslim league functional is in alliance with the tehreek-e-insaaf-led government. the politics of translanguaging plays an influential role in igniting ethnic sensitivities of sindhis in sindh. politicians in sindh use translanguaging as a tool of linguistic exploitation, and their use of sindhi along with arabic and urdu in their speeches incites the emotions of the sindhi speech community in sindh. this politicized use of translanguaging also brings about in sindh what smith et al (2020) have identified as a tension between the urges of pluralism and collectivism. the politics of translanguaging has become a strategic tool of politicians in sindh who use it to achieve their political goals. political speech involves highly influential, complex processes (smith, 2009). it is “usually the product of a three‐tiered authorship comprising media advisors, researchers, and drafters” (smith, 2009, p.52). at every stage of decision making, and within each functional group, those who write/make political indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 2, july 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 107 speeches have impact on the final product (smith, 2009). the aim of this research is to determine how politicians in sindh, against the backdrop of language policy, make use of translanguaging as a tool to ignite the ethnic sensitivities of sindhis in sindh. in addition, verses are also used in their speeches. sindhi politicians make use of sindhi verses which they derive from the poetry of a famous seventeenth century poet, shah abdul latif bhittai. in sindh, many politicians use urdu to demonstrate national interest, sindhi to accommodate to the listening public, religious terms in arabic to denote they are muslims, and english to denote power and education. it is not only the politicized choice of these named languages that wins the hearts of people but different genres of poetry which are embedded in these speeches are also effective tools of translingual politics. language policy/regime in pakistan’s sindh province is exclusionary, and many sindhis in sindh have been actively engaged in a struggle for their language rights. in sindh, two languages sindhi and urdu along with english are used as official languages, however, the language activists of sindhi language are passionately calling for the implementation of the sindhi language bill (1972) that gave sindhi language official status (for details see ali and david, 2021). the use of the two languages-sindhi and urduhave different implicationsurdu is seen as a language of national integrity and cohesion, while sindhi is seen as a marker of ethnic identity of the sindhis in sindh. sindh’s history of language policy is replete with critical junctures. critical junctures are acts of protest or resistance which attempt to counter oppressive language policies much like other governmental policies (for details on critical junctures see ali and david, 2021). according to cardinal and sonntag (2015), these critical junctures tend to influence language policy. language agitation and protests become inevitable in a multilingual region where languages become markers of identity. pakistan is a multilingual country, and language is a marker of identity that renders it a politically sensitive subject. ethnicity in such a multilingual country incites the feelings of people on the basis of identity symbols, such as language, religion or experience to gain some share in goods and services (rahman, 2002). therefore, multilingualism has been considered as problem rather than asset in pakistan’s successive language policies (manan, david, and dumanig, 2017). gordon (2005) reporting on multilingual reality of pakistan says that there are seventy-two languages spoken in pakistan. for details on the major languages of pakistan see table 1: table 1. major languages of pakistan and their speakers (rahman, 2002) language speakers their percentage in pakistan punjabi 48.17% pashto 13.14% sindhi 11.77% seraiki 9.83% urdu 7.60% balochi 3.02% hindko 2.43% brahvi 1.21% note: other minor languages spoken in pakistan number more than 50. in pakistan, english and urdu are languages of power, while the other languages have been downplayed, and language activists are calling for teaching students in their indigenous languages (rahman, 2002). this activism for less powerful languages has been a result of what rasool and mansoor (2007) call the partition of india in 1947. the fractures and displacement of the division have caused ethnolinguistic conflicts which are still prevalent in pakistan (rasool and mansoor, 2007). the exclusion of indigenous languages and therefore multilingualism in pakistan has been due to orthodox beliefs of elt practitioners which discourage them from using mother tongues as a tool to learn the target language (english) (manan and tul-kubra, 2020). according to rahman (1996), there is inextricable link between language and politics in pakistan. in his book, he (1996) argues that the linguistic conflict is related to political dominance in pakistan. using historical data, he examines british-era language policies, urdu-bengali controversy, and how the politics of identity formation inspired bengali, baluchi, pashto, punjabi, sindhi, and seraiki movements in pakistan. after the influx of urdu-speaking immigrants to sindh in 1947, “the teaching of sindhi has become an ethnic, identity symbol for the sindhi nationalists. thus, it is promoted by the sindhis and resisted by the urdu speaking muhajirs” (immigrants from india who came to pakistan’s ameer ali, maya khemlani david, & syed abdul manan translanguaging – a tool for igniting ethnic sensitivities in multi-ethnic sindh, pakistan 108 sindh province after the partition of the subcontinent in 1947) (rahman, 1999, p.21). in such a linguistically diverse region where languages have become a symbol of ethnic identity, language-based politics becomes a norm, and different language groups struggle for their upward linguistic mobility. these ethnolinguistic emotions have been exploited by politicians in sindh much to their advantage through translanguaging. in their speeches, the tactical use of translanguaging has been identified critically to derive a theoretical lens. the theoretical framework used in this research has been developed after codifying the data culled from the politicians’ speeches in sindh. the concept of translanguaging has been reconsidered and modified to better understand the politicized use of translanguaging and its repercussions in sindh. central ideas developed from the collected data are presented here. translanguaging is a politicized process that ignites and exploits ethnic emotions. it appeals to ethnic identity of different speech communities in a multi-ethnic region; it is a dynamic practice which codifies politicians’ multi-lingual, political speech acts. politics of translanguaging incites ethnic groups’ sensitivities through popular culture, language choice and nationalist discourse. consequently, it leads people into believing that their culture, language and identity are being taken care of by their leaders, however, it is a tactic used to win political support of different ethnic communities. sometimes, politicians who strive to make use of translanguaging lack diverse, linguistic repertoire. consequently, they memorize a few popular sentences of different languages so that they may use these to demonstrate their translingual practices. however, it is a political tactic of fabricating translanguaging to influence opinions of multiethnic audience. this fabricated translanguaging is more effective strategy because it convinces the multi-ethnic audience in to believing that their leaders are trying their best to converge to ethnolinguistic diversity. in sindh’s context, for instance, using arabic demonstrates the act of fabricating translanguaging because many politicians cannot speak or write in arabic. however, they use it to gain support of those people who respect arabic language because it is language of the quran, a sacred book of muslims. whether it is fabricated or not, translanguaging renders certain repercussions on society where it is used. usually, it results in encouraging translingual practices among languages of major ethnic groups. therefore, it is right to say that it is majoritarian translanguaging that politically encourages major social, ethnic groups and their languages, while at the same time discourage minority groups and their languages. in this way, translanguaging helps politicians gain general support, on the one hand, whereas divide society across majority and minority lines, on the other hand. the political unity that it induces is beneficial for politicians, while the social division that it causes is harmful for minority language groups. translanguaging, therefore, is not always a mechanism of encouraging linguistic inclusion, cultural independence and democratic representation rather it is a process of going beyond language boundaries promoting fixed political interests. linguistic fluidity and dynamism facilitates politicians to promote their political interests by using multilingual repertoire. 1.4 segment breakdown in the first section, topic has been introduced contextualizing it to sindh province of pakistan, and grounded approach towards politicized use of translanguaging in sindh has been explained. in the second section, concepts of translanguaging have been reviewed to show how they lack rigour to analyze politicized use of translanguaging in a multilingual context. the third section describes research methodology adopted in this research. analysis has been conducted in the fourth section, while the fifth segment is about discussion. the sixth section concludes the research article. now, theories/concepts of translanguaging and codeswitching are to be critically discussed to demonstrate how these lack in their critical underpinnings and thereby are not suitable to examine politics of translanguaging in a multiethnic region. previous concepts/theories of translanguaging show its democratic role and inclusive nature. however, none of these concepts/theories to the best of our knowledge, showed how translanguaging becomes a tool of igniting ethnic sensitivities and its repercussions on the society in general and sindhi society in particular. moreover, none of these concepts elaborated why politicians usually switch among languages of wider communication and how indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 2, july 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 109 translingual practices help them achieve their goals of influencing general will of their multi-ethnic audience. against this backdrop, we propose a theoretical concept of translanguaging which seeks to problematize linguistic fluidity and dynamism in politicians’ speeches. it is hoped that this research fills the theoretical gap by showing how translanguaging cashes on linguistic, cultural concerns of a multi-ethnic audience and how political interests are translanguaged beyond linguistic boundaries. the nation state’s expectations police the linguistic behaviour of students and other citizens (blommaert et al., 2009). however, multilingual environments, “for instance, new media (e.g., the internet and computer games) create translocal moments of activity and…thus offering multiple forms of allegiance (blommaert et al., 2009, p.204), and ethnic association is one of the forms of allegiance. their view also refers to the emerging fact that ethnolinguistic struggles come about in multilingual, virtual environments and how translanguaging can be easily missed as an opportunity of developing hybrid, translocal opportunity precisely because ethnic interests are stressed more than translocal priorities. garcía (2009) views translanguaging as a strategy of maximizing communicative skills. in contrast, it is a strategy of inciting ethnic emotions that is designed to serve political interests in multiethnic regions. erdocia, (2020) states that translanguaging causes linguistic exploitation when used by politicians as a tool. erdocia’s (2020) critical, qualitative analysis contextualized in catalonia, spain demonstrates how politicians invocate international educational standards, such as translanguaging/plurilingualism as a tool to achieve their political goals. erdocia’s view of translanguaging puts light on political exploitation through translanguaging, however, it does not demonstrate how politicians use it in their speeches to achieve their goals. smith et al (2020) argue that translanguaging also causes clash between political forces of pluralism and collectivism. they conceptualize it as pluralists’ strategy used against proponents of monolingual collectivism. they implicitly claim that it encourages linguistic pluralism and cultural diversity. their view lacks critical approach towards translanguaging, especially how politicians exploit it in multi-ethnic regions. paulsrud and rosen (2019) critically reviewed empirical studies on translanguaging conducted in different countries to show how translanguaging in educational, and political contexts manifests, negotiates, and challenges both implicit and explicit language ideologies. their research focusses on the connection between language ideologies and translanguaging in different political contexts. in sindh’s context, ali (2021) has qualitatively discussed how translanguaging is a pedagogical tool for language learning. ali views translanguaging as a tool of acquiring second language. in sindh’s context, politicians’ use of translanguaging has increased in recent years that is politically, linguistically, and socially affecting different speech communities. therefore, translanguaging and its role inside classroom or out of the classroom context cannot be taken for granted and there is dire need to problematize linguistic fluidity and dynamism in all multi-ethnic contexts. method this research is qualitative in its form and content because the grounded theory was used to reconsider the concept of translanguaging in the out-ofclassroom context in sindh. data collection secondary data, such as politicians’ speeches made between 2018 and 2020 in sindh, was collected for conducting analysis. speeches were chosen from this period because ethnolinguistic awareness was resurging in pakistan and sindh. ten political speeches made through translanguaging in sindhi, urdu, english and arabic taken from youtube channels belonging to pakistani news channels were purposively selected, manually transcribed and translated into english. data was collected from these channels because they were virtual, easily accessible domains of pakistan’s media outlets. details of youtube channels are given below, see table 2. table 2. youtube channels youtube channel name web-link 1. news hd https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrfx2p6164q&feature=share&fbclid=iwar3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrfx2p6164q&feature=share&fbclid=iwar3iebwwi9tzhyphovvlbyd9cdmfftwwrlli81shxccqkmrj0oerxuungpc ameer ali, maya khemlani david, & syed abdul manan translanguaging – a tool for igniting ethnic sensitivities in multi-ethnic sindh, pakistan 110 iebwwi9tzhyphovvlbyd9cdmfftwwrlli81shxccqkmrj0oerxuungpc. 2. ary news https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpjyca1bpcg&feature=share&fbclid=iwar2o gkwew19mujuxd6nlfuak2sgnuabyymtgvbzg78r9_ebu4_dx5kxc4he. 3. charsadda journalist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfl6x7ukj10&feature=share&fbclid=iwar2 dnyssakxzqlw3vwyssc0i19ehfekeacfwejustov5i_hhw4g3r_ubhnc. 4. naya daur tv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5shmtszmuy8&feature=share&fbclid=iwar 0hfe1-qvpbi2yknl9-0n8fnrof00lj6iqcsddgvp-8hooo8ihvvvvirw0. 5. news line https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtrvwko25ws&feature=share&fbclid=iwar 3jrc7fojgwc2cbxhsisk_qop6wflqeoex7ckakscg-dlk0ntf2lqzzj2a. 6. samaa tv link 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nftxc8kptas&feature=share&fbclid=iwar1e uxuouqmdmh6fa9fifw_tzqtgggatxtlcvnp3k1imc6aiq-ynj8228ek. link 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pogosouqhdo&t=919s 7. sindh tv news https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyrf7mz0ziq&feature=share&fbclid=iwar0 qwvxqymoi9emsf_nzpruupmwmx5uwuatokybvtu2j9wgxsez4woeixjw . 8. syed sardar ali shahofficial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vns8qqz7i0&t=300s. 9. united tv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iznz_wcafqq&feature=share&fbclid=iwar 2knsre1nc0q4qa2fjhghpr7ke7d8wrnbmknabhp-gbzd-fgdpgweu2byu. coding the collected data was coded into three broader themes based on insights derived from the careful, contextual reading of the politicians’ speeches. these speeches were codified into broader themes which are translanguaging: a mechanism of political selectiveness of languages in sindh, a politicized nexus of poetry and speech genre through translanguaging, and translanguaging: a tool of manufacturing popular consent. moreover, these broader categories also enabled us to develop theoretical generalizations in sindh’s context. theoretical sampling the three broader categories developed during the coding process were used as theoretical concepts to analyze the data culled from the known speeches. the three concepts were critically applied to demonstrate how politicians in sindh make use of translanguaging which is politically motivated. in this way, a theory of the politicized use of translanguaging was developed in sindh’s context to better understand politics of translanguaging. details about the politicians the speeches were either from party leaders or people’s representatives in the provincial assembly of sindh who represent a large portion of the people in sindh and pakistan. the politicians belong to pakistan’s different political parties which have been earlier described. they made speeches either in the provincial assembly of sindh or in their political shows. details about the politicians are given here, see table 3: table 3. details about the politicians politician name gender political affiliation province 1. riaz chandio male jiye sindh mahaz (leader) sindh 2. murad ali shah male pakistan people’s party sindh 3. maryam nawaz female pakistan muslim league (nawaz) punjab 4. qaim ali shah male pakistan people’s party sindh 5. nusrat sehar abbasi female pakistan muslim league (functional) sindh 6. nisar khoro male pakistan people’s party sindh 7. akhtar mengal male baluchistan national party (mengal). baluchistan 8. sardar ali shah male pakistan people’s party sindh results and discussion excerpts culled from political speeches of politicians in sindh show a number of instances in which they make use of politics of translanguaging to achieve their goals of igniting ethnic sensitivities. the political speeches clearly demonstrate that in some speeches translanguaging occurs among languages, such as sindhi, urdu, or english, while https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrfx2p6164q&feature=share&fbclid=iwar3iebwwi9tzhyphovvlbyd9cdmfftwwrlli81shxccqkmrj0oerxuungpc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpjyca1bpcg&feature=share&fbclid=iwar2ogkwew19mujuxd6nlfuak2sgnuabyymtgvbzg78r9_ebu4_dx5kxc4he https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpjyca1bpcg&feature=share&fbclid=iwar2ogkwew19mujuxd6nlfuak2sgnuabyymtgvbzg78r9_ebu4_dx5kxc4he https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfl6x7ukj10&feature=share&fbclid=iwar2dnyssakxzqlw3vwyssc0i19ehfekeacfwejustov5i_hhw4g3r_ubhnc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfl6x7ukj10&feature=share&fbclid=iwar2dnyssakxzqlw3vwyssc0i19ehfekeacfwejustov5i_hhw4g3r_ubhnc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5shmtszmuy8&feature=share&fbclid=iwar0hfe1-qvpbi2yknl9-0n8fnrof00lj6iqcsddgvp-8hooo8ihvvvvirw0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5shmtszmuy8&feature=share&fbclid=iwar0hfe1-qvpbi2yknl9-0n8fnrof00lj6iqcsddgvp-8hooo8ihvvvvirw0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtrvwko25ws&feature=share&fbclid=iwar3jrc7fojgwc2cbxhsisk_qop6wflqeoex7ckakscg-dlk0ntf2lqzzj2a https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtrvwko25ws&feature=share&fbclid=iwar3jrc7fojgwc2cbxhsisk_qop6wflqeoex7ckakscg-dlk0ntf2lqzzj2a https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nftxc8kptas&feature=share&fbclid=iwar1euxuouqmdmh6fa9fifw_tzqtgggatxtlcvnp3k1imc6aiq-ynj8228ek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nftxc8kptas&feature=share&fbclid=iwar1euxuouqmdmh6fa9fifw_tzqtgggatxtlcvnp3k1imc6aiq-ynj8228ek https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pogosouqhdo&t=919s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyrf7mz0ziq&feature=share&fbclid=iwar0qwvxqymoi9emsf_nzpruupmwmx5uwuatokybvtu2j9wgxsez4woeixjw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyrf7mz0ziq&feature=share&fbclid=iwar0qwvxqymoi9emsf_nzpruupmwmx5uwuatokybvtu2j9wgxsez4woeixjw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vns8qqz7i0&t=300s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iznz_wcafqq&feature=share&fbclid=iwar2knsre1nc0q4qa2fjhghpr7ke7d8wrnbmknabhp-gbzd-fgdpgweu2byu https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iznz_wcafqq&feature=share&fbclid=iwar2knsre1nc0q4qa2fjhghpr7ke7d8wrnbmknabhp-gbzd-fgdpgweu2byu indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 2, july 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 111 in other speeches translanguaging takes place among arabic, sindhi, or english. patterns and mechanisms of politics of translanguaging in political speeches have been used by politicians in sindh as a basis for igniting ethnic sensitivities which have often resulted in critical junctures and controversial language regimes and policies (for more details see ali and david, 2021). in sindh’s context, politics of translanguaging, like critical junctures is basically aimed at language accommodation, influencing general will, and thereby impacting electoral results. information about the alternating processes of languages in the politicians’ speeches through translanguaging can be studied by language researchers as a basis for igniting ethnic sensitivities of sindhis and other speech communities living in sindh. in some educational contexts, translanguaging will signify some appreciative remarks about the translanguaging user and the norm is to accept the practice (romanowski, 2019). however, translanguaging also causes linguistic exploitation when used by politicians as a tool (erdocia, 2020). therefore, in this research, politicians’ use of translanguaging has been analysed based on three themes: translanguaging: a mechanism of political selectiveness of languages in sindh, a politicized nexus of poetry and speech genre through translanguaging, and translanguaging: a tool of manufacturing popular consent. please note in the following examples, colours, such as red for sindhi, green for urdu, blue for arabic and purple for english have been used. also, the same has been done in the roman scripts of the languages, and their translations in english have also the same colour. translanguaging: a mechanism of political selectiveness of languages in sindh translanguaging is a political tool that facilitates politicians in sindh to politically involve themselves in multilingual practices to attract support of multiple language groups. therefore, politics of translanguaging appears to have similar exploitative patterns in different language contexts (erdocia, 2020; smith et al, 2020; muelder et al, 2019). example 1 taken from riaz chandio’s speech, a sindhi nationalist party jeaye sindh mahaz leader, shows how translanguaging is used by nationalist politicians in sindh. in karachi, a city in sindh where the speech is sited and which witnessed ethnic conflicts between sindhis and urdu speaking muhajirs in 1970s, it is a political tactic to translanguage, and it is the translanguaging user who is perceived as being a heroic figure representing interests of sindhis. thus, the politics of translanguaging and the ethnic sensitivities associated to it is an act of politically exploiting sindhis in sindh. riaz chandio, jeaye sindh mahaz leader addressing at karachi press club in sindh province makes a political use of translanguaging. jeaye sindh mahaz is a sindhi nationalist party in sindh, and its inspiration comes from the political discourse that the non-sindhis are exploring the sindhis and their land and resources. in the speech, chandio demonstrates his dynamic, linguistic practice by politically selecting two languages which are sindhi and urdu. he employs sindhi language to point out the economic exploitation of sindhis in sindh at the hands of their rulers, simultaneously, he shifts to urdu holding rulers responsible for many sindhis’ appalling condition. through these politicized, bilingual choices, he is trying to appeal to the emotions of the urdu speaking, and the sindhi speaking communities of sindh and thereby exploiting the provincial multiethnicity. also, the dynamic, linguistic practice in sindhi and urdu allows him to ignite both the speech communities against their oppressive rulers, he claimed. example 1 وشحال سنڌ جيڪا کربين ڊالر توھان جي خزاني ۾ـڀري اوھان ان خ ٿي, توھان منھنجي ڪروڙين ڌرتي ڌڻين , منھنجي مأ رن , منھنجي ٻچڙن , ڀيڻن کي جيڪو معاشي طرح بدحا ل ڪيو آ. دنيا ۔ يے پريس کلـب کراچی کے ميداں سے ، يے جيہی سندھ ڏسي ور محاذ کے سرخ جھندوں ميں ھم يے کھتے ھيں ھمارے بھوک ا افالس ، يے جبر، يے سياھی، حکمرانوں نے ھم پر مصلت کی ھے۔۔۔ roman script …^awah un khushaal sindh jeka kharabein dollar tawajay khazany mn bharay thee, tawa munja karorein dharti dhanyun, munjay maorin, munjay bachiran, bhenun khy jeko muashi tarah badhaal kayo aw. dunya disay yeh press club karachi kay maiden sey, yeh jea sindh mahaz kay surkh jhandon mn hum yeh kehtay hn kay hamaray bhook aur aflas, yeh jabir, yeh siyahi, hukuranon nay hum per musalat ki hay… riaz chandio, jeaye sindh mahaz leader addressing ameer ali, maya khemlani david, & syed abdul manan translanguaging – a tool for igniting ethnic sensitivities in multi-ethnic sindh, pakistan 112 at karachi press club (united tv, 2020). english translation …you have looted the sindh which pays you billions of dollars, you have economically plundered countless indigenous sindhis, my mothers, my children, and my sisters. let the world see us drapped with the red flags of jeay sindh mahaz here at karachi press club, we are saying that this hunger and poverty, this oppression, this darkness have been imposed on us by our rulers. in the same manner, example 2 culled from chief minister of sindh murad ali shah’s speech at ghotki, a small town in sindh where the muslim sindhis live in majority, shows how the politics of code selectivity through translanguaging ignites ethnic sensitivities of sindhis and impacts electoral reality. since shah is in an official position, he uses arabic, sindhi, and urdu languages in his translingual process. to make his translingual practice much more effective, shah has employed islamic way of greeting and starting his speech using arabic language to stir the religious feelings of muslims in sindh (saying greetings and starting speeches with the name of allah). speaking translingually, shah’s linguistic practice shows that he is fabricating translanguaging because it is neither his first language nor his second language. he has memorized these greetings and solutions to appeal to religious feelings of muslims belonging to different ethnic groups in sindh. additionally, shah’s politics of translanguaging is tactically placed on two linguistic choices. on the one hand he shows through translanguaging by using sindhi how people in sindh are suffering, while on the other hand by using urdu he demonstrates how the prime minister who is his political opponent is showing his enmity towards sindhis by not allowing their leaders to contest election. shah’s politics of translanguaging, thus, reflects the fact that sindhis are being oppressed by a non-sindhi prime minister of pakistan and thus sindhis should keep themselves away from his party and should support shah’s political party by voting for him in the next election. at the same time, he switches to urdu and criticizes the prime minister. thus, through his dynamic practice of translanguaging he is politically choosing linguistic codes to win support of sindhi and urdu and other muslim speech communities. example 2 ﷽ ! آع ٿورٔاتو آھيان علي ـنواز خان مھرـجو , جٔيي ڀٽواسالم عليڪم ... يے جو اب آيا ھے جنھن دعوت ڏني ... ٿوروـاردو ۾ ڳلھأ يندس کے جس طريقے سے وھ سندھ کے ساتھ دشمنی کر رھا ھے ۔۔۔ ھيں لڑنے ديا کوششيں کی گئں ھمارے بڑے ليڈرس کو اليکشنس ن ۔۔۔گيآ roman script (bismillah rehman raheem, …asslam o alaikum, ^jiye bhutto! aoa thraito ahya ali nawz khan mahar jo jehn dawat dini…thoro urdu mn galhaindus yeh joh ab ayah hai (new prime minister of pakistan) k jis tareeqay si woh sindh k sath dushmani kar raha ha…koshishen ki gaen hamaray bary leaders ko election nhn larnay day gaya. chief minister sindh murad ali shah 2018 at ghotki.(samaa tv, 2018). english translation in the name of allah, the most kind and the most merciful …peace be on you. long live bhutto! i am thankful to ali nawaz mahar who invited us…i will speak a bit in urdu…this new prime minister of pakistan is showing his enmity towards sindh…efforts were made to prevent our leaders from partaking in election. in addition to the politicians of sindh, some politicians of the punjab province of pakistan also employ politics of translanguaging to stir up ethnic sentiments of sindhis living in sindh. example 2 that has been taken from maryam nawaz’s speech who is a pakistan muslim league-nawaz punjabi leader in pakistan contains politically inspired dynamic choices of language. the speech was made during the death anniversary of a sindhi politician benazir bhutto near larkana that is a small town to the north of sindh. nawaz though an ethnic punjabi intentionally uses sindhi. also, it shows an instance of fabricating translanguaging on her part when she tries to use a few memorized, sindhi sentences because sindhi is neither her first nor her second language. she accommodates to sindhis’ ethnic language so as to build rapport with them. her linguistic, dynamic practice allows her to translanguage in arabic, sindhi, and urdu languages. using sindhi language, she appreciatively says that sindhis are her brothers and sisters and their land is peaceful. this translanguaging by a punjabi politician enables her to use the ethnic card as a political strategy of indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 2, july 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 113 language accommodation or what giles (2016) calls language convergence. additionally, she switched to arabic and urdu to gain support of the urdu speaking muslim community in sindh and pakistan. example 3 ﷽ جناب محترم آصف زرداری صاحب ، جناب پاکستاں پيپلز پارڻی چئرميں بالول بھڻو صاحب ، پی۔دی۔ايم کے محترم قاءديں پيپلز پارڻي کے جيالو ، محترمہ ، منھنجا ـڀٔاروـ, منھنجون ڀينرون شھيد اور بھڻو شھيد کے ماننے والو، سندھ درتی کے بيڻو، آپکو اسالم عليکم طرف سے سندھ کی بيڻی۔۔۔مريم نواز کی اڄ مان سنڌ جي امن جي سرزمين تي ٔآي آھيان... roman script bismillah rahman raheem, janab mohtram asif zardari sahib (.) janab pakistan people’s party chairman bilawal bhutto sahib, pdm (pakistan democratic movement) kay mohtram qaideen, ^ mohnja bhairo, muhnjoon bhainroon, people’s party k jiyalo, mohtarma shaheed aur bhutto shaheed kay mannay walo, sindh dharti kay beto, apko sindh ki beti…maryam nawaz ki taraf sey assalam o alaikum. aj mawn sindh jay amun ji sarzameen tay ae ahya (people applauding and clapping) … maryam nawaz n-league leader during benazir warsi at garhi khuda baksh bhutto, 27th december 2020 (ary news, 2020) english translation in the name of allah, the kindest and the most merciful. respected asif ali zardari sahib, respected chairman of pakistan people’s party, bilawal bhutto sahib, the respected leaders of pdm (pakistan democratic movement), my brothers, my sisters, the followers of pakistan people’s party, the believers of mohtarma shaheed and bhutto shaheed, sons of sindh, the daughter of sindh…, i, maryam nawaz wish you peace. today, i have come to the land of sindh which is the land of peace… (people applauding and clapping). moreover, the similar type of political selectiveness through translanguaging has been shown in the following example. example 4 ميرے جيلو اور جياليو (.) اسالم عليکم ^جيءی بہٹو! توھان اڄ نيازي صاحب کي پيغام ٔڏي ڇڏيو آ ...سنڌ وارا سدٔاين اٻوجھ ناھن...ھنن اڳٔيي تاريخ ٺا ھي آ ۽ ضيالحق کان ن مڙيا. ھي ڊڪٽيٽرن کان ن مڙيا ^... roman script (mere jiyallo (an urdu word for men followers of pakistan people’s party) or jiyaleo (an urdu word for women followers of pakistan people’s party) (.) assalam o alaikum. jeaye bhutto! ^ tawa aj niazi sahib khy paigham dae chadyo aw…sindh wara sada ae abojah nahin. hinan agay ee tareekh thahee aw aen zia-ul-haq kha na murya. hee ^dictataran kha na murya…) qaim ali shah 2019, 21 june in nawab shah jalsa (sindh tv news, 2019) english translation my jiyalo (pakistan people’s party men followers) and my jiyaleo (women followers of pakistan people’s party in sindh), peace be on you. long live bhutto! today, you have sent out a message to niyazi sahib…that people of sindh are not naïve. they have made history and zia ul haq could not suppress them. dictators could not suppress them… qaim ali shah, a sindhi member of pakistan people’s party government in the provincial assembly of sindh, also makes political use of translanguaging through politicized selectiveness of languages during his formal address to his party activists in nawabshah, a district in sindh. much like nawaz, shah has also employed his multilingual repertoire to translanguage his political interests beyond linguistic boundaries shah politically selects three languages, such as arabic, urdu, and sindhi through translanguaging to help sindhis recall their struggle against dictatorships in the past. use of urdu and sindhi represent shah’s majoritarian translanguaging; shah’s obsession with majority languages and negligence of minority languages is politically beneficial for his party but socially harmful for minority language groups. translingual strategy and historical knowledge also allow him to ignite ethnic sensitivities of sindhis against his political opponent, prime minister of pakistan who he calls ‘niazi sahib’ (this expression is sarcastically used by members of opposition to refer to pakistan’s current prime minister imran khan). when viewed in the backdrop of sindh’s language policy, shah is complying with it, because he is effectively using both of the official languages ameer ali, maya khemlani david, & syed abdul manan translanguaging – a tool for igniting ethnic sensitivities in multi-ethnic sindh, pakistan 114 sindhi and urdu. additionally, shah’s speech also involves an islamic way of greeting using arabic (assalam o alaikum) which he also employs to convey his political message effectively to his followers whom he calls ‘jiyalo’ (a man follower of pakistan people’s party) and ‘jiyaleo’ (a woman follower of pakistan people’s party). a politicized nexus of poetry and speech genre through translanguaging in example 5, nusrat sehar abbasi, a sindhi member of an opposition party in the provincial assembly of sindh, makes use of politics of translanguaging through political mechanism of selectiveness. abbasi belongs to pakistan muslim league functional party, and she is a staunch critic of the ruling party in sindh that is pakistan people’s party (ppp). she tactically selects a sarcastic stanza in sindhi and chooses english and urdu to express her complaints against the governing politicians in the provincial assembly of sindh. example 5 جڏھن ڪرپٽ ھتي حکمران ٿيندا اي سندڙي ڇو ن تونجا نقصان ٿيندا ^جڏھن حق انصاف جوتن سان ٿڏجي ^ پو ڇو ن سندڙي تنھنجا نقصان ٿيندا ۔۔۔کے ٹاۂيم بہت کم ملے کا سر آء نو = roman script jaden corrupt hitay hukmran thenda, ay sindhri chona tunja nuqsan thenda. ^jaden haq insaf jootan san thadjay, ^poi chona sindhri tunja nuqsan thenda. sir i know, k time bohot kam milayga = nusrat sehar abbasi 2020, 22 june in the provincial assembly of sindh (24 news hd, 2020). english translation when the corrupt become rulers, they will ruin generations. when justice is not done, it will be harmful for beloved sindh. sir i know that i will be given a very little time… ethnic sensitivities are also reflected in her politicized discourse of translanguaging because she claims that much harm is being done against sindh by neglecting justice. her politics of translanguaging demonstrates material aims of preserving her party’s political interests beyond language boundaries. employing her linguistic repertoire, she is trolling her political opponents that they are corrupt, and they are plundering sindh. moreover, she has also relied on majoritarian translanguaging by satirically reciting a sindhi quadruplet in the beginning of her speech. the quadruplet raises ethnic feelings of sindhis in sindh by telling them that their land is being looted by the corrupt rulers and therefore they should stop this exploitation. then, she moves ahead to speak in english and urdu complaining that she will not be given much time, because she would be criticizing her political opponents in the assembly. her politics of translanguaging contains three languages which are sindhi, urdu, and english. her speech in the provincial assembly of sindh, therefore, is subject to sindh’s official language policy that allows the use of all the three languages in official domains. thus, she has relied upon official policy through tactical use of translanguaging accommodating linguistic concerns of majority groups and simultaneously outadministering her political opponents in sindh. politicians’ use of translanguaging relies upon the use of poetic verses which are effective in instigating deprived sindhis living in sindh. example 6 taken from a speech of nisar khoro who is pakistan people’s party the provincial assembly of sindh member shows how popular poetry intertwines through translanguaging with political discourse in igniting sindhis’ ethnic sensitivities. the politician in example 6 has relied upon shah abdul latif’s influential stanza. through translanguaging, he exploits the semantic force of the stanza and incites sindhis to rise with weapons and take on his political opponents, who he claims, have brought about marginalization of the sindhis in sindh. in addition, using sindhi poetry and urdu slogans as a political tool through translanguaging, the politician creates an emotional bond between sindhis and their cherished leader late benazir bhutto to awaken emotions of the former. furthermore, through translanguaging he also preserves political interests by going beyond one language boundaries. example 6 اچو ھڪ نعرو تـ ھٔڻون! جٔيي ڀٽو! ھا ڻي ... سورھيـ مڙھين سوڀ کي تـ دل جا وھم وسار ھڻ ڀاال , وڙھـ ڀاڪرين اڳيان ڍال مـ ڌار مٿان تيز ترار مار تـ متارو ٿٔيين. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 2, july 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 115 يھاں۔۔۔ قيآدت بيڻھی ھے اور يے لوکوں کو ديکھ رھی ھے۔ اور يے ں سالم کرنے آۓ بيبی ميں آپ کو کھ رھا ھوں، بيبی يے تمھي ھيں۔۔۔ roman script (…acho hik naro ta hanaon ^ jiye bhutto! hany… suriyah mariean sobh khy, ta dil ja waham wisar, han bhala, wirh bhakren, ageyan dhal ma dhar, ^mathan tez tarar mar ta mataro thean). yaha…qayadat bethi ha aur yeh logo ko dekh rehi ha (.) aur yeh ^ bibi mn ap ko keh raha hn, bibi yeh tumhen salam karnay aye hn… nisar khoro ppp leader at garhi khuda bakhsh (naya daur tv, 2020). english translation let’s raise a slogan! jeaye bhutto! now… oh, brave if you want to achieve success, forget your fears, strike spears, fight hard, be not coward, strike your sword hard and achieve success. …here leadership is sitting and putting their hopes in people, and bibi i am telling you this that bibi they have come here to greet you… translanguaging: a tool of creating popular consent translanguaging is an instrument used by politicians in sindh to arouse people’s emotions of populism by accommodating to local languages. this goal is usually achieved through fluid, linguistic practices which enable politicians to use different languages at the same time and thereby build rapport with different speech communities. moreover, their linguistic accommodation is mixed with content of popular culture and discourse. for instance, while switching to sindhi, politicians tend to speak highly of sindhi culture and nation. this is also applicable to other speech communities and their languages. in this situation, translanguaging becomes a tool through which politicians manage to create a sense among their diverse audience that their politicians/leaders are much attached to them. example 7 also shows this. example 7 اس مجموۓ ميں بيٹہے ہوۓ پاکستان پيپلز پارٹی کے ورکروں ساتھيو، محتلف سياسی پارٹيوں سے تعلق رکھنے والو دوستو، سب سے پھلے تو ميں شکريہ ادا کرنا چاھتا ھوں پاکستاں پيپلز پارٹی کے چئرميں۔۔۔آپ کی اجازت سے کيونکے سندھ کی درتی پے آيا کی ميٹھی زبان ميں بات نا ھوں تو يے عجيب بات ھوگی کے سندھ کروں سنڌ جي ڌرتٔي سان تعلقـ رکڻ وارٔو اوھان کي جيتري اوھان کي ان رتي جي مٽي سان پيار آ...تٔين جي مٽي عزيز آ... اوھان کي ان ڌ توھان اسا ن جو استقبال ڪيو. سنڌ جي ثقافت, سنڌ جي مھمان ت نوازي جو جيڪو نڪشو پيش ڪيو... آع شڪر گزار آھيان...دل چوي ٿي سڄي تقرير سنڌي ۾ ڪيا. ليڪن ڪجھ مجبوريون آھن. ڪجھ ٻيون ٻوليون ڳلھأيندڙ ب آيا آھن roman script …iss mujmuay mn bethay huye pakistan people’s party k workron (.) sathyo, mukhtalif siyasi partyun say taluq rakhnay walay dosto (.) sabh say pehlay toh mn shukrya ada karna chahta hn pakistan people’s party k chairman…aap ki ijazat sey kyunkay sindh ki dharti pay ayah hn tou yeh ajeeb bat hogi kay sindh ki meethi zaban mn baat na karun. (.) sindh ji dharti san taluq rakhan warao, jetri tawah khy inaji miti aziz aw…awah khy ina dharti ji mitea san pyar aw…^tean tawah asanjo istaqbal kayo. sindh ji saqafat, sindh ji mehmannawazi jo aj jeko awha naqsho paish kayo…aon shukar guzar ahya…dil ta chaway thi sajee taqreer sindhi mn kaya. lekin kujh majbooryun ahen. kujh byun boolyun galhaindar bhi aya ahen… akhtar mengal (chairman of balochistan national party (mengal)) in ppp jalsa at garhi khuda baksh 27 december, 2020 (charsadda journalist, 2020). english translation …the workers of pakistan people’s party, companions, friends belonging to different political parties sitting in the crowd, first of all i would like to thank pakistan people’s party chairman…with your permission, since i have come to land of sindh, it would be strange not to talk in sweet sindhi language. the people belonging to sindh, to the extent you love sind’hs land…the same extent of love you have demonstrated by welcoming us, the way you represented sindh’s culture and hospitality…i am feeling thankful…my heart is telling me to make my entire speech in sindhi language. but there are some constraints. people speaking other languages have also come… in example 7, while making his speech in garhi khuda baksh, a small village near larkana, sindh, akhtar mengal, a brahui chairman of balochistan national party (mengal), was involved in bringing forth popular consent through translanguaging by sharing his appreciative views of sindhi language and culture. mengal’s manufacturing process contains two popular languages which are sindhi ameer ali, maya khemlani david, & syed abdul manan translanguaging – a tool for igniting ethnic sensitivities in multi-ethnic sindh, pakistan 116 and urdu. furthermore, his translingual practices reflect how translanguaging can facilitate politicians with influencing multi-ethnic, majoritarian groups using their multilingual repertoire.. mengal translingually employs sindhi language, because he is making his speech in sindh where sindhi language users are much attached to their language. moreover, this tactical use of sindhi language enables him to revive emotions of sindhis by admiring their culture and land. although using his multilingual repertoire, he recognizes the ethnic value of sindhi language, but he openly confesses that there are other language users as well and thus starts speaking in urdu being conscious of getting their consent as well. this clearly shows that he is consciously translanguaging to appeal to his diverse, multi-ethnic audience. therefore, for him translanguaging becomes a political tool that enables him to translanguage in languages of wider communication and propagate his political agenda, . additionally, analysis of example 8 shows that translanguaging has been used by syed sardar ali shah who is a sindhi minister ofthe provincial assembly of sindh. he belongs to the ruling party in sindh that is pakistan people’s party. the deep, contextualized analysis shows how the provincial minister is using translanguaging as a tool by emotionally talking about the unity of sindh employing the national language (urdu) and the official language (english). the use of english is associated with education and power, while urdu is linked with pakistan’s unity. he has used these languages of power to construct discourse of populism because his claim implies that he is representing sindhis’ interests by rejecting the federal government’s proposal to divide sindh on ethnic lines. building upon his bilingual repertoire, the minister emotionally raises the issue of sindh’s integrity in the provincial assembly by emphatically saying that sindhis will not allow the division of sindh, because sindhis are emotionally and spiritually attached to their motherland, sindh. in this way, the minister has used translanguaging as a tool to construct goodwill among sindhis so that his party can get more votes in the upcoming election. example 8 ھيں۔ يے بات وحدت کی ھے سندھ اموشنلی انوالود سندھ کے لوگ کی، يے بات محبت کی ھے سندھ کی، يے بات عشق کی ھے سندھ کی، يے بات عقيدے کی ھے سندھ سے۔ اور آءيں تو کيا آسماں سے صحيفہ بھی آۓ تو ھم سندھ کی تقسيم قبول نھيں کريں گے، نھيں ھے کوءي آنکھ اٹھا کر بھی کريں گے!۔۔۔اگر ايک بھی سندھی زندھ ھے پاکستانکےبننے ک۔۔۔ کآز ديکھ نھيں سکتا۔۔۔سندھ roman script …sindh kay log emotionally involved hn. yeh bat ^ wahdat ki hai sindh ki, yeh bat ^ mohabat ki hai sindh ki, yeh boat ^ ishq ki ha sindh sey, yeh bat ^ aqeeday ki ha sindh sey. aur aaein toh kya, ^ asman sey sahifa bhi aye toh hum sindh ki taqseem qabool nhn karengy, nhn karengy! …agar ek bhi sindhi zinda hai, koi ankh utha kar bhi dekh nhn sakta… sindh ^cause ha pakistan kay baninay ka…” syed sardar ali shah ppp mpa in the provincial assembly of sindh (news line, 2019). english translation …sindh’s people are emotionally involved in this matter. this is a matter of sindh’s unity, this is a matter of affection towards sindh, this is a matter of love of sindh, this is a matter of a faith in sindh. not mention to the constitution, even if divine scriptures are revealed, we will not allow the division of sindh at any cost! if one sindhi is alive, no one will dare separate sindh…sindh is not a toy, sindh is a cause of pakistan’s coming into being. one more example (9) of translanguaging that contains english and urdu has been culled from syed murad ali shah’s speech who is a sindhi chief minister of sindh in the provincial assembly of sindh. in his speech, he employs his multilinguistic repertoire to say that he endorses freedom of institutions, however, the members of opposition in the provincial assembly of sindh exert their political influence to persuade sindh police to do what they desire illicitly. the political address allows him to translingually propagate his policies in different languages; it also enables him to pose as a victim of institutional malpractice in front of sindhis who were watching his live speech made in the assembly. furthermore, through translanguaging he means to influence sindhis’ opinions by telling them that institutions are being politically influenced by his opponents. the translingual practice in two languages of power make him emerge as a heroic figure of sindh’s majority communities because he sarcastically claims that the inspector general of sindh police is being misused by his political rivals. example 9 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 7, issue 2, july 2021 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 117 کام کرے، ليکں پوليس اندپيندنٹلیميں پوليس کو چھوڑتا ھون کے ۔۔۔۔کے جی بکاز دی انسپيکٹر جنرل آف پوليسجب پارٹی بن جاۓ، ۔۔۔جيسے کھيں گے کرونگا roman script …mn police ko chorta hn k independently kam kary, lekin police jab party ban jae, because the inspector general of police has become a party… k ji yeh jaisay kahengay mn karunga… cm sindh murad ali shah in the provincial assembly of sindh (samaa tv, 2020). english translation …i allow police to work independently, but when police become a party, because the inspector general of police has become a party…trying to seek their help in deciding what to do… in example 10, one more sindhi minister in the provincial assembly of sindh, syed sardar ali shah raises through translanguaging the ownership issue of islands which are currently disputed between pakistan’s federal government and sindh’s provincial government. he is engaged in productive process of translanguaging using urdu and sindhi languages. his politicized condemnation of the federal government’s proposal on sindh’s islands in sindhi and urdu ignites ethnic sensitivities of sindhis who were in those days protesting against the federal government’s proposal. he uses sindhi to arouse and attract the support of sindhi nationalists because voicing their concerns he condemns the federal government’s claim to sindh’s islands. this process also allows him to create feelings of trust among sindhis towards his party. moreover, he switches to urdu to tell the concerned authorities that these are not mere islands but (switches to sindhi in a very emotional tone) these are sindh’s assets which came into being for many centuries. hence, translanguaging has been used in sindh for political purposes by different politicians in their speeches, while not being able to defend the rights of their sindhi constituencies. example 10 اسان سڀ چٔون ٿا تـ قوم پرست جماعتون ھجن جيڪي اڄ رستن تي ٻيٽن جي خالف مظاھرا ڪن ٿيون , جيڪي سڀ سموري تنظيمون ھجن , سڀ جو سڀ اچو تـ اسين توھان سان گڏ بيھنداسين... اڄ تو ...ملھايو آھي ھے جنابے اسپيکر،۔۔۔ميں نے يھاں بھيٹھے ھوۓ جزيروں کی بات اردوکی چار الئنيں لکھيں، جنابے اسپيکر يے جزيرے نھيں ھيں،ان ۔۔۔ھي صدين کان پاٹي کو فقط جزيرے تصور نھيں کيۓ جاناچاھيۓ مان نروار ثي نکتا آھن۔۔ roman script …asan sabh chaon tha ta qoum parast jamaitoon hujan jekay aj rastan tay betan jay khilaf muzahira kanthyun, jekay sabh samoori tanzeemon hujan, sabh ja sabh acho ta aseen tawah san gad behandasen…aseen jeki bhi sindh ja manhoon ahyu sey sabh tosan gadeji behandsen…aj tou malhayo ahe… jazeeron ki bat ha janabay speaker,…meinay yaha bethay huay urdu ki char linean likhen, janabay speaker yeh jaziray nhn hn, inko faqt jaziray taswar nhn kiya jana chaye…hi sadiyan kha panea mawn nirwar thee nikta ahen… mpa sindh in the provincial assembly of sindh. syed sardar ali shah (syed sardar ali shah-official, 2020). english translation …all of us say that the nationalist parties that are protesting against islands (construction), we call on all the parties that come ahead we stand with you…we all sindhis will stand with you (gesturing towards an mpa who has changed his side on the issue of islands) …today, you have proved your loyalty with sindh…respected speaker, this is a matter of islands…while sitting here i composed a quadruplet in urdu. these are not islands and these should not be considered just islands…they have journeyed over a course of centuries to emerge over the surface of the sea… discussion the intertwining of translanguaging and political discourse within sindh’s local context necessitates the need for developing critical apparatus to investigate the political speeches which in the words of smith (2009) involve highly influential and complex processes. such critical apparatus should contain a wide range of tools which question ethnically inspired translanguaging in its political context. when politicians make translingual speeches, this should not be seen as an incidental act or a signal of creativity/virtue. their speeches are manifestations of dynamic practices which also demonstrate their language ideologies (vogel and garcía, 2017). a translingual act can be in fact an expected move towards achieving political support of ethnically diverse language groups. garcía (2009) suggests that translanguaging ensures linguistic security and identity investment of different speech communities while simultaneously guaranteeing social justice. however, against this generally held view, this research presents a case ameer ali, maya khemlani david, & syed abdul manan translanguaging – a tool for igniting ethnic sensitivities in multi-ethnic sindh, pakistan 118 where politicians’ use of translanguaging in social domains arouses ethnolinguistic sensitivities among the various speech communities of sindh. this research analysis shows how the politicians demonstrated emotional undertones and ethnic consciousness when publicly making their speeches in sindhi, urdu, english, and arabic in sociopolitical contexts generally resulting in fluid language practices. the conscious use of translanguaging can be plausibly explained by considering the context in which the politicians are situated. this discussion suggests a link between the politicians’ observed persistence and the nationalist ideology of language found in ethnonationalist conflicts, where the neglect of the sindhi language has been historically associated with oppressive language regimes. “conflicts promote homogenizing discourses in terms of both language and collective identity” (charalambous, charalambous, and zembylas, 2016, p.347), and it is very likely that the politicians’ awareness of these ethnic conflicts motivate their political use of translanguaging. investigating the politics of translanguaging in a context of ethnically sensitive province makes one rethink fluidity assumption in linguistically diverse settings. there is a need to pay heed to the ideological processes which structure and control social life. rampton et al. (2015) invite researchers to go beyond celebrating superdiversity (linguistic diversity and translanguaging) and look critically at the ideological processes and social stratification which surround it. in sindh, the intersection between diversity and conflict has given rise to the dynamics of fluidity: firstly, the nationalist assumption that equates ‘speaking sindhi’ with ‘being sindhi’ and secondly, the federalist assumption of ‘using urdu’ implies ‘being pakistani’. there is also religious ideology that involves employing arabic to show religious sentiments and using english signifies education and power. the translanguaging critic’s role is to provide such critical apparatus to initiate critical questioning of politically inspired translingual practices across different contexts. the translanguaging critic cannot give exhaustive information about the politics of translanguaging in different contexts, however, he/she can effectively help in raising people’s consciousness about what erdocia (2020) calls political exploitation of translanguaging. people of different ethnic backgrounds, once made aware of the politics of translanguaging and its repercussions, can be made critically aware of this abuse of translanguaging in certain contexts. it is imperative to note here that the political speeches in which politics of translanguaging is embedded are similar in their goals in different countries. what is critically considered as political exploitation through translanguaging in catalonia, spain (erdocia, 2020) might also be relevant to different multilingual contexts, such as sindh. translanguaging enables politicians in sindh to use sindhi, urdu, english and arabic languages to achieve their political goals effectively against the backdrop of language policies and regimes. politicized strategy of translanguaging causes ethnic tensions which politicians exploit much to their interests. therefore, it is recommended that language policy experts should seriously examine how the use of translanguaging has been exploited and used as a political tool in sindh, pakistan. conclusion in this research, politics of translanguaging in pakistan’s sindh province was critically analysed using the modified concepts of translanguaging. excerpts taken from politicians’ speeches were analysed to show how they used translanguaging to ignite ethnic sensitivities and obtain consent of sindh’s speech communities. also, it was found that using poetry in translanguaging was effectively used by politicians to make their speeches effective. this research was limited to politicians’ speeches in sindh, however, further research on the politics of translanguaging in the context of pakistan’s other provinces can be conducted. finally, it is recommended that raising awareness about the politicized use of translanguaging might help the layman in a number of multilingual countries become aware of the importance of critical thinking when listening to translanguaged political discourses. references 24 news hd. 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(2017). process types in students’ narrative text. indonesian efl journal, 3(1), 69-78 received: 24-11-2016 accepted: 26-12-2016 published: 01-01-2017 abstract: this study aims to investigate the process type in students’ narrative text. it involves 20 first grader of department of english education, university of kuningan. the title of narrative text given to all respondents is “rabbit and twenty crocodiles.” this study raises two problems: the process types appear in students narrative texts and the errors of the process types occur in students’ narrative texts. this research used a descriptive qualitative method to describe the data. as result, by using derewianka (2002), the process types found in students’ narrative texts were material, mental, verbal, and relational process. material process was the dominant type found in students’ narrative texts in which there were 232 material processes from 371 data with percentage 62.53%. it means that, in the text telling about a sequence of happenings and experiences, the characters did many material activities than the other process types. besides, this research also found three process type errors occurred in students’ narrative texts, namely material, verbal, and relational process. material process is the dominant error occurred in students’ narrative texts in which 100 errors occurred in 157 data with percentage 63,7%. in conclusion, considering that students face diffuculties mostly in material process, teacher should deal with its teaching more cautiously. keywords: narrative text, transitivity and error, process types introduction language has three metafunctions of language, namely ideational, interpersonal, and textual function (gerot & wignell, 1994). first, the ideational function consists of logical and experiential function. the experiential function is realized by the transitivity system. transitivity is normally understood as the grammatical feature which indicates if a verb takes a direct object. second, the interpersonal function are meanings which express a speaker’s attitudes and judgments. meanings are realised in wordings through what is called mood and modality. third, the textual function expresses the relation of language to its environment, including both the verbal environment, what has been said or written before (co-text) and the non-verbal, situational environment (context). these meanings are realised through pattern of theme and cohesion. in the concept of transitivity proposed by halliday (1985), there are three components of what halliday calls a transitivity process, namely participants, process, and circumstance. the participants are them who directly involved in the process: the one who behaves, senses, says or exists. the process consists of material process (process of doing), mental process (process of sensing), relational process (process of being), verbal process (process of saying), behavioral process (the combination of psychological and physiological behavior), and existential process (represents that something exist and happen). while circumstances are typical adjuncts. halliday’ transitivity system belongs to experiential metafunctions. when we looked at the experiential metafunctions, that’s mean that we looked at the grammar of the clause as representation. it is called so because the clause in its experiential functions is a way of representing pattern of experience. through the system of transitivity, it can be explored the clause in its aspects, such is who does, what, to whom, when, where, why or how function. when people talk about what a word or sentence means, it is a kind of meaning they indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 69 have in mind. meaning in this sense is related to content or idea. so, here the clause that functions as the representation of processes is explored by transitivity system. transitivity analysis offers a description of one of the structural strands of the clause. transitivity specifies the different types of processes that are recognized in the language and the structures by which they are expressed. we use the term process and participant in analyzing what is represented through the use of language. processes are central to transitivity. they are also regarded as what “goings-on” and suggest many different kinds of goings-on which necessarily involve different kinds of participant in varying circumstances. while participants and circumstances are incumbent upon the doings, happenings, feelings, and beings. processes can be subdivided into six different types, namely 1) material doing bodily, physically, materially; 2) mental sensing emotionally, intellectually, sensorilly; 3) relational being equal to or some attribute of; 4) verbal saying lingually, signaling; 5) behavioral behaving physiologically and psychologically; and 6) existential existing there exist (halliday, 1985). each of them is explained briefly below. 1. material process gerot and wignell (1994) state that material processes are processes of material doing. they express the notion that some entity physically does something which are done to some other entity. so, clauses with material process obligatorily have a doing (process) and a doer (participant) as in “he built the house for the kids” in which ‘he’ refers to the actor, ‘built’ refers to the material process, ‘for the kids’ refers to the beneficiaries. 2. mental process mental process is a process of sensing, feeling, thinking, or perceiving. some processes involve not only a material action but also a phenomenon described as states of mind or psychological event. people are not always talking about concrete process of doing. they often talk not about what they are doing, but about what they think or feel. halliday (1985) calls processes which encode meaning of thinking or feeling as mental processes. these processes tend to be realized through the use of verbs like think, believe, understand, know, feel, smell, hear, see, smell, want, like, please, admire, repel, enjoy, fear, frighten, etc. basically, there are three types of mental process, namely 1) affective or reactive (feeling) which is recognized through the use of verbs of liking, fearing, 2) cognitive (thinking) which is recognized through the use of verbs of thinking, knowing, understanding, and 3) perceptive (perceiving through the five senses) which is recognized through the use of verbs of seeing, hearing. the participant role in mental process are “senser” and “phenomena” associated with any mental process. 3. relational process according to gerot and wignell (1994), relational processes involve states of being (including having). eggins (1994) adds that relational process covers many different ways in which “being” can be expressed in english clauses. simply, it can be said that “states of being” refers to the statements stated to convey the existence. relational processes can be classified according to whether they being used to identify something (barry tuckwell may be the finest living horn player), or to assign a quality to something (barry tuckwell is a fine horn player). relational processes are fundamental on how the above mentioned subject construct the words. 4. verbal process verbal processes are processes of saying (lock, 1996). further, gerot and wignell (1994) assume that verbal processes are processes of saying or more accurately of symbolically signaling. verbal processed are expressed by verbs such as say, tell, ask, reply, and suggest. verbal process clauses normally have one participant, desired, plus in most cases a representation of what is said, called the “saying”. in addition, verbal process clauses have participant which represents the person toward whom the erwin oktoma process types in students’ narrative text 70 words are directed. this participant is the addressee. 5. behavioral process according to halliday (1985), “behavioral process includes the “mental” and processes of consciousness that are being represented as forms of behavior, like look, watch, listen, think.” similarly, gerot and wignell (1994) states that “behavioral processes” are processes of psychological and psychological behavior, like breathing, dreaming, snoring, smiling, looking, coaching, christening and pondering. for example, “don’t look, i am thinking, no one’s listening.” this statement shows that the behavioral processes are done consciously. 6. existential processes existential process is the representation that something exists or happens (halliday, 1985). these clauses typically have the verbs “be” or some other verb expressing existence, such as exist and arise. frequently, the existential clause contains a circumstantial element, as in “there was a picture on the wall.” these six process types are commonly found in texts or in daily conversations. but, not all people knows about this division. so, to make it clearer, the researcher intends to analyze the process types found in students’ narrative text. according to gerot and wignell (1994), narratives deal with problematic events which lead to a crisis or turning point of some kind which in turn finds a resolution. it is used to amuse, to entertain, and to deal with actual or vicarious experience in different ways. narratives include fairy stories, mysteries, science fiction, romances, horror stories, “heroes and villains” (e.g. tv cartoons), adventure stories, parables and moral tales, myths and legends, and historical narratives. the features of narrative text according derewianka (2002) are; 1) specific, often individual participants with defined identities, (2) mainly use actions verbs [material processes], but also many verbs which refer to what the human participants said, or felt, or thought [verbal and mental processes], (3) normally use past tense, (4) there are many linking words to do with time, (5) dialogue often included with the tense may change to the present or future, (6) descriptive language chosen to enhance and develop the story by creating images in the reader’s mind, and (7) can be written in the first person (i, we) or third person (he, she, they). unfortunately, in the study of second and foreign languages learning, students often made mistakes or errors relating to these language features of narrative. but, learning language is a process, so it is not matter if students do some errors of mistakes. exactly, from their errors they can learn more, correct and improve their knowledge. as stated by richards et al. (1992), errors have been studied to discover the processes learners make use of in learning and using a language. stevenson (1996) states that many errors are due to that the learner uses structures from his/her native language. the possession of one’s native language is facilitative. errors in this case are not inhibitory, but rather evidence of one’s learning strategies. error analysis owes its place as a scientific method in linguistics. finally, triggered by the fact that there are still many first grade students in university of kuningan get difficulties in constructing the text, the researcher is interested to firstly analyze the process types used by the students in their narrative texts, then analyze the errors made by them. this research is expected to be beneficial for either students or english teachers. method this study is a qualitative research. creswell (1994) states that “qualitative research is interpretative research.” it is the theory used by those conducting grounded theory studies as an outcome for their studies. grounded researchers hope to discover a theory that is grounded in information from informants. further, creswell (1994) adds that “qualitative theory may shape the initial research questions and provides additional information about pattern of theories.” by means of purposive sampling design, this research involves twenty students of the first frade in department of english education, university of kuningan. here, the indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 71 researcher does not need informants, rather than he gives writing assignment to students in order to analyze the types of process occurred in their writings. here, a narrative text entitled “rabbit and twenty crocodiles” is used as a guidance for the students to write the story by using their own words. this narrative text tells about a rabbit that was clever, smart, and kind. the rabbit had an idea when he wanted to cross a river because he couldn’t swim. a rabbit laid the boss of crocodiles to make a line in order he can crossed the river. all of the data were collected qualitatively. according to richards et al. (1992), qualitative data are not in numerical form, it is a written account of what happened during a lesson or an interview data collected in qualitative form. the quantitative form is also employed in this study to count up the frequency of process type appearances in students’ narrative texts. the steps in collecting the data are as follows; 1) giving students instruction to make a narrative text individually; 2) leading 20 students to be the sample of the study; 3) allowing the student to write with their own words; and 4) analyzing students’ writing by means of transitivity system. next, the steps conducted by the writer in analyzing the data are; reading the narrative texts written by the students, and analyzing the types of process in students’ narrative text. results and discussion there are two findings in this research. the first finding relates to the proccess types represented in narrative texts produced by the first grade students. while, the second finding presents the error of the process types occurred in students’ narrative texts as constructed by the transitivity system. process types appear in students’ narrative text as the result of data analysis, the process types used by students in their narrative texts are mental, material, verbal, and relational process. the record of this finding is shown in the table below. table 1. frequency of appearance of the process types text process types frequency of appearances percentages narrative text material 232 62.53% mental 41 11.05 % verbal 42 11.32 % behavioral 0 0 existential 0 0 relational 56 15.1 % total 408 100 % based on the table above, it can be seen that material process is the dominant process types found in students’ narrative texts in which 62.53% out of the data are material process. while the other three process types found in the narrative texts are mental process with percentage 11.05%, verbal 11.32%, and relational 15,1 %. first, from all narrative text produced by 20 first grade students, the number of material process found are 232 or 62.53% out of the data. these 232 material processes come from twenty respondents in which each respondent use material process with different number. in the narrative text produced by respondent 1, the total of material proccess occured are 10 times, 13 times in respondent 2, 10 times in respondent 3, 10 times in respondent 4, 8 times in respondent 5, 11 times in respondent 6, 12 times in respondent 7, 7 times in respondent 8, 11 times in respondent 9, 11 times in respondent 10, 16 times in respondent 11, 19 times in respondent 12, 14 times in respondent 13, 21 times in respondent 14, 12 times in respondent 15, 13 times in respondent 16, 12 times in respondent 17, 8 times in respondent 18, 5 times in respondent 19, and 19 times in the last respondent. erwin oktoma process types in students’ narrative text 72 the examples of material processes appear in students’ narrative text are as follows. from respondent 1 “he can’t go there”, “can’t go” explain that it is a material proccess. from respondent 2 “the rabbit wish went to mountain”, “went” explains that it is a material proccess. from respondent 3 “a rabbit went to jungle”, “went” explains that it is a material proccess or doing activities. from respondent 4 “he can’t swim”, “can’t swim” explain that it is a material proccess or doing activities. from respondent 5 “he must crossed a river”, “must cross” explain that it is a material proccess or doing activities. from respondent 6 “he will went to house”, “will went” explain that it is a material proccess or doing activities. from respondent 7 “he couldn’t swim”, “couldn’t swim” explain that it is a material proccess or doing activities. from respondent 8 “he will went to party”, “will went” explain that it is a material proccess or doing activities. from respondent 9 “he can’t went to jungle”, “can’t went” explain that it is a material proccess or doing activities. from respondent 10 “the rabbit jump on twenty crocodile”, “jump” explains that it is a material proccess or doing activities. from respondent 11 “he like play with a friend”, “play” explains that it is a material proccess or doing activities. from respondent 12 “he must swimming”, “swimming” explains that it is a material proccess or doing activities. from respondent 13 “he came to a boss of crocodile”, “came” explains that it is a material proccess or doing activities. from respondent 14 “he went to a river”, “went” explains that it is a material proccess or doing activities. from respondent 15 “he can’t swimming”, “can’t swimming” explain that it is a material proccess or doing activities. from respondent 16 “he can jumping and cross a river”, “can jumping and cross” explain that it is a material proccess or doing activities. from respondent 17 “he couldn’t swim”, “couldn’t swim” explain that it is a material proccess or doing activities. from respondent 18 “a rabbit went to jungle”, “went” explains that it is a material proccess or doing activities. from respondent 19 “a rabbit jumped from one crocodile to another crocodile”, “jumped” explains that it is a material proccess or doing activities. from respondent 20 “he will went to house”, “will went” explain that it is a material proccess or doing activities. second, mental process relates to deed of mental like feeling and thinking. for example from respondent 1 “he saw a boss of crocodiles”. the word “saw” describes the mental proccess. the frequency of mental process appearances in twenty narrative texts is 41 with percentages 11.05 %. from respondent 1, the total of mental proccess occured is 2 times, respondent 2 is 1 time, respondent 3 is 1 time, respondent 4 is 3 times, respondent 5 is 1 time, respondent 6 is 2 times, respondent 7 is 2 times, respondent 8 is 2 times, respondent 9 is 2 times, respondent 10 is 1 time, respondent 11 are 4 times, respondent 12 is 2 times, respondent 13 is 2 times, respondent 14 is 3 times, respondent 15 is 2 times, respondent 16 is 2 times, respondent 17 is 2 times, respondent 18 is 2 times, respondent 19 is 1 times, and the last respondent is 4 times. the examples of mental processes appear in students’ narrative text are as follows. from respondent 1 “he saw a boss of crocodiles”, the word “saw” explains that it is a mental proccess. from respondent 2 “the rabbit wish went to mountain”, the word “wish” explains that it is a mental proccess. from respondent 3 “he saw a boss of crocodiles”, the word “saw” explains that it is a mental proccess. from respondent 4 “a rabbit thanked for them”, the word “thanked” explains that it is a mental proccess. from respondent 5 “he saw a boss of crocodiles swim”, the word “saw” explains that it is a mental proccess. from respondent 6 “he saw a boss of crocodiles swimming in the river”, the word “saw” is a mental proccess. from respondent 7 “a rabbit thanked for them”, the word “thanked” explains that it is a mental proccess. from respondent 8 “when he saw a boss of crocodiles swimming”, the word “saw” explains that it is a mental proccess. from respondent 9 “after that he saw a boss of crocodiles swim in the river”, the word “saw” explains that it is a mental proccess. from respondent 10 ““when he saw a boss of crocodiles swimming in the river”, the word “saw” explains that it is a mental proccess. from respondent 11 “he get idea”, the word indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 73 “get” explains that it is a mental proccess. from respondent 12 “and finally he thanked all crocodiles”, the word “thanked” explains that it is a mental proccess. from respondent 13 “he thanked to all the crocodiles”, the word “thanked” explains that it is a mental proccess. from respondent 14 “he thanked to all crocodiles because crossed a river”, the word “thanked” explains that it is a mental proccess. from respondent 15 “he get idea”, the word “get” explains that it is a mental proccess. from respondent 16 “he get idea”, the word “get” explains that it is a mental proccess. from respondent 17 “he saw a boss crocodiles swim in the river”, the word “saw” explains that it is a mental proccess. from respondent 18 “he thanked to all crocodiles”, the word “thanked” explains that it is a mental proccess. from respondent 19 “a rabbit thanked to all crocodiles”, the word “thanked” explains that it is a mental proccess. from respondent 20 “when he saw a boss crocodiles swimming in the river”, the word “saw” explains that it is a mental proccess. third, the frequency of verbal process appearances in twenty narrative texts is 42 with percentages 11.32 %. verbal process is usually presented through conversation indirectly by participant. for example in respondent 1 “he ask to him for help a cross a river”. from respondent 1 the total of verbal proccess occurs is 2 times, respondent 2 is 2 times, respondent 3 is 2 times, respondent 4 is 1 times, respondent 5 is 1 times, respondent 6 is 1 times, respondent 7 is 3 times, respondent 8 is 1 times, respondent 9 is 3 times, respondent 10 is 3 times, respondent 11 is 4 times, respondent 12 is 1 times, respondent 13 is 3 times, respondent 14 is 2 times, there is no verbal process in respondent 15, respondent 16 is 1 times, respondent 17 is 1 times, respondent 18 is 3 times, respondent 19 is 5 times, and the last respondent is 3 times. the examples of verbal processes appear in students’ narrative text are as follows. from respondent 1 “he ask to him”, the word “ask” explains that it is a verbal proccess. from respondent 2 “a boss of crocodiles call a twenty crocodiles”, the word “call” explains that it is a verbal proccess. from respondent 3 “and a boss of crocodiles call a twenty crocodiles”, the word “call” explains that it is a verbal proccess. from respondent 4 “then the rabbit asked to boss of crocodiles”, the word “asked” explains that it is a verbal proccess. from respondent 5 “he get idea for ask help”, the word “ask” explains that it is a verbal proccess. from respondent 6 “the rabbit said that the crocodiles was good, nice and gentle”, the word “said” explains that it is a verbal proccess. from respondent 7 “the boss called his friend”, the word “called” explains that it is a verbal proccess. from respondent 8 “he try and said to boss of crocodiles”, the word “said” explains that it is a verbal proccess. from respondent 9 “he must call the twenty crocodiles”, the word “call” explains that it is a verbal proccess. from respondent 10 “then the boss called his friends and asked them for make line”, the words “called and asked” explain that it is a verbal proccess. from respondent 11 “the boss of crocodiles call his friend”, the word “call” explains that it is a verbal proccess. from respondent 12 “he saying if a boss of crocodiles …”, the word “saying” explains that it is a verbal proccess. from respondent 13 “he said to boss crocodiles”, the word “said” explains that it is a verbal proccess. from respondent 14 “the boss called twenty crocodiles”, the word “called” explains that it is a verbal proccess. from respondent 15 “for ask the boss of crocodiles”, the word “ask” explains that it is a verbal proccess. from respondent 16 “he ask to the boss of crocodiles”, the word “ask” explains that it is a verbal proccess. from respondent 17 “he ask to the boss of crocodiles and his friend”, the word “ask” explains that it is a verbal proccess. from respondent 18 “the rabbit call the boss of crocodiles”, the word “call” explains that it is a verbal proccess. from respondent 19 “a rabbit said ok”, the word “said” explains that it is a verbal proccess. from respondent 20 “a boss of crocodiles call twenty crocodiles”, the word “call” explains that it is a verbal proccess. fourth, the frequency of relational process appearances in twenty narrative texts is 56 with percentages 15.1 %. from respondent 1, the total of relational proccess occurs is 4 times, respondent 2 is 3 times, erwin oktoma process types in students’ narrative text erwin oktoma process types in students’ narrative text 74 respondent 3 is 2 times, respondent 4 is 1 times, respondent 5 is 3 times, respondent 6 is 2 times, respondent 7 is 3 times, respondent 8 is 2 times, respondent 9 is 2 times, respondent 10 is 2 times, respondent 11 is 3 times, respondent 12 is 2 times, respondent 13 is 1 times, respondent 14 is 5 times, respondent 15 is 2 times, respondent 16 is 4 times, respondent 17 is 2 times, respondent 18 is 2 times, respondent 19 is 7 times, and the last respondent is 4 times. the examples of relational processes appear in students’ narrative text are as follows. from respondent 1 “he get idea”, the word “get” describes relational proccess. from respondent 2 “he life happy everyday”, the word “life” describes the relational proccess. from respondent 3 “in the wood life a rabbit smart” the word “life” describes the relational proccess. from respondent 4 “he had idea” the word “had” describes the relational proccess. from respondent 5 “he live with all animals” the word “live” describes the relational proccess. from respondent 6 “he had idea” the word “had” describes the relational proccess. from respondent 7 “he had idea” the word “had” describes relational proccess. from respondent 8 “once upon a time, life a little rabbit with his family” the word “life” describes the relational proccess. from respondent 9 “he get idea”, the word “get” describes the relational proccess. from respondent 10 “he get idea”, the word “get” describes the relational proccess. from respondent 11 “he like play with a friend” the word “like play” describes the relational proccess. from respondent 12 “he get idea”, the word “get” describes the relational proccess. from respondent 13 “long time ago live in jungle a rabbit”, the word “live” describes the relational proccess. from respondent 14 “he life fun because every day he always play”, the word “life” describes the relational proccess. from respondent 15 “he get idea”, the word “get” describes the relational proccess. from respondent 16 “the rabbit is a clever”, the word “is” describes the relational proccess. from respondent 17 “he get idea”, the word “get” describes the relational proccess. from respondent 18 “in the wood life a rabbit with his friend”, the word “life” describes the relational proccess. from respondent 19 “a rabbit lived in the wood”, the word “lived” describes the relational proccess. from respondent 20 “he had idea”, the word “had” describes the relational proccess. there are not behavioral process found in all narrative texts entitled “rabbit and twenty crocodiles” produced by the respondents because there are not processes of physiological and psychological behavioral, like smiling, dreaming, breathing, coughing, etc. similarly, there are not also existential process in all of respondents’ narrative text because this story only tells about activities of rabbit and crocodile. the errors of process occurred in students’ narrative texts the second stage in this research was analyzing the errors of the processes in students’ narrative texts by using the transitivity system. as the result of the analysis, there are 100 errors or 63.7% out of the sample occur in material process, 10 errors or 6.4% in verbal process, and 47 errors or 29.9% in relational process. the record of this finding is shown in the table below. table 2. the error of the processes in the students’ narrative text text process types frequency of appearances percentages narrative text material 100 63,7 % mental 0 0 verbal 10 6,4 % behavioral 0 0 existential 0 0 relational 47 29,9 % total 271 100 % indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 75 first, from all narrative text produced by 20 students, it is found that students frequently make errors in material proccess in which it happens in 100 data with percentages 63.7%. from respondent 1, the total of error in material proccess is 3 times, respondent 2 is 4 times, respondent 3 is 7 times, respondent 4 is 3 times, respondent 5 is 6 times, respondent 6 is 5 times, respondent 7 is 5 times, respondent 8 is 1 times, respondent 9 is 6 times, respondent 10 is 3 times, respondent 11 is 9 times, respondent 12 is 2 times, respondent 13 is 4 times, respondent 14 is 11 times, respondent 15 is 5 imes, respondent 16 is 9 times, respondent 17 is 6 times, respondent 18 is 3 times, there is no error analysis in respondent 19, and the last respondent is 28 times. for example from respondent 3, the sentence “he life play with a friend” shows that there is an error in material proccess because the word “life play” is wrong, it should be “lives”. second, the frequency of errors in verbal process is 10 with percentages 6.4%. from respondent 1 the total of verbal proccess errors is 1 times, there is no error analysis in respondent 2, respondent 3 is 2 times, there is no error in respondent 4, there is no error in respondent 5, there is no error in respondent 6, there is no error in respondent 7, there is no error in respondent 8, respondent 9 makes error 1 times, there is no error in respondent 10, respondent 11 makes error 2 times, respondent 12 makes error 1 times, there is no error in respondent 13, there is no error in respondent 14, there is no error in respondent 15, respondent 16 makes error 1 times, there is no error in respondent 17, respondent 18 makes error 1 times, there is no error in respondent 19, and the last respondent makes error 1 times. for example from respondent 3, the sentence “a boss of crocodiles call a twenty crocodiles” shows that there is an error in verbal proccess because the word “call” is wrong, it should be “called”. third, there is no error in mental process occurred in students’ narrative texts. fourth, the frequency of errors in relational proccess is 47 with percentages 29.9%. from respondent 1, the total of relational proccess error is 3 times, respondent 2 is 1 times, respondent 3 is 2 times, respondent 4 is 2 times, respondent 5 is 3 times, respondent 6 is 1 time, respondent 7 is 3 times, respondent 8 is 2 times, respondent 9 is 2 times, respondent 10 is 2 times, respondent 11 is 3 times, respondent 12 is 2 times, respondent 13 is 1 time, respondent 14 is 5 times, respondent 15 occurs 2 times, respondent 16 occurs 4 times, respondent 17 occurs 2 times, respondent 18 is 2 times, respondent 19 is 2 times, and the last respondent is 3 times. for example from respondent 14, the sentence “he life fun because every day he always play” shows that there is an error in relational proccess because the word “life” is wrong, it should be “lived”. so far, the discussion has focused on the clause as representation. thus, the concept discussed above are sought to be relevant to this study. from the analysis above, the researcher found that all respondents had not mastered the narrative writing because there are so many mistakes done by them in writing narrative texts. this error is especially in the use of tense. some respondents wrongly use simple tenses. finally, it can be concluded that the errors can be influenced by some factors such as the teacher or the respondents itself. the teacher might less in teaching narrative writing to all respondents. but, it could be also caused by the respondents self who did not quite understand about the narrative writing so they made errors in writing narrative texts. conclusion as result of the data analysis, the researcher found 4 process types in students’ narrative texts entitled “a rabbit and twenty crocodiles”, namely material, mental, verbal, and relational process. the results are taken from process type analysis by means of transitivity system. material process is the dominant process types appear in students’ narrative texts. it is because a rabbit as a character does many activities and interaction with other characters. as stated previously that material processes are process of doing. they express the notion that some entity “does” something which may erwin oktoma process types in students’ narrative text 76 be done to some other entity. from the analysis, the researcher find out 232 material processes from 408 data with percentage 62.53 %. it means that the text is telling about a sequence of happenings and experiences and characters do many material activities than other process types. many activities which are done by the characters make the readers understand the story easily. the readers can know what will the character do and can imagine what will happen and acts will be done. in addition, the researcher also finds out four process types error that occur in students’ narrative texts, they are material, verbal, and relational process. the students frequently make errors in material process in which there are 100 errors occurred from 157 data with percentage 63.7%. references 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(1996). second language acquisition: learners' errors and error correction in language teaching. retrieved from: http://www.proz.com/dochtml. indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(1) january 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 77 drummer a drummer, sick of all the drummer jokes, decides to change his instrument. after some thought, he decides on the accordion. so he goes to the music store and says to the owner, "i'd like to look at the accordions, please." the owner gestures to a shelf in the courner and says, "all our accordions are over there." after browsing, the drummer says, "i think i'd like the big red one in the corner." the store owner looks at him and says, "you're a drummer, aren't you?" the drummer, crestfallen, says, "how did you know?" the store owner says, "that 'big red accordion' is the radiator." (source: http://www.study-express.ru/humour/funny-stories.shtml, picture: www.google.co.id) erwin oktoma process types in students’ narrative text 78 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 147 learning how to be polite through a movie: a case on brown and levinson’s politeness strategies roita angel isabella department of english education, universitas hkbp nommensen, medan, indonesia email: roita.isabella@student.uhn.ac.id eni julita br. munthe department of english education, universitas hkbp nommensen, medan, indonesia email: eni.munthe@student.uhn.ac.id dian jessica noventy sigalingging department of english education, universitas hkbp nommensen, medan, indonesia email: dian.sigalingging@student.uhn.ac.id ridwin purba (corresponding author) department of english education, universitas simalungun, pematangsiantar, indonesia email: purbaridwin61@gmail.com herman department of english education, universitas hkbp nommensen, medan, indonesia email: herman@uhn.ac.id apa citation: isabella, r. a., munthe, e. j. b., sigalingging, d. j. n., purba, r., & herman. (2022). learning how to be polite through a movie: a case on brown and levinson’s politeness strategies. indonesian efl journal, 8(2), 147-154. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v8i2.6438 received: 07-03-2022 accepted: 12-05-2022 published: 31-07-2022 introduction language is an important part of people’s life. peoples use language in their daily life. language is a tool used by people to communicate with others. according to chaer and agustina in fitria, ningrum, and suhandoko (2020), language allows people to convey their feelings, emotions, thoughts, ideas, and so on. without language, it is impossible to communicate with others. when someone speaks with others, they always want everything to go well. it is due to a desire to maintain a positive or close relationship with others. in case of communication, people should be able to decide a polite language which is appropriate to maintain communication. polite language is used to make a comfortable interaction with others while abstract: this research discusses politeness strategies at the tinkerbell movie. the purpose of this study is to analyze the types of politeness strategies, to determine the most dominant types of politeness strategies and to determine the factors that influence the selection of politeness strategies contained in the tinkerbell film. this research uses theory by brown and levinson (1987). the research method is descriptive qualitative research with content analysis, because the data are collected from documents. there are several steps in collecting data, such as: searching, downloading, watching and listening, transcribing. the results showed 20 politeness strategies found in tinkerbell movie, such us: bald on-record 2 (10%), positive politeness 13 (65%), negative politeness 3 (15%), and off-record 2 (10%). the most dominant type of politeness strategy found in tinkerbell movie is positive politeness. factors that influence the selection of politeness strategies contained in the tinkerbell movie are circumstances. circumstances related to sociological variables included relative power of 6 (30%) and social distance of 14 (70%). relative power (p) uses a greater degree of politeness with other people who have higher power or authority. social distance (d) is seen as a composite of psychological factors such as status and age. in conclusion, with this research we must be careful when using language to communicate with other people so that the conversation goes well. keywords: pragmatics; politeness strategies; movie. roita angel isabella, eni julita br. munthe, dian jessica noventy sigalingging, ridwin purba, & herman learning how to be polite through a movie: a case on brown and levinson’s politeness strategies 148 using impolite language may be rugged for others. according to pardede, herman and manurung (2021), polite or impolite utterances in public involve social interaction, distance, solidarity, and status. it means that many aspects can affect the speaker in using polite or impolite language. people often think that politeness is only by saying sorry, please, and thank you but actually politeness has its own rule. yule in fitria, ningrum, and suhandoko (2020, p.58) stated “politeness is respecting another person’s face and it is related to social distance and closeness”. in this case, politeness is needed to build a good relationship or social interaction with others. pragmatics is the study of how a speaker communicates his or her senses and how a listener interprets them. according to sianturi, saragih, sinaga, & herman (2021), the analysis of language users' ability to pair sentences in situations where they are important is known as pragmatics (herman, 2015). it means that it has consequently more to do with analyzing what people meant by them. study pragmatics is very interested because it teaches the meaning of utterances by the context between speaker and listener. by accepting the background or situation, the hearer can easily catch the speaker’s intended meaning. it can be pragmatics is the association’s learning amid language and context to interpret what the speaker wants. with the different term, according to griffith as cited in aulia, marliani, and suryani (2019), pragmatics is about the relationship of our semantic knowledge with our knowledge of the world, taking into account context of use. in addition, van thao, purba and herman (2021) also described pragmatics as the study of the speaker meaning. this types and how the context influences what is said. it requires a consideration of how speakers organize what they want to say in accordance with who they are talking to, where, when and under what circumstances. pragmatics is the study of contextual meaning. from the explanation of pragmatics given, pragmatics is a study about language, meaning, and the context in communication. according to wang (2010), speakers have to be able to choose various communicative strategies to build a good relationship between both interlocutors. they also need to apply strategies to construct a good conversation. it means that these strategies have to be noticed to build a good conversation. these strategies are also called as politeness strategies. considering others’ feeling is important because it will make others feel comfortable with our existence. brown and levinson as cited in fitria, ningrum, and suhandoko (2020) emphasized politeness strategies are to save hearer’s face. face refers to respecting someone and maintaining ‘self-esteem’ in public or private situations. it means that people must be aware of others’ face. when someone feels comfortable in the conversation, a good relationship is created. politeness is reflected through the way of communication on verbal or we call speaking manner. according to simaremare, nainggolan and herman (2021), politeness can be interpreted as an act of behaving right in social interaction and treating the interlocutor more well. basically, politeness is not only about how to say please, sorry, excuse, and thank you in conversation but also it is more than just following the norm, custom or protocol. furthermore, cruse (2006) stated that politeness “enters into ways of addressing people”. the speaker can have a preference of pronouns for assigning the address according to the relationship between the speaker and the addresses. then, pardede, herman and pratiwi (2019) stated that politeness is an expression of the speaker to reduce the facial threat brought about by certain threatening faces against others. for this case, to relate the analysis about politeness, the researcher used a media. media is an equipment that is used to send the topic material in learning process. many media can be used in learning english, one of them is by using movie. according to saragih, sinaga, herman, purba, saragi, and manurung (2022), movie is a general term used for a particular motion picture or in general. the researcher chose a movie as a media to conduct the study because the movie provided the conversations which showed interpersonal relationships among speakers. thus, this movie provided the example of how language was used in communication. researcher is interested in analyzing politeness strategies, because of some problems, sometimes there are still misunderstandings in interpreting politeness. understanding politeness is very important. people often think that politeness is simply a matter of saying please, sorry, excuse, and thank you. politeness is a manner or etiquette in indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 149 communication that is aimed to respect each other in communication. in doing communication, people need to know how to make their conversation run well and smoothly. consequently, people need to use politeness strategy to get a good response from the hearers. when we use the politeness strategy to communicate it means we respect each other and decrease misunderstanding. according to brown and levinson cited in norra (2015), there are four main types of politeness strategies: bald on record, negative politeness, positive politeness and offrecord. example: bobble : when preparing for spring clank : we do all this and more! clank/bubble : yes, being a tinker is never a bore! tinkerbell : that was great. in this conversation clank and bubble show tinkerbell the work of a tinker, and say: yes, being a tinker is never a bore! then, tinkerbell said: that was great, with what his friends have done. showed that the speaker wanted to give the word stressing, such as the word "that was great. tinkerbell used positive politeness shown in bold and italicized words. in this conversation, the speaker used positive politeness strategy 2: exaggerate. the researcher analyzes based on brown and levinson’s theory about politeness strategies. the researcher uses a movie as the source of data because a movie can be a good medium to learn politeness strategies of communication. people can watch movies intensively so they can conclude which one is good and which one is bad for them to apply in their daily life. nowadays, people are so close to the digital device which they can watch movies everywhere and every time. knowledge of politeness has a great importance and effects for daily communication of life so the researcher chooses politeness strategies as a topic in this research. politeness relates to how people use a language in communication with others. this research has been conducted by several previous research. hutahaean, herman, girsang (2021) from universitas hkbp nommensen, medan. they analyzed about "an analysis of the politeness strategies utilized by pesbukers in their variety show" the researcher conducted this research. this analysis took a realistic approach, concentrating on politeness techniques encountered in the pesbukers variety show. this study aimed to look at various types of politeness strategies, decide which type was the most prevalent, and learn what factors influenced politeness strategies in pesbukers’ variety show. since the data gathered from the journal, the research approach was descriptive qualitative research with content analysis. the researcher chooses episode 10, broadcasted on 15 may 2019, with a duration of 1 hour 12 minutes. the data was collected in several stages: familiarisation and organisation, coding and reduction, interpretation, and representation. positive politeness was the most common form of politeness strategy in pesbukers' variety show. the difference between this research and previous research lies in the purpose of the research. previous studies discussed the politeness strategies used in variety show, while in this study the researchers analyzed the politeness strategies of the main character in tinkerbell movie. in this research, tinkerbell movie was used by the researcher in analyzing of the research because the researcher finds the types and factors which influenced of politeness strategies were used by the main characters in tinkerbell movie and it was also very interesting movie. method this research belongs to a descriptive qualitative method. it means that the research is interested in process, meaning and understanding gained through words or pictures, qualitative employs conversation, document analysis, interview and recording. purba, herman, manullang, and ngongo (2022) stated that qualitative approach is used to describe the data. one of the hallmarks of the qualitative technique is that it allows us to see the process we're dealing with in terms of the context, or the location where the study will be conducted. there were seven types of qualitative research. there were case studies, content or document analysis, ethnographic studies, grounded theory studies, historical studies, narrative research, phenomenological research (ary et al. 2010). the researcher uses content or document analysis. according to ary et al. (2010), a content or document analysis is a research method that is used to examine textual or visual information in order to find specific features. the materials analyzed can be text book, newspaper, web pages, speeches, television programs, advertisements, musical compositions, or any of a host of other types of roita angel isabella, eni julita br. munthe, dian jessica noventy sigalingging, ridwin purba, & herman learning how to be polite through a movie: a case on brown and levinson’s politeness strategies 150 documents. based on the purpose in this paper, this research is considered as qualitative research, because the researcher wants to analyze and describe the types of politeness strategies and factors influencing the choice of politeness strategies found in tinkerbell movie based on theory brown and levinson. the aim of the research was to get data. according to arikunto (2010) said that the data are information or facts used in discussing or deciding the answer of research question. the source of data in the study was the subjects from which the data can be collected for the purpose of research. the data of this research take from dialogue of the main character which were containing politeness strategies in tinkerbell movie. meanwhile, the source data was https://t.me/tinker bellmovies/3. tinkerbell is a computer-animated film based on the disney fairies franchise, produced by jeannine roussel, directed by bradley raymond. and the duration of the film is 1 hour 18 minutes with english. the film is produced using digital 3d modeling. the album was released on dvd and blu-ray by walt disney studios home entertainment on october 28, 2008. researcher analyzes the film footage of tinker bell movie because the film had an interesting story and can be watched by all ages. besides, the researcher wants to analyze the types of politeness strategies, to know the most dominant types of politeness strategies found in tinkerbell movie. the research instrument is the researcher herself. it does not need to make questionnaire because the subjects of this study are movies. the researcher analyzes the data by interpretation since the data are forms of politeness that using by main character in this movie. according to lincoln and guba (1981) in vanderstoep & johnston (2008), humans are the best instrument for qualitative analysis. this style is well known as human instrument. more, human instrument means the one who analyses by interpreting the data objectively. as sources of data, the document has various forms, such as printed materials such as textbooks, newspapers, novels, script, or recorded material such as documentary film, movie, and any other types of recordings. the researcher used the movie script of tinker bell as the document. from the record, the researcher classifies the utterance of politeness strategy by using document analysis based on brown & levinson's theory (1987). according to creswell (2014), a documentary is a technique to collect the data based on documents can be transcripts, books, newspapers, magazines, and many more. the researchers gathered data from the transcript for this study (herman and pardede, 2020). the data for analysis is collected from one movie: tinkerbell movie, the movie are produced 3 november 0082 . this study uses the following steps to collect the data: (1) searching video from telegram. (2) downloading the video from https://t.me/tinkerbellmovies/3. (3) watching and listening the movie. (4) transcribing the utterances from the movie. data analysis is a process of organizing and classifying the data into a pattern category and basic of analysis in order to find a theme and to formulate working hypothesis as the data suggest (purba et. al., 2021). after the data have been collected from the data source, the researcher comes to data analysis. the approach that seems most purposeful in relation to the research questions of this study is politeness strategies. (1) watching the movie tinkerbell, take notes of the utterances containing politeness strategy. (2) analyzing and examining the kinds of politeness strategy by using politeness strategy theory from brown and levinson (1987). (3) finding the data in the factors influencing politeness strategies in tinkerbell movie. (4) describing and interpreting data to answer the research problems. (5) drawing conclusions. results and discussion results after analyzed the politeness strategies found in main character in tinker bell movie, the researcher found that: (1) there were four politeness strategies found in tinker bell movie. they were: bald onrecord (2), positive politeness (13), negative politeness (3), and off-record (2) based on the data analyzed showed that the most used politeness strategies found in tinker bell movie was a positive politeness. positive politeness used by main character in tinkerbell movie to create a pleasant situation, build good relationships and good interactions. based on the data, the researcher showed the percentage of politeness strategies in the table. the percentage of the contrast will be counted as: indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 151 table 1. data findings of politeness strategies no. types of politeness frequ ency percentag e 1. bald on-record 2 10% 2. positive politeness 13 65% 3. negative politeness 3 15% 4. off-record 2 10% total 20 100% figure 1. percentages of politeness strategies found in tinkerbell movie the factor influenced choice of politeness strategies found in tinkerbell was circumstances. circumstances deal with sociological variables included the relative power 6 (30%) and social distance 14 (70%). relative power (p) used greater degrees of politeness with others who have higher power or authority. social distance (d) can be saw as the composite of psychological factors such as status and age. based on the data, the researcher showed the percentage of factors influenced the choice of politeness strategies in the table. table 2. factors influenced the choice of politeness strategies n o. factors influenced the choice of politeness strategies frequ ency perce ntage 1. relative power 6 30% 2. social distance 14 70% total 20 100% figure 2. percentage of factors influenced the choice of politeness strategies found in tinkerbell movie discussion after analyzed the data, the researcher discussed the whole data and answer the problem of the research/research questions. there were three aims of this research, such as: to analyzed the types of politeness, to know the most dominant type of politeness strategies, and to know the factors influenced choice of politeness strategies found in tinkerbell movie. the researcher used brown and levinson (1987) theory to analyzed the types of politeness strategies found in tinkerbell movie and to know the factors influenced choice of politeness strategies found in tinkerbell movie. from the research findings above, the researcher found there were 20 politeness strategies in tinkerbell movie, such as: bald on-record 2 (10%), positive politeness 13 (65%), negative politeness 3 (15%), and offrecord 2 (10%). the most dominant type of politeness strategies found in tinkerbell movie was positive politeness. positive politeness used by main character in tinkerbell movie to create a pleasant situation, build good relationships and good interactions. the factor influenced choice politeness strategies found in tinkerbell movie was circumstances. circumstances deal with sociological variables including the relative power 6 (30%) and social distance 14 (70%). relative power (p) used greater degrees of politeness with others who have higher power or authority. social distance (d) saw as the composite of psychological factors such as status and age. based on findings of the research, the researcher found that there were the similarities with the findings from related previous research by hutahaean, herman, girsang (2021) entitled "an analysis of the politeness strategies utilized by pesbukers in their variety show". they used roita angel isabella, eni julita br. munthe, dian jessica noventy sigalingging, ridwin purba, & herman learning how to be polite through a movie: a case on brown and levinson’s politeness strategies 152 descriptive qualitative to analyze the data, and analyzed the politeness strategies found in the data based on brown and levinson (1987) theory they are: bald on-record, positive politeness, negative politeness, and off-record. from the findings of his research, showed the most dominant type of politeness strategies found in pesbukers variety show was positive politeness. most of the speaker and hearer in pesbukers used a positive politeness to made enjoyable situation, build good relation, good interaction between speaker and hearer so the conversation become run well. the difference between this research and previous research lies in the purpose of the research. previous studies discussed the politeness strategies used in variety show, while in this study the researchers analyzed the politeness strategies of the main character in tinkerbell movie conclusion based on the data analysis in chapter iv, the conclusions were drawn as follows: (1) objective of this research of this research is to analyze the types of politeness strategies found at the tinkerbell movie. researcher used brown and levinson (1987) theory in classified types of politeness strategies into 4 types they are: bald on-record, positive politeness, negative politeness, off-record. from those types, researcher found the types of politeness strategies as follows; there are bald onrecord 2 data (10%), positive politeness 13 data (65%), negative politeness 3 data (15%), off-record 2 data (10%). (2) the most dominant type of politeness strategies found in tinkerbell movie was positive politeness. the main character in tinkerbell movie used a positive politeness to create a pleasant situation, build good relationships and good interactions. (3) in this analysis the factor influenced choice politeness strategies found in tinkerbell movie was circumstances. circumstances deal with sociological variables includes the relative power 6 data (30%) and social distance 14 data (70%). relative power used greater degrees of politeness with others who have higher power or authority. social distance saw as the composite of psychological factors such as status and age. in this study, the researcher concluded that in a conversation the use of politeness strategies is really needed. because by using politeness strategies we can communicate with other people well. furthermore, this research is expected to be a reference for readers to better understand knowledge about politeness strategies. references aulia, p., marliani, r., & suryani, l. (2019). an analysis on record politeness of pragmatic in tinker bell and the great fairy rescue movie. project (professional journal of english education), 2(6), 811-815. arikunto, s. (2010). prosedur penelitian suatu pendekatan praktik. jakarta: rineka cipta, cet. ke-13. ary, d., jacobs, l. c., sorensen, c., & razavieh, a. (2010). introduction to research in education 8th edition. belmont, california: wadsworth. brown, p., & levinson, s. c. (1987). politeness: some universals in language usage (vol. 4). uk: cambridge university press. creswell, j. w. (2014). a concise introduction to mixed methods research. sage publications. fitria, h., ningrum, d. r., & suhandoko, s. (2020). politeness strategies reflected by the main character in “bridge to terabithia” movie. etnolingual, 4(1), 57-70. herman. (2015). illocutionary acts analysis of chinese in pematangsiantar. international journal of humanities and social science invention, 4(12), 41-48. herman., & pardede, h. (2020). deixis analysis in the business article of the jakarta post. wanastra: jurnal bahasa dan sastra, 12(2), 2579-3438. doi: 10.31294/w.v12i2.8464 hutahaean, d. t., herman., and girsang, a. f. f. (2021). an analysis of politeness strategies found in pesbukers variety show. wanastra: jurnal bahasa dan sastra, 13(1), 39-46. doi: 10.31294/w.v13i1.9218 pardede, h., herman., & pratiwi, w. (2019). an analysis of politeness principle maxims found in big hero 6 movie. european exploratory scientific journal, 3(4), 1-7. pardede, h., herman, and manurung, e. t. r. (2021). an analysis of politeness strategies in garis tangan reality show. american journal of social and humanitarian research, 2(2), 1-19. doi: https://doi.org/10.31150 purba, r., herman, h., manullang, v. r. m., and ngongo, m. (2021). investigation of decoding fillers used in an english learning talk show “english with alice”. english review: journal of english education, 10(1), 37-48. https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v10i1.5352 purba, r., herman, h., purba, a., hutauruk, a. f., silalahi, d. e., julyanthry, j., and grace, e., (2022). improving teachers’ competence through indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 153 the implementation of the 21st century competencies in a post-covid-19 pandemic. jurnal masyarakat mandiri, 6(2), 1486-1497. doi: https://doi.org/10.31764/jmm.v6i2.7340 saragih, d. y., sinaga, y. k., herman, purba, r., saragi, c. n., and manurung, l. w. (2022). the analysis of directive illocutionary acts on some conversations in the miracle worker movie. sarcouncil journal of arts and literature, 1(2), 18. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6519387 sianturi, o., saragih, y. e., sinaga, y. k., & herman. (2021). an analysis of speech act found in bernie sander’s speech: a pragmatics case. international journal of culture and modernity, 9, 105–114. simaremare, y. n., nainggolan, w. c., and herman. (2021). pragmatics analysis on conversational implicature used in mulan (2020) movie. middle european scientific bulletin, 15, 64-74. doi: https://doi.org/10.47494/mesb.2021.15.696 vanderstoep, s. w., & johnson, d. d. (2008). research methods for everyday life: blending qualitative and quantitative approaches (vol. 32). john wiley & sons. van thao, n., purba, p. m., and herman. (2021). pragmatics analysis on commisive speech act in a movie. european journal of humanities and educational advancements, 2(7), 70-74. wang, y. (2010). analyzing hedges in verbal communication: an adaptation-based approach. english language teaching, 3(3), 120124. roita angel isabella, eni julita br. munthe, dian jessica noventy sigalingging, ridwin purba, & herman learning how to be polite through a movie: a case on brown and levinson’s politeness strategies 154 indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 71 the characterization analysis of rob hall in everest: never let go film 2015 risna budiarti department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia email: risna.budiarti@yahoo.co.id nani ronsani thamrin department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia e-mail: nani_cute@yahoo.com apa citation: budiarti, r., & thamrin, n. r. (2016). the characterization analysis of rob hall in everest: never let go film 2015. indonesian efl journal, 2(1), 71-79 received: 12-11-2015 accepted: 23-12-2015 published: 01-01-2016 abstract: this research focuses on rob hall’s characterizations and moral values found in “everest: never let go” film. the aims of this research are to find out rob hall’s characterizations portrayed in the film everest: never let go and the moral values of the film. the researcher used the theory about psychological analysis (based on sigmund freud in schultz, 2005) to find out rob characters through his words or sentences in script of everest; never let go film and semiotics theory (based on roland barthes, 1968, 1990, 1991) to find out the characteristics of rob hall through pictures or signs which show his character in film “everest: never let go” with print screen of each pictures or signs, and theory of moral value based on george and uyanga (2014). qualitative descriptive method was used by the researcher to find out the characteristic of rob hall in everest: never let go film and the moral values of rob hall characterized in the film. as result, the researcher found 6 characterizations of rob hall in everest: never let go film, those are honest, sociable, responsible, assertive, attentive, and pessimistic. while, the moral values from this film was that a leader should be able to support, keep, help, open, responsible, honest, assertive, wise attitude, sacrifice, and direct their team towards better. keywords: characterization analysis, rob hall, everest: never let go film, pyschological analysis, semiotics, moral value introduction film has an essential that can make the audience interested and feel enjoy. klarer (1999) states that film is a performing arts that use actors to present the major means of character expression that should be used visual power and needs modes of presentation such as camera angel, editing, slow and fast motion, and is recorded with sound to tell a story in the film. from klarer’s explanation, film is created by literary works of society or even conversely. film gives the strong impact on the audiences because film has its own characteristics. we can take positive aspects from the film although it also has negative aspects. from film, we also could learn something new such as other cultures, someone’s character, how to solve problems or conflicts, or even we have influenced by the film because the film has strong influences for audiences. everest: never let go film is an american-british biographical adventure-disaster survival thriller drama film in 2015 directed by baltasar kormakur, written by william nicholson and simon beaufoy, and distributed by universal pictures. the actors are jason clarke (as rob hall), josh brolin (as beck weathers), john hawkes (as dough hansen), and others. everest: never let https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/jason_clarke_(actor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/jason_clarke_(actor) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/josh_brolin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/john_hawkes_(actor) risna budiarti & nani ronsani thamrin the characterization analysis of rob hall in everest: never let go film 2015 72 go film is based on true story experienced by roberto hall (rob hall) in 1996. this film tells us about a struggle in climbing everest mountain in nepal. rob hall is a leader of adventure consultants. he became a popular one because he pioneered to make a commercial guiding on everest for amateur climbers in 1992. he successfully led 19 clients to summit everest without anyone died. in 1996, his team got clients to climb everest once again. rob hall is an interesting character in everest: never let go film even though he died in the top of everest but his character that is strong, friendly, struggle, brave, ambitious, kind, and responsibility to everyone especially to his clients are interesting to be analyzed. thus, the researcher interested in analyzing his characterization in this film. in practice, the researcher used the theory about psychological analysis based on sigmund freud in schultz (2005) to find out rob’s characters through his words or sentences in script of everest: never let go film and semiotics theory based on roland barthes (1968, 1990, 1991) to find out the characteristics of rob hall through pictures which show his character in the film. the theory about moral values based on george and uyanga (2014) was also used to find out the moral values of the film. finally, this research intends to achieve the following objectives: finding out rob hall’s characterizations portrayed in the film everest: never let go and the moral values of the film everest: never let go. method in conducting the research, qualitative descriptive method is used by the researcher to find out the characteristic of rob hall in everest: never let go film and the moral values of rob hall characterized in the film. according to creswell (2012, p. 16), “qualitative research is the research exploring a problem and developing a detailed understanding of a central phenomenon.” in other words, creswell (2012) explains that the description in qualitative research includes some information about person, place, and setting in the object of our research as details of each information. qualitative descriptive was considered as an appropriate method for this research because this method helps the researcher to solve the problems found in this research. the researcher used theory about psychological analysis to find out rob characters through his words or sentences in script of everest: never let go film and semiotics to find out the characteristics of rob hall through pictures which show his character in the film. in this study, the data was taken from the dialogues on the script of each scene from beginning to the end of the story in the film everest: never let go. while, pictures and signs were used to support characterization of rob hall in the film. in collecting the data, the researcher did some steps as follows: first, choosing and downloading the film. second, watching and reading the subtitles of everest: never let go film to more understand about the film. third, collecting or selecting utterances, words, or even sentences that show the character of rob hall, scene by scene from the script. fourth, the researcher analyzes and identifies rob hall character in the film everest: never let go through psychological analysis and semiotics. in psychological method, the researcher used id, ego, and superego based on freud in schultz (2005) theory by focusing on rob hall’ utterances in the film. while in semiotics, the indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 73 researcher used denotation, connotation, and myth as signs of rob hall character based on barthes’ (1968, 1990, 1991) theory in the film everest: never let go by capturing screen which show rob hall’s characterization. fifth, describing or interpreting the data accord with those theories. sixth, finding out or searching the dominant type characterization of rob hall in the film. last, concluding the characteristic of rob hall and finding out the moral value of the film everest: never let go. then, in analyzing the data, the researcher used psychological analysis theory based on sigmund freud to find out the characterization of rob hall through the dialogue on the script. here, the researcher analyzes each sentence said by rob hall in the film which shows rob hall’s character by using a note to write the sentences, duration, and the condition when rob hall expresses his words. in addition, the researcher used semiotics theory based on roland barthes to find out the characterization of rob hall through the pictures or signs on the film. the researcher captured the screen on the computer in every sign that shows rob hall’s character. then, the researcher interpreted it based on barthes theory. after rob hall’s character has been drawn, the researcher analyzed the moral value of this film based on george and uyanga theory. the final step was the researcher interpreted the data that has been arranged and analyzed. results and discussion after analyzing the data, the researcher found 6 characterizations of rob hall in everest: never let go film. those are honest, sociable, responsible, assertive, attentive, and pessimistic. those characterizations are described below. figure 1. characterizations of rob hall in everest: never let go film 1. honest character figure 1.1 the evidence of script hellen : “you stole him from scott fischer.” rob : “no, he made his own mind.” figure 1.2 the evidence of script 2. sociable character figure 2.1 the evidence of script rob : “oh. beck weathers, ladies and gentlemen. you might’ve noticed he’s a bit of a lone star state.” beck : “100% texan right here, people. 100% texan.” figure 2.2 the evidence of script scott : “you want a cup? sit 3. responsible character figure 3.1 the evidence of script harold : “ah. rob! rob!.” rob :“i got you. harold, you okay?” ang :“is everyone okay?.” figure 3.2 the evidence of script guy : “rob, i suggest you get yourself down. you know you’re risna budiarti & nani ronsani thamrin the characterization analysis of rob hall in everest: never let go film 2015 74 rob : “for those of you who dare face the dreams, adventure consultants offer something beyond the power of words to describe. and why don’t we describe it in the brochure. because it’s mostly just pain. yes.” down, man. acclimatize.” rob : “okay. i’m normally a tea man myself, but... let’s give it a go.” doing no good up there. and we got people we can send up there to help doug, but you got to get yourself down, you understand?” rob : “i mean, come on, mate. we’re playing with a man’s life here. there’s no way i’m leaving doug behind. we got to keep moving, mate. we got to keep moving, we are in some trouble.” 4. assertive character figure 4.1 the evidence of script ian : “on everest. everyone knows everest is a bussiness for you, rob, but are you kidding? what gives you the right to tell us when we can climb and we can’t.” rob : “i’m not telling you, man. i’m asking. if we know when everybody is planning to summit, for instance... you know we can avoid the chaos that happened at the icefall today. adventure consultants are aiming for may 10th.” figure 4.2 the evidence of script rob : “yeah, but anatoli, you’re guiding for scott this year. you have people’s lives in your hands. it’s a 5. attentive character figure 5.1 the evidence of script rob : “you sure you’re going to be okay? scott?.” scott : “i’ll be good. just taking a shot of dexamenthasone now.” rob : “just don’t push yourself too hard. okay? over and out.” figure 5.2 the evidence of script rob : “that’s it. 1 step at a time, doug. come on, dougy. deep breaths, dougy. 6. pessimistic character figure 6.1 the evidence of script rob : “hi, my love. i’m a bit a bit cold. my love, i’m okay.” jan : “i know you are. but the sun will warm you soon. sweetheart. you got to get moving. you got to come on down.” rob : “my hands... frozen. my... my feet are frozen.” figure 6.2 the evidence of script rob :“i don’t think i’m going to get to meet her. i’m so sorry.” jan :“don’t say that. if indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 75 job.” anatoli : “never used it. never will. bigger problems if you run out.” come on, mate. keep it on. keep it on.” doug : “rob.” anyone can make it, you can. remember.” rob :“i love you. please don’t worry too much. good bye, my love.” 1. honest character figure 1.1 showed rob’s honesty to helen by using the sharp eyes and showed rob’s seriousness to tell the truth by maintaining his body towards helen. although helen refused rob’s news firmly with raising her arms to her waist, rob was still on his stand. it can be seen that rob is a honest character who would stare intently to his opponent talking. it can be seen on the bold and underlines words of rob hall in the scene time 00:03:32 until 00:03:54 when rob and his teams are in the parking area of the airport. rob told to helen and guy that their teams got jon krakauer. jon krakauer was a journalist from outside magazine. previously, jon krakauer was a journalist from scott fischer’s teams, mountain madness. rob was showing his superego because he had already known what he would get after he got jon krakauer. rob’s character was seen when he tried to explain the reason why krakauer joint his teams. rob tried to explain it calmly. even though helen supposed him that rob got an expensive payment from krakauer but rob refuted her calmly because he had already known its advantages and disadvantages for the teams. from figure 1.1, the researcher saw that rob was a honest character since rob explained the truly condition and he did not think that he stole krakauer from scott fischer but outside magazine was calling to rob first. on figure 1.2, rob showed his honesty that belonged to intellectual component by telling the truth to his clients. with a little smile, rob told the truth to his clients closely. rob held a guidebook, it can be seen that rob told the truth based on the guidebook and the reality on the trek. it can be seen in the scene 00:07:38 until 00:07:59. rob told to his clients about his team, adventure consultants. he told the right and wrong of adventure consultants. rob shows his ego. rob knew that his clients had to know the adventure consultants deeply. rob told the reason why adventure consultant did not describe the truly condition and could not say with words because he knew that it was mostly just pain. then, rob asked mike to show his toe because mike lost his toe when climbing everest. rob showed mike’s toe to make his clients believe and more be careful when trekking everest. from the figure 1.2 above, the researcher saw that rob was honest character by telling the good or bad of everest’s condition and also adventure consultants. he could not think that he should have any clients but he just thought how to make them believe. 2. sociable character from figure 2.1, rob was welcoming and introducing beck weathers closely with a little smile and laugh. by pointing forward to beck, rob introduced beck to others’ clients. rob also came to beck’s seat. it happened in the scene time 00:08:27 until 00:08:42. rob was looked like very kindly and friendly on his face. rob shows his superego. it could be seen when rob came close to beck with a little laughing and smiling. the meaning from this picture was that to become a leader, someone should be got closeness with all teams to get each others’ sympathy and knew how to make them felt comfort. rob was acted purely and looked so close with his clients. rob wanted to show his closeness in front of all clients in order to risna budiarti & nani ronsani thamrin the characterization analysis of rob hall in everest: never let go film 2015 76 make his clients could get the closeness each others. rob showed sociable character on figure 2.1 in the scene time 00:17:01 until 00:17:21. rob was using the brown hat and purple jacket. rob held a paper on the right hand and a cup of coffee on the left hand as if showed that rob was a sociable character because rob was holding a cup of coffee from scott and wanted to lay away a paper even though he did not like coffee. it happened when rob walked around base camp and scott fischer accosted him. they showed their friendly each other. rob showed his superego when he was offered a cup of coffee from scott fischer. actually, he did not like coffee but he tried to appreciate what scott given. the researcher saw that rob was sociable character because he could diffuse with others teams such scott fischer who was the leader of mountain madness teams. he always appreciated what others gave to him although he did not like it. 3. responsible character on figure 3.1 above, rob was wearing red jacket and blue bag. rob’s look was arrested harold who was going to fall. rob catched harold abruptly by catching harold’s feets. rob as responsible character also can be seen as on the bold and underlines words in the scene time 00:43:30 until 00:44:34. rob shows his id when he helped harold who fell down because the icefall came to his teams and it happened in unconscious condition. it can be seen in the first conversation when harold was screaming and rob immediately catched him. the researcher saw that rob has a responsible character because he could help his clients abruptly in unpredictable condition. he also showed that he had always ready to help everyone who needed the help. on the figure 3.2, rob was talking to guy through his hand-talk. even though the picture just showed rob’ face but it can be seen that rob was a responsible character. rob bowed his head and spoke firmly to show that he was playing with a man’s life so he could not leave doug alone on the top. rob’s responsible character is shown on the bold and underlines words in the scene time 01:13:37 until 01:13:56. rob showed his ego when guy asked rob to leave doug and bring himself down. rob would not to leave doug alone. however, it was danger for doug and himself. rob tried to make guy believed that rob was helping a man’s life and there was no way to leave doug. from this, the researcher saw that rob was a responsible character. rob was responsible thoroughly in all clients’ life. rob did not leave his clients alone in the trouble. 4. assertive character on figure 4.1, rob maintained his head and spoke firmly. rob brandished his right hand to assert to ian. rob did not make misunderstanding with his friends. it can be seen in the scene time 00:30:12 until 00:30:49. rob showed his superego. it happened in the meeting with all teams talking about the schedule. ian as leader of other teams said that everest just became rob’ business and he thought that rob did not reserve to ban when should climb or not climb on everest. suddenly, rob showed his assertive with saying “i’m not telling you, man. i’m asking.” so, from that statement, the researcher saw him as assertive character by seeing from what he said. rob did not only think about himself and his teams, but also all teams who climb everest. on figure 4.2, rob puckered his forehead. rob showed his amaze but still spoke firmly to assert anatoli that he should use oxygen. rob was staring at anatoli earnestly. it can be seen in the scene time 00:33:46 until 00:34:16. rob indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 77 showed his superego when anatoli said that he would not use oxygen when climbing to the summit of everest. anatoli thought that if he used oxygen, it would make a bigger problem when he ran out of the summit of everest. rob convinced anatoli that anatoli should guide scott fischer in that years, 1996, and anatoli had all people’s lives in his hands because he should responsible to mountain madness teams. unfortunately, anatoli did not want to hear what rob and scott said. rob gave understanding to use oxygen on trekking everest because it was an important thing. from figure 4.2, the researcher saw that rob was a wise character from his explanation to all clients to use oxygen because he knew that all clients’ destiny is in his hands. 5. attentive character on figure 5.1, it can be seen that rob was looking down and holding his hand-talk. rob was talking with scott. with his anxious face, rob told to scott that scott should take a rest. it can be seen in the scene 00:44:35 until 00:45:24. rob showed his superego because he knew scott fischer’s condition. rob gave his attention to scott to rest about one day in base camp. rob said “don’t push yourself too hard” to scott because he did not want to let his friend ill. from the figure, the researcher saw that rob was an attentive character that he could not let everyone ill because they pushed them too hard. by looking down and using hand-holder, rob’s sound was quiet and tried to convince scott to climb tomorrow because of up and down in the way to camp 1. on the figure 5.2, rob showed his attentive when helping doug. rob held doug’s body that fell and weak. with glared at doug, rob tried to open doug’s mask. it can be seen in the scene time 00:55:53 until 00:56:29. rob showed his ego. rob gave a spirit to doug to never give up. rob showed his attention to doug when climbing down to the bottom because of doug lost his oxygen. rob guided doug to keep his way and made doug’s believe that he could do it. rob did not want to leave doug alone although he knew the black blizzard would come up to the summit of everest. from figure 5.2 above, the researcher saw that rob was an attentive character because he did not let everyone struggle alone. 6. pessimistic character on the figure 6.1, rob’s body and his eyeglasses were covered by snow. by holding the hand-talk, rob tried to talk with jan and tell his condition. rob showed a pessimistic character as on the bold and underlines words. it can be seen in the scene time 01:30:52 until 01:31:53. rob showed his superego. rob’s teams, adventure consultants, tried to call jan to give him a spirit to move on to the bottom. the conversation showed that jan was very worry about rob’s condition. unfortunately, rob had a bit cold. rob told jan that he could not move anymore because his hands and feet were frozen. jan tried to convince rob that the sun would come and warm his body. jan said that she would send people up and bring a tea and oxygen but rob should get moving. from figure 6.1 above, the researcher saw that rob was a pessimistic character because although he got a spirit from jan, but he still could not move. from figure 6.2, rob laid on the snow but still kept his hand-talk. rob closed his eyes and folded his hand on his stomach. it can be told that rob was trembled and he could not continue his trekking. his face showed that he was weak. it can be seen in the scene time 01:38:18 until 01:40:35 that included rob’s ego. guy tried to call jan and ask her to talk with rob with the hope that risna budiarti & nani ronsani thamrin the characterization analysis of rob hall in everest: never let go film 2015 78 rob would get more spirit to keep going down to the bottom. in the first conversation between rob and jan, rob asked about her condition. but jan truly worried about rob and wanted rob to say “i’m good” but unfortunately rob had a little frostbite. jan asked rob to keep moving continuously but rob could not. rob asked jan about his daughter, sarah. rob thought that he may could not meet his daughter because he lost his balance and hoped he can keep moving to the bottom. rob asked jan to treat and love sarah although he could not beside her. rob became a pessimistic because his body was covered by ice and frozen and no one came to help him. rob showed his ego when he told that he might never meet his baby. by closing his eyes, it indicated that he had not strong to go or move anymore, and rob wanted jan not to worry too much about him and finally rob said goodbye to jan. at the time, rob passed away on the south summit on hillary step of everest. in addition to 6 characterizations of rob hall in everest: never let go film mentioned above, the researcher also found the moral values of this film. in finding the moral value, the researcher used the moral values theory proposed by george and uyanga (2014), as follow: 1. a leader should be able to support and direct their team towards better. 2. a leader should be able to keep and help their team. 3. a leader should become their team as their family. 4. a leader should be able to open everything good or bad to their team. 5. a leader should responsible and honest to their team in every situation and condition. 6. a leader should be able to show his assertive when their team got the wrong ways. 7. a leader should have a wise attitude in every decision in order to avoid any troubles in their team. 8. a leader should be willing to sacrifice in order to save their team. 9. a leader should not to distinguish their team. by using the theory, the researcher finally got moral values of the everest: never let go film that a leader should be able to support, keep, help, open, responsible, honest, assertive, wise attitude, sacrifice, and direct their team towards better. conclusion everest: never let go film is an american-british biographical adventure-disaster survival thriller drama film 2015 directed by baltasar kormakur, written by william nicholson and simon beaufoy, and distributed by universal pictures. the film was released on september 18, 2015. the duration of this film is 02:01:04. the genres of this film are adventure, biography, drama, history, and thriller. this film is based on true story experienced by roberto hall (rob hall) in 1996. in 1992, rob successfully led 19 clients to summit everest without anyone died. in 1996, his team got clients to climb everest again. it was different from his climbing before, rob got any obstacles when he would turn down into a bottom until he passed away in the south summit on hillary step. here, the researcher found 6 characterizations of rob hall in everest: never let go film. the 6 characterizations are honest, sociable, responsible, assertive, attentive, and pessimistic. the researcher gets rob’s characterization after reading whole script and watching the film. the researcher used the theories of psychological analysis based on sigmund freud in schultz (2005) and semiotics indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 79 based on roland barthes (1968, 1990, 1991). then, the researcher also gets moral values from this film that a leader should be able to support, keep, help, open, responsible, honest, assertive, wise attitude, sacrifice, and direct their team towards better. references barthes, r. (1968). elements of semiology. new york, ny: hill and wang. _________. (1990). s/z. united kingdom, uk: blackwell publishing ltd. _________. (1991). mythologies. new york, uk: the noonday pr. creswell, j. w. (2012). educational research: planning, conducting and evaluating quantitative and qualitative research (4th edition). united states, us: pearson education. everest: synopsis. retrieved march 31st, 2016 from http://m.imdb.com/title/tt2719848/s ynopsis?ref_=m_tt_stry_pl george, i. n. & uyanga, u. d. (2014). youth and moral values in changing society. iqsr journal of humanities and sosial science (iqsr_jhss), 19(6), 40-44. klarer, m. (1999). an introduction to literary studies. london, england: routledge. kumar, r. (1997). research methodology: a step-by-step guide for beginner (2nd edition). new delhi, india: sage publication. schultz, d. p & schultz, s. e. (2005). theories of personality (8th ed.). usa: thomson wadsworth. standford encyclopedia of philosophy: kant’s moral philosophy. (2008). retrieved february 2nd, 2016 from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant -moral/ http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/barthes.htm http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/barthes.htm http://m.imdb.com/title/tt2719848/synopsis?ref_=m_tt_stry_pl http://m.imdb.com/title/tt2719848/synopsis?ref_=m_tt_stry_pl http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/ indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 259 teacher professionalism in richard lagravenese’s freedom writers movie sri rahayu astuti english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas mercu buana yogyakarta, depok, yogyakarta 55283, indonesia email: srirahayu2843@gmail.com restu arini english education department, faculty of teacher training and education, universitas mercu buana yogyakarta, depok, yogyakarta 55283, indonesia email: arini@mercubuana-yogya.ac.id apa citation: astuti, s. r., & arini, r. (2022). teacher professionalism in richard lagravenese’s freedom writers movie. indonesian efl journal, 8(2), 259-269. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v8i2.6476 received: 07-03-2022 accepted: 12-05-2022 published: 31-07-2022 introduction teacher is one of the important elements in education who manages and facilitates the process of transferring knowledge from learning sources in order to be accepted by students. teachers should make efforts to raise the standard of student learning and have the responsibility to develop human capital (maria et al in husain, harefa, cakranegara, & nugraha, 2022). in order to be called as competent, afriyanli and sabandi (2020) explained that teachers have to own certain skills: educate, teach and train in short, being a teacher is a profession that requires special skills that cannot be carried out by anyone (sulastri, fitria, & martha, 2020). teacher and professionalism are terms that are important in the world of education. teacher’s professionalism is seen from the behavior, expertise, and broad insight, known as personal competence, which is carried out sincerely. further, professional teachers are those who are able to implement learning strategies into practice and present the materials well; they also do not only focus on finishing the learning objectives but also have great attention on the process of developing the potential of students that includes cognitive, affective and psychomotor aspect (sulastri et al., 2020). for this reason, professionalism is an important thing that every teacher must have. the low professionalism of teachers will result in low quality of education (muis, 2019). wardani (2012) explicated four reasons why teachers must develop professionalism: professionalism trait, rapid development of science, technology and arts, the paradigm of lifelong learning, and legal request. all are crucial but one of the reasons highlighted here is legal request. in the law of the republic of indonesia number 14 of 2005 article 8, teachers are said to be professional if they have four competencies: personality competence, professional competence, pedagogic competence, and social competence. professional teachers are required to master special competencies in the field of education in order to optimize the implementation abstract: professionalism is pivotal for teachers because it influences student accomplishment and qualifies educational goals. the demeanor of professional teachers encourages students to develop what is inside them and present it to the world. based on socket's professional teacher theory, the study analyzes lagravenese’s freedom writers movie to describe teacher professionalism through erin gruwell's character. to answer this problem, literature study, in-depth analysis and descriptive-qualitative methods are used. the study revealed that professional teachers' performance by erin gruwell contains five aspects: character, commitment to change and continuous improvement, subject knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, obligations and working relationships outside the classroom. the impact is also seen by the changes in students’ behavior from being difficult to manage to being obedient students with good achievements. thus, teacher professionalism produces prestige for students making them able to become learners with good behavior, motivation, and academic performance. keywords: teacher professionalism; teacher competences; student behavior; teacher education. mailto:arini@mercubuana-yogya.ac.id sri rahayu astuti & restu arini teacher professionalism in richard lagravenese’s freedom writers movie 260 of their duties (kunandar in nastiti, 2016), have academic qualifications and competencies to achieve national education goals (mulyasa in arlita, ahyani, & missriani, 2020), as well as increasing work productivity (asmarani, sukarno, & el widdah, 2021). many studies have found that professionalism encourages teachers to contribute to the determinants of the quality education process. as we believe that the more professional teachers are, the better their performance in carrying out their duties. professional teachers are more responsible for their duties, collaborating effectively with students, teachers, parents, and the community, as well as innovating to increase knowledge and skills and broad insight in their field. unfortunately, fact on the ground claims that the numbers of professional teachers in indonesia has not met the expected target. this is due to the low pedagogic competence and professional competence of teachers as shown by sennen (2017) in teachers’ certification. teacher certification is a program to prove the fact of a teacher's eligibility as a professional one by meeting teacher professional standards, creating quality education systems and practices, carrying out educational functions and goals. aji (in jayani, 2019), the former secretary of the directorate general of gtk, said that almost 50 percent of the three million ten thousand indonesian teachers did not pass the test when taking the teacher certification program. the reasons why teachers fail the teacher certification program 1) lack of quantity and quality in education and training, (2) low motivation for self-development, (3) time limitation, (4) lack of knowledge and misconception about government regulation (muis, 2019). in fact, this teacher certificate is a proof of a teacher's professionalism as mandated by law number 14 of 2005 concerning teachers and lecturers. according to him, a good teaching and learning process is influenced by teachers who can educate and fulfill competencies as professional teachers. moreover, professionalism of teachers is related to state-level issues, where government support is needed to improve the quality of teachers in meeting the needs of students. as revealed by wardoyo & herdiani (2017), the increasing need in education is a challenge for the government and teachers. the study concerns analyzing the movie "freedom writer" directed by richard lagravenes. the aim of the study is to discover how teacher professionalism is portrayed through erin gruwell's character in the movie which highlights the five aspects of professional teachers: character, commitment to change and continuous improvement, subject knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and working and obligations outside the classroom. method the study used a qualitative descriptive method, where a movie is analyzed through understanding the scene and dialogue and then identifying its meaning. the study focused more on textual data analysis the content was a comprehensive summary of what happens to an individual or group (elliott & timulak in pramudyani & arini, 2022) and related to aspects of social life. in the study, there were two kinds of data; primary sources and secondary data. the premier data was freedom writers movie directed by richard lagravenese in 2007; while the secondary data were the theories and research articles about teacher professionalism, teacher competences, teacher certification program, and the impact of teacher professionalism. the process of analyzing research data based on the theory of miles & huberman consisted of three steps: data reduction, data presentation, and conclusion drawing. data reduction was done by watching the film freedom writers, identifying research topics by looking at erin's role in the movie; the presentation of the data was shown from the analysis and categorizing the content data through dialogues or words used by erin which showed the professionalism of the teacher; results discussion is considered as conclusion drawing. results and discussion considering that teachers and education are very important aspects in human life, it is necessary to carry out an in-depth discussion on this matter. it relates to a movie about a teacher entitled freedom writers, which is one of the interesting things to discuss in the world of literature. the movie is directed by richard lagravenese, a white american man who was educated in acting and known as a writer and producer whose performance and dedication in his career led him to several achievements: oscars for best screenplay written indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 261 directly for the screen at the 64th academy awards, dramatic special in 2013 and outstanding nonfiction special in 2004. in 2007, he began writing and directing a based on true story movie, freedom writer, that awarded him the humanitarian award. freedom writers is a movie starring hilary swank and patrick dempsey which was filming the life of a very strong and professional teacher, erin gruwell. it is an inspirational movie that shows how a teacher struggles with her students in room 203, facing several problems such as students of various races, disputes with other teachers, and manages to show that she is someone who is brave and professional. the five aspects of teacher professionalism shown by erin gruwell in order to be called professional, a teacher must possess five qualities: character, commitment to change and continuous improvement, subject knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, obligations and working relationships outside the classroom (sockett in tichenor & tichenor, 2005). besides, professional teachers have to acquire a strong fighting spirit and enthusiasm in carrying out and practicing their skills and insights for the success of the teaching and learning process of their students. in the movie, erin meets all criteria of a professional teacher (table 1). she puts all of her energy into her students. she is very enthusiastic in teaching and motivating her students to achieve their success. her passion is always burning in teaching and awakening her students to achieve good results from their learning efforts. table 1. the five aspects of teacher professionalism shown by erin gruwell character commitment to change and continuous improvement subject knowledge pedagogical knowledge obligations and working relationships outside the classroom 1. motivating personality 2. oriented toward success 3. professional demeanor 1. adapt to change 2. adjust to the needs of the students 1. preparing and studying the material 2. mastering the material 1. innovative 2. using appropriate learning strategies 3. learning motivation 1. effective communication with colleagues 2. teacher-parents collaboration aspect 1. a teacher with character: erin gruwell’s personal competence teaching is the process by which teachers impart knowledge, facilitate learning, and help increase understanding. a factor that influences teaching is teacher characteristics. character is related to the personality or traits and qualities of teachers that distinguish one from another. according to neugebauer (2019), character is related to personality, abilities, experience, knowledge, and beliefs. the ‘character’ that must be possessed by a professional teacher are 1) motivating personality; 2) orientation toward success; and 3) professional demeanor; which are described as enthusiastic, warm and humorous, credible, optimistic about the success of themselves and their students, adaptable, and knowledgeable. in the movie, erin performs all the characteristics. motivating personality of a teacher is seen from the way teachers enjoy what they do to encourage a sense of enthusiasm and show great interest in something. since the first day erin entered woodrow wilson high school, she showed her passion and optimism as a teacher. even the head of department, ms. campbell was happy to meet a bright and good young teacher. however, in the meantime ms. campbel also lamented that erin was there after the voluntary integration program, a program that allowed anyone to enter and increased knowledge at the school regardless of race. because of the program, the problem of war between races in la was carried over to the school, it was what makes the school not as famous as it used to be. nonetheless, erin saw woodrow from a different perspective. for her, the school was very interesting because it was where the war actually took place. ms. campbell: “… we used to have one of the highest scholastic records in the district, but since voluntary integration was suggested, we've lost over 75% of our strongest students.” erin: “well, actually, i chose wilson because of the integration program. i think what's happening here is really exciting, don't you?” sri rahayu astuti & restu arini teacher professionalism in richard lagravenese’s freedom writers movie 262 erin: “... and i remember when i was watching the la riots on tv ... i think the real fighting should happen here in the classroom.” (05:33 to 05:36) a teacher with a motivating personality must also be able to make students comfortable by creating fun learning situations so it needs to be humorous. erin could be fair to her students as a wise teacher. she was capable of solving the existing problems without creating an atmosphere of tension. during the lesson, tito bullied jamal. he drew jamal's face on a piece of paper. tito exaggerated his drawing by drawing a black man with big and thick lips. jamal felt sad, all his classmates laughed until erin realized that. instead of scolding and taking sides with one student, erin responded that it was an art. erin communicated tito and jamal's problems well. she controlled the atmosphere as calmly as possible so that none of the students felt judged for the matter that occurred. erin really lightened the mood with her humor. erin: "tito? would this be funny if it were a picture of you?" tito: "it ain't." erin: “maybe we should talk about art. tito's got real talent, don't you think?” (29:55 to 29:59) erin always saw everything in positive ways. it is said that she was a teacher with success orientation (oriented toward success). she never gave up, even though she faced noisy students who were difficult to manage and were judged as being ‘different’ from other classes. erin believed that her students had the ability to learn and it was her own ability to help students be successful. she saw there were hidden talents in her students, and her job was only to explore and lead them to reach it. brian: ".... by then, most of your kids will be gone anyway." erin: "well, if i do my job, they might be lining up at the door." (12:35 to 12:38) lastly, erin had a professional demeanor inside her. teacher's professional demeanor is shown in the teacher's attitude in focusing activities on the tasks that are most likely helping students to learn. after the issue of tito and jamal, erin unintentionally discussed the holocaust an event of persecution and murder of jews who have very big noses, during world war ii. she finally knew what she was supposed to teach, it was about gangsters. without support from the school did not stop erin from continuing trying to help her students learn, she asked for support from the school board dr. cohn. as a form of professional demeanor, erin helped students learn in real terms in the field because it is important to open their mindset and increase new knowledge. dr. cohn: “look, i appreciate your intentions, but there's nothing i can do on a class-by-class basis.” erin: “... i'm thinking of trips. most of them have never been outside of long beach. they haven't been given the opportunity to expand their thinking about what's out there for them. and they're hungry for it. i know it. and it's purely a reward system. they won't get anything they haven't earned by doing their work and upping their grades." (57:39 to 57:56) aspect 2. erin gruwell and commitment to change and continuous improvement teacher commitment is an internal drive to give better dedication in order to build an effective learning environment for students. this is related to the teacher's efforts to show improved performance (altun, 2017). teacher commitment is the teacher's efforts to find ways to create learning to enable students to achieve their goals (adjust to the needs of students). meanwhile, continuous improvement is a process related to teaching that requires teachers to continuously make changes by way of thinking, identifying, evaluating what has been applied and then trying to improve it (adapt to change) (szőköl, 2018). commitment to change and continuous improvement in education become a form of teacher's internal strength regarding the potential to develop teaching practices for the creation of learning strategies that lead to students' achievement (altun, 2017). in the latest literature on teacher commitment, one of them focuses on the commitment of teachers to their students while continuous change refers to a process of progressive improvement. thus, the aspect here should show: adapt to change and adjust to the needs of students. adapt to change refers to the desire of teachers to do more, best and better than before. in the film, erin brought her desire out to make a higher quality of education for her students. erin protested the school's policies which she considered did not give any significant effect on students. the policy implemented by the school only requires students coming to school as an obligation, not coming to indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 263 school to get an education. to her, it was like a pointless waste of time. dr. cohn: "ms. gruwell, there's a system in place based on years of running an educational facility. you have to follow that system." erin: "no. i won't. look, i'm just trying to do my job here. what's the point of a voluntary integration program if the kids making it to high school have a 5th grade reading level? ...all that program is doing is warehousing these kids until they're old enough to disappear. dr. cohn, why should they waste their time showing up when they know we're wasting our time teaching them?" (57:02 to 57:13) a further point, erin proved that she can adjust to the needs of students. after erin knew her students were interested in stories of gang riots like the holocaust, she finally thought about provided books related to gangsters. in this case, erin as a teacher fulfilled the necessity of students by seeing something related to their real life. the daily lives of her students were filled with interracial enmity. every day, they struggled with how to survive violence such as shootings that could happen anytime and anywhere. infrequently, they had to be involved in violence and fights until they had to go in and out of prison and eventually dropped out of school. erin: "we were discussing the holocaust." ms. campbell: "no, they won't be able to read that." erin: "what about these? romeo and juliet. that's a great gang story." ms. campbell: "no, not the books. this is what we give them. it is romeo and juliet, but it's a condensed version. but even these, look how they treat them. see how torn up they are? they draw on them." erin: "ms. campbell? they know they get these because no one thinks they're smart enough for real books." (39:11 to 39:23) erin's role here was to ensure that she knew all the resources her students needed to succeed. she believed that by explaining something related to how they feel can enlighten them to imitate the good side of it. “...i really think that the stories like the diary of anne frank and that they'd be so great for them … they could relate to these stories considering all that they face." (39:11 to 39:23) aspect 3. subject knowledge: erin gruwell’s professional competence subject knowledge is understanding of teachers' subject matter which becomes an important factor in determining teacher effectiveness. teachers need a deep concept of the subjects to be delivered to develop their professional skills (mee, 2020). before teaching-learning takes place, teachers are required to understand the curriculum and subject syllabus first to build confidence and ensure that they are ready and able to explain the material in order to make students understand it. teachers should also reconsider their position as subject matter experts, where it is related to the teachers' professional competence. in other terms, subject knowledge relates to a component that concerns professionalizing school teaching and recognition of the professional autonomy of individual teachers. effective subject knowledge for teaching depends on mastering and combining the subject content that teachers teach to suit the needs of their students (bagoum & suking, 2020). aspects of subject knowledge consist of preparing and studying the material then mastering the material. before the teaching and learning process, erin always prepared (preparing) everything well. she studied (studying the material) it before giving it to the class to make her comprehend and deliver the material well. in this case, erin taught authentic material, the use of material related to real life where students interact (setyaningrum & sabilah, 2017). authentic material has the potential to make lessons interesting and fun. here, erin used the lyrics of the song 2pac shakur, about the struggle of african americans for equality in life to study poetry. the form of erin's readiness before teaching could be seen when she provided a song lyric of 2pac shakur and printed it so it was ready to share with students. the students were asked to pay attention to the lyrics which contain some sophisticated phrases. during the teaching-learning process, erin confidently responded to the song's lyrics because she had already learned it. she also knew the purpose of this lesson was to improve students' listening and reading skills. erin: "we're gonna be covering poetry. who here likes tupac shakur?" jamal: "it's 2pac." erin: "raise your hand." (just two of the students raise their hand) sri rahayu astuti & restu arini teacher professionalism in richard lagravenese’s freedom writers movie 264 "really? i thought there'd be more fans." erin: "i have the lyrics to this song printed out. i want you to listen to this phrase i have up on the board. it's an example of an internal rhyme. what he does is very sophisticated and cool, actually." (20:16 to 20:28) in another case, a scene of another subject knowledge showed erin developing her professionalism by mastering the material deeply and directing student learning activities to achieve learning objectives (scene in minute 28:28 to 28:35). erin asked students to arrange some ambiguous sentences into sentences with the right tenses. according to freeman (2002 in rahman, 2021), the method used by erin educated students in the use of grammatical sentence patterns. erin as a teacher plays a role in controlling and directing students' language behavior. in this situation, erin focuses on how to give practice to her students in analyzing grammar. erin's learning objectives are for students to master vocabulary, especially in pronunciation and spelling of words. aspect 4. erin gruwell’s pedagogical knowledge pedagogic knowledge is the teachers' capital in carrying out their professional duties, referring to the teachers' knowledge in creating an effective teaching-learning environment. pedagogy is useful for teachers in understanding educational phenomena systematically as well as instructions on what to do and what to avoid. teachers' pedagogical knowledge is related to pedagogical competence, namely doing assignments and developing teachers' abilities in managing the teaching and learning process (kumala, susilo, & susanto, 2018). according to prihatin (2022), pedagogical knowledge includes understanding of: creating teaching-learning situations that have never been done before (innovative), using learning models to encourage learning progress based on student needs (using appropriate learning strategies), fostering student learning motivation (learning motivation). erin presented memorable learning, where the interest of students appeared to be actively involved in the classroom. it is called pedagogical knowledge teachers’ skill in improving the quality of the learning process so that the scope of learning and interaction becomes more alive (prihatin, 2022). erin's pedagogical knowledge is pervasive and innovative, using appropriate learning strategies and giving learning motivation to the students. the way erin teaching introduced something new by utilizing her creative ideas as a teacher (innovative). to find whether the students got involved in the riots between the gangs or not, erin invited them to play a game, line game. it was a game that started by asking questions to the students; if the questions were related to them then they had to step closer to the line that erin had drawn. on the other hand, if the questions did not apply to them, they could go back or even sit down. erin: “we're gonna play a game, all right? it's a lot of fun. i promise. look, you can either sit in your seats reading those workbooks, or you can play a game. either way, you're in here till the bell rings. okay. this is called the line game. i'm gonna ask you a question. if that question applies to you, you step onto the line, and then step back away for the next question. easy, right?" students: “yeah, whatever (41:23 to 41:33) the line game that erin gave to class was a way of teaching that had a great opportunity to familiarize teachers with the students, the students learn it in an interactive way. in my point of view, the game allowed erin as a teacher to analyze the learning by knowing the background of the students. erin's focus was teaching communicative language, where the students were indirectly given the opportunity to say something happened in their lives, even though it did not come out through their words. in another scene, erin exhibited that she used a learning strategy that fits the needs of the students (using appropriate learning strategies). she had adequate knowledge of teaching methods which she believed she could apply in the classroom. through an empty book that she shared to each student, erin opened up opportunities for herself to get to know each of her students better. the book functioned as a daily diary for them to use and write about anything, erin created a specific condition; she required the students to write every day. besides, she did not include this diary task in the assessment. from this assignment, erin applied strategies to practice writing skills and make students learn how to express ideas. erin: “now, i have something for each of you. everyone has their own story, and it's important for you to tell your own story, even to yourself. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 265 so, what we're going to do is we're gonna write every day in these journals. you can write about whatever you want, the past, the present, the future. you can write it like a diary, or you can write songs, poems, any good thing, bad thing, anything. but you have to write every day. keep a pen nearby. whenever you feel the inspiration. and they won't be graded..." (45:26 to 46:06) erin also provided learning motivation, which was needed to achieve learning goals. the movie showed that the motivation of the teacher succeeded in encouraging students to learn and do their best. to increase students' motivation, erin held a celebration through toast for change, an activity to increase students' academic fulfillment, foster selfconfidence, cultural and racial diversity. the activity focused on internal learning motivation, where erin as a teacher accommodated students' voices, attracted interest, and developed their problem solving skills. in addition, toast for change was also a form of commitment for each student to start the process towards something better than before. erin arranged all the chairs that were set aside while a few tables were full of some bags and some drinks on them. she invited the students to take a glass of drink and picked it up then said what happened to them in the past and promised to change and make it even better in the future. erin: "okay, guys, listen up! this is what i want you to do. i want each of you to step forward and take one of these borders bags, which contain the four books we're gonna read this semester. students: "all right!" erin: "they're very special books and they each remind me, in some way of each of you. but, before you take the books, i want you to take one of these glasses of sparkling cider, and i want each of you to make a toast. we're each gonna make a toast for change. and what that means is, from this moment on every voice that told you "you can't" is silenced. every reason that tells you things will never change, disappears. and the person you were before this moment, that person's turn is over.” (01:10:50 to 01:11:17) aspect 5. obligation and working relationships outside the classroom: erin’s social competence obligation and working outside the classroom refers to the ability of teachers to understand that they are an inseparable part of society outside the classroom, it is called social competence of teachers. it can be defined as the ability to carry out work demands that require teachers to adapt to the surrounding environment as a form of social communication both with school devices and even with society. the strongest finding of abdullah, shamsi, jenatabadi, ng, & mentri (2022) stated that the support from the society outside the classroom on the students' learning environment had a positive influence. from the teachers’ collaboration with colleagues and also parents, each person's awareness arises that they have a role and responsibility for the progress of students' learning. thus, this aspect consists of effective communication with colleagues and teacher-parents collaboration (ahmad, 2019). in the movie, erin made effective communication with co-workers and also the school board, dr. cohn, supervisor's support for his members (effective communication with colleagues). the authority in the school was entirely in the hands of the head department, ms. campbell. unfortunately, ms. campbell did not support erin's efforts to prosper her students on stupidity. ms. campbell disagreed with all of erin's ideas which she considered a waste of energy. instead of despair, erin even bravely went to the school board to gain strength. erin expressed her desire to do anything to make her students grow. she asked for help from dr. cohn to ensure no one could hinder her including ms. campbell. dr. cohn: “…you united and that’s a step. what can i do for you?” erin: “i want to do more with them. i need the support of someone in power” afterwards, erin's action was to try getting support from the parents of her students (teacherparent cooperation). this showed erin's efforts in preparing for the school parents night event were because she wanted to be close and get to know the parents of her students. erin arranged and decorated the classroom well, her attitude was very respectful of the parents' presence but no one came. it was very different from brian gelford's class, a junior english and distinguished honors teacher almost all parents attended the event. gelford's class was filled with good and smart students, quite the opposite of erin's class. the possible reason that the sri rahayu astuti & restu arini teacher professionalism in richard lagravenese’s freedom writers movie 266 parents of her students did not come to the event, may be because they knew how their children were doing at school, who considered their children had less intelligence so they thought coming to the event would only be in vain. although what erin hoped for had not been successful, at least she had tried to build cooperation with the parents. conclusion law number 14 of 2005 teachers and lecturers requires teachers to develop four competencies: personal competence, professional competence, pedagogic competence, and social competence. this is in line with what is portrayed in the "freedom writer" movie through erin gruwell’s character who showed all the competencies: character and commitment to change and continuous improvement (personal competence), subject knowledge (professional competence), pedagogical knowledge (pedagogic competence), obligations and work relations outside the classroom (social competence). freedom writers movie showed teacher professionalism through erin's character. the movie is a true story that tells the story of erin gruwell, an idealistic and anti-discriminatory teacher who arrives hopeful at a school – a place that became a violent war zone, at woodrow wilson high school, united states in 1992. the tension between races increased and was inevitable, a feeling of hatred was mounting in each group of races. it carried over to the school environment, where students sat based on their race. as a professional teacher, erin's task is not only to transfer knowledge to students, but also to educate and direct students to become virtuous human beings in order to be able to achieve educational goals. faced with students who were problematic and lacking in academics as well as the absence of support from the outside classroom, it did not stop erin from carrying out her duties as a teacher by carrying out aspects of teacher professionalism. the movie exemplified the importance of teacher professionalism in education. with aspects of professional teachers, erin had: (1) a personality that motivated students to learn and felt optimistic about the students' success, (2) a reformer spirit who was moved to make changes to learning and adapted to the needs of the students, (3) actual knowledge for thorough understanding so teacher had more prepared to teach and master learning materials with confidence, (4) teacher who created a learning atmosphere that allowed students to learn comfortably in an innovative and creative way and used learning strategies to facilitate student understanding, (5) maintained good relations with parents and the community outside classrooms to foster participation and shared responsibility for education. overall, teacher professionalism on erin had been shown to have a significant effect on education. when erin developed her professionalism with the aspects of professional teachers, it not only improved her professional quality as a teacher, but also succeeded in changing the character of unruly students into students who had good attitudes and were able to improve academically and achieve what they dream. therefore, what erin did as a professional teacher can be an inspiration for other teachers to prosper the world of education. acknowledgement special thanks to mrs. restu arini, s.pd., m.pd., the second author for her proofreading the article; for lovely parents and family for the never-ending love, support and prayers, last but not least for precious friends, thanks for making happiness and being great discussion partners. references abdullah, n. a., shamsi, n. a., jenatabadi, h. s., ng, b. k., & mentri, k. a. c. 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(2017). teacher professionalism: analysis of professionalism phases. international education studies, 10(4), 90-100. fromhttps://eric.ed.gov/?id=ej1138573 http://dx.doi.org/10.51278/aj.v2i3.70 https://doi.org/10.31538/ndh.v6i2.1365 https://doi.org/10.37411/jjem.v1i2.522 https://doi.org/10.35445/alishlah.v14i2.1060 https://databoks.katadata.co.id/datapublish/2019/12/12/guru-sertifikasi-belum-sampai-50 https://databoks.katadata.co.id/datapublish/2019/12/12/guru-sertifikasi-belum-sampai-50 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331965462 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/331965462 http://doi.org/10.13140/rg.2.2.21043.99369 https://repository.uinjkt.ac.id/dspace/handle/123456789/39496 https://repository.uinjkt.ac.id/dspace/handle/123456789/39496 https://repository.usd.ac.id/8133/1/121214028_full.pdf https://repository.usd.ac.id/8133/1/121214028_full.pdf https://doi.org/10.4337/9781788110426.00030 https://doi.org/10.4337/9781788110426.00030 https://jurnal.unsil.ac.id/index.php/tlemc/article/view/3610 https://jurnal.unsil.ac.id/index.php/tlemc/article/view/3610 https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v8i1.5591 https://proceeding.unikal.ac.id/index.php/kip/article/view/749 https://proceeding.unikal.ac.id/index.php/kip/article/view/749 https://ejournal.unpatti.ac.id/ppr_iteminfo_lnk.php?id=1704 https://ejournal.unpatti.ac.id/ppr_iteminfo_lnk.php?id=1704 https://www.erudio.ub.ac.id/index.php/erudio/article/view/202 https://www.erudio.ub.ac.id/index.php/erudio/article/view/202 https://doi.org/10.37985/jer.v1i3.30 https://sciendo.com/downloadpdf/journals/jolace/6/1/article-p53.pdf https://sciendo.com/downloadpdf/journals/jolace/6/1/article-p53.pdf https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ej728484 https://doi.org/10.33830/jp.v13i1.357.2012 https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ej1138573 sri rahayu astuti & restu arini teacher professionalism in richard lagravenese’s freedom writers movie 268 the english immersion program: jane lockwood the english immersion program: measuring the communication outcomes the english immersion program: measuring the communication outcomes jane lockwood department of english, city university of hong kongemail: lockwood@cityu.edu.hkapa citation: lockwood, j. (2015). the english immersion program: measuring the communicationoutcomes. indonesian efl journal, 1(1), 98-107received: 10-09-2014 accepted: 13-10-2014 published: 01-01-2015 abstract: this paper explores how language assessment is typically used to measure language gain asa result of the immersion experience abroad. it also explores ways in which this might be improved.this study explores a recent experience where australian immersion providers, participants andfunders all report significant intercultural awareness raising and improved confidence inunderstanding and speaking in english as a result of the sojourn. however, it transpires that theimmersion providers used traditional proficiency focused language assessment tools on entry and exitto measure communication outcomes across the skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing. itappears therefore, that there is a gap between what the perceived outcomes and value are of theimmersion experience, and how they are currently measured. this article reports on a small scalestudy exploring the perceptions of two immersion providers in australia, one immersion coordinatorin hong kong and four returnees on the language assessments they used and experienced, particularlyprobing on how well they felt these assessments measured their communication gains as a result ofthe immersion experience. keywords: language assessment, immersion, indigenous criteria. introductionmillions of students head off tointernational destinations to spend timeliving with ‘homestay’ families and studyingin tertiary institution that offer differentlanguage and cultural experiences. oecdfigures predict that this number will reach 8million by 2025 (davis 2003). in asia,universities have, over the last two decades,been sending increasing numbers of studentsto english speaking destinations such as uk,usa, canada, australia and new zealand toimprove their english language skills in theauthentic contexts. (bodycott & crew 2001).in 2008-2009, the hong kong institute ofeducation spent just under hkd2 millionsubsidizing short term immersion programsin such english speaking destinations as uk,canada and australia, but little data exist onhow effective such programs are in terms ofenglish language communication gain.this article reports on two languageimmersion providers’ tools and processesused to measure language proficiency gain.these measures are briefly described and then the outcomes of key stakeholder groupsincluding the providers, the returnees and thehong kong based immersion coordinator areanalyzed in terms of the efficacy of suchmeasures. the immersion experience of hongkong institute of education undergraduatestudents takes place over a full semesterwhere they live with homestay families andattend university programs in either canada,australia or the uk. each student does a pre-and post course assessment as well as thecompletion of an ethnographic study as partof their program.if intercultural awareness is a key areain which sojourners are expected to makeprogress while abroad, then appropriatemethods of assessment should be used tomeasure the gains they have made. whilemuch attention has focused on thepreparation, format, and the content of thestudy abroad programs, relatively little hasbeen published about the modes ofassessment (jackson 2005:165). this articlewill report on student and staff perceptionsof the communication gains and finally it 98 indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427report on student and provider perceptionsof the efficacy of the assessments used andsuggestions for improvement. what do english language assessment practitioners and researchers say about measuring communications skills?english language assessment hasreceived a great deal of attention fromapplied linguists over the last 35 years. in thepast, teachers have mostly concernedthemselves with simply testing the discretelanguage learning outcomes of programdelivery in language learning classrooms.commercial english language tests aboundbut tend to focus on the measurement ofgeneric or academic english languageproficiency gain across the skills of listening,speaking, reading and writing. these trendsin turn have resulted in a preoccupation withthe summative assessment comprising of aseries of discrete language items that add upto an overall score. this emphasis on thequantitative score as the sole indicator ofprogram success reflects a psychometricapproach to language program evaluationand has been seriously challenged bylanguage assessment experts (hamp lyons1991; shohamy 1992; brindley 1995;bachman and palmer 1996, mcnamara 1996,douglas 1999).more recently much of this research hascentred around how language teachers andassessment providers can improve their toolsand processes to reflect the whole context aswell as the specific purpose for assessment.there has been a paradigmatic shift frompositivist models of language assessment tomore constructionist models where thelanguage assessment tools and processes aredesigned to be more responsive to theparticular contexts and purposes for languageassessment.much discussion has also taken placeabout the introduction of ‘formative’ languageassessment tasks e.g. assessment for learningtasks that take place in the class room,portfolio assessment and other on-goingassessment tools (hamp lyons 1991) that arequalitative but can also yield scores. as well,much discussion has also taken place aboutthe veracity of reporting on language proficiency indicators as opposed to languageperformance indicators as being more or lessappropriate for different contexts andpurposes of language training (mcnamara1996); of qualitative rather than quantitativeindicators (shohamy 1998); of tailor madeassessments as opposed to standardizedassessment ( douglas 1999, pennington1998).the two unifying themes in the mostrecent language testing and educationalliterature revolve around the related issues ofbeing open to different forms of assessmentand being open to how these forms ofassessment can be context and purposesensitive. the language testing literature isrich in the discussions about the relativemerits of using different applied linguisticframeworks to achieve construct validity andreliability in the design and use of any test.much of the discussion has revolved aroundpushing criteria for language assessmentbeyond the traditional preoccupations withpronunciation and grammatical accuracy to aconsideration of broader communicativedomains such as discourse and interactivecapabilities (canale and swain 1980;bachman and palmer 1982; bachman andsavignon 1986; bachman 1990, davies 1988;hughes 1989; weir 1993, douglas 2005).assessment practices that reflectcommunicative approaches to languagetraining in language for specific purposes(lsp) contexts is also well covered (lumleyand brown 1996; mcnamara 1997; douglas2000; elder 2001), and well–documentedaccounts of test development for differentgroups of occupations and professionalsabound. mcnamara (1990,1996);elder (2001)and mcdowell (1995) have both developedstandardised and performance-based testsfor a range of teachers and healthprofessionals in australia and douglas (2000)looks at specific language use situations todevelop test content and test methods forhighly specific lsp, such as english for pilotsand air traffic control. such frameworks,however, have yet to be fully understood in anindustry context and incorporated intobusiness language assessment practices on-site (lockwood 2002; lockwood 2008).in recent discussions about language for 99 jane lockwood the english immersion program: measuring the communication outcomesspecific testing (jacoby and mcnamara 1999,douglas and myers 2000, douglas 2001),there has been a call for what they havetermed “indigenous assessment criteria”.such criterion is derived from the targetlanguage use (tlu) context. performanceassessment practices are seen as morerelevant to knowing whether a candidate canhandle a complex professional and/or socialsituations where mere language proficiencyindicators are not likely to provideappropriate performance profiles. theimmersion context can be viewed as another‘indigenous assessment’ site encompassingthe homestay context and the universitycontext. what is interesting about this contextis the intercultural richness of the immersionexperience on the one hand and therequirement, on the other hand, to reportoutcomes in terms of language proficiencygains to secure and maintain funding.much has been written on interculturalassessment (kramasch and sullivan 1996;byram and fleming 1998). all start withattempts to define what it is exactly we aretrying to assess when we assess interculturalperformances; is it knowledge?; is it skills?; isit behaviours?; is it motivation?; is it all ofthese? some even argue the efficacy of such agoal as the perfect mastery of a secondlanguage where acculturalization is the aim(seelye, 1984). a large number ofstandardized measures exist to assessintercultural knowledge ( allen & herron,2003; coleman, 1995; redden, 1975; corbitt,1998; pedersen, 2010); these are typicallyachieved through surveys, inventories,proficiency exams and multiple choice teststo quantify the amount of knowledgeabsorbed regarding the target culture.however, earley and ang (2003) suggest thatthe assessment of intercultural intelligence ismuch more than mere cognition andknowledge. they propose a threedimensional model that encompassesknowledge, behaviour and motivation. theyfurther propose that non psychometricmethods can be applied appropriately toassess the motivational and behaviouralcomponents of cultural intelligence (cq).jackson (2005) came to much the sameconclusion in the study she carried out which involved introspective, qualitative assessmentof the sojourn experience as captured by agroup of hong kong students when away onimmersion. in this study students wereencouraged to use first person introspectiveaccounts (in the form of diaries) to assess thelearning processes of short term sojournersas a way of measuring intercultural andcommunication gains. these were thenassessed against standardized gradingcriteria (a-excellent ----f-fail).in an earlier study which involved hongkong students on immersion (evans, alanoand wong 2001), three levels of interculturalawareness were hypothesized as ‘emergent,growing and enhanced’ (p.96) andvideotaped discussions hong kong studentson english speaking immersion programswere analyzed for both linguistic and culturalgains. another study in the late 1990’s(murdoch and adamson 2001) investigatedthe extent and range of english use beforeand during a 4 week immersion experiencein australia as a way of explaining thesociolinguistic gain from this experiencereported by students. not surprisingly thesestudies showed considerable increase inenglish use in a range of social andeducational settings and situations. thesekinds of studies may hold the key forimagining more enriched assessment toolsand processes for immersion programs thattake hong kong students away overseas. methodthis study is a qualitative enquiry intothe pre and post course languageassessments of two hkied languageimmersion providers domiciled in australia.two immersion provider coordinatorsprovided documentation regarding theassessments they currently use, the most upto date records of the results, as well as theend of course reports. they were interviewedspecifically about the assessment processesin a semistructured interview on the phone.four returnees also agreed to be interviewedabout what they perceived to be the maingains of the immersion experience and howthese were assessed and evaluated. theyagreed to provide their end of programethnographic studies and in one case, one of 100 indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427the returnees volunteered her diary whichshe had kept during her stay overseas. finally,the hong kong immersion coordinator wasinterviewed to elicit his views on what he feltwere the gains of the immersion experienceare and how these match with the tools andprocesses used to measure communicationgain. all interviewees were encouraged toprovide suggestions for improved andalternative measurement and these arediscussed in some detail in this article. findings and discussion what do the pre and post immersion program scores indicate about the improved language levels of the students? the english language assessment toolsused by the two providers are described indetail later in this section. they are similar inthat they assess the four skills of listening,speaking, reading and writing. interestingly,the results indicate gains across all the skillsand are not just confined to the skills oflistening and speaking, reading and writingalso appeared to report gains. no studentappeared to go down in any of the skills areas,although there were differences in thepercentage gains particularly in the areas oflistening and speaking where one studentappeared to have made gains of over 100%on the initial score for speaking. the averagegains across the four skills for the twoproviders are tabulated below:table 1: average language gains of students on immersion listening speaking reading writingprovider 1 20% 30% 10% 10%provider 2 4.3% 6.5% 3.9% 3.75%in the data provided by both providergroups it appears that the speaking levelsfollowed by the listening levels showed mostimprovement with a fairly even distributionacross the writing and reading levels. what isinteresting in the data is the significantdifference in the reported % of gain acrossthe skills of listening and speaking betweenthe two provider groups. provider 1 reportsmuch higher post immersion gains thanprovider 2. given that both immersionprograms took place in australia at about thesame time, and given that the students werenot ‘streamed’ into levels (i.e. a more ablegroup going to provider 2 and a less ablegroup going to provider 1), one of thevariables that needs to be considered is theassessment tools and processes themselves. what do the providers do and think about the assessment processes they carry out? provider 1provider 1 complied with the tenderregulation that requires pre and post courseassessment by administering an (languageproficiency assessment for teachers of english)lpate type test. this comprises a reading andlistening comprehension that test thecomprehension of authentic type texts throughcloze testing, multiple choiceand open-ended questions.the open-ended questions probereading skills that go beyond informationextraction to eliciting students’ interpretative,inferential and analytic skills of what they haveread and listened to. the writing test is alsodesigned to mirror the lpate test andassesses both the ability to write extensive textas well as the ability to recognize student errorand use appropriate metalanguage to explainthe errors. similarly, the speaking test mirrorsthe lpate test tasks and assessment criteria.the students areasked to read aloud anextensive passage and are marked withcriteria that are related to pronunciationability as well as the ability to read aloud withmeaning. the last criteria is highly contentiousin that students are really being assessed ontheir reading comprehension ability as well astheir pronunciation. the second part of thespeaking test is a short semi spontaneouspresentation on a given topic. here thestudents are assessed on their ability toorganize what they are going to say as well astheir ability to use grammatical and lexicalitems accurately and showing range. finallythe students are askedto participate in anopen discussion with threeother participantsaround a given topic. here the criteriaforassessment relate to their ability to interactwell with their peers. 101 jane lockwood the english immersion program: measuring the communication outcomesthe pre and post assessment record issent to the funding provider in compliancewith the tender regulation. however none ofthe returnees knew what their languageassessment results were, nor did they appearconcerned to know, as they understood thatthese were not high stakes test. the lpatetest is marked on a 5 point scale with .5 levelsrecorded if the candidate exhibits features inthe whole number score.interestingly provider 1 felt there wereextreme limitations on what this languageassessment could measure as it relates to theimmersion experience. its value seemed torelate more to compliance with the tenderregulation. however, this provider also said:we knew that the assessment would not capturewhat we felt were the real communications gainsof immersion but nonetheless we wantedsomething that was valid and reliable; somethingthat would be useful to the student and wouldalso comply with the tender regulation. afterconsulting (an external assessment group) wedecided it would be most useful for students todo an lpate type test as we know this is a highstakes test for the immersion students when theyreturn to hong kong.during the course of the interview, thecourse provider coordinator expressed herviews about the gap between the currentassessment procedure as described aboveand what she felt the real gains were in termsof communication improvement of the cohortof english major students from the hongkong institute of education. she said: we know that students make huge gains beyond what is routinely assessed in the pre and post course test. for example the students develop great confidence in their ability to speak and understand. at the end of immersion they are able to engage much more in informal day to day interaction as a result of living with english speaking families, travelling around australia and making friends on campus. they allow themselves more thinking time when speaking and they rephrase what they say to make their meaning clear…there has obviously been a shift from worrying about themselves as communicators to worrying about whether they are making their meaning clear to the person they are talking to…a sure sign of a good communicator. this shift from a preoccupation with the mechanics of language and grammar accuracy to real communicative ability including more confident paralinguistic and intercultural behaviours are huge. provider 1 suggested it would bedifficult to measure, in a standardized format,this kind of shift and suggested one vehiclefor tracking this change would be in theactual presentation of the ethnographic study,which is an end of course requirement, aswell as the quality of observation containedtherein. the provider cited one student in the2008/2009 cohort as follows: one of the mainland students made a remarkabletransformation in his body language andcommunicative confidence during immersion.when it came to presenting his ethnographicstudy, he stood up straight (where previously hehad stooped), he made eye contact and deliveredhis findings in such a confident and articulateway…i couldn’t believe the transformation butthis is not unusual.provider 1 suggested that perhapsattempting to develop some kind ofstandardized marking scheme to capture thisshift either as part of the ethnographic studyassignment and /or the post test in speakingwould be worth considering. she suggestedthe videoing this final presentation mayprovide a source of evidence for furtherspeaking assessment and gain. it should benoted however that provider 1 postimmersion speaking and listening scoresreported very significant gain. it is the natureof this assessment construct that is beingchallenged for validity in this chapter provider 2provider 2 immersion coordinator alsorepresented a tertiary provider in australia.like provider 1, provider 2 felt there werehuge gains made in confidence andintercultural awareness that translated intoimprovements in communications strategiesnot reflected in the provider 2pre and postcourse language assessments, which showedrelatively small gains. this coordinator alsobemoaned the lack of standardization acrossthe immersion provider group in terms of preand post course assessment. he reported thata core group of the immersion providers hadinformally agreed to administer the ieltstests as a way of aligning, although he did notbelieve that this to be an ideal tool. currentlythis provider uses the professional english 102 indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427assessment for teachers (peat) developed innew south wales. this assessment has beenspecifically designed to evaluate whether ateacher’s english proficiency is good enoughto interact effectively in a school setting. thetest consists of four components: listening,reading, writing and speaking and resultsare given in terms of bands a, b, c or d butare ultimately expressed in terms of anoverall percentage score. band a means the candidate can for listening, comprehend easily and accurately in all personal and professional contexts; for reading, are able to read all styles and forms of the language pertinent to their professional needs; for writing, are able to write fluently and accurately on all levels normally pertinent to their personal and professional needs ;and for speaking, are able to use language fluently and accurately on all levels normally pertinent to their personal, social, academic or professional needs.(htt://www.trb.sa.edu.au/english_tests.htm (accessed 5/2/2010)provider 2 had two main concerns withthe current tool and processes. first, he feltthat students do not necessarily show theirstrengths soon after arrival. he felt that in thefirst few days many students are sufferingfrom culture shock and a dip in their ownconfidence to communicate. this may be theresult of being ‘thrown in the deep end’ withtheir homestay family and generally being ina strange new environment; but whatever thereasons, it was felt that the test at this stagemay not be yielding results that arecommensurate with what the students canreally do.provider 2 was also concerned about theareas that the test ‘do not tell you about’.when probed on this point he cited theenormous confidence gain that the studentsexperienced during the immersionexperience, which he said were evidenced bya range of improved communicationstrategies such as initiating conversations,turn taking, changing the topic, maintainingeye contact, responding to cultural references,improved pronunciation (particularlyprosodic features) and so forth. he describedthe linguistic and intercultural challenges inthe process of carrying out the ethnographicstudy as follows: to complete the ethnographic study component of the immersion program, the students first have to interview nns students on campus…we send them out with cassette players. they then follow this up by interviewing a native speaker and then their home families. finally they do a 4th interview of their own choice but it must be at a much deeper level.students finally write up and presenttheir findings before they leave. from thedata collected the students chose to focus ona broad range of ethnographic study topicssuch as comparative studies betweenaustralians and chinese on racism, public andprivate transport choices, part-time workchoices and one study was carried out toexplore the reasons for the prevalence ofgraffiti in melbourne. what do students do by way of assessment and do they think it measures the communication gain made on immersion? what suggestions do they have? the student interviewsthree of the students interviewed hadcompleted their immersion program inprovider 1 university. when self reportingtheir perceived language gains they wereunanimous about their improved speakingand listening ability and general increase inself confidence and intercultural awarenesswhen interacting in english. whilst thehomestay families varied in terms of age,social status and numbers of family members,the students attributed much of theirnewfound communicative confidence gainsand intercultural insights to the regularinteraction with their homestay families andto their close observations of how thesefamilies lived. the students all appreciatedthe time homestay family members took tofind out, at mealtimes, about their dailyactivities. one of the students who wasethnically chinese, but a native speaker ofenglish having been educated internationally,recounted the biggest challenge as beingintercultural:i had to gauge how to deal with things going on inmy homestay family like telling them that themeat portions are way too big; that i was reallyscared of one of their dogs and that i wantedthem to pick me up on saturday night from the 103 jane lockwood the english immersion program: measuring the communication outcomescity as i was too afraid to come home on the trainby myself…even though i had the language tocommunicate with them perfectly well therewere these kinds of situations, especially in thebeginning, where i wasn’t sure whether it was theright thing to do…the right thing to say.one of the students said she wassurprised at the easy intimacy displayed byher homestay ‘mum’ which, she said, wasunusual in chinese culture. she said shelearned about how making jokes withinfamilies about individual members was a kindof endearment and was a hallmark ofacceptability even when the jokes were risky.this same student observed this kind ofjoking among students she befriended on thecampus . she said, you know you are accepted when they make a joke about you!these students also said they feltdifferent kinds of communicative gains whenthey went travelling. they reportedserendipitous friendships struck up withother international travelers from japan,holland and belgium when they travelledinterstate. as english was the ‘lingua franca’they reported a different kind of experiencein talking with fellow tourists.it was a different kind of talking because we bothhad english as a second language in common andbecause we had already spent about 10 weeks inaustralia with our families we were able todisplay our knowledge of the culture…with thejapanese speakers we adjusted our english sothat they could easily understand…we felt veryconfident at this stage of our immersion stay andvery proud of our ability to communicate.a deeper kind of cultural shift appearedto have taken place in the students when theyself reported the value of attending thedifferent programs at the provider university.one of the students articulated this well whenshe said: i had learned about student-centred and enquirybased learning before but i felt what this was likein the classroom in australia. the lecturer onlytook 25% of our time and we had to make ourown decisions for what to do next we were left onour own a lot but for my classmates this wasquite usual.whilst some of the students madefriends on campus and these endure through facebook, some said they spent their socialhours with each other. this finding wasevident in one of earlier studies whichreported:the greatest deficiency (as shown by figures forreported use as well as reported perceptions)lies in opportunities presented by this programto expand sociolinguistic competence related tomeeting, conversing and socializing withaustralian peers-students of a similar age…(murdoch and adamson 2001:111)one of the students commented on theodd appearance of young people inmelbourne which she found strange and quiteintimidating:on my way home i had to catch a bus atfrankston station. the young people there woreweird clothes and had lots of piercings andtattoos. they looked quite rude and i didn’t daretalk to them.for all of the students the preand post -course assessment was completed under nopressure. one student reported that theywere told it was an institutional requirementonly and not high stakes. none of them knowtheir results from the test but recognized thatthe assessment was based around the fourskills assessed in the lpate exam. some saidthe assessment was very easy and all agreedthat they were not able to display the realcommunicative competency gains they feltthey had made on the immersion. they foundthe question of how to mend this gapbetween the gain and measuring the gainbetter, confounding, and commented:it’s really hard to measure what we have learnedin terms of socialization. i mean you know whensomeone is being socially or culturallyinappropriate, but it is hard to measure exactlyhow good you have become.another student reported her ownobservations of her friend who had arrivedwith relatively low confidence in her speakingability compared to when she left, and put itdown to confidence more than languageproficiency gain. on the last day before we left my friend and i and her homestay mum went to a movie together. it was amazing to see her chatting with her host 104 indonesian efl journal, volume 1 (1) january 2015issn 2252-7427 mum…she could really hold her own…they were joking and messing around. when we arrived in australia she could only talk, hesitating all the time and looking for words.all the students commented on the valueof the ethnographic project they wereexpected to complete during their immersionstay and cited this as perhaps evidence of oneaspect of their communicative development.one student suggested ‘writing about’ thegain as part of their final assessment, but ofcourse recognized its limitation as‘knowledge’ evidence rather thancommunication skills effectiveness. the hong kong coordinatorthere was very broad agreement fromthe hong kong coordinator’s point of viewwith those of the australian providers andthe returnees about the mismatch betweenthe real communication gains and theassessment practices currently being carriedout preand post immersion stay.interestingly, he made the point that thesecurrent assessment practices may reinforcein the students’ minds that language gain isall about making improvements the kinds ofacademic language tasks in the lpate andpeat assessments and may inadvertentlywork against the development of the lessformal communication skills for which theimmersion experience is reported as sovaluable. he agreed however that to assessthe reported gains in confidence, interculturalawareness and the ability to participate incasual conversation to be extremelychallenging and doubted whether they couldbe captured in a quantitative score. he alsoagreed that the lack of systematic tools andprocesses across the providers would meanthat reported results could not be relied on asa measure of success and gain.rather than changing the currentassessment practices by changing the toolitself, this coordinator felt something muchmore radical may be considered. hesuggested that perhaps the immersionexperience could be built into their coursebecome a 3 credit program of study roughlydivided into 3 segments, each attracting onecredit point as follows: (i) pre departure studies –e.g. preparing e.g.how to keep a journal (one credit)(ii) journal keeping when they are away(one credit)(iii) portfolio when they return (one credit)this would both ensure that thestudents would make better preparation anduse of their immersion experience as well asbeing formally assessed as part of the degreestudies. this program could also embed intoit autonomous learning principles andimproved skills in self and peer assessing arange of linguistic and intercultural skills.it would appear that the overseasproviders, and the students themselves, feltconstrained and dissatisfied by the languageassessment tools and processes theycurrently use to measure the communicationoutcomes of the immersion experience. itwould appear however, that the assessmentsused did in fact report gain across the skillswith specific reference to speaking andlistening. one of the big problems seems to bethe lack of a systematic proficiency test usedby all providers. this would generate morereliable results than the ones reported in thisstudy, assuming calibration and moderationprocesses were also in place. the other issueto emerge from this study is the need for supplementary information about theperceived ‘other’ communication gains thatare not captured in the domains of thecurrent tools being used. the fundinginstitution itself expressed doubt about thecurrent use of the preand post-courseassessment tools and processes and proposedbetter ways to measure the outcomes of theimmersion experience. can the results of thepre and post course assessment really reflectthis shift? clearly the gains appear to impactthe listening and speaking skills particularly,but go far deeper than improved languageproficiency. all interviewed in this studyreported that the immersion experienceoffers the opportunities of observing andparticipating in authentic english speakingcontexts at home and at university. these tworich contexts throw up ‘indigenous criteria’that may be able to be mapped intoimmersion communication assessment toolsand processes. as well, it could also be arguedthat a scale of intercultural gain, as suggested 105 jane lockwood the english immersion program: measuring the communication outcomesby evans et al (2003) could be mapped ontosuch a revised assessment. however, does itneed to be a test? the current literature asoutlined in a previous section of this articledescribes other forms of assessment asmeasures of gain. on-going assessmentprocesses such as diary keeping, focus groupdiscussions that probe critical experiences athome and on campus, ethnographic studiesthat involve data collection and analysis onthe people around them, all that yield richqualitative information that demonstrate “allthose shifts that formal pre and post courseassessment doesn’t”(provider 2). a radicallyrevised program that is credit bearing, asproposed by the funding institutionalcoordinator could also embed tasks andmeasurements that reflect themultidimensional communication gains madeon immersion.one of the greatest limitations of thisstudy has been the small scale of theinvestigation and the difficulty in accessingprovider assessment tools and processes.both tools had been developed for teachingcontexts rather than to probe language gainsfrom an immersion experience. it would be ofgreat interest to know if any of the providershave attempted to map into their languageassessment tools and processes any of the‘indigenous criteria’ that douglas(2001)argues for in any language for specificpurpose (lsp) testing situation. self –reporting, peer rating, provider rating of theethnographic study presentation and evenhomestay ratings using a validated rating toolmay supplement the pre and post course testas it currently exists and ultimately somekind of standardized measure may well bedeveloped. conclusionwhilst the tender documents clearlystate a requirement for pre and post courseassessments, it seems the funding authorityin this study rarely demanded to see theseresults as proof of success of the immersionexperience. reports written by the twoproviders all reported language gains of thestudents as ascertained by the lpate andpeat type tests although that the percentagegains were significantly divergent. however, the returnees’ own confidence in their ownimproved language skills and in their newfound skills of living and travellingindependently were testimony ofcommunication improvement at quiteanother level. perhaps in critiquing such toolsand processes, it is not the instrument initself that is wholly to blame, but more thelimitation of its use alone as the proposedreporting and program evaluation instrument,as well as a lack of a standard tool. this studyhas reported on a range of approaches andtypes of evidence that could be usedsystematically to evaluate success incommunication as a result of the immersionexperience. perhaps it is therefore not somuch the assessment tools and processesthat should come under scrutiny but morethe program evaluation brief that providerinstitutions are being asked to comply with todemonstrate that the hong kong fundinginstitutions are getting 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(2005). exploring the impact of studyabroad on students' intercultural communicationskills: adaptability and sensitivity. journal of studies in international education, 9(4), 356-371. 107 indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 1 the effects of symmetrical and asymmetrical scaffolding on speaking complexity, accuracy, and fluency parviz ghasedi english department, faculty of humanity, university of zabol, iran e-mail: ghasedi.p.988@gmail.com farideh okati english department, faculty of humanity, university of zabol, iran e-mail: farideh.okati@uoz.ac.ir habibollah mashhady english department, faculty of humanity, university of zabol, iran e-mail: mashhadyh@uoz.ac.ir nasser fallah english department, faculty of humanity, university of zabol, iran e-mail: nfallah84@yahoo.com apa citation: ghasedi, p., okati, f., mashhady, h., & fallah, n. (2018). the effects of symmetrical and asymmetrical scaffolding on speaking complexity, accuracy, and fluency. indonesian efl journal, 4(1), 1-10. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v4i1.793. received: 12-11-2017 accepted: 28-12-2017 published: 01-01-2018 abstract: this experimental study was set ought to explore the efficacy of symmetrical and asymmetrical scaffolding in boosting speaking complexity, accuracy, and fluency among 38 upperintermediate efl learners. to this end, the participants were assigned into random, homogeneous, and heterogeneous groups. the control group participated in normal speaking classroom, while the experimental groups shared their ideas and collaboratively complete tasks related to 7 lessons of new interchange 2 during 15 sessions. two different versions of ielts speaking test were used as pre/post-test. the data were audio recorded and transcribed for statistical analysis. the results of multivariate tests revealed that there was a statistically significant difference between the mean scores of control and experimental groups on complexity and fluency. on the other hand, descriptive statistics showed the superiority of heterogeneous groups over homogeneous ones. however, the results of independent sample t-test indicated that the differences between homogeneous and heterogeneous groups reached the significant level just for complexity not fluency and accuracy. briefly, the results lead support to the vegotsky’s (1978) socio-cultural theory. the findings and pedagogical implications were discussed in details at the end of the study. keywords: accuracy, asymmetrical scaffolding, complexity, fluency, symmetrical scaffolding introduction from constructivist point of view, learning as a cooperative built in developmental process, must be formed and developed individually or collaboratively (jenkins, 2000). this school of thought in second language acquisition assumes that learners have to build up their own comprehension through implementing and reflecting on the received feedbacks, rather than memorizing lessons’ contents which lead to rote learning (byerly & brodie, 1999). generally speaking, the roots of this theory are associated with the works of piage (1970) and vegotsky (1978). they claim that, fruitful learning and advancement occur in aimed communication among symmetrical learners with different perspective, point of view, or claim (piaget, 1977) or through parviz ghasedi, farideh okati, habibollah mashhady, & nasser fallah the effects of symmetrical and asymmetrical scaffolding on speaking complexity, accuracy, and fluency 2 affiliation with their proficient partners (vegotsky, 1978). considering disclosure as the main tenant of input internalization, piaget and inhelder (1969) argue that people generate knowledge and meaning through interfacing with the nature and background knowledge. kaufman (2004) cited in (brown, 2007) asserts that, from this point of view, learning is a formative procedure that includes development and advancement; expanding on prior stored knowledge in the schemata. cognitive constructivists believe that human beings are inherently roused to progress and improvement, therefore the interaction among learners with equal proficiency levels facilitates learners’ progress (piaget & inhelder, 1969). on the other side, the proponents of sociocultural theory note that leaning and progress could not be separated from sociocultural contexts and communications in which the presence of more capable peers seems necessary (vygotsky, 1978). the supporters of this theory claim that receiving feedbacks from more knowledgeable peers, teachers, or parents give the low capable learners the opportunities to develop their psychological functions to a higher level (ellis, 2000; hughes, 2001; lantolf, 2000). more recently, the main tenants of cognitive constructivism and sociocultural theory were manifested in symmetrical and asymmetrical scaffolding (granott, 1993; izanlu & feyli, 2015; roth & radford, 2010). there are substantial evidences that underpin the efficacy of symmetrical and asymmetrical scaffolding in academic contexts (ableeva, 2010; cooper & robinson, 2014; gagné & parks, 2013; nguyen, 2013; roth & radford, 2010). more interestingly, nowadays, developing learners’ oral skill and it sub-skills is considered as the chief aim of any language education classroom (goh & burns, 2012). goh and burns (2012, p. 165) mention that “not only does the spoken language offer affordances for learning as the main communicative medium of the classroom, but it is also an important component of syllabus content and learning outcomes.” on the significant role of speaking in learning the second or foreign language, celik and yavuz (2015) numbered four main reasons. these reasons could be summarized as 1) it is the fundamental mean to conduct the communicative role of language, 2) oral ability are particularly relates to brain science and generally relates to human science, 3) for most knowing, a language is synonymous with mastering oral skills, and 4) it puts much demands on the target language learners. taking this fact into account that, speaking has large proportion in learning the target language (mackey, 2012; nation, 2011), we should welcome any attempt to find conscionable ways for improving learner's speaking skills. on the other hand, an inclusive review of the related studies showed that, developing learners’ oral skills faced lots of challenges, especially in efl contexts (alonso, 2014; zhang, 2009). moreover, large portion of studies that were conducted in the domain of scaffolding were focused on the receptive skills. besides, no study compared the effects of symmetrical and asymmetrical scaffolding on speaking complexity, accuracy, and fluency (caf). therefore, the current study was set out to fill these gaps and shed more light on the efficacy of scaffolding in enhancing speaking caf. symmetrical and asymmetrical scaffolding the concept of scaffolding, emerged from cognitive psychology (donato & mccormic, 1994), was considered as an effective strategy for human learning and more specifically for teaching and learning basic language skills in efl or esl contexts (ellis, 2008; wood, bruner, & ross, 1976). ellis (2008) views scaffolding as a mental process through which less capable learners disguise information dialogically. research indicates that there are two kinds of scaffolding that seem to have significant place in academic context, namely symmetrical and asymmetrical (baleghizadeh, timcheh-memar, & timcheh-memar, 2010; roth & radford, 2010). it is assumed that, the main tenants of symmetrical scaffolding go to the heart of cognitive constructivism (izanlu & feyli, 2015). it alludes to the co-constructed advancement of homogeneous learners with indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 3 distinctive ideas, thoughts, and beliefs (izanlu & feyli, 2015). in the piagetian perspective, the interaction between heterogeneous learners is counter-profitable to reasonable improvement and learning (granott, 1993). nguyen (2013) argued that symmetrical group tasks and assignments enhance learners’ inspiration, self-confidence, and give them the chance to assemble affinity with each other, which consequently lead to higher achievement. furthermore, it was found that cooperating in symmetrical groups lead to the development of learners’ psychological, affective, and academic skills (jalilifar, 2010; law, 2011). on the other hand, the asymmetrical scaffolding roots in the vygotsky’s (1978) perspective and his notion of zone of proximal development (zpd). from the vygotsky’s (1978) perspective, the notion of zpd connote two developmental levels in learners’ minds. these levels are called “the actual developmental level” and “the level of potential development” and are defined as “the functions that have already matured; it is the child’s ability to solve a problem without any assistance” and “those functions that have not yet matured but are in the process of maturation, functions that will mature tomorrow but are currently in an embryonic state”, respectively (vygotsky, 1978, p. 86). accordingly, asymmetrical scaffolding could simply be defined as the steady intercession of an expert in the promotion of a learner who tries to solve a problem or carry out a task, but he/she can’t do it without others assistance (mercer, 1995). some researchers considered the presence of asymmetrical learners in gathering activities necessary for gaining fruitful results (guk & kellogg, 2007; lantolf, 2000). besides, in asymmetrical collaboration providing a setting for co-learning and supporting (emotionally and intellectually) by experts facilitate internalization (hughes, 2001) and give both novices and experts the opportunities to experience teacher roles (pishghadam & ghadiri, 2011). a plethora of studies highlighted the vital role of scaffolding in academic context, especially in promoting learners proficiency in basic language skills (ableeva, 2010; talley, 2014; wachyunni, 2015). in a rather different study, baleghizadeh et al. (2010) investigated the effects of symmetrical versus asymmetrical scaffolding on efl learners' reading ability. they collected data from 80 elementary efl learners and came to the conclusion that homogeneous learners’ mean score was higher than heterogeneous ones. such results were not confirmed by pishghadam and ghadiri (2011) who collected data from 52 efl learners through pre-test, post-test, and interview and argued that the presence of more capable learners in groups is a necessity to improve efl learners' reading skills. besides, izanlu and feyli (2015) claim that heterogeneous group formation results in the effective construction of the basis of cooperation. speaking speaking which is viewed as the process of building and sharing meaning (chaney & burk, 1998) to interact directly and immediately with others (butler, eignor, jones, mcnama & suomi, 2000) is assumed to have three main dimensions; fluency, accuracy, and complexity (ellis, 2003; skehan & foster, 1999). complexity draws attention to the production of continuously more detailed utterances with more noteworthy and complex syntactic structures and put much emphasizes on the association of oral or written outputs (foster & skehan, 1996). ellis (2005) noted that complexity refers to the learner’s capacity to implement complex sentences and structures in their language productions and defined it as the degree to which the produced language is grammatically and lexically varied and complex (ellis, 2003). accuracy manifests the learner’s proficiency to avoid errors in language production (housen & kuiken, 2009). considering accuracy as the language learners’ capacity to avoid making error in oral or written outputs, skehan and foster (1999, p. 96) state that it reflects “higher levels of control in the language as well as a parviz ghasedi, farideh okati, habibollah mashhady, & nasser fallah the effects of symmetrical and asymmetrical scaffolding on speaking complexity, accuracy, and fluency 4 conservative orientation, that is, avoidance of challenging structures that might provoke error”. fluency relates to “the rapid, smooth, lucid, and efficient translation of thought or communicative intention into language under the temporal constraints of on-line processing” (lennon, 2000, p. 26). byrne (1997) regards it as the capacity to convey ones thought precisely, sensibly, and without too much delay. al-shareef (2016) defines it as the number of connected lexical morphemes or phrasal expressions that learners can produce in specific time-limit. generally speaking, the achievement of native like fluency is regarded as the ultimate goal of studding the second or foreign language (bamanger & gashan, 2015). research indicates that, there is a competitive relationship among caf because of the law capability of working memory (skehan, 2009) or learner’s tendency to be more fluent or accurate in the specific situation (robinson, 2001; skehan, 2009). more recently, bei (2013) investigated the impacts of oral narrative task repetition on intermediate and high proficiency adult learners’ speaking caf. the results showed that, the reiteration of narrative tasks improved learners’ exactness and their rate of speaking. however, its effects on complexity were not significant. besides, the findings indicated that the repetition of oral activities promotes speakers’ self-perception of meaningfulness and correctness of their outputs. in a rather different study, chau (2014) compared the effects of planning with writing, planning without writing and no-planning on l2 learners’ speaking caf. the results of the statistical analysis revealed that, planning oral narratives with and without writing promotes learners’ speaking caf. likewise, the researcher found no significant differences between the impacts of planning with and without writing on learners’ speaking caf. as mentioned before, speaking as one of the four major language skills has been reported to play a significant role in learning the target language effectively (celce-murcia, 2003). however, teaching oral skills and developing learners’ speaking caf has been one of the main challenges of teachers, scholars, and researchers in teaching and learning field (alonso, 2014; ellis, 2000). on the other hand, the efficacy of scaffolding in academic context has been approved by some studies, however their main focuses were on receptive skills (ableeva, 2010; wachyunni, 2015) or written outputs (obeiah & bataineh, 2015). furthermore, no conclusive study compared the effects of symmetrical and asymmetrical scaffolding on learners’ speaking caf. therefore, this study was set out to fill these gaps and recommends productive propositions for enhancing the caf of oral outputs. accordingly, this study was set out to find plausible answers to the following research questions: 1. is there any significant difference between the effects of placebo, symmetrical, and asymmetrical scaffolding on the speaking fluency, accuracy, and complexity? 2. is there any significant difference between the effects of symmetrical and asymmetrical scaffolding on the fluency, accuracy, and complexity of efl learner's oral production? method the participants of the current study were 38 upper-intermediate efl learners from university of zabol. their ages ranged between 19 and 28 years, comprising 22 females and 16 males. all of them were persian speakers who had no opportunities to communicate with native english speakers during the time of the study. the selection of the participants was done based on the results of oxford placement test (opt) from a whole population of 85. therefore, those who scored between 40-47 were selected as the participants of the study, since based on the opt manual for interpretation of scores the scores between this range are considered as upper-intermediate level. the selected subjects were specified into three groups, namely control group (cg), symmetrical scaffolding group (ssg), and asymmetrical scaffolding group (asg). table 1 shows the group specification. indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 5 table 1. groups’ specification gender total groups male female cg 7 7 14 ssg 5 7 12 asg 4 8 12 total 16 22 38 the participants of cg were randomly assigned, the learners in ssg were those whose scores on opt did not differ more than one standard deviation, and the members of asg were those whose scores differed from others more than one standard deviation. a public version of ielts speaking test was used as pre-test. one week after pre-test, the treatments were started. the participants during 15 sessions, twice a week for around 45 minutes each session, covered 7 lessons of interchange 2. the cg participated in an ordinary speaking class. first, they listened to the audio files from the book and teacher asked them some general questions. then, they listened carefully and teacher asked them to retell what they heard. students were supposed to explain their answers and relate their answers to their real life and experiences. concerning the treatments of experimental groups, at the begging of the first session, the researcher explained the concept and purposes of scaffolding, that by discussing the material with each other and helping each other, they will improve their own comprehension and production abilities. two principal tasks that were used in the treatments of ssg and asg were retelling and decision making. in line with the previous studies (lee, 2000; skehan 1996), three main stages of task based instruction, pre-task, main task, and post-task, were implemented in this study. during the pre-task, the samples were scaffolded concerning how to do the tasks and they made aware of the determined outcomes of each task. likewise, they were inspired during this stage. in decision making task, main task phase, the learners were supposed to discuss their understandings, misunderstanding, ideas, and information to solve a problem or achieve a specific goal in symmetrical and asymmetrical intra-class groups. concerning retelling task, they were supposed to read the predetermined text of the book, new interchange 2, then closed their books and retell their comprehension of the read text. in post task stage, the researcher called the name of one member of each intraclass group randomly and gave him/his 5 minutes to retell the outcomes of his/her group cooperation to the class members. on the other hand, for decision making task, they were supposed to give a summary of their group suggestions, results, or relate the proposed problem to the real situation in the university, zabol university. the sequencing of these tasks in each session was different from the next one. the teacher sequenced them based on the content of each unit. the teacher moved around the class and helps them if necessary. the learners used molding as well as texts and pictures of the book to scaffold each other. another version of ielts speaking test was used as post-test to measure learners’ speaking caf at the end of the experimental period. the data were audio recorded and transcribed for statistical analysis. results and discussion this study was set out with the intent of investigating the effects of symmetrical and asymmetrical scaffolding on upperintermediate efl learner speaking caf. in the interim, a comparison was made between the impacts of homogeneous and heterogeneous group formation on the quality and quantity of uttered utterances. the collected data after transcribing and coding were interred into spss for further analysis. an important issue that seems necessary to be mentioned here is how recorded interviews were scored concerning speaking caf. speech complexity was measured through calculating the number of lexical morphemes per as-units which was parviz ghasedi, farideh okati, habibollah mashhady, & nasser fallah the effects of symmetrical and asymmetrical scaffolding on speaking complexity, accuracy, and fluency 6 considered as a reliable tool to measure learners’ speech complexity (foster, tonkyn, & wigglesworth, 2000; mehnert, 1998). accordingly, in the current study of lexical density, dividing the number of uttered open class words by delivered words (norris & ortega, 2009; rahimpour, 2008) was considered as the indicator of learners’ speaking complexity. furthermore, based on rahimpour (2008) and rahimpour and mehrang (2010) recommendations, the obtained data were multiplied by 100 to made them more tangible to quantify speech fluency, the researcher divided the quantity of words in learners’ outputs by allotted time (skehan & foster, 1999), filers like um and unn were considered as pausing (mehnert, 1998). on the other hand, the author took all of the mispronunciations, grammatical illformedness, and lexical errors into account, following skehan and foster (1999), and divided the uttered error-free t-units by all tunits (skehan & foster, 1997; mehnert, 1998) to measure speech accuracy. the first research question investigated the efficiency of symmetrical and asymmetrical scaffolding in boosting learners’ speech caf. to answer the first research question manova was run. the results of descriptive statistics of learners’ speech caf scores during post-test of the study are presented in table 2. table 2. descriptive statistics for the efficiency of symmetrical and asymmetrical scaffolding groups n mean sd se complexity post-test cg 14 35.366 4.097 1.095 ssg 12 39.150 2.140 .617 accuracy post-test asg cg 12 14 42.811 64.355 3.230 3.624 .932 .968 ssg asg 12 12 65.458 66.925 1.970 3.381 .568 .976 fluency post-test cg 14 89.186 1.704 .455 ssg asg 12 12 90.226 90.758 .615 2.095 .177 .604 as table 2 reveals that the m scores of asg (mcomplexity= 42.811, maccuracy= 66.925, mfluency=90.758) and ssg (mcomplexity=39.150, maccuracy=65.458, mfluency=90.226) are higher than cg (mcomplexity=35.366, maccuracy= 64.355, mfluency=89.186). for further investigation of the differences among groups manova was run. preliminary assumption testing revealed that the assumption of homogeneity of variance-covariance matrices was not violated (table 3). besides, a multivariate test was conducted to investigate the differences between the cg and experimental groups (table 4). table 3. box’s test of equality of covariance matrices box's m f df1 df2 sig. 32.362 2.355 12 5.643 .005 table 4. multivariate tests for the effect of cg, ssg, and asg on speaking caf effect value f hypothesis df error df sig. partial eta squared groups pillai's trace .518 3.960 6 68 .002* .259 wilks' lambda .486 4.781 6 66 .000* .303 *significant at p< .05 as table 4 reveals, there was a statistically significant difference among the effects of cg, ssg, and asg, f=3.96, p= .002, pillai's trace= .518, partial eta squared=.259, on the learners’ speech caf. to find out where the differences laid, tests of between-subjects effects were run. indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 7 table 5. tests of between-subjects effects for the effect of cg, ssg and asg on speaking caf source dimensions type iii sum of squares df mean square f sig. partial eta squared groups complexity 359.168 2 179.584 16.391 .000* .484 accuracy 42.711 2 21.355 2.203 .126 .112 fluency 16.779 2 8.390 3.254 .05* .157 *significant at p< .05 as shown in table 5, the differences that reach statistical significance were belonged to complexity, f = 16.391, p=.000, partial eta squared=.484, and fluency, f= 3.254, p= .05, partial eta squared= .157. consequently, it could be claimed that symmetrical and asymmetrical scaffolding lead to the production of more fluent and complex speech. these findings correspond to the general tenants of scaffolding, arguing that aimed negotiations, in which a plethora of opportunities for testing understandings are provided, lead to internalization of available outputs and advancement (roth & radford, 2010). similarly, leloup and ponterio (2005) consider peer interaction as a fundamental element for discourse advancement. besides, such findings are bolstered by similarly previous research on reading, writing, and listening (ableeva, 2010; obeiah & bataineh, 2015; wachyunni, 2015). the reason for the superior speaking performance of the ssg and asg may be attributed to the fact that in amid coordinated efforts and transaction exercises the sentiment necessities to give and receive feedbacks, telling and hearing various opinions, and mutual supports to reach a predetermined specific objectives (regarded as the performance of the hole group) inspired the language learners to feel greater obligations to find plausible answers to justify their miss/understandings, consequently lead to speech development. additionally, the lower impact of ssg and asg on speech accuracy could be justified through considering the fact that conveying meaning and intention received, not linguistics structures, draw learners’ focal attention during interactions. the second research question compared the efficacy of symmetrical and asymmetrical scaffolding in enhancing speaking caf. the inspection of the m scores (table 2) indicated that the m scores of asg were higher than ssg which indicates that asymmetrical scaffolding has more fruitful and effective impacts on speaking caf than symmetrical one. therefore, a series of independent sample t-test were conducted to investigate whether the difference between ssg and asg were statistically significant or not. table 6. independent sample t-test for the efficiency of symmetrical scaffolding f t df sig. (2-tailed) m difference std. error difference complexity 3.128 -3.273 22 .003* -3.660 1.118 accuracy 3.068 -1.298 22 .208 -1.466 1.129 fluency 16.824 -.843 12.882 .414 -.531 .630 *significant at p< .05 table 3 indicates no significant differences between the effects of ssg and asg concerning accuracy (f= 3.068, t= 1.298, df= 22, p> .05) and fluency (f= 16.824, t= -.843, df= 12.882, p> .05). however, the differences between experimental groups’ complexity scores (f= 3.128, t= -3.273, df= 22, p=. 000) were statistically significant. the second research question compared the impacts of symmetrical and asymmetrical scaffolding on speaking caf. the findings showed that the differences between two groups were significant just for speech complexity; however the m scores of asg (maccuracy= 66.925, mfluency=90.758) were higher than ssg (maccuracy=65.458, mfluency=90.226). it means that, asymmetrical parviz ghasedi, farideh okati, habibollah mashhady, & nasser fallah the effects of symmetrical and asymmetrical scaffolding on speaking complexity, accuracy, and fluency 8 scaffolding has more fruitful and beneficial effects on speaking caf than symmetrical scaffolding. in sum, the results lend support to the vygotsky’s (1978) socio-cultural theory. besides, izanlu and feyli (2015) note that asymmetrical group outperformed the symmetrical group on grammatical accuracy. however, the results conflict with those found by maftoon and ghafoori (2009), who observed no differences between the effects of homogeneous and heterogeneous group activities on writing skills, and that of baleghizadeh et.al. (2010), claiming that symmetrical scaffolding had more effective results on reading comprehension. such outcomes could be defended through considering the benefits of interaction among participants who were more knowledgeable in different linguistics era such as pronunciation, lexical, grammatical, discourse knowledge, and cultural information. therefore, when such students gathered together, they can support each other in constructing well-formed structures which are not grammatically or lexically ambiguous. conclusion the major aim of the current study was exploring the efficacy of symmetrical and asymmetrical scaffolding in boosting upperintermediate efl learners’ speech caf. the results demonstrated that, gathering works or exercises, symmetrically or asymmetrically, significantly affected speaking subcomponents, especially on complexity and fluency. therefore, it seems that a great part of the efl learners’ deficiency in speaking sub-skills linked to the implementation of traditional teacher-centered methods of teaching like grammar translation or audio lingual method (behroozizad, nambiar, & zaini, 2014). furthermore, the findings uncovered that the presence of more proficient speakers in groups made the novices aware of the differences that existed between their oral outputs and that of more capable peers concerning caf, which inspired them to resemble more proficient speakers and produce more accurate lexically rich utterances fluently. based on the findings of the current study some pedagogical implications are suggested: 1. educational policy makers and supervisors are recommended to conduct training programs for pre-service and in-service teachers on the main notions of scaffolding. furthermore, teachers need training on how to manage student-centered classrooms. 2. teachers ought to set the grounds and provide learners with abundant co-learning opportunities. 3. concerning group formation, it is suggested that the educators select group members based on the learners proficiency level, not their gender, friendship, or age. one of the big limitations of the current study was the limited number of participants (22 female and 16 male), beside the selection of learners were restricted to upper intermediate level. moreover, a subset of potential measures of complexity (lexical density) was used to measure learners’ speaking complexity. therefore, repeating similar study involving larger participants with various capability levels, elementary, intermediate, and advanced, and implementing various indicators of complexity (as-units or syntactic variety) may lead to more fruitful outcomes. references ableeva, r. 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(1976). the role of tutoring in problem solving. journal of child psychology and psychiatry, 17(2), 89–100. zhang, s. (2009). the role of input, interaction, and output in the development of oral fluency. english language teaching, 2(4), 91–100. indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(2) july 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 100 improving students’ speaking skill by using picture strip story odi kosdian department of english education, university of kuningan email: odikosdian@yahoo.com apa citation: kosdian, o. (2016). improving students’ speaking skill by using picture strip story. indonesian efl journal, 2(2), 100-109 received: 16-05-2016 accepted: 22-06-2016 published: 01-07-2016 abstract: this research is aimed at improving students’ speaking skill by using picture strip story in class xi ipa 1 of senior high school 1 luragung. the problems in this research are the low of students’ skill in speaking. this research was applied through collaborative action research which was conducted in two cycles. the subject of this research was english subject in class xi ipa i with total number of students 34. the result of the research showed that picture strip story could improve students’ speaking skill. the result of test i was 62.69, test ii was 68.83 and test iii was 74.22. the students who passed the minimum mastery criterion (kkm) were 22 students or 64.71%. in addition, the result of field notes showed that the classroom situation during teaching learning process by using picture strip story created the positive atmosphere. in cycle 1, there were no students who chatted and played handphone during the teaching and learning process by using picture strip story, all of students in a group did the task together and discussed it each other, the students could answer teacher’s question, and all of students spoke in english while expressing their ideas. in cycle 2, the classroom situations were completed with students asking questions to the teacher. keywords: speaking skill, picture strip story, improve, collaborative action research introduction speaking is the most important skill of all the four simplex skills. according to sarosdy, bencze, poor and vadnay (2006, p.57), “of all the four simplex skills (listening, reading, speaking, writing) speaking seems to be the most important as people who know a language are referred to as ‘speakers’ of that language, as if speaking included all other kinds of knowing a language.” it means that speaking is important as standard of mastering language include for students in language class. then, for students in indonesia as efl learners, speaking also is the most important skill. based on the ktsp academic curriculum, agus, mahrum, and hastini (2014, p. 2) explain that “the goal of language learning is to enable students to communicate the language.” the main purpose of learning is aimed to improve the students’ skill in communicating english well. furthermore, the students should master all of the speaking components; those are fluency, accuracy, and comprehensibility. on the other hand, richards & renandya (2002, p. 121) states that “a large percentage of the world’s language learners study english in order to develop proficiency in speaking.” then, riggenback & lazaraton as cited in cahyono & widiati (2006) tell that “students of second/foreign language education programs are considered successful if they can communicate effectively in the language.” here, in english learning, speaking is a main purpose for student. so, they are considered successful if they can communicate well in english. as efl learners, they should master speaking skill to be successful. opposite with it, the students of sman 1 luragung in xi ipa 1 class, they odi kosdian improving students’ speaking skill by using picture strip story 101 face speaking skill problems. the first, the students have problems in fluency; they have too long time for pausing and they have many hesitation or filler. the second, they have problems in pronunciation; there are many phonemes errors in articulations of vowels and consonants, also there are question intonation errors. the third, they have grammatical errors; there are tenses errors of present tense and past tense, also there are error sentence grammars of question. the fourth, they have the limitation of vocabulary knowledge; there are too much code mixing and register errors. and the last, they also have comprehension problem; they can’t answer simple question about their story telling. moreover, in english learning there are other students’ activities. first, some students chat with his/her classmate during the teacher was explaining in front of the class. second, the students were busy using hand phone during teacher explaining material. third, only the leader of group who did the task well in the class, the others chat. fourth, there was no feedback from students towards teacher’s question. fifth, there was no student who tried to express their idea in english and then, there was no question to the teacher. from the problems above, the researcher collaborated with the teachers and lecturers. the teachers were mrs. pristie antari s.pd and mrs. ria shofariatin s.pd, who teach in senior high school 1 luragung. then, the lecturers were mr. yayan suryana m.pd and mr. m. aprianto b.n. m.pd from kuningan university. finally, we took communicative language teaching (clt) approach to improve students’ speaking skill. the purpose of clt based on diane larsen-freeman (2000, p. 128), “the goal is to enable students to communicate in the target language.” so, clt was appropriate approach to improve students’ speaking skill. then, because of clt has some techniques, the researcher chose one technique. according to freeman (2000, p. 132), “there are some materials and techniques associated with clt, they are authentic materials, scrambled sentences, language games, picture strip story, and role play.” so, the researcher chose picture strip story technique to improve students’ speaking skill. the researcher considered the using of picture strip story because there are some supporting statements from many scientists who explain the correlation between picture and speaking skill. one of them, for example, is andrew wright (2004, p. 17), who says that “speaking and writing are both productive skills and pictures can often be used in similar ways to promote them.” so, it strengthens to use picture strip story to be assosiated with clt for improving students’ speaking skill. besides that, picture strip story also can overcome classroom situation’s problem above. based on canning-wilson as cited in nurvitasari (2014) stated that the picture is one of media, which can help teacher draws students’ interest and improves students’ motivation to learn because pictures assist students develop creativity and increase thinking ability. moreover, according to wright (2004, p. 71), “the picture strips devised especially for language teaching are usually very boring. alternative sources are cartoon strips or photo story strips.” so, it means that picture strip story appropriates to overcome some classroom situation’s problems in sman 1 luragung. method in this study, the researcher took action research (ar), especially collaborative action research. carr & kemmis as cited in burns (2010) gave the definition of action research as follows: indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(2) july 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 102 ‘self-reflective enquiry’ undertaken by participants in order to improve the rationality and justice of their own social or educational practices as well as their understanding of these practices and the situations in which these practices are carried out. besides, according to ferrance (2000, p. 1), “action research is a process in which participants examine their own educational practice systematically and carefully, using the techniques of research.” moreover, based on fraenkell & wallen (2009, p. 589) stated that “action research is conducted by one or more individuals or groups for the purpose of solving a problem or obtaining information in order to inform local practice.” also, carmen as cited in burns (2010) said that “ar is a reflective process that aims to solve a particular teaching-learning problem that has been identified.” meanwhile, elliot as cited in burns (2010) said that “car is the study of a social situation with the view to improving the quality of the action in it.” so, action research is a research which is conducted by teachers in the classroom to improve the quality or to solve the problem in teaching learning process based on theory or experience or a hypothesis they think of an intervention. in this study, the researcher used collaborative action research. based on ferrance (2000, p. 6) that “some kinds of action research, they are: individual teacher research, collaborative action research, school wide action research, and district wide action research. then, based on explanation above, the researcher involves two teachers from school and two lecturers from university in doing this collaborative action research. then, ferrance (2000) gave specific explanation about collaborative action research: collaborative action research may include as few as two teachers or a group of several teachers and others interested in addressing a classroom or department issue. this issue may involve one classroom or a common problem shared by many classrooms (p. 4). the model of collaborative action research as one kind of ar that the researcher used was spiral model by kemmis and mctaggart. based on kemmis & mctaggart as cited in burns (2010) that “who are major authors in this field, ar typically involves four broad phases in a cycle of research.” they proposed a spiral model comprising four steps: planning, acting, observing and reflecting. planning according to kemmis and mctaggart as cited in burns (2010), they say: in this phase, we identify a problem or issue and develop a plan of action in order to bring about improvements in a specific area of the research context. this is a forward-looking phase where we consider: a) what kind of investigation is possible within the realities and constraints of our teaching situation; b) what potential improvement we think possible. besides, ferrance (2000, p. 3) says, “a plan of research can involve a single teacher investigating an issue in his or her classroom, a group of teachers working on a common problem, or a team of teachers and others focusing on a schoolor district-wide issue.” based on explanations above, in this phase, the researcher identifies the problems in the classroom with the teacher. then, we discuss this problem with other teacher to decide what appropriate solution is to overcome this problem. next, one is involved as outside supporter from community partner. action kemmis and mctaggart as cited in burns (2010), they state: odi kosdian improving students’ speaking skill by using picture strip story 103 the plan is carefully considered one which involves some deliberate interventions into our teaching situation that we put into action over an agreed period of time. the interventions are critically informed as we question our assumptions about the current situation and plan new and alternative ways of doing things. based on explanation above, the researcher put the plan into action. the researcher applied the lesson plan into action in the class. it meant that in this phase, the teacher taught students by using clt approach, especially picture strip story technique. observation the researcher in observation phase took participant observation, where the researcher also participated in this step as the teacher. according to fraenkell and wallen (2009, p. 441), that “in participant observation studies, researchers actually participate in the situation or setting they are observing.” besides, kemmis and mctaggart as cited in burns (2010), they tell: this phase involves in observing systematically the effects of the action and documenting the context, action, and opinions of those involved. it is a data collection phase where we use open-eyed and open minded tools to collect information about what is happening. based on statement above, the researcher collected information about what is happening when picture strip story technique was applied by documenting context and action. besides, the researcher noted all of case which happen during observes that was needed carefully. reflection kemmis and mctaggart as cited in burns (2010) describe: at this point, we reflect on, evaluate and describe the effects of the action in order to make sense of what has happened and to understand the issue we have explored more clearly. we may decide to do further cycles of action research to improve the situation even more, or to share the story of your research with others as part of your ongoing professional development. based on explanation above, the researcher reflected, evaluated, and described the result in each cycle. the result from the cycle was evaluated to make the next cycle be better in improving students’ speaking skill. then, the researcher also shared the story of the research with others as part of the professional development. figure 1. cyclical ar model based on kemmis and mctaggart cyclical ar model based on kemmis and mctaggart (as cited in burns, 2010) indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(2) july 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 104 results and discussion the interpretation of interview after action research interview was conducted after action research on saturday, 31th october 2015. the researcher and collaborators carried out the interview started 10.00 a.m. and finished at 10.30 a.m. the first criterion talked about general condition in speaking class during implementing the action. it was found that students’ condition were better rather than before. in this sense, the most of students listened to the teacher’s explanation. it meant that students didn’t chat and play hand phone again during teacher explained the material. then, every student in a group did the task together and discuss it each other. moreover, most of them could answer teacher’s question correctly. it meant that students gave feedback to the teacher. besides, every student expressed their idea through pictures orally, so every student spoke in english one by one. the last, students gave question to the teacher when they didn’t understand. the second criterion talked about students’ speaking skill. the researcher and collaborators decided that picture strip story could improve students’ speaking skill. based on the result of test 1, test 2, and test 3, it can be seen that students’ speaking skills were improving. the first, the mean of fluency improved from 63.73 in test 1 become 70.02 in test 2, and 75.98 in test 3. the second, pronunciation improved from 64.36 in test 1 become 68.31 in test 2, and 73.56 in test 3. the third, grammar improved from 61.52 in test 1 become 66.96 in test 2, and 71.72 in test 3. the fourth, vocabulary improved from 63.09 in test 1 become 69.59 in test 2, and 75.43 in test 3. the last, comprehension improved from 60.74 in test 1 become 69.28 in test 2, and 74.43 in test 3. then, from mean score of speaking from test 1 to test 3 increased that was from 62.69 to 74.22. the third criterion talked about the difficulties in implementing picture strip story. every weakness could be overcome in every cycle. so, there was no big problem during implementing picture strip story in the class. but, there was one weakness; the weakness of the last cycle is reference of picture strip story in cycle 2 only used one source. actually, be better if use many sources such as in cycle 1. but, this case didn’t have big influence towards the effectiveness of picture strip story in improving students’ speaking skill. the last, was about collaborator’s opinion toward picture strip story. the collaborators said that picture strip story was a good technique in teaching speaking. they were interested and motivated to use it for improving students’ speaking skill. figure 2. the improvement of students’ speaking score 62.69 68.83 74.22 55 60 65 70 75 80 test 1 test 2 test 3 odi kosdian improving students’ speaking skill by using picture strip story 105 from the result above, it showed that there was improvement of students’ speaking score. from test 1, the mean of speaking score was 62.69 improved to 68.83 in test 2 and 74.22 in test 3. it indicated that there was an improvement of students’ speaking skill from test 1 to test 3 through picture strip story. figure 3. the improvement of speaking skill’s score based on the result above, it can conclude that students’ speaking skills were improving. first, the mean of fluency improved from 63.73 in test 1 to 70.02 in test 2, and 75.98 in test 3. second, pronunciation improved from 64.36 in test 1 to 68.31 in test 2, and 73.56 in test 3. third, grammar improved from 61.52 in test 1 to 66.96 in test 2, and 71.72 in test 3. fourth, vocabulary improved from 63.09 in test 1 to 69.59 in test 2, and 75.43 in test 3. the last, comprehension improved from 60.74 in test 1 to 69.28 in test 2, and 74.43 in test 3. then, from mean score of speaking from test 1 to test 3 increased that was from 62.69 to 74.22. it indicated that there was an improvement in students’ speaking skill from test 1 to test 3 through picture strip story. figure 4. the improvement of speaking graduation 63.73 64.36 61.52 63.09 60.74 70.02 68.31 66.96 69.59 69.28 75.98 73.56 71.72 75.43 74.43 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 mean test 1 mean test 2 mean test 3 17.65% 38.24% 64.71% 0.00% 10.00% 20.00% 30.00% 40.00% 50.00% 60.00% 70.00% test 1 graduation (6 students) test 2 graduation (13 students) test 3 graduation (22 students) indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(2) july 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 106 from the result above, it showed that there was improvement of students’ speaking skill, seeing the number of students who graduated from the kkm. there was 22 student (64.71%) could pass the kkm, whereas before in test 2 only 13 students (38.24%), moreover in test 1 only 6 students (17.65%). it meant that the target was achieved because more than 50% that was 64.71% students passed kkm. table 1. the improvement of classroom situation no problem observed indicator success preliminary cycle 1 cycle 2 1 the students couldn’t focus. a. they chatted with his/her classmate during the teacher was explaining in front of the class. a. all students didn’t chat again during the teacher was explaining in front of the class. a. all students didn’t chat during the teacher was explaining in front of the class. √ b. they were busy using hand phone during teacher explaining material. b. all students didn’t use hand phone again during the class. b. all students didn’t use hand phone during the class. √ 2 they were passive a. only the leader of group who did the task well in the class, the others chat. a. all students in a group did the task together and discuss it each other. a. all students in a group did the task together and discuss it each other. √ b. there was no feedback from students towards teacher question b. there was feedback from students. students could answer teacher’s question. b. there was feedback from students. students could answer teacher’s question. √ c. there was no student who tried to express their idea in english. c. all students expressed their idea in english through pictures. c. all students expressed their idea in english through pictures. √ d. there was no question to the teacher. d. there still no question to the teacher. e. many students gave questions to the teacher √ d. there was no speaking f. all students speak in english by express their idea through pictures. e. all studentsspeak in english by express his/her idea in english. √ from the table above, it showed that the classroom situation in xi ipa 1 class was better than before. first, the most of students listened to the teacher’s explanation. they didn’t chat again and focus to the teacher. whereas, before, they didn’t listen to the teacher, whereas chatted with his/her classmate during the teacher was explaining in front of the class. second, they didn’t use hand phone again during english class. whereas, before in preliminary study situation, they didn’t look at to the teacher, whereas they were busy to play hand phone during teacher explained the material. third, every student in a group did the task together and discusses it with each other. whereas, before in odi kosdian improving students’ speaking skill by using picture strip story 107 preliminary study situation only the leader of group who did the task well in the class, the others chat. fourth, there was feedback from students. it can be seen when the researcher gave question to the students, most of them could answer correctly. fifth, every student expressed their idea through pictures. so, they could speak in english. whereas, in preliminary study situation, there was no student who tried to express their idea in english. it meant that before hand, there was no speaking in the class during english class, but now through pictures strip story, they could express their idea in english orally. sixth, students asked to the teacher when they didn’t understand. whereas, in preliminary study and cycle 1, they didn’t give question to the teacher when they didn’t understand the material during english class. the last, every student spoke in english one by one. whereas, in preliminary study they didn’t speak in the class in english, starting from the opening until closing meeting in the english class. so, all of classroom situations indicators got the target, so the researcher and collaborators decided that this action research is success. figure 5. students’ responses toward picture strip story (pss) from the result of questionnaire above, it showed that students’ response toward the picture strip story were positive. it could be proved by seeing the result of questionnaire. first, the result showed that 28 students (82.35%) like picture strip story technique. second, 28 students (82.35%) felt that picture strip story helped them to speak better. third, 24 students (70.59%) assumed that picture strip story helped them to speak more fluently than before. fourth, 31 students (91.18%) felt more understand about the story with using picture strip story. fifth, 29 students (85.29%) felt that picture strip story could improve their vocabulary. sixth, 25 students (73.53%) felt that picture strip story could improve their grammar. seventh, 27 students (79.41%) felt that picture strip story could improve their grammar. the last, 26 students (76.47%) were 82.35% 82.35% 70.59% 91.18% 85.29% 73.53% 79.41% 76.47% 0.00% 10.00% 20.00% 30.00% 40.00% 50.00% 60.00% 70.00% 80.00% 90.00% 100.00% indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(2) july 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 108 interested in the teaching way of the teacher. so, picture strip story not only improved students’ speaking skill but also was liked by students. conclusion picture strip story can improve students’ speaking skill. it can be proved by the result of test 2 and test 3. first, the result of test 2 indicates the improvement of students’ speaking skill. it describes the change of students’ graduation of speaking in english subject are better than before; there are 13 students (38.24%) can graduate from the kkm whereas before only 6 students (17.65%). second, the result of test 3 indicates significant improvement, there are 22 students (64.71%) can pass kkm. so, it is more than 50%. besides, based on the result, the improvement can be seen from the increase of students’ mean speaking score from 62.69 in the preliminary study and 68.83 at the first cycle to 74.22 in the second cycle. then, picture strip story also makes classroom situations are controlled. it can be proved by seeing the acting phase of collaborative action research in cycle 2 and 3. first, in cycle 1 there are no students who chat and play hand phone again during teacher explain the material using picture strip story. also, every student in a group does the task together and discusses it each other. then, there are feedbacks from students. it can be seen when the researcher give question to the students, most of them can answer correctly. moreover, every student expresses their idea through pictures. it makes no student who doesn’t speak english in the class. then, in cycle 2, the classroom situations are completed with students who give question to the teacher. so, picture strip story can overcome the problem of classroom situation at second grade in sman 1 luragung. on the other hand, students’ responses toward picture strip story activity in the class are positive. it can be proved by seeing the result of questionnaire which shows good response. references agus, i. p., mahrum, m., & hastini. (2014). improving speaking skill through information gap technique. journal of english language teaching society (elts), 2(4), 1-14. retrieved from http://jurnal.untad.ac.id/jurnal/index. php/elts/article/view/3224/2295 burns, a. (2010). doing action research in english language teaching. new york: routledge. canning-wilson. (2001). visuals & language learning: is there a connection. retrieved from www.eltnewsletter.com/back/feb200 1/art482001.htm carr, w., & kemmis, s. (1986). becoming critical: knowing through action research. london: the falmer press. ferrance, e. (2000). themes in education: action research. providence rhode island (ri): brown university lab. freeman, d. l. (2000). techniques and principles in language teaching (2nd ed.). new york: oxford university press. kemmis, s., & mctaggart, r. (eds.). (1988). the action research planner (3rd ed.). geelong: deakin university press. nurvitasari, h. (2014). improving students' speaking ability by using picture: a classroom action research at the tenth grade students of sma negeri 3 ketapang in the academic year 2013/2014. west kalimantan scholars: studies on english language and education, 1(1), 18-37. richards, j. c. & renandya, w. a. (2002). methodology in language teaching. new york: cambridge university press. sarosdy, j., bencze, t. f., poor, z., & vadnay, m. (2006). applied linguistics i for ba students in english. budapest, hungary: bölcsészkonzorcium. widiati, u., & cahyono, b. y. (2006). the teaching of efl speaking in the indonesian context: the state of the art. bahasa dan seni, 34(2), 269-292. retrieved from odi kosdian improving students’ speaking skill by using picture strip story 109 http://sastra.um.ac.id/wpcontent/uploads/2009/10/theteaching-of-eflspeaking-in-the indonesian-context-the-state-of-theart-utami-widiatibambang-yudicahyono.pdf. wright, a. (2004). pictures for language learning. new york: cambridge university press. indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 1 efl teachers’ understanding in developing lesson plan annisa putri indonesia university of education, bandung, indonesia email: ichasofwan@gmail.com apa citation: putri, a. (2016). efl teachers’ understanding in developing lesson plan. indonesian efljournal, 2(1), 1-11 received: 09-11-2015 accepted: 22-12-2015 published: 01-01-2016 abstract: this research attempts to find out efl teachers’ understanding of lesson plan and the development along with problems the teachers faced in developing lesson plan. the researcher used two data collection techniques; interview and analyzing the lesson plan developed by four efl teachers. the interview results revealed that all participants understand about the lesson plan as well as its development and understand about the elements that should be included as parts of lesson plan, but, unfortunately, the teachers could not understand the system of learning assessment. they thought that it is too complicated because they should provide one system of learning assessment along with the rubric of assessment. on the other hand, the result of lesson plan analysis showed that all participants understand how to develop lesson plan by stating all elements of lesson plan in accordance with the requirements stated in the regulation of ministry of education and culture no. 103 in 2014. the problems found are when the teachers did not state learning purposes, even two of the teachers stated that learning indicator is similar with learning purposes. another problem is found when they did not include the assessment rubric. then, the other problem is found when they were asked about the implementation of scientific approach. scientific approach is a new thing for them to be applied as the approach consists of observing, questioning, associating, collecting, and communicating. keywords: lesson plan, lesson plan development, 2013 curriculum introduction the 2013 curriculum, as quoted in minister of education and culture regulation no.59/2014 aims at “developing and equipping people in indonesia with excellent characters such as faithful, productive, innovative, and creative in order to give meaningful and beneficial contribution to local, national, and international community.” to reach the goal, teachers need to develop their innovative and creative plans to be applied in their teaching and learning process. the 2013 curriculum allows teachers to create and to develop their own lesson plan based on their school and students’ needs (syahmadi, 2013). lesson plan must be arranged before entering classroom (jalongo, et al., 2007). a teacher should consider that a learning process externally and internally happens inside the students themselves. it happens because of the influence coming from teachers, friends, students’ surrounding, or students’ curiosity. in the learning process, teachers need to consider the characteristics of material that students are going to learn. they also need to give learning experiences that are able to reveal, to develop, and to apply students’ potential. thus, it is important for a teacher to develop well learning plan that covers all of activities that can be applied to reach the learning experiences (prihastuti, 2015). annisa putri efl teachers’ understanding in developing lesson plan 2 however, most of the teachers seem to be not ready to face the challenges from 2013 curriculum to develop their own lesson plan. study conducted by suhendra and sundayana (2011) revealed that teachers’ knowledge in developing lesson plan was not satisfying. furthermore, sundayana and alwasilah (2012) found that teachers’ conceptual understanding of designing, developing, and applying syllabus and lesson plan did not reach the expectation. moreover, a preliminary research conducted by the researcher found that teachers in school faced difficult time in designing assessment for students’ achievement since there are many assessments that should be conducted by the teachers such as portfolios, authentic assessment and writing or oral test, practice, projectbased, or self-assessment. those techniques of assessment are very complicated, taking a long time, and it is hard for teachers to keep focus on the students (nurfuadah, 2014). additionally, from the lesson plan analysis done in the preliminary research, it was found that there is incompatibility between the operational word (kko) in ki and kd. similar problem also found by nurfuadah (2014) who said that the arrangement of core competence (ki) is not in accordance with the basic competence (kd). meanwhile, sumaryanto (2014) stated three main problems in designing lesson plan in 2013 curriculum including the relation between kd, indicators, and learning purposes are not match, formulation or learning purposes are not appropriate with the learning activities, and the assessment instrument only uses test (essay or multiple choices). those problems became the basis of this research. the researcher thinks that it is important to conduct further study relating to teachers’ understanding in developing lesson plan in 2013 curriculum. this research is expected to reveal teachers’ understanding about lesson plan in 2013 curriculum, how they develop lesson plan, and the problems faced by them in developing lesson plan. thus, this research is purposely designed to achieve the following objectives: 1. find out efl teachers’ understanding about lesson plan in 2013 curriculum. 2. find out how efl teachers develop lesson plan of 2013 curriculum. 3. find out the problems faced by efl teachers in developing lesson plan. method this research attempted to find out efl teachers’ understanding in developing lesson plan of 2013 curriculum along with the steps of developing lesson plan and the problems faced by them in developing lesson plan. this research dealt with qualitative as a research design which explores a problem and develop a detailed understanding of a central phenomenon (bogdan & biklen, 1992; thomas, 2003; heigham & croker, 2009; alwasilah, 2008; creswell, 2012). one pilot school was the site of this study. meanwhile, the participants were all of efl teachers (four teachers) in the pilot school. the participants have been teaching for more than 10 years, which means that they are already familiar with lesson plan. all teachers from every level were asked to give their brief understanding relating to the lesson plan development in 2013 curriculum. results and discussion the data gathered from interview is attempted to get deep information relating to participants’ understanding of lesson plan, the way they develop a lesson plan, and the problems faced by them in developing a lesson plan. the interview was conducted by asking 17 indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 3 questions to the participants. all questions have been categorized based on each point of information stated previously. besides, the data gathered from analyzing the documents act as the triangulation. the result of the documents analysis shows the product of efl teachers’ understanding of lesson plan and the development of lesson plan. efl teachers’ understanding of lesson plan in order to find out efl teachers’ understanding of lesson plan, the researcher proposed several questions relating to their period of teaching, their training for implementing the new curriculum, and their understanding about lesson plan as the main component in implementing the curriculum. the four participants of this research are efl teachers who have been teaching for years. regarding their period of teaching, all of the participants have different period of teaching. the first teacher has been teaching for 10 years, 25 years for the second teachers, 15 years for the third teacher, and 18 years for the fourth teacher. the participants come from a school. they have been given enough preparation by the school to develop lesson plan, including a meeting of teachers’ association (mgmp) which helps them know all information about the curriculum and the lesson plan, and also gives the teachers a training to develop lesson plan. besides, the researcher also proposed a question about the participants’ understanding relating to what lesson plan is. it is important since developing lesson plan is the first step before the teachers conduct teaching-learning activity (jalongo, et al., 2007). the interview revealed that the teacher know that lesson plan is a teaching outline. they also know that they should develop lesson plan before they are going to the classroom. it is in line with brown (1995) who states that lesson plan is used as a teaching framework. celce-murcia (2001) also supports by saying that a lesson plan is an extremely useful tool that servers as a combination guide, resource, and historical document reflecting our teaching philosophy, students population, textbooks, and our goals for our students. teachers cannot be apart from lesson plan since lesson plan is their framework for teaching (wyse, 2002). in addition, from the lesson plans analyzed by the researcher, it showed that all of the participants understand the elements of lesson plan that should be included in a lesson plan such as school identity, identity of material/class/time allocation, core competences, basic competences, methods, materials, activities, and evaluations. each participant clearly understands the importance of lesson plan to be described in detail. the more detail lesson plan is described, the more success the learning activities. it is in line with scott and ytreberg (2000) who mention that there are at least five advantages of lesson planning; making the lesson run smoothly, becoming more aware of how much time activities take, reflecting at the end of the lesson on what happened, anticipating how to balance the lesson, and giving the teacher time to observe what is going on. efl teachers’ understanding in developing lesson plan regarding the efl teachers’ understanding in developing lesson plan, teacher 1 (t1) stated that lesson plan consists of several elements such as core competences, basic competences, annisa putri efl teachers’ understanding in developing lesson plan 4 purposes of learning, materials of learning, methods of learning, media and sources of learning, and assessment of learning. it is clear that the teacher know about the elements of lesson plan. it is in accordance with the elements of lesson plan proposed by the regulation of ministry of education and culture no. 65/ 2013 which consist of title, core competence, basic competence, learning indicator, teaching objectives, materials, time allocation, teaching method, procedures, assessment, and sources. there are 46 indicators which refer to each element of lesson plan. the second question in interview relates to teachers’ understanding about the steps in developing lesson plan. the interview result shows that teachers know that they should look into the four competences and the basic competences in regulation of ministry of education and culture number 59/2013 and number 69/2013 as their guidance to develop learning purposes, learning materials, and learning resources to be used in learning activities and its assessments. it means that teachers understand about the four competences and the basic competences mentioned in the regulation of ministry of education and culture number 69/ 2013. ki is formulated as core competence-1 (ki-1) for core competence in spiritual aspect; core competence-2 (ki-2) for core competence in social aspect; core competence-3 (ki-3) for core competence in knowledge aspect; and core competence-4 (ki-4) for core competence in skills aspects (regulation of ministry of education and culture no. 69/ 2013). basically, the teachers know that each core competence (ki), then, is formulated into the learning materials that the students should do as a form of standard competence of outcome (skl). ki-3 (knowledge competence) and ki-4 (skill competences), then, are developed into basic competences (kd) and indicator of competence achievement (ipk) to determine the materials for learning activities. meanwhile, ki-1 and ki-2 (spiritual and attitude competence) should be achieved by the students in form of nurturant effect and become their indirect teaching through learning activities developed by the teachers. here, english competence for senior high school is divided into three types of discourse: interpersonal, transactional, and functional. those competencies are required for oral and written communication acceptable in personal, social, cultural, and academic context. in other words, the classroom activity will involve the integration of four language skills; listening, speaking, reading, and writing. another question is related to teachers’ understanding about indicators of achievement competence and learning purposes. learning indicator is defined as specific statement of purposes in order to achieve certain goals (richard, 2001). reiser & dick (1996) says that objectives are explicit descriptions of what students will be able to do as a result of the instruction they received. it describes competences that the students are expected to demonstrate in accordance with the basic competence or known as performance objectives (nunan, 1989; rothwell & kazanas, 2009; brady & kennedy, 2012). in 2013 curriculum, indicator of learning is called as indicators of competences achievements (ipk). it shows the characteristics and the actions that will be done by the students and used as an indication that they have reach the basic competence. ipk is constructed based on the basic competences which are observable and measureable, involves affective, cognitive, and psychomotor domain (regulation of indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 5 ministry of education and culture no. 65/ 2013). in this research, 6 indicators has have been stated in accordance with the regulation of ministry of education of culture no. 65/ 2013. in case of teacher 1, the three lesson plans did not stated the objectives which cover affective and psychomotor domain. the levels of competences for all three domains have been stated in the summary of kko (operational words). for lesson plans developed by teacher 2, in his first lesson plans, there were no objectives which cover both affective and psychomotor domain. but in his second and third lesson plan, there were objectives which cover affective and psychomotor domain, mengelola (a4 & p5), membiasakan (a4), menentukan (p5), and menunjukkan and melengkapi (p2). another case is teacher 2 stated about objectives for kd-4, but there was no statement about kd-4 in the basic competence. for the lesson plans developed by teacher 3, there was no statement of objectives which cover affective and psychomotor domains in the second lesson plan. but there were statements of objective which cover affective domains (offer, respond, and answer (a2)) in his first and third lesson plan. but, there were statements of objectives which cover psychomotor domain. lastly, in the lesson plan developed by teacher 4, there were no statements of objectives which cover affective and psychomotor domain in the first and third lesson plan. but there were statement of objectives which cover psychomotor domain in his second lesson plan (mencoba menirukan (p1)). further, to determine the teaching materials in a lesson plan, a teacher is suggested to provide the cognitive element or the factual knowledge to be taught and evaluated by the ability to recall (piskurich, 2006). besides, the teacher is demanded to present concept that what the learners can intellectually generalize from the content and evaluated by their ability to apply them on real or simulated situations (adams, 2005). in addition, it is suggested that the teacher sequences the materials by considering the prerequisite relationships among the objectives, such as 1) the new learning is supported by previous learning, 2) doing a learning analysis to determine that the skills are being taught in a sequential order, 3) that the sequences are complete, and 4) that objectives irrelevant to the learning task at hand are eliminated or taught at a different time (gagne et al., 1992). in 2013 curriculum, learning materials are developed based on kd-3 and/or kd-4 along with kd-1 and kd-2 as the nurturant effects of students’ learning result (regulation of ministry and culture no. 65/ 2013). learning materials can be in form of textbook and teacher’s guide book, newspaper, news, movies, or other authentic materials, and students’ environment. in this research, there were six indicators of learning material’ points checked in analyzing lesson plan which refer to learning materials. in lesson plans developed by teacher 1, almost all indicators were complete, except the indicator of “the teachers presented material from easy to difficult”. all of three lesson plans did not state whether the teacher present the material sequential from easy to difficult. moreover, in the second lesson plan, the teacher did not use authentic material. similar case found in lesson plans developed by teacher 2. the lesson plans did not state whether the teacher used sequential order to present materials from easy to difficult. in addition, in the first lesson plan, the teacher did not state annisa putri efl teachers’ understanding in developing lesson plan 6 appropriate learning strategy and did not use authentic material. similar statement refers to the third lesson plan where the teacher stated she did not use authentic material. while, in the lesson plans developed by teacher 3 and teacher 4, all indicators are almost complete, but they did not state that they presented materials from easy to difficult. all of the lesson plans did not state that the teacher used a sequence order to present material from the lower level to the higher. more, in first lesson plan developed by teacher 4, he did not state the appropriate strategy to present material and he did not use authentic material. learning activities consider learning approach, method, technique which persuades students’ innovation, adaptation, and fun (sundayana, 2009). learning activities are constructed to guide the teacher during the teaching learning activities (whitman, et. al., 1992) by considering the teaching methods and learning experiences that will best bring about the accomplishment of the aims and objectives (john, 2006; johnson, 1989). the teachers should notice the model or learning method that will be used in classroom. in 2013 curriculum, model or learning methods are chosen based on the scientific approach which is needed to develop the competences (spiritual, social, knowledge, and skills). the decision of learning methods or models should consider the characteristics of kd or learning materials. the learning model is a form of learning that has a name, characteristics, syntax, settings, and culture for example, discovery learning, project-based learning, problem-based learning, or inquiry learning. in the case of lesson plans developed by the teachers in this research, they clearly stated about appropriate approach, method, strategy, or techniques. in implementing lesson plan in the classroom, there are three activities that have to be covered, pre-activity, mainactivity, and post-activity (syahmadi, 2013, see also regulation of ministry of education no. 65/ 2013). in pre-activity, teacher have to create condition for an attractive learning, discuss previous competences relating to the next competences that will be learned by the students, inform competences that will be reached and their uses in daily life, inform the point of materials and the activities that will be conducted, and inform the techniques of assessment that will be used. in this research, the lesson plans developed by teacher 1 completed only 4 indicators. in her lesson plans, she did not state the indicator of giving motivation to the students and did not relate the current material to the previous lesson. on the other hand, first lesson plan developed by teacher 2 was complete. the lesson plan completed all of indicators. but, in her second and third lesson plan, some indicators were incomplete. the teacher did not state that she gave motivation to the students and did not relate the current materials to the previous lesson. similar case stated in third lesson plan. lesson plans developed by teacher 3 indicated that all indicators had been completed, except the indicator of relating current material to the previous lesson. all of the three lesson plans did not contain this indicator. on the other hand, the researcher found similar case between teacher 1 and teacher 4 in which two indicators of giving motivation to the students and relating material to the previous lesson were incomplete. after conducting pre-activity for about 10 minutes (woodward, 2009), the teacher may start to conduct mainactivity. this activity is conducted by presenting information or material and indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 7 examples (reiser & dick, 1996) or introducing the language form or content (jensen, 2001). main activity is conducted based on students characteristics and covers three aspects of learning; attitude, knowledge, and skill (syahmadi, 2013). main activity can be conducted for about 70 percent of time allocated (mcardle, 2010). main activity is a process of learning which is done interactively, attactively, inspirative, full of challenge, and actively motivates students to get involve in learning process (regulation of ministry of education and culture no. 65/ 2013). more, main activities provide students for having a space where they can develop their creativity and ability based on their talent, interest, and their psychology development. in this research, the first lesson plan developed by teacher 1 completed only four of six indicators of mainactivity. in the lesson plan, the teacher did not state how to manage classroom. moreover, the lesson plan also did not state whether or not the students work in group, peer, or individual. meanwhile, the lesson plan developed by teacher 2 and teacher 3, all indicators in the lesson plan were complete. and for the lesson plan developed by teacher 4, only one indicator was stated incompletely. the teacher did not mention whether the students work in group, peer, or individual. post activity or the closing part of an instructional event is the activities that may bring a lesson presentation to an appropriate conclusion (cooper, 1990). those closing activities will help students bring things together in their own mind to make sense out of what has been going on during the course of the presentation (cooper, 1990). there are three indicators analyzed relating to post-activity. in post-activity, the teachers are suggested to make conclusion of all materials learned, to give feedback or homework, and to inform the materials for the next meeting. as reiser & dick (1996) states that in post-activity, teacher provides feedback and summarize or review the lesson (see also woodward, 2009; syahmadi, 2013). teachers also give homework, write journals, and tidy up the classroom for the next teacher as well (woordward, 2009). regulation of ministry of education and culture no. 65/ 2013 also mentions that in postactivity, teacher and the students summarize all of the learning materials, reflect all of the learning activities, and give feedback of the process and result of the learning. while for the teachers, they should assess students’ works, plan the lesson for remedial program, and inform the plan of the lesson for the next meeting. in this research, only the lesson plans developed by teacher 1 indicating to be completed. all of the indicators have been stated in all lesson plans. meanwhile, in case of lesson plans developed by teacher 2, the researcher found there was only one indicator that did not state in the second lesson plan. in this lesson plan, the teacher did not state that he gave information about materials for the next meeting. further, in the lesson plan developed by teacher 3, his first lesson plan had completed all indicators. but in his second and third lesson plan, the last indicator was not stated. the lesson plans did not mention that the teacher gave information relating to the material for the next meeting. in case of teacher 4, only the second lesson plan was indicated to be complete. while for the first and the third lesson plan, the last indicator was not stated in the lesson plan. the teacher did not give information related to material to be given in the next meeting. annisa putri efl teachers’ understanding in developing lesson plan 8 lastly, assessment refers to a various ways of collecting information about students’ language ability or achievement (brindley, 2001). it is the tools of assessing whether students have achieved the learning goals and objectives or not (reiser & dick, 1996); hutchinson & water, 1994; brown, 1995). learning outcomes assessment by educators has a function to monitor the progress of learning, learning outcomes monitoring, and detecting needs improvement learning outcomes of students on an ongoing basis (regulation of ministry of education and culture no. 104/ 2014). the assessment of students learning achievement can be done based on the indicator which is developed from kd. in this research, there were five indicators which were included into learning assessment. all lesson plans developed by the teachers were analyzed to know whether or not the learning assessment in the lesson plan has been in accordance with the indicators. in case of first lesson plan developed by teacher 1, three indicators were not complete. in the lesson plan, the teacher did not mention other technique of evaluation but observation. besides, the teacher also did not complete the indicator 5. the teacher did not state the rubric of evaluation. meanwhile, in case of the second and third lesson plan, both lesson plan did not state rubric of evaluation by using practice and observation and did not mention how to evaluate students’ learning outcome by using observation. in case of lesson plans developed by teacher 2, 3, and 4, the three lesson plans have completed all indicators of learning evaluation. all lesson plans stated types of assessment used to assess students’ learning outcome. variety of evaluation also stated clearly in the lesson plans. all assessments were in accordance with teaching objectives. the teacher also clearly stated the instruments used to assess the students’ learning outcome. the statements of rubrics were also clearly stated. the teachers stated the rubric used to assess the student’ learning outcome by using observation and practice. efl teachers’ problems in developing lesson plan in developing lesson plan, teachers revealed that they have some problems. the problems came up when they have to integrate scientific structure into learning activities. learning activities is arranged to reach basic competence (kd) by giving learning experience which involves the mental and physical processes through the interaction between the students, teachers, environment, and other learning sources. the learning experiences can be achieved by using scientific approach or methods, or by giving various learning experience based on students’ first potential and learning material’s characteristics. in developing the learning activities, teachers should consider several aspects, there are 1) learning activities should be arranged as a guidance for teachers to conduct effective learning, 2) learning activities should cover a sequence of manageable activities which are done by students and teachers in order to achieve learning purpose, 3) learning activities in every meeting are a scenario, by using scientific approaches, that leads the students to be active in learning and apply their knowledge. another problem came up when the teachers have to use variety of learning assessments. as we know that each learning assessment techniques have different process to assess, as well as the rubric. as the regulation of ministry of education and culture number 104/2014 mentions that several indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 9 techniques of assessment can be conducted to assess students’ learning outcome and the use of those learning assessment techniques should be in accordance with the indicators which are based on the kd, authentic assessment and writing or oral test, practice, projectbased, portfolio, or self-assessment. authentic assessment is a form of assessment that demands the students to perform attitude, use the knowledge, and apply the skills in a real context. meanwhile, self-assessment is a kind of reflective assessment to see students’ attitude, knowledge, and skills inside themselves. besides, there is homework, which is used to assess students’ task done in group or by themselves. on the other hand, project can be done to assess students’ project starting from the planning, conducting, data analyzing, and reporting. the criteria of assessment are based on students learning product that they have achieved after finishing the learning processes. the result of assessment, then, will be analyzed to decide whether kd has been achieved or not. in case of kd has not been reached, the teacher can give remedial program. the assessment system should be based on what students have done in learning process. the solution for the problems that the teachers faced in developing lesson plan is by having discussion with other teachers in school or in teacher association (mgmp). conclusion while the data gathered from document analysis, it is found that all teachers have complete the structure of lesson plan mentioned in the regulation of ministry of education and culture number 103/ 2014 about the guide of learning implementation. the researcher analyze three lesson plans as the representative of lesson plan in the beginning semester, mid-semester, and the final semester. the lesson plans are analyzed based on the elements of lesson plan. all of the teachers stated school identity, learning subject, and class/semester; time allocation; core competence (ki), basic competence (kd), indicators of competences achievement (ipk); learning materials; learning activities; assessments; and learning sources and media. related to learning materials, two of the teachers did not mentioned clearly about the materials in detail. related to learning indicator and learning purposes, all teachers only mention the learning indicator, but it is stated in a specific operational sentences which belong to learning purposes. both two terms supposed to be mentioned differently. as reiser & dick (1996) says that learning objectives are explicit descriptions of what students will be able to do as a result of the instruction they receive. learning objectives are statements of observable and measurable behaviors (gagne et al., 1992). it describes competences that the students are expected to demonstrate in accordance with the basic competence or known as performance objectives (nunan, 1989; rothwell & kazanas, 2009; brady & kennedy, 2012). further, the learning objectives must be written in observable terms, student – oriented (cooper, 1990; piskurich, 2006), cover three domains of objectives, namely: cognitive, affective, and psychomotor (posner, 1992), and stated in action verbs (cooper, 1990). from the result of interview, it reveals that all the teachers have problems when they have to integrated scientific approach in learning activity. besides, the teachers also faced a problem when they have to adjust the learning method with the assessment technique. as ministry of education and culture regulation no. 104/ 2014 states some assessments that are used to assess annisa putri efl teachers’ understanding in developing lesson plan 10 students’ achievement, such as authentic assessment and writing or oral test, practice, project-based, portfolio, or selfassessment. authentic assessment is a form of assessment that demands the students to perform attitude, use the knowledge, and apply the skills in a real context. meanwhile, self-assessment is a kind of reflective assessment to see students’ attitude, knowledge, and skills inside themselves. besides, there is homework, which is used to assess students’ task done in group or by themselves. on the other hand, project can be done to assess students’ project starting from the planning, conducting, data analyzing, and reporting. but those techniques of assessment are complicated for them. references alwasilah, c. (2008). dasar-dasar merancang dan melakukan penelitian kualitatif. jakarta: pustaka jaya. brady, l., & kennedy, k. (2012). curriculum construction. sidney: pearson. brindley, g. (2001). assessment. cambridge: cambridge university press. cooper, j. (1990). classroom teaching skills. canada: d.c. health and company. gagne, r., wager, w., golas, k., & keller, j. (1992). principles of instructional design. orlando: harcourt brace jovanovich college publishers. heigham, j., & croker, r. a. (2009). qualitative research in applied linguistcs: a practical introduction. united kingdon: palgrave macmillan. jalongo, m., rieg, s., & heltebran, v. (2007). planning for learning: collaborative approaches to lesson design and review. new york: teachers college press. mcardle, g. (2010). instructional design for action learning. new york: amacom. nunan, d. (1989). learner-centered curriculum design. cambridge: cambridge university press. nurfuadah, r. n. (2014). 10 masalah utama kurikulum 2013. retrieved december 4, 2015, from http://news.okezone.com posner, g. j. (1992). analyzing the curriculum. new york: mcgraw-hill, inc. prihastuti, i. (2015). analisis rencana pelaksanaan pembelajaran (rpp) tematik yang disusun guru pada diklat implementasi kurikulum 2013. retrieved december 8, 2015, from http://lpmpbanten.net regulation of ministry of education and culture no. 103/ 2014 about learning system for elementary and middle school. regulation of ministry of education and culture no. 104/ 2014 about learning assessment system. regulation of ministry of education and culture no. 65/ 2013 about standard process. reiser, r., & dick, w. (1996). instructional planning: a guide for teachers. boston: allyn and bacon. rothwell, w., & kazanas, h. c. (2009). mastering the instructional design process: a systematic approach. suhendra, y., & sundayana, w. (2011). pengembangan model bahan ajar literasi membaca berdasarkan model pisa 2009 bagi siswa smp rsbi di jawa barat. jakarta: pusat penilaian pendidikan depdiknas. sundayana, w. (2009). persepsi guru dan kesulitan guru bahasa inggris smp/ mts di jawa barat dalam pengembangan kurikulum tingkat satuan pendidikan. bandung: hipkin. sundayana, w., & alwasilah, a. c. (2012). pemahaman konseptual guru terhadap desain, pengembangan, dan penerapan perangkat pembelajaran. bandung: lppm upi. syahmadi, h. (2013). bedah curriculum 2013 bagi guru bahasa inggris. bandung: adoya mitra sejahtera. woodward, t. (2009). planning lesson and courses: designing sequence of work for the language classroom. new york: cambridge university press. wyse, d. (2002). becoming a primary school teacher. new york: rotledge. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 237 the pre-service teachers’ communication ability analysis at teacher training and education faculty lamhot naibaho faculty of letters and languages, universitas kristen indonesia, east jakarta, indonesia email: lamhot.naibaho@uki.ac.id apa citation: naibaho. (2022). the pre-service teachers’ communication ability analysis at teacher training and education faculty. indonesian efl journal, 8(2), 237-246. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v8i2.6474. received: 07-03-2022 accepted: 12-05-2022 published: 31-07-2022 introduction communication plays a huge role in human life. in the socialization process, these skills can help sociologists create social institutions and, in turn, influence culture and social structure (knowles, 2021). it is because each individual will go through their life journey. based on the experience will be a lesson to them. the knowledge can then be shared with others to establish communication. for example, during the teaching and learning process in the classroom, teachers and students should practice twoway communication to exchange experiences and knowledge with each other. with these interactions, their experiences and knowledge can be shared and, in turn, benefit them. in order to convey information, communication ability are an essential aspect that needs to be emphasized (chebab, moulay & rabbani, 2021). it is because the message interpreted by the recipient is misinterpreted message due to the presenter or recipients' error in communication. in education, the main pulse in an educational institution is communication ability which is a medium to convey knowledge. the process of learning and knowledge gained from these institutions will be the input for the formation and change of an individual. in addition, studies have found that in daily human activities, most of the human time is used for communication purposes (fishman, 2020). it is because humans are always eager to get new information and interact with each other in most of their daily activities. for students, their daily activities are more concentrated in school. therefore, teachers should use the space and opportunities available to help form excellent and quality students. after school hours, teachers must also maintain communication with the outside community, especially parents, because the public assesses a teacher's credibility at all times. schools are social institutions that strongly emphasize the importance of effective communication in the classroom to create universal social development. effective learning is an interactive process that provides space for students to interact, help each other, carry out responsibilities, build self -confidence and the like. it is conducted in an exciting and fun atmosphere so that it can be a motivator for students to channel opinions and thoughts effectively. in addition, effective communication also emphasizes the aspect of social skills in order to help students respond to the environment and control themselves in facing challenges to achieve and improve self-excellence. in going through daily life, language skills are an essential aspect as an intermediary medium (leung & jenkins, 2020). teachers with good communication ability in building an exciting and fun teaching abstract: this study is aimed assessing the english pre-service teachers’ communication ability at teacher training and education faculty. it was done at universitas kristen indonesia within 3 months. this study is a quantitative study and the results of the study are reported descriptively to describe the findings obtained. the study involved respondents of 116 students who were taken using the purposive cluster sampling technique. the instrument of the study is a set of questionnaire which was divided in to two parts (demographics and generic skills data). the data was analyzed by inferential statistical analysis. the finding of this study is that there is no significant difference between the level of communication ability of male and female students, and there is a significant relationship between the level of communication ability and student achievement. then, it is concluded that the level of confidence in communication ability of education students is at a high level. however, the ability to communicate in english is still at a moderate level that is less satisfactory. keywords: pre-service teachers; communication; ability; gender. lamhot naibaho the pre-service teachers’ communication ability analysis at teacher training and education faculty 238 environment will influence students 'interest and behavior in learning. in addition, communicating well can also help teachers apply positive values to improve students' social and emotional skills. therefore, a teacher should have seriousness, experience, and interest in the profession entrusted to him. communication is a process of giving meaning and can influence a person to believe and do something as desired (coombs, 2020). it is because verbal or non-verbal communication involves transferring knowledge, understanding, or feelings shared through the message (uleanya, uleanya, taiwo, & shobiye, 2020). in education, teachers who impart knowledge must have various skills, including speaking skills, classroom control, teaching techniques, and practical and orderly communication. it is because communicating in the classroom not only serves to impart knowledge but builds interaction so that the teaching and learning process achieves its goals. communication occurs when a teacher conveys his experience and knowledge to his students (zwozdiak-myers & capel, 2019). it is supported by the opinion that teachers with skills in building effective interactions are among the characteristics of effective classroom leadership (salamondra, 2021). the teaching and learning process is not only limited to communication between teachers and students in sharing knowledge or information but also relates to interaction and social control in the classroom. the social development and teaching quality in an organization are determined by the social relationship mechanisms built into it, such as effective use of language, interaction processes, open communication, and verbal skills (meulenbroek, ness, lemoncello, byom, macdonald, o’neilpirozzi & moore sohlberg, 2019). the teaching and learning process not only aims to produce students who excel in academics alone but are also involved in the process of personality formation and applying the skills needed to make the student quality. this goal is challenging to implement if there is a communication gap between teachers and students. in addition, the administration, colleagues, parents, and the community also need good interaction to ensure that the development goals of healthy and excellent students are successful. usually, in the teaching and learning process, teachers play the role of communicators of information while students play the role of recipients. however, this communication process should not be tied in one way only. a good teaching and learning process should involve a two-way communication process where there are times when teachers need to listen to opinions or feedback from students to encourage students to be active and always think. it can indirectly indicate whether the knowledge imparted by the teacher can be accepted and understood by students. thus, the effectiveness of this teaching and learning process can be said to depend on the interaction process created by the teacher (herrera-pavo, 2021). it is in line with the teacher's teaching goal to ensure that students understand and can apply the information presented during the teaching and learning process. the learning process is successful if the student's knowledge increases with the increased disclosure of information obtained from his teacher. therefore, teachers play an essential role in producing excellent and quality students. if teachers do not have practical communication ability, the teaching and learning process becomes bland and will ultimately affect students' academic excellence. therefore, to ensure effectiveness in teaching and learning, teachers should take the initiative by learning, practicing, deepening, and practicing to master these skills well. every teacher must always be creative and innovative to create a conducive learning environment to attract students to learn. in addition, teachers also need to be prepared to face all possibilities with patience, efficiency, and optimism in dealing with uncertainties that may occur in the classroom. it is because interactions between teachers and students in the classroom usually occur spontaneously following a limited period. teachers or students do not have the opportunity to think long or follow the lesson plan one by one as contained in the teaching handbook. it is where the role of teachers, especially in the aspect of communication, ensures that the goals of teaching on the day are achieved even with the various methods chosen. subsequent positive interactions can guarantee success not only for the teachers but also for the students. if teachers can establish effective communication, they will indirectly be able to identify problems and weaknesses in each student and subsequently try to help solve them. a harmonious classroom atmosphere resulting from an exemplary communication process can motivate students to achieve excellent academic achievement. it is because, in addition to teaching, teachers are also able to influence and be a motivator for students to study hard. as such, students will be more confident and interested in learning. the teaching and learning indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 239 process will also be more straightforward when students understand what their teachers are teaching. the national philosophy of education goals emphasize the close relationship and characteristics of effective communication between students and teachers, the administration with teachers, and among peers. therefore, understanding and applying effective communication is the responsibility of all parties involved in educational institutions. effective communication is the mainstay in making excellent and quality education. therefore, the administration should be sensitive to the importance of communication in teaching and learning. disclosure of the importance of having communication ability should be given to trained teachers or trainee teachers in the hope that their students can absorb the knowledge. the effectiveness of the teaching and learning process will be affected if teachers fail to establish good communication. it will affect the students because the information presented will be challenging to understand and misinterpret. what complicates the situation is if what the student understands is held and applied in his daily life without thinking deeply about the effects of the previous misunderstanding. the role of teachers is enormous in ensuring that the graduates produced can be a source of energy that meets the needs of employers. students will experience problems when they graduate later if these skills fail to be applied in education. it is evident when there is feedback from employers who dispute the inconsistency between the level of academic achievement with the level of communication ability among pre-service teachers. what is sadder is that graduates not only have problems communicating in english but also in indonesia, the national language that has been the medium of instruction for 11 years in their school environment (lan, 2018). the main reason for a person's failure in his job is their failure to establish a positive interaction with their environment (petitta, probst, ghezzi & barbaranelli, 2019). in the teacher context, in addition to teaching a predetermined subject, this group is also responsible for being indirectly involved in the formation and development of a good personality, mental and physical, for his students (tnay, adruce, lau, ting & sandhu, 2020). in line with the role played as an agent of change to the self-development and personality of students, teachers should prepare themselves with good mastery in the context of communication before entering the realm of teaching. it prepares teachers to face the different styles and backgrounds of their students. factors such as background, attitude, level of education, experience, and exposure will create the diversity of students and gaps among them in a class (resch & schrittesser, 2021). therefore, communicating is necessary to enable them to know each other and share information well. several studies have shown the dissatisfaction of schools where the pre-service teachers were taken their teaching practice with the level of communication ability and ultimately caused the unemployment rate to increase (donitsa-schmidt & ramot, 2020); öztekin & tekel, 2021); then this study was done to see if the same situation occurs among prospective education graduates. communication ability include listening, reading, writing, and speaking. these four basic skills are essential in facilitating the task when handling the teaching and learning process. a conducive learning environment will encourage student involvement in all activities performed by teachers (naibaho & silalahi, 2022). this study is expected to help students prepare not only in academic aspects but also in the context of their social practice with the external environment and as a preparation to enter the world of work later. the purpose of this study is to a) identify the level of communication ability among students in semester 7 of the bachelor of education students of universitas kristen indonesia (uki); b) study the differences in the level of communication ability between the sexes, and c) identify the relationship between each communication ability and student academic achievement. method this study is a quantitative study conducted by surveying the teacher training and education faculty of uki. the results of the study are reported descriptively to describe the findings obtained. the study involved respondents of 116 students who were taken using the purposive cluster sampling technique. the students from eight study programs took the field practice course as pre-service teachers at schools within three months. the details of the study program and the samples are in table 1. table 1. proportionally stratified samples study program respondents counseling guidance 16 english language education 21 religion education 24 mathematics 20 lamhot naibaho the pre-service teachers’ communication ability analysis at teacher training and education faculty 240 biology 18 physics 7 chemistry 6 mandarin 4 total sample 116 this study uses a communication ability questionnaire instrument adapted previous researcher. to ensure the instrument's reliability, researchers have conducted a pilot study, and the study's findings showed a high-reliability value, with a reliability value of 0.88. the collected questionnaires will be analyzed using spss version 20.0 to obtain accurate data. the analysis findings are displayed in tabular form showing the frequency and percentage. the questionnaire is divided into two parts. the first is student demographics, and the researchers used the mean from descriptive statistical analysis. this data was analyzed according to gender. this analysis only gives a comprehensive picture where from this analysis can be known which gender has a high level of communication ability. the second is the generic skills data; it was analyzed by inferential statistical analysis, that is, using correlation and independent ttest to measure the hypotheses constructed. this inferential analysis was used to look at the differences between communication ability with gender and the relationship between communication ability and cumulative grade point average (cgpa) results. the level of communication confidence was determined based on the scale range in table 2. table 2. range of communication ability scale based on the mean score mean score confidence level measures 1.00 – 2.40 low 2.41 – 3.80 moderate 3.81 – 5.00 high results and discussion descriptive analysis is used to identify students 'backgrounds according to gender and educational department or study program of the pre-service teachers, analyze data according to parts of the questionnaire, analyze students' perceptions of the level of confidence of generic skills in themselves, and analyze the overall level of confidence of generic skills, analyze the comparison of mean scores of generic skills based on gender. the presentation of research data is presented as follows. figure 1. female and male respondent based on gender figure 1 shows the frequency distribution of respondents by gender. the total number of respondents for this study was 116 people. the majority of respondents are female respondents, which is 95 people (79%), compared to male respondents, consisting of 21 people with a percentage of only (21%). this difference is very significant, but it is a common phenomenon in higher learning institutions today, where most of the students are women. figure 2. pre-service teachers’ characteristics based on study program figure 2 shows the frequency distribution of respondents by study program, with the highest number of students taking field training or preservice teaching courses. the first was 24 students (20.68%) of 116 respondents were from religion education. the second was 21 students (18.11%) were from english language education. third, followed by 20 students (17.24%) were from mathematics education, 18 students (15.51%) were from biology education, then 16 students (13.79%) were from counseling and guidance, then followed by seven students (6.03%) were from physics education, then followed by six students (5.2%) were from indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 241 chemistry education, and the last followed by four students (3.44%) from mandarin education. table 3. distribution of respondents' confidence levels in communication ability statements level of confidence mean sd 1 2 3 4 5 speaking in bahasa indonesia well 1.2 24.2 74.2 4.72 .473 speaking english well 0.6 4.5 38.7 44.0 11.7 3.51 .769 writing in bahasa indonesia well. 0.6 1.29 36.7 61.1 4.58 .556 writing the english language well. 4.5 39.4 39.4 16.3 3.67 .801 conveying information verbally 4.5 54.5 40.0 4.35 .569 conveying ideas verbally 3.8 60.4 35.4 4.31 .544 listening to the opinions of others 0.6 49.2 49.2 4.48 .514 responding to other people’s opinions 3.8 58.5 37.4 4.33 .550 using technology in teaching 4.7 54.5 40.7 4.35 .569 average 4.26 .403 while the statement "i can speak english well," where the majority of respondents that is 50 people (43.1%) agreed with this statement, followed by 47 people (39.8%) who disagreed with this statement, and a total of 12 people (10.8%) strongly agree they can speak english well. a total of 6 people (5.6%) disagree they can speak english well, and only one person (0.7%) strongly disagrees with this statement, with a mean value of 3.51 and a standard deviation of 0.769. for the statement "i can write in bahasa indonesia well," 70 people (60.2%) of respondents strongly agree and can write in bahasa indonesia well, while 43 people or (37.8%) agree with this statement and only two people (1.3%) of respondents disagree with this statement. at the same time, one person (0.7%) of respondents do not agree with this statement. the mean value for this statement is 4.58, and the standard deviation is 0.556. next to the statement "i can write in english well," there are two statements that give the same value: less agree and agree is 69 respondents (59.5%). it was followed by 42 people (36.4%) who strongly agreed with this statement, and only five respondents (4.1%) who disagreed. the mean value is 3.67, and the standard deviation value is 0.801. for the statement "i can convey information verbally well," a majority of 62 people (53.6%) of respondents agreed with this statement, and 48 people (41.1%) strongly agreed with this statement, while six respondents (5.3%) disagreed they were able to convey information orally well. the mean value is 4.35, and the standard deviation value is 0.569. furthermore, with the statement "i can convey ideas verbally well," 71 people (61.5%) agreed with this statement, and 40 people (34.5%) strongly agreed that they were able to convey ideas through word of mouth well. then only five people (4.0%) agreed with this statement. the mean value is 4.31, and the standard deviation value is 0.544. for the statement "i can listen to other people's opinions well," 114 people (98.3%) agreed and strongly agreed with this statement, followed by only two persons (1.7%) less who agreed that they could listen to others people's opinions well. the mean value is 4.48, and the standard deviation value is 0.514. in the statement "i can respond to other people's opinions well, " the majority of respondents, 66 people (56.6%), agreed with this statement, while 44 people (38.5%) strongly agreed. followed by only five people (4.9%) disagreed with this statement. the mean value is 4.33, and the standard deviation value is 0.550. the last statement was "i can use technology in my presentation" a total of 61 people (52.6%) agreed with this statement, followed by 48 people (41.8%) of the respondents who strongly agreed. a total of six people (5.6%) agreed that they were able to use technology in their presentations. the mean value is 4.35, and the standard deviation value is 0.569. while the average mean value for the entire distribution of this statement is 4.26, and the standard deviation value is 0.403. overall, the mean score for the statements related to communication ability indicated a high confidence level except for speaking and writing in english, which showed a moderate level. it shows that the main problem of students is that communication is from the aspect of english. it is in line with a study that stated that one of the main factors in graduate unemployment is problems in mastering the english language (bori, 2021). it is because english is the most widely used language in the world. along with the current circulation that emphasizes global communication, it is crucial for graduates to have a good command of english to lamhot naibaho the pre-service teachers’ communication ability analysis at teacher training and education faculty 242 ensure being able to compete to place themselves in the world of work. comparative analysis of mean scores was used to identify confidence levels of communication ability based on gender. table 4. analysis of communication ability by gender aspect gender n mean standard deviation communication female 95 4.15 .495 male 21 4.27 .378 table 4 shows that the mean score of male students' communication ability level of 4.27 is higher than the mean score of female students of 4.15. it shows that male students are more confident communicating than female students. however, these differences are not significant, as shown in table 6. based on table 5, it was found that the level of communication confidence for male and female education students did not differ significantly (t = 0.46, p> 005). these results accept ho1, i.e., there is no significant difference between the levels of communication ability between the sexes. table 5. t-test of communication ability by gender test df sig. (2-tailed) communication 0.462 148 0.645 correlation tests showed that communication ability had a very low but significant positive relationship (r = 0.07, p = 0.004). the results of this test reject h0 and accept h1 that there is a significant relationship between the level of communication ability with student achievement even at a low rate (r = 0.07). however, the value of r² = 0.005 indicates that although the relationship between communication ability and student achievement is weak, communication ability accounted for 0.49% of the variance related to student achievement. it means that the communication factor becomes one of the factors that contribute to excellent academic achievement. table 6. correlation analysis between communication ability and student achievement communication spearman's rho cgpa 0.065 sig. (2-tailed) 0.004(**) n 116 a university needs not only to produce graduates who excel in academic knowledge but also to be equipped with soft skills, especially in communication (baird & parayitam, 2019). graduates are now more exposed to the importance of technical knowledge, so they are less concerned with soft skills throughout their study period. this statement is supported by a study that stated that the graduates' failure causes to get a job is a lack of skills in communication and interpersonal (prikshat, montague, connell & burgess, 2020). the academic qualification in higher education institutions cannot be promised in the job market, and this is because the ability of graduates will be affected if only tied to one ability or not have soft skills, especially communication ability (naibaho, 2021). for the level of communication ability, it was found that the highest mean score obtained was for the first statement, "i can speak bahasa indonesia well." the mean obtained is 4.73 and is categorized as high. it is because most of the respondents are indonesian students and among the conditions for admission to uki is that they must pass the subject of bahasa indonesia. the statement "i can speak english well" with a mean of 3.62. although the mean is at a high level, this statement shows the lowest mean value compared to the other eight communication items. this situation occurs because most of the teaching in the uki is using bahasa indonesia. however, proficiency in english is significant nowadays. many indonesian university graduates fail to get jobs due to failure to speak english well (poedjiastutie, amrin & setiawan, 2018). from the evaluation made from the results of this study, it was found that the students can master the skills of communicating orally and in writing in bahasa indonesia well. mastery of communication ability is an essential skill required in any employment field (coffelt, grauman & smith, 2019). it is fundamental in every relationship and is the key to success. nevertheless, speaking skills in english got the lowest mean score in communication ability. although the mean obtained is high, it clearly shows that the skills involving speaking and writing in the language of the world are still not fully mastered by the students of the uki. it is in line with the statement that speaking and writing in english is the lowest matter compared to other communications (naibaho, 2019). this opinion is also supported by the opinion that students are less able to write and speak fluently and clearly in english (aizawa, rose, thompson & curle, 2020). many skills need to be improved to produce strong and quality graduates. among the skills identified are communication ability in english. in addition, based on a study conducted on students indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 243 found that the application of communication ability in line with the current circulation and successfully mastering it well will contribute to the ability to lead, encourage, negotiate, resolve conflicts, solve problems as well as create a healthy relationship (darling-hammond, flook, cook-harvey, barron & osher, 2020). based on the findings of this study, the mean score of communication ability level of male students, which is 4.30, is higher compared to the mean score of female students, which is 4.26. it shows that male students are slightly more confident communicating than female students. however, only a slight difference (0.04) distinguished the confidence level between male and female students. overall all students, regardless of gender, showed a high level of communication confidence. the findings of this study are in line with a study that showed that women were more anxious and afraid to communicate compared to men, especially in the context of public speaking (tsang, 2020). it is because a woman's nature is shyer than men's. in other words, female students are more afraid to make public speeches than male students. however, another study found that gender did not affect students' communication confidence levels (willis, hunt, wodika, rhodes, goodman & jozkowski, 2019). it is in line with the current circulation, which shows that women are more dominant in public universities and eventually venture into various careers. the findings of this study also showed a low positive relationship between academic achievement and communication ability (r = 0.07). a similar study was also conducted on 320 students for eight years. his study showed a significant association between communication ability and academic achievement despite having a weak relationship or r = 0.11 (zhang, jiang, ming, ren, wang & huang, 2020). it indicates that communication ability indirectly affect academic achievement. the graduates are now more theoretical than practical. the university-produced graduates now fall short of the standards set by employers in the hiring process (altbach, reisberg & rumbley, 2019). it is in line with a study that found that many graduates have excellent academic achievements but are still unemployed because they did not pass the interview session due to a lack of communication ability (tang, 2019). the number of graduates possessing various skills such as communication and academic excellence is still low. it shows that although communication ability can impact, they are not a significant factor influencing academic achievement. in addition, a study showed a significant negative relationship between the level of communication confidence and academic achievement (zhang, 2020). the findings of this study are consistent with previous studies that found that students with communication anxiety obtained less satisfactory academic results than students who reported otherwise (beghoura, 2020). stressing that communication anxiety is a determinant of students' academic achievement. another study also found a significant relationship between communication anxiety and academic achievement (weda & sakti, 2018). in addition, in the context of student academic achievement, learning should focus more on learning style and emotional intelligence. it is because these two aspects have a significant influence on the level of academic performance of students. however, communication ability are a medium in the delivery of knowledge. it means that it also plays a role in forming learning styles and emotional intelligence (regueig, 2021; naibaho, 2021). for example, communication ability need to be mastered by students to enable them to exchange ideas through discussion. in the current education system, communication ability need to be mastered for communication and learning because the teachinglearning pattern now emphasizes students submitting their opinions more (moşteanu, 2021). it will indirectly affect students 'academic achievement. overall, this study answers the research questions and research hypotheses as stated. the level of communication ability showed a high mean score of 4.27. in addition, there is no difference between the sexes. as for the relationship with student achievement, communication ability showed a positive relationship with student achievement. conclusion overall, the results of the analysis show that the level of confidence in communication ability of education students is at a high level. however, the ability to communicate in english is still at a moderate level that is less satisfactory. every teacher should master communication ability. being able to communicate in multiple languages is a bonus to individuals. in some diverse classrooms, students will create varying communication ability. therefore, every teacher should strive to identify the strengths and weaknesses of each student so that teachers can plan better teaching and learning process activities and organize and involve two-way communication. therefore, teachers must think and adopt the best methods to lamhot naibaho the pre-service teachers’ communication ability analysis at teacher training and education faculty 244 encourage their students to communicate effectively. directive and expressive communication are the methods to build good interaction between teachers and students during the teaching and learning process in the classroom. therefore, it can be concluded that communication ability influence teaching effectiveness because communication is the basis of the relationship between teachers and students. in conclusion, it is hoped that all parties encourage students to master communication ability, especially english. in addition, all parties involved must also pay attention and take effective measures in efforts to develop student's communication ability, especially in public universities, to provide a workforce that meets the needs of the current and future job market to ensure the country continues to develop and be able to 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(2019). communicating with pupils. in learning to teach in the secondary school (pp. 123-141). routledge. lamhot naibaho the pre-service teachers’ communication ability analysis at teacher training and education faculty 246 indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 23 a study of efl students’ oral communication strategies in discussions rosi hardianti department of english education, university of kuningan email: rosihardianti12@gmail.com apa citation: hardianti, r. (2016). a study of efl students’ oral communication strategies in discussions. indonesian efl journal, 2(1), 23-33 received: 19-11-2015 accepted: 24-12-2015 published: 01-01-2016 abstract: in the process of communication, efl students frequently experience problem in saying what they want to say in english. oral communication strategies (ocs) surface as the students needs to solve problems of expressing their intended meaning. this descriptive qualitative study intended to analyze (1) types of ocs used by students while conducting discussion, and (2) the students’ reasons for using certain types of ocs. the participants of this study were a group discussion consisting of five efl students of english education department in the university of kuningan. the data in this study were gained from observation and interview which were then transcribed. the data were analyzed qualitatively by using dornyei’s (1995) taxonomy of ocs. the results revealed that students participated in this study tended to use achievement strategies (73.07%) more frequently than avoidance strategies (26.92%). specifically, students used nine out of twelve communication strategy types, and the most frequent strategy used by students while conducting discussion was the use of fillers strategy (51.28%). then, the students’ reasons for using fillers strategy in their communication were basically because of their lack of english vocabulary knowledge and content knowledge of topics which were being discussed. thus, students encounter communication problems as the results of target linguistic inadequacy. hence, further study might yield different result if the topics chosen for discussion were desired topics among students. keywords: efl (english as a foreign language), oral communication strategies, discussion introduction learning a foreign language includes the ability to communicate. for english language learners, they are going to be put in situations where communication in english is needed (khadidja, 2010). the need for english speaking mastery has been increased due to the status of english as a global language recognize in every country (crystal, 2003). however, communication is one of the crucial skills that challenge the efl (english as foreign language) learners to different degrees. there is often a lack of communication in efl classroom which leads to the inability to communicate in a native-like way even after several years of learning the language (flyman, 1997). besides, foreign language speaking differs from first language speaking in terms of the lack of grammar and vocabulary knowledge of the learners (khadidja, 2010). as a result, english language learners frequently experience problems in saying what they want to say. in the process of communication, learners may come across a great number of problems without doubt (wei, 2011). to make communication smooth, therefore, learners must find some effective ways to communicate their rosi hardianti a study of efl students’ oral communication strategies in discussions 24 thoughts. whenever the learner experiences a problem because of the limitation of linguistic resources, learners may use strategic competence. strategic competence is the crucial element in communicative competence since it refers to language learners’ ability to use communication strategies either to solve communication problems or to enhance the effectiveness of communication (brown, 2000). oral communication strategies (ocs) is regarded as useful tools to keep the communication channel open (moattarian, 2012). corder (1981, in dornyei, 1995, p.56) defines oral communication strategy as “a systematic technique employed by a speaker to express his or her meaning when faced with some difficulty”. avoidance strategies and compensatory strategies are two sub types of ocs that can be used by learners in practicing oral communication whenever communication problems occur. if learners do not know a word in the target language they may 'borrow' a word from their l1, or use another target-language word that is approximate in meaning, or try to paraphrase the meaning of the word, or even construct an entirely new word (ellis, 1997). in other word, when language learners do not know how to say a word in english, they can communicate effectively by using their hands, imitating sounds, mixing languages, inventing new words, or describing what they mean (dornyei, 1995). table 1. dornyei’s taxonomy of ocs (1995) no types of cs description 1. message abandonment leaving a message unfinished because of language difficulties. 2. topic avoidance avoiding topic areas or concepts which pose language difficulties. 3. circumlocution describing or exemplifying the target object or action (e.g., the thing you open bottles with for corkscrew). 4. approximation using an alternative term which expresses the meaning of the target lexical item as closely as possible (e.g., ship for sail boat). 5. use of allpurpose words extending a general, empty lexical item to contexts where specific words are lacking (e.g., the overuse of thing, stuff, make, do, as well as using words like thingie, what-do-you-call-it). 6. word coinage creating a non-existing l2 word based on a supposed rule (e.g. vegetarianist for vegetarian, paintist for painter). 7. use of nonlinguistic means mime, gesture, facial expression, or sound imitation. 8. literal translation translating literally a lexical item, an idiom, a compound word or structure from li to l2. 9. foreignizing using a li word by adjusting it to l2 phonologically (i.e., with a l2 pronunciation) and/or morphologically (e.g., adding to it a l2 suffix). indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 25 10. code switching using a li word with li pronunciation in l2. 11. appeal for help turning to the conversation partner for help either directly (e.g. what do you call. . . ?) or indirectly (e.g., rising intonation, pause, eye contact, puzzled expression). 12. use of fillers/hesitation devices using filling words or gambits to fill pauses and to gain time to think (e.g., well, now let me see, as a matter of fact). the presence of oral communication strategy is even more prevalent during communication between those that are communicating in an l2 and do not share a common l1 (yule & tarone, 1991, in spromberg, 2011). to the present time, a great deal of research has been done to investigate the use of ocs. ellis (1984, in moattarian, 2012, p.2349) mentions that “ocs can be considered as a good notion for evaluating l2 communicative performance”. understanding the ocs employed by students can help teachers understand their strategic competence so that appropriate strategies could be chosen for pedagogical purposes. the teachers can understand a lot about the learners’ knowledge by examining the ocs they employ (moattarian, 2012). discussion is regarded well suited to facilitate a number of course goals. it is one of the examples of classroom speaking activities which are able to promote speaking skill (harmer, 2001). discussion which refers to student speaking to group members is defined as spoken communication among the students. it allows learners to practice communicating in an l2 (target language) which can provide more opportunities for language production (mingzhi, 2005). therefore, this study attempts to show the specific types of communication strategies that english language learners in the university of kuningan use to communicate with one another in a group discussion. it is derived from the fact that learners in the level of university also have limited knowledge in the foreign language, so they may use oral communication strategies to overcome this problem. in reference to the rationale previously mentioned, therefore, the problems of the research are formulated as follows: 1. what types of oral communication strategies are used by students in discussions? 2. what are the students’ reasons for using certain types of oral communication strategies in discussions? method to answer the research questions, a qualitative research was adopted as the approach of this study. qualitative research was chosen in order to explore and understand the social phenomenon (creswell, 2009). this study was undertaken at department of english education in the university of kuningan. the participants of this study were a group of five students of speaking 2 class in the academic year of 2014/2015. the voluntary students participated in this study were 2 males and 3 females aged 18-25. they had been learning english for approximately 6 years. all participants involved in this study were indonesian efl learners or non-native english speakers, which means that english was not used in their daily communication. rosi hardianti a study of efl students’ oral communication strategies in discussions 26 in this study, the data was collected through observation and interview. the data collected through observation was students’ interaction while conducting two sessions meeting of discussions, which was then videotaped and transcribed. the topics of discussion were about ‘character in drama’ and ‘reading aloud poetry’. the writer then conducted face to face interviews with the participants. semistructured interview was conducted with all students participated in this study. the semi-structured interview was conducted in order to find out the students’ reasons for employing certain types of ocs while conducting discussions. further, the data taken from observation and semi-structured interview were analyzed qualitatively. in analyzing data, the writer used dornyei’s taxonomy of ocs (cited in dornyei, 1995) to answer the research questions. results and discussion types of oral communication strategies used by students the first objective of this study was designed to identify types of oral communication strategies used by second semester students of english education department in the university of kuningan. dornyei’s (1995) taxonomy of communication strategies was adopted to identify types of oral communication strategies used. within dornyei’s (1995) taxonomy, the communication strategies were divided into two main types: avoidance strategies and achievement strategies. then, under each two main types, there exists specific types of communication strategies. table 2. the frequency of two main types of ocs used no types of ocs frequency percentage (%) 1. avoidance /reduction strategies 21 26.92% 2. achievement /compensatory strategies 57 73.07% total 78 100% as table 2 showed, a total of 78 communication strategies were used in this study. it was found that achievement strategies (73.07%) were more frequently used than avoidance strategies (26.92%). moreover, this indicated that most of students participated in this study attempted to maintain their communication by developing an alternative plan and to solve problems in communication by expanding their communicative resources, rather than avoiding their message. thus, the finding of this study was in line with nakatani’s (2012) study, where the students tended to use achievement strategies more than avoidance strategies in their communication. this might be because the students have been studying in the english education department for almost a year and their experience in learning english while they were in junior and senior high school. they were probably able to speak english regardless of their grammatical errors. most of them attempted to speak as much and as best as they could to convey their message to their interlocutor. indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 27 further, the following table presents the use of specific types of communication strategies by the students in this study in terms of their frequency, percentage, and rank order table 3. the frequency of specific types of ocs used no . types of ocs strategy frequency percentag e (%) rank order 1. avoidance or reduction ma 20 25.64% 2 ta 1 1.28% 6 2. achievement or compensatory uf 40 51.28% 1 cs 7 8.97% 3 ah 3 3.85% 4 up 3 3.85% 4 un 2 2.56% 5 c 1 1.28% 6 f 1 1.28% 6 a 0 0% wc 0 0% lt 0 0% total 78 100% according to the table above, the data analyzed showed that the students participated in this study used nine out of twelve communication strategy types proposed by dornyei (1995, p.58). the finding revealed that within the specific types of avoidance strategies, 25.64% were message abandonment, and 1.28% were topic avoidance, from the total of communication strategies used. moreover, within the specific types of achievement strategies, 1.28% were circumlocution, 3.85% were use of allpurpose words, 2.56% were use of nonlinguistic means, 1.28% were foreignizing, 8.97% were code-switching, 3.85% were appeal for help, and 51.28% were use of fillers/ hesitation devices. on the other hand, approximation, word coinage, and literal translation, were the strategies never used by students while conducting discussions. then, the following section provided description and some information on the types of ocs used by participants, as claimed in the first research question. 1. avoidance or reduction strategies under subcategory of avoidance or reduction strategies, they were message abandonment and topic avoidance as the specific types of ocs proposed by dornyei (1995). in this study, it was found that avoidance or reduction strategies comprised 26.92% of the total strategy used by all of students while conducting discussions. message abandonment message abandonment was designated as “incomplete sentences” (nakatani, et al., 2012, p.72). it was found that almost all students participated in this study used message abandonment strategy; only one of them who never used this strategy. the following excerpt of students’ discussion rosi hardianti a study of efl students’ oral communication strategies in discussions 28 illustrated how the participants used message abandonment strategy: s2: “i think there is some character also in drama. do you know by, do you know what we called as ‘cameo’?” s1: “cameo? a…, ‘cameo’, it’s like er… (p:02)” (s1 left her message unfinished by using fillers ‘er…’, then silent for more than two seconds) in the next example, s5 used this strategy by saying “i forget” rather than silent as what s1 did, as follow: ss: “what? what?” s5: “i mean er…, in characteristic there is antagonist, protagonist, but er…, there is one more in characteristic, but i forget. maybe you can searching in the internet!” (s5 left his message unfinished by saying ‘i forget’) based on the example above, s1 and s5 were the participants who used message abandonment strategy. nakatani (2012, p.73) notes, “participants resorted to message abandonment as their language capability did not enable them to continue the message effectively”. in this study, message abandonment strategy used for 20 times or 25.64% of the total strategy used by all of students while conducting discussions. topic avoidance besides message abandonment strategy, topic avoidance as the other specific types of avoidance or reduction strategies proposed by dornyei (1995) was the strategy found in this study. topic avoidance was designated as “going off the point” (dornyei & thurrell, 1992, p.71). it was found that not all students participated in this research used topic avoidance strategy; only s1 was the participant who used this strategy. the following excerpt then illustrated how topic avoidance strategy employed by participant: ss: “comedian?! <laugh>” s1: “i think it is about the genre?” s2: “huh?” s1: “oh, no no no <laugh>” (s1 tried to go off the statement by saying “no”) based on the conversation above, s1 was deliberately going off the statement or topic by saying ‘no’ when s2 asked about her statement before. faerch & kasper (1983) believed that topic avoidance occurs when the learners simply do not talk about the concepts for which the vocabulary or other meaning structure is not known for them. in such situation, learner may change the topic of discourse or remain passive (syahrial, 2013, p.12). in this study, topic avoidance strategy was used just for once or 1.28% of the total strategy used by all participants while conducting discussions. 2. achievement or compensatory strategies under subcategory of achievement or compensatory strategies, they were circumlocution, use of allpurpose words, use of non-linguistic means, foreignizing, code-switching, appeal for help, and use of fillers/hesitation devices, as the specific types of ocs used by students. in this study, it was found that avoidance or reduction strategies comprised 73.07% of the total strategy used by all of students while conducting discussions. then, each single achievement or compensatory strategy with the degree of its use then could be mentioned in the following sections: use of fillers use of fillers was the most frequently strategy used by all students participated in this study. it was used for 40 times or comprised 51.28% of the total strategy used. the application of indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 29 expressions such as umm…, er…, you know…, and what is it?, were the use of fillers strategy occurred in this study. these expressions were used to “fill pauses and to gain time to think” (dornyei, 1995, p. 58). these strategy used by the participants as they wanted to keep the attention of their group members in discussion. code switching this strategy was rather frequently used by almost all students participated in this study; only s3 who did not use this strategy. while conducting discussions, participants employed code-switching strategy for 7 times or 8.97% of the total strategy used. the following excerpt was the example illustrated how this strategy used: s2: “who is being, you know, pemeran pengganti.” (because s2 did not know the words of ‘pemeran pengganti’ in english, so she used indonesian) s5: “…it is er…, make me, ketagihan, enjoy.” (because s5 did not know the words of ‘ketagihan’ in english, so he used indonesian) as shown in the examples above, s2 and s5 used this strategy when they did not know the english word of ‘pemeran pengganti’ and ‘ketagihan’. therefore, s2 used the word ‘pemeran pengganti’ instead of ‘stuntman’ and s5 used the word ‘ketagihan’ instead of ‘addicted’. related to this, syahrial (2013, p.10) pointed out that “the learners’ l2 utterance will form a mixture of the target language (l2) and mother tongue (l1)”. in this study, it was found that the mixture of languages formed was english and indonesian. appeal for help this strategy was manifested in rising intonation or in directly asking for repetition or help (nakatani, et al., 2012). in this research, it was not frequently used by all participants; only s2 who used appeal for help strategy. it was used for 3 times or comprised 3.85% of the total strategy used. for example, s2 did not know the meaning of the word “dramatical appropriateness”, so she asked to one of her group members in discussion to help her in defining this term. then, another example of this strategy was rather different with the example previously mentioned. s2 did not know the correct word for “pembaca puisi” in english, so she asked her group members in discussion to help her in translating the word “pembaca puisi” into english. although s2 mixed her utterances by using indonesian, it was include in ‘appeal for help’ strategy since it was indicated by raising the intonation at the end of her utterances. use of all-purpose words this strategy used by extending a general, empty lexical item to contexts where specific words are lacking (dornyei, 1995). the words such as “thing”, “stuff”, and “something” frequently used by students, because these expressions assisted in sustaining conversations with the interlocutors when the exact word was not retrievable (nakatani, et al., 2012). the following excerpt was the example illustrated how s3 used this strategy: s3: “… because it has a lot of preparation; it takes more than a week, and then what it is? um…, tired preparation. and i need to pick up some things, some stuffs, er…” s3: “…in real drama also have something like that. if you watch drama on opera house or something like that, it also need stunt man, because stunt man is not only for movie or film, or something like that.” as shown in the example above, s3 used general words such as ‘thing’, rosi hardianti a study of efl students’ oral communication strategies in discussions 30 ‘stuff’, and ‘something’ to refer to the words she meant. in this study, this strategy was not frequently used by all participants; only s3 who used appeal for help strategy. then, it was revealed that s3 applied this strategy for 3 times or comprised 3.85% of the total strategy used. use of non-linguistic means another compensatory strategy which had low frequency was use of nonlinguistic means. learners used specific body language to explain unfamiliar cultural expressions (nakatani,et al., 2012, p.75). in this study, s2 and s4 were the participants who used this strategy. in the following excerpt illustrated how this strategy used by s2 and s4: s2: “…but in reading aloud poetry in english, of course is not need. you know, what you need is only your mime {she used her hands to describe the word ‘mime’}, and also your eye contact {she used her hands to describe the word ‘eye contact’}, right?” s4: “use veil?”{he used his hands to refer to the word ‘veil’} as shown in the example above, s2 and s4 tried to communicate the words ‘mime’, ‘eye contact’, and ‘veil’ by using gesture of their hands.a few students used specific body language to explain certain words which seemed difficult to understand. in the other words, mimes and gestures are seldom used among students participated in this study. this strategy was used for twice or comprised 2.56% of the total strategy used. circumlocution as explained by dornyei (1995, p. 58), circumlocution can be understood as “describing or exemplifying the target object or action”. in this study, this strategy was another compensatory strategy which had low frequency; only s3 who used this strategy. it was found that circumlocution strategy was just used once or 1.28% of the total strategy used. in the following example illustrated how circumlocution strategy used: s3: “…and the antagonist is the opposite, er… someone who act like bad way, or umm, bad guy or bad girl.” (character) as the example of circumlocution strategy used, it showed that s3 tried to describe the word “character” any longer. s3 hence used the words ‘bad way, or umm, bad guy or bad girl’ to refer to the word ‘character’. foreignizing another compensatory strategy which participants used was foreignizing. in this study, foreignizing strategy was another compensatory strategy which had low frequency; only s3 who used this strategy. in this strategy, learners use l1 word by adjusting it to l2 phonologically (dornyei, 1995, p.58). in the following example, s3 pronounced the word ‘figuran’ in indonesia by using english pronunciation. s3: “stunt man here is a someone who just act like er…figuran.” {s3 pronounced the word ‘figuran’ by /figjurәn/} as the example above showed, s3 used the indonesian word of ‘figuran’ (/figjurәn/) by using english pronunciation. then, it was found that this strategy was just used once or comprised 1.28% of the total strategy used. on the other hand, three more types of ocs never used by students while conducting discussions, they were: approximation, word coinage, and literal translation. approximation strategy was used to express the meaning of the target lexical item with an alternative term indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 31 (nakatani, et al., 2012, p.74). it was found that no students participated in this study used approximation while conducting discussions. it might be about the efl students’ knowledge of alternative term. moreover, this strategy apparently was difficult for students as their vocabulary knowledge is still limited. word coinage strategy was the next compensatory strategy which refers to creating a non-existing l2 word based on a supposed rule, e.g. vegetarianist for vegetarian, paintist for painter (dornyei, 1995, p.58). it was found that no students participated in this study used word-coinage while conducting discussions. as rusina (2008, in nakatani, et al., 2012, p.75) pointed out, “efl learners are sometimes anxious about making mistakes in speaking and have a propensity to avoid speaking altogether”. so, they tried to avoid making up a new word which was not exist in the target language. it might be about the fear of being laughed at if they made mistakes. the last strategy never used by students in this study was literal translation. literal translation strategy is defined as “translating literally a lexical item, idiom, compound word, or structure from l1 to l2” (dornyei, 1995, p.58). it was found that no students participated in this study used literal translation strategy while conducting discussions. it probably due to the existence of native-language mindset among the students rather decreased. although they had limited knowledge of communication in english, they tried to minimize the existence of indonesian while communicating in english. the students’ reasons for using certain types of ocs the second objective of this study was to know the reasons of efl students for using certain types of ocs in their communication. it was analyzed to get conclusion of the reason of efl students for using certain types of ocs while conducting discussion. based on the answer of the first research question, the finding revealed that the highest frequency of oral communication strategy types used by all participants was allocated to the use of fillers strategy. then, to analyze the reasons of students for using certain types of ocs, a semi-structured interview was held with participants. the data collected through a semi-structured interview then was audio-taped and transcribed. five efl students participated in this study were specifically asked about their reasons in choosing certain types of ocs used while conducting two sessions meeting of discussions. based on the interview, it was found that all students participated in this study have same reasons for using fillers strategy. the following transcript provided complete description of the students’ interview result related to their reasons for using fillers strategy. it was revealed from the interview: #s1: “firstly, maybe it’s because i forget. secondly, maybe it’s for gaining time, because i have to think what i have to say.” #s2: “probably it’s due to the reflex. so, when i said like that, i might have the difficulties in saying what i wanted to say directly. i still thought what i wanted to say, maybe in the aspect of its vocabulary. so, in order to remind me, i said “you know?”, like that.” #s3: “it’s actually to gain time because i didn’t know what the english word for something. then, to think and find the vocabulary or words i didn’t know.” #s4: “first, it’s because i didn’t know the vocabulary. second, it’s because to think and remind, so better for me to say ‘what is it?’ rather than silent, stop speaking or stuck, and seem blank.” rosi hardianti a study of efl students’ oral communication strategies in discussions 32 #s5: “because i didn’t know; i didn’t have idea in what i wanted to say. then, i didn’t know the vocabulary which was still strange.” based on the interview above, it indicated that although the reasons conveyed by students seemed vary, however the intended meaning of their answers were generally same. the reasons of students for using fillers strategy in their communication during discussion were because they didn’t know the english vocabulary for something and how to express directly what they wanted to say in english. the students frequently used fillers strategy during discussion as they tried to speak as much as they could instead of silent, although their english vocabulary and content knowledge about topic which was being discussed was still limited. it is particularly useful for language learners since they provide them with sense of security in the language by allowing them extra time and room to maneuver (dornyei & thurrell, 1992). perhaps, students frequently used fillers strategy in order to keep communication going instead of getting stuck in their communication. conclusion overall, students tend to use achievement or compensatory strategies more frequently than avoidance or reduction strategies indicating that most students attempt to solve problems in communication by expanding their communicative resources, rather than avoiding their message or leaving their original communication goal. for instance, the most frequent strategy used by all of students during discussions conducted is the use of fillers strategy. then, according to the interview conducted, the students’ reasons for using fillers strategy in their communication are basically because of their lack of english vocabulary knowledge and content knowledge of topic which are being discussed. in conclusion, students encounter communication problems as the results of target linguistic inadequacy. in order to overcome these problems, the students resort to several types of communication strategies. thus, oral communication strategy used by the students is not indicating a sign of communication failure. conversely, communication strategies surface as the students realize that they have problems of expressing their intended meaning and they need to solve the problems. then, the writer suggests further researchers to continue researching on the use of oral communication strategies with different context of study, for example conducting the research in the context of informal classroom setting. besides, the study might yield different result if the topics chosen for discussion were desired topics among students. it becomes recommendation for further researchers to conduct a further study in this field, especially for conducting the research in different classroom speaking activity, such as in debate. references brown, h. d. 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(2012). ‘free’ to choose: communication strategy use in efl classrooms in iran. iranian journal of applied linguistics (ijal), 15(2), 61-83. spromberg, s. (2011). communication strategies used by high school english language learners in multilingual classrooms. (unpublished master thesis). new york: university of new york. syahrial, a. (2013). communication strategies used by young learners in a billingual classroom. (unpublished thesis). salatiga: universitas kristen satya wacana. wei, l. (2011). communicative strategies in second language acquisition: a study of chinese english learners’ attitude and reported frequency of communicative strategies. (unpublished thesis). stockholm: kristianstad university. yule, g., & tarone, e. (1991). the other side of the page: integrating the study of communication strategies and negotiated input in sla. in spromberg, s. (2011). communication strategies used by high school english language learners in multilingual classrooms. (unpublished master thesis). new york: university of new york. http://www.zoltandornyei.co.uk/uploads/1995-dornyei-tq.pdf http://www.zoltandornyei.co.uk/uploads/1995-dornyei-tq.pdf http://bu.umc.edu.dz/theses/anglais/kou1159.pdf http://bu.umc.edu.dz/theses/anglais/kou1159.pdf meliyawati & fahrus zaman fadhly requestive strategies of indonesian efl learners 212 requestive strategies of indonesian efl learners meliyawati department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education the university of kuningan, indonesia e-mail: meliyawati.melmel@gmail.com fahrus zaman fadhly department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education the university of kuningan, indonesia e-mail: fahruszf@gmail.com apa citation: meliyawati & fadhly, f. z. (2015). requestive strategies of indonesian efl learners. indonesian efl journal, 1(2), 212-223 received: 21-08-2014 accepted: 06-02-2015 published: 01-07-2015 abstract: this study aims to investigate the realizations of requestive strategies used by indonesian efl learners. the respondents are 25 of junior students of the department of english education in the university of kuningan. the data were collected through discourse completion test (dct) and interview. the collected data were analyzed by using the requestive strategies theory by blum-kulka, house, and kasper (1989). the query preparatory is the most term of requestive strategy type used by indonesian efl learners in department of english education in some different situations on dct (64.8%). second is mild hints with 13.6%, third is mood derivable with 10.4%, forth is obligation statement with 7.5%, fifth is want statement with 2.4%, sixth is suggestory formulae with 1.1%, seventh is hedge performative with 0.3% and the last are performative and strong hints with nothings. the respondents incline used requestive strategies which is avoid conflict or threatening to the hearer. the study reveals that the social variables such as power, social distance and ranking of imposition really affect toward the realization of requestive strategies used by indonesian efl learners. keywords: requestive strategy, indonesian efl learners, discourse completion test. introduction language is used as a tool of communication in doing activites in social life. by using language, people can interact with others, communicate and also they can express their thought and feeling to another. they used language to convey a message what they want. but blum-kulka, house and kasper (1989) explain that the minimal units of human communication are not linguistic expression, but rather the performance of certain kinds of acts, such as making statements, asking questions, giving directions, apologizing, thanking and so on. one of basic distinctions offered is between direct speech acts, where the speaker says what he/she means, and indirect speech acts where he/she means more than or something other than what he/she says. rue & zhang (2008, p. 1) say “a request is to ask someone to do/not do something or to express the need or desire for something. the interactional goals are represented by particular speech acts such as requests, apologies, compliments, refusals, disagreements, and the like.” while, schauer (2009) states that requests are very frequent in language use (far more frequent, for example, than apologizing or promising); requests are very important to the second language learner; they have been researched in more detail than any other type of speech act; they permit a wide variety of strategies for their performance; and finally, they carry with them a good range of subtle implications involving politeness, deference, and mitigation. brown and levinson (1987) describe the speech act of a request has been considered a noteworthy subject for the research of speech acts because requests are ‘face-threatening acts (ftas)’ which entail an imposition on the addressee: the purpose of a request is to mailto:meliyawati.melmel@gmail.com mailto:fahruszf@gmail.com indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 213 get the addressee to do something. sometimes people use the marker ‘please’ when he/she request something to others. stubbs (1983 cited in house 1989) states that in english the marker please in fact occurs exclusively with utterances which are interpret able as request; i.e., it does not appear in assertions, promises, offers, invitations, threats, etc. according to brown and levinson (1987, p. 74) “the requestive strategies are included politeness strategy because when people are asking for requesting people should know when they request, how they request and to whom they request.” they point out that there are three factors that include into politeness strategy such as social distance (d), power (p) and ranking of imposition (r). they also describe social distance as the distance of social relationship between the speaker and the hearer. they argue the degree of familiarity or solidarity they share (a symmetric relation). power (p), according to them, is that the speaker’s respect to the hearer in effect, the degree to which the speaker can impose his/her will on the hearer (an asymmetric relation). then they also explain that ranking of imposition (r) in the culture in terms of the expenditure of goods and or services by the hearer, the right of the speaker to perform the act, and the degree to which the hearer welcomes the imposition. blum-kulka, house and kasper (1989) classifies request on a nine-point scale of mutually exclusive categories. there are nine requestive strategies (1)mood derivable: utterances in which the grammatical mood of the verb in the utterance marks its illocutionary force as a request (clean up the kitchen). (2) performative: the illocutionary force of the utterances is explicitly named by the speakers (i’m asking you to move your car). (3) hedged performative: utterances embedding the naming of the illocutionary force (i would like to ask you to move your car). (4) obligation statement: the illocutionary point is directly derivable from the semantic meaning of the locution (you’ll have to move your car). (5) want statement: the utterance expresses the speaker’s intentions, desire or feeling (i would like you to clean the kitchen). (6) suggestory formulae: the sentence contains a suggestion to x (how about cleaning up?). (7) query preparatory: utterance contains reference to preparatory conditions as conventionalized in any specific language (could you clean up the mess in kitchen?). (8) strong hints: utterance contains partial reference to object or to elements needed for the implementation of the act (you’ve left the kitchen in a right mess). (9) mild hints: utterance that make no reference to the request proper but are interpretable through the context as requests (we don’t want any crowding) (as a request to move the car). to make clear about requestive strategies of indonesian efl learners, this study involved 25 respondents of junior students of department of english education in university of kuningan to answer the two research questions: (1) what are kinds of requestive strategies used by indonesian efl learners? and (2) how do power, social distance and ranking of imposition infleunce on the realization of requestive speech act? method in this study, qualitative method is used as method design. this study involved 25 junior students of department of english education in university of kuningan, indonesia as respondents. the participants are chosen by using purposive sampling. fraenkel and wallen (2009) state that purposive sampling is different from convenience sampling in that researchers do not simply study whoever is available but rather use their judgment to select a sample that they believe, based on prior information, will provide the data they need. the disparity of student’s ability in mastering speaking was selected hopefully to extend important information and also give a qualified data because it can show the influence of the performance in asking for requesting. the respondents are chosen based on some considerations. discourse completion test (dct) and interview were used to collect the data. discourse completion test (dct) is used to collect the data. “dct is a form of questionnaire making use of some natural meliyawati & fahrus zaman fadhly requestive strategies of indonesian efl learners 214 situations in which the respondents are expected to respond by making requesting. ideally, all data should come from natural conditions” (blum & kulka, house, and kasper 1989, p. 13). they are given 15 requestive expressions with different situations. the respondents are asked to relate to the situation and express their normal language interaction in such situations. besides dct, the interview was held to know their reason about requesting which related with social variables such as power (p), social distance (d), and ranking of imposition (r). brown and levinson (1987, p. 74) “the requestive strategies are included politeness strategy because when people are asking for requesting people should know when they request, how they request and to whom they request.” they point out that there are three factors that include into politeness strategy such as social distance (d), power (p) and ranking of imposition (r). they also describe social distance as the distance of social relationship between the speaker and the hearer. they argue the degree of familiarity or solidarity they share (a symmetric relation). power (p), according to them, is that the speaker’s respect to the hearer in effect, the degree to which the speaker can impose his/her will on the hearer (an asymmetric relation). then they also explain that ranking of imposition (r) in the culture in terms of the expenditure of goods and or services by the hearer, the right of the speaker to perform the act, and the degree to which the hearer welcomes the imposition. the interview taken from five questions which include about social variables. the researcher conducts face to face interviews with participants, interviews participants by telephone, or engage in focus group interviews with six to eight interviewees in each group (creswell, 2009). the interview conducted in group interviews with four and five interviewees in each group. results and discussion based on the data, from 15 situations on dct which was spread to the 25 participants, produce result 375 utterances. the 375 utterances are classified into nine requestive strategies. the result of analysis from blumkulka’s theory (1989) arranged from the highest percentage to the lowest. query preparatory is the most term used by indonesian efl learners in department of english education in some different situations on dct (64.8%). it is followed by mild hints term (13.6%). and the third followed by mood derivable (10.4%), the forth followed by obligation statement with (7.5%). fifth followed by want statement with (2.4%) and the next followed by suggestory formulae with (1.1%). and the last is hedge performative (0.3%), while performative and strong hints is nothing. the detail description of requestive strategies will be shown in the table below : table 1. the distribution of requestive strategies used by indonesian efl learners at department of english education university of kuningan no requestive strategies frequency % 1 query preparatory 243 64.8% 2 mild hints 51 13.6% 3 mood derivable 39 10.4% 4 obligation statements 28 7.5% 5 want statements 9 2.4% 6 suggestory formulae 4 1.1% 7 hedge performative 1 0.3% 8 performative 0 0 9 strong hints 0 0 amount 375 100% query preparatory term is utterance contains reference to preparatory conditions as conventionalized in any specific language. the most respondent used query preparatory form in 5th, 7th and 14th situations. in some contexts of situations, respondents used appropriate form requestive strategy. indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 215 situation #5 when you’re studying in the class, suddenly your mobile phone vibrates. you ask for a permission to your lecturer to receive the phone call and go out of the classroom. what would you say? r3: sir, may i answer my phone? this is urgent. situation #7 one of your lecturers asks you to buy a book while you forget to bring the wallet. so you borrow the money rp. 50.000 to your friend to buy the book. what would you say? r14: i’m forgetting to bring my wallet; may i borrow your money rp.50.000 to buy the book? situation #14 there are tasks for tomorrow then you want to borrow your friend's notebook to search the material. what would you say? r17: hey, may i borrow your notebook, please? i have to search material for my task. the respondents used query preparatory for conveying a request to older person, it means that the respondents consider usage power (p) when they requested with others. beside that, they consider ranking of imposition (r) when requesting something. it can be shown in example of situation #7 above when speaker (respondent) wanted borrowing money to their friend. mild hints is utterance that make no reference to the request proper but are interpretable through the context as request. beside that, mild hints can be meant less indirect while the speaker does not show his/her want explicitly to hearer. there is an interesting requestive strategy of mild hints that appears in situation #4, when the student want to admonish their lecturer who smoke in the class, can be shown below: situation #4 one of your lecturers smoke in the classroom when he explained the material, then you wanted to admonish him because there was a warning not to smoke in the classroom. what would you say? r9: i’m sorry sir; would you like to see the warning? the example of respondents’ responses above can be seen that respondent used mild hints strategy. the speaker (students) wanted the hearer (lecturer) not to smoke in the classroom, but the speaker or respondent did not show his wants in his request explicitly. the speaker believed that a boy who was ordered to take a ball will understand his wants. the speaker hid the meaning what he said and made request strategy in mild hints term. maybe the respondents meant above that the speaker (students) did not want speak exactly about what he/she wanted because the power of the speaker was lower than the hearer (lecturer). maybe the respondent did not want hurt his lecturer and used mild hints strategy to show his respect. although social distance between them was casual, the ranking of imposition is high. the other example usage of mild hints used by respondents can be shown below: situation #11 one day when your lecturer teaches at 01 p.m., the classroom is very hot. you ask your friend who sit near the window to open the window. what would you say? r1: it’s very hot today, isn’t it? the speaker does not say “open the window!”, but the speaker wants his/her friends can understand his/her statement like shown above. when the speaker says “it’s very hot today, isn’t it?” the speakers shows his/her willing that he/she want his/her friend open the window because the classroom is so hot. indirectly, he/she orders his/her friend to open the window because he/she maybe wants to show his/her joke by saying like above. in situation #6, there is a mild hints term used by respondent which is less different with the example above. the utterance is less threatening the hearer to do something. it meliyawati & fahrus zaman fadhly requestive strategies of indonesian efl learners 216 forces the hearer to respond what speaker wants is repeating the material. situation #6 your lecturer does not explain the lesson clearly because his voice is too low to hear. you want your lecturer to repeat the material. what would you say? r1: excuse me, sir. i could not hear your voice. r9: sorry miss, your voice so low. the speaker (students) hides her wants of repeating the material by the lecturer by saying “i could not hear your voice”. maybe the speaker thought that his utterance can be understood by the lecturer. so the respondent used mild hints in this situation to show his wants, although the respondent can use another utterance such as: “would you repeat the material, sir?” mood derivable is usually used when the speaker wants the hearer to do something in strong position (speaker), because of higher power. this term is started by the verb illocutionary force ahead, such as “do x!”. although usually mood derivable is used for high power, but from the result of questionnaire taken before it shown that usage of mood derivable is also used for equal power. it is because this study is about requestive strategies used by students to the lecturer. in some situation, this term is used by respondent such as the example below: situation #12 a friend who sits beside you keeps interrupting. you feel annoyed and ask him to not disturb you again. what would you say? r9: silent please! r18: don’t be noisy please! r25: please, don’t disturb me! the speaker does not use utterance which is softer than mood derivable, such as using query preparatory. it does not show that the speaker does not respect the hearer, but related to the power because the power between them is equal, the speaker maybe benefitted it to make his wants more effective. the utterance shown above indicates the student did not want his friends to keep interrupt him. the term of mood derivable that is almost the same with utterance above is shown in situation #13. situation #13 you come late to the class. at that time, there are no empty chairs in the classroom. you ask your male friend to take a chair beside your class. what would you say? r15: hey, take the chair, please! r23: help me please! do you want to take a chair for me? although the social distance between them is close, but the speaker can use mood derivable term for her utterances like it above. she (speaker) maybe does not use her power to threaten her male friend to do her wants, but she may be confident that her friend will not refuse to do because the social distance between them is close. the last example of mood derivable is in situation #4. here is explained that the students want his/her lecturer not to smoke in the classroom. situation #4 one of your lecturer smokes in the classroom when he explains the material, then you want to admonish him because there is a warning not to smoke in the classroom. what would you say? r3: sorry sir, don’t smoke here! in the example above, speaker (student) did not care about his power which was lower power than hearer (lecturer). speaker used mood derivable for asking hearer to do something, in this situation the speaker wanted the hearer not to smoke in the classroom. the situation like this can use another strategy of request such as query preparatory for example “could you turn off your cigarette, sir?”, maybe the speaker want shown his utterance explicitly to the lecturer not to smoke in the classroom. whereas ranking of imposition in this situation is high. indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 217 obligation statement is the illocutionary point is directly derivable from the semantic meaning of the locution (‘you’ll have to move that car’). it is the utterances which state the obligation of the hearer to carry out the act, maybe making this term like the utterance in parenthesis is rather hard. the example of this strategy can be shown below: situation #4 one of your lecturers smokes in the classroom when he explains the material, then you want to admonish him because there is a warning not to smoke in the classroom. what would you say? r8: i’m so sorry sir, you can’t smoke here, and because it’s no smoking area and it disturbs us. r20: i am sorry sir, you can’t smoke here. because it is no smoking area. the example above is the situation when the speaker (student) given command to hearer (lecturer) not to smoke in the classroom. this situation not only can use obligation statement but also with use mood derivable for giving confirmation. however maybe speaker want given command softly because in this situation power of hearer (lecturer) is high than the speaker (student). the utterance which used by respondent such as: “you can’t smoke here” is direct speech act from the semantic meaning of the locution. the term of want statement is the utterance expresses the speaker’s intentions, desire or feeling. below are the examples of want statements used by respondent. there is only an example shown, because it is the interesting one to analyze. the utterance tells us that the speaker tries to avoid conflict with the hearer. the speaker avoids threatening the hearer by not saying “do x”, the speaker used the softer utterance to express his/her desire. the speaker hoped that the hearer will understand what he/she wants and gave him/her a statement not to blame him/her anymore. want statement usually uses the words “i hope”, “i wish”, “i want”, etc. situation #3 last subject is at 11 a.m. and you have not had breakfast yet, so you are stuffing. then you ask for a permission to your lecturer to come out the class. what would you say? r24: miss, i hope can get time to break, can i? the example above shows that the speaker (student) realizes that his/her power is lower than hearer (lecturer), so the speaker uses the softer utterance to express his/her willing. another example shows the different utterance used by respondent to express his/her desire to the hearer. situation #14 there were tasks for tomorrow then you want to borrow your friend's notebook to look for the material. what would you say? r23: sorry, i want to borrow your notebook for doing my task, may i? situation #7 one of your lecturers asks you to buy a book while you forget to bring the wallet. so you borrow the money rp. 50.000 to your friend to buy the book. what would you say? r24: i want borrow your money. respondent used not only softer utterance to express his/her desire to hearer who had power that was higher than respondent. but in the example above, respondent used softer utterance for asking something to hearer who had equal power with speaker (respondent). the speaker wanted to borrow something important which had such imposition as borrowing notebook. sometimes the respondent will use the softer utterance to request something which has such imposition like borrowing money. in this context, respondent can use another strategy of request to express his desire to hearer. but if we see what the speaker wants in this situation, something which has such imposition or it means something which cannot be given easily. meliyawati & fahrus zaman fadhly requestive strategies of indonesian efl learners 218 suggestory formulae is the sentence contains a suggestion to x (“how about cleaning up?). the term of suggestory formulae is a complex utterance which is seldom used by the respondent. the example below, there are differences between utterance which used by respondent in same situation: situation #1 if your first lecturer was coming late to class and tended take the next lecture’s hours, while the next lesson will hold a test. what would you say? r6 : sorry, it’s better to make up class because mr. dadang will come. r24 : sorry sir, time is up. how about you make up class tomorrow? because next subject would hold a test. respondent (speaker) tries to make a suggestion to the lecturer (hearer) to end the teaching and learning process in the classroom because the time is over. respondent 6 and respondent 24 give suggestion to their lecturer to continue the teaching and learning process in another day because next lesson will hold a test. while respondent 23 below gives suggestion to the lecturer for asking permission to take the next lecturer’s hour to explain the material until finish. situation #1 if your first lecturer was coming late to class and tended to take the next lecture’s hours, while the next lesson will hold a test. what would you say? r23 : sorry sir, could you ask to the next lecturer first? because we have to join the test. by the utterance above, the hearer will think that time is over and she/he must stop the teaching and learning process. the hearer will not be forced to do something by speaker. the other utterance is shown below: situation #4 one of your lecturers smokes in the classroom when he explains the material, then you want to admonish him because there is a warning not to smoke in the classroom. what would you say? r21 : i’m sorry sir but it is no smoking area. it is better for us if you stop smoking. suggestory formulae is usage in situation #4 only one utterance. in this situation, the speaker (student) gives a suggestion for his/her lecturer not to smoke in the classroom. the speaker gives the information if there is prohibition no smoking in the class before the speaker asks the lecturer not to smoke. maybe the information before a suggestion is used because the speaker (student) did not want offended the hearer (lecturer). the hedged performatives are the utterances in which the naming of the illocutionary force are modified by hedging expressions (‘i would like to ask you to move your car’). the example below is the usage of hedge performative by respondent: situation #15 you is left behind when your lecturer dictate the material. then you want to borrow the notes book from your friend when he/she has finished writing. what would you say? r8 : i would like to borrow your notes. from the example above, hedge performative is usage in situation #15 only one respondent. in this situation, the speaker (student) want the hearer (lecturer) to borrow his/her friend’s book. the utterance does not use interrogative marker, but that is more polite to express what the speaker wants. whereas the speaker and hearer have the equal power. performative and strong hints do not appear in this study. it means they only reach 0% of data. no respondents use those terms for responding the situations. performative term is the illocutionary force of the utterances is exlipictly named by the speakers (i’m asking you to move your car). maybe making this term like the utterance in parenthesis is rather hard. sometimes the speaker does not use performative term in the campus situation specifically for their indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 219 friends who have equal power with the speaker. the last requestive strategies is strong hints. strong hints are utterances containing partial reference to object or element needed for the implementation of the act (‘you left the kitchen in a right mess’). therefore, the strong hints term is not used by efl learners at the department of english education in university of kuningan in all situation. the findings of data interview show that social variables such as power, social distance, and ranking of imposition can influence usage requestive strategies. interview sections were taken from 13 respondents of 25 respondents. they used courtesy when they requested to others. beside that power, social distance and ranking of imposition are influential when they used requestive strategies. the degree of power ownership is associated with determiner by personal variables such as age and gender. in this present study there are categories of power (p) ownership: low, equal and high. the speaker is said to have low power when speaking to a more powerful person in terms of personal or social variables characterizing the hearer. in contrast, the speaker is said to have high power when speaker can control the behavior of the hearer and they are equal when no one dominates the others because they share the power equally. the differences of request strategies used by respondent shown from the level of relative power. first, lower (-) power when the students (respondent) asked for permission to the lecturer to receive the phone. respondents used courtesy for requesting what they wanted. it can be shown from beginning utterance, they used “i’m sorry sir” and “excuse me sir”, that utterances can be assumed if respondent is aware his/her power is lower than lecturer. meanwhile second equal (0) power, when the students asked to their friends for borrowing book from them, respondent used courtesy too with “may i” and “please”, but sometimes respondent said what his/her want directly. from that example of equal power, it can be assumed that respondents not always used courtesy for conveying of requesting something. the respondents regardless to the relative power are described in the situations when they responded the questionnaire. obviously, the respondents are unaware such social variables are not because of their lack of knowledge of information about such social variables since they explicate clearly in the interview making request of course should consider the hearer’s power. the degree of power ownership is associated with determined by personal variables such as age and gender. data finding from interview found the respondents consider courtesy and age when realizing their requests. “saya berfikir bahwa memang kesopanan memang sangatlah penting dalam kehidupan kita karena dalam situasi apapun dan kepada siapapun baik itu kepada orang yang lebih tua ataupun kepada yang lebih muda. pertama kepada yang lebih tua, itu kewajiban kita untuk menghormati mereka. dan kepada yang lebih muda 100% 0% relative power age considered age unconsidered 46.15% 53.84% relative power gender considered gender unconsidered meliyawati & fahrus zaman fadhly requestive strategies of indonesian efl learners 220 itu kita bisa memberikan contoh kepada mereka bagaimana berkata yang sopan dan ketika kita berkata sopan kepada orang lain maka orang lain pun akan melakukan hal yang sama, mereka akan berkata yang sopan juga.” (i think that indeed civility is important in our lives because in any circumstances and to anyone good to people who are older or younger too. first, it is our duty to honor them. and to the younger we can give an example to them how to say a polite and courteous when we say to others then others will do the same thing, they would have said a polite too.) the data finding below is respondent’s response from interview that considers gender when realizing request strategy. “tentu jenis kelamin lawan bicara berpengaruh juga dalam menyampaikan permintaan karena menurut saya menyampaikan permintaan kepada seorang laki laki dan perempuan itu berbeda. ketika kalau misalnya kita meminta tolong kepada anak perempuan karena saya juga perempuan saya merasa lebih enak tapi kalau misalnya menyuruh kepada seorang laki laki ada perasaan sungkan.” (certainly the interlocutor’s gender is influential when conveying the request because i think conveying the requests to a male and female were different. for example when we ask help to female because i am also a female, i felt better but if i ask to a male there is a feeling of hesitate.) while, one of male respondent stated that gender unconsidered for conveying request. because the main things to convey request for him is distance. “saya berpendapat bahwa jenis kelamin lawan bicara itu tidak penting karena semuanya sama. yang terpenting yang membedakan itu adalah kedekatan kita. jadi jenis kelamin itu ngga membedakan gitu.” (i argue that the interlocutor’s gender is not important because everything is the same. the most important which distinguishes it is our closeness. so gender does not distinguish.) all of data finding from interview above can be assumed the respondents have prior knowledge of background about politeness norms related to such social variable as relative power. all of respondent used courtesy for delivering a request for something to people who has position lower, equal or higher age than respondents. meanwhile, for the categories of gender some respondents have no differences to deliver his/her request because they used closeness with the hearer. although respondent used variation diction, if we compare the utterances above related to the level of relative power described in the three situations, we find significant differences between request strategies used by respondents. social distance (d) can be defined as the relative familiarity between the speaker and the hearer. in this study, there are three categories of the degree of relationship: close, casual and distance. the term close is used when the participants have kin relationship or have such very close friendship as brother or member of an in-group who have similar values and ideology or the same agreement between them. while the term distance is used when the participant is not a kinsman, or seeks another dialect or language (brown and levinson, 1987) or strangers who meet in public places even colleagues in a workplace but do not know each other. while the term casual is between both conditions, close and distance. it happens when participants know each other but they are unwilling or unable to establish kin relationship. the diagram below shows that social distance relationship used by respondent when interviewed section. indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 221 diagram 12. the distribution of social distance the diagram above shows that all of respondents considered social distance for conveying the request for something. they believed that social distance can be influenced for conveying the request for something. the result above can be shown from the example statement from some responses of respondent by interview below: “ketika kita mempunyai kedekatan dengan seseorang itu akan lebih enak ketika kita akan menyampaikan suatu permintaan terhadapnya, akan tetapi ketika kita ingin meminta sesuatu kepada orang yang tidak dekat dengan kita, pasti kita akan merasa canggung dan sungkan untuk menyatakannya.” (when we have propinquity to someone it would be nicer when we convey a request, but when we want to request something to people who are not close with us, we certainly would feel awkward and hesitate to reveal it.) from the reason above the writer assumes the respondents have prior knowledge of background about politeness norm related to such social variable as social distance. the respondent would feel awkward for conveying a request for something to people who close yet with him/her, while respondent when conveying request to people who close with them easily. ranking of imposition (r) refers to degree of degree of interference that is imposed by the speaker to the hearer in proportion to the expenditure of services and of goods. in this study, there are three categories of the degree of ranking of imposition: low, medium, and high. the size of the imposition is determined by the size of request and is affected by whatever benefit the hearer might receive and the power of differences and familiarity of the speaker and the hearer. if the request size is higher, it involves a higher imposition on the hearer. if the hearer benefit, if the social distance is lose (high familiarity), or if the hearer’s status (power) is lower than the speaker’s is perceived as low. the imposition is said medium when the request size is not extremely high or low. the diagram below shows that level of ranking of imposition used by respondent when interviewed section. diagram 13. the distribution of ranking of imposition the data above shows that 84.61% respondents considered ranking of imposition for conveying requesting something, while 15.38% respondents unconsidered ranking of imposition. we can see the examples of statement from respondent when they are interviewed that respondents considered ranking of imposition for conveying a request for something. “saya pribadi segan ketika meminta sesuatu yang memiliki pembebanan seperti meminjam uang. hal itu dikarenakan karakteristik seseorang itu berbeda ya. kedekatan itu tidak menjadi topik utama dalam hal ini, karena ketika kita bercerita kepada orang yang dekat atau tidak dekat dengan kita mengenai hal yang saya butuhkan biasanya saya menceritakan dulu keluhan saya, ketika mereka menawarkan bantuan baru saya terima, tapi saya pribadi justru lebih segan ketika saya harus langsung to the point untuk meminta hal tersebut.” 100% 0% social distance social distance considered social distance unconsidered 84.61% 15.38% ranking of imposition ranking of imposition considered ranking of imposition unconsidered meliyawati & fahrus zaman fadhly requestive strategies of indonesian efl learners 222 (i’m certainly unwilling when requesting something which has such imposition like borrowing money. it is because the different characteristics of a person. yes. the closeness that doesn't become a major topic here, because when we tell to close people or no close people with us about what i need i usually tell my problem before, when they offer of assist so i receive, but i am personally even more unwilling when i have to the point to ask for it.) from statement above, respondents felt unwilling when conveying requesting something which has such imposition. thus, the example of that statement was taken from the situation when request borrowing money. they would tell wordy about their request although they tell their request to their friends and someone who has closeness with them. while, some respondents’ unconsidered ranking of imposition for conveying requesting something. there are examples of statement from respondents when interviewed: “permintaan meminjam uang merupakan sesuatu hal yang sensitif ya. namun ketika kita memintanya kepada seseorang yang dekat dengan kita, kembali lagi ya dengan kedekatan, kita mungkin bisa saja meminjam uang dengan lebih santai karena mungkin kedekatan tersebut. namun ketika kita memintanya dengan orang yang belum begitu dekat dengan kita, mungkin itu merupakan sesuatu yang sangat sega untuk kita lakukan. jadi ketika melakukan hal tersebut, kita harus melihat kepada siapa kita meminta.” (borrowing money is something sensitive. but when we ask someone who close with us, back to propinquity, maybe we just borrow money more relaxed because of that. but when we ask people who have not been close with us, maybe it is something unwilling to do. when we do it, we must see to whom we ask for.) the example statements above can show that any respondents unconsidered ranking of imposition for conveying a request for something. but the respondents used social distance relationship when asked something which has such imposition to others people. the respondent used directly utterance when borrowed money to their friends with to the point of problem. although the ranking of imposition of money is high imposition, they saw the nominal of that money is not too much so they used directly utterance for it. maybe when the respondent borrowed much money, they would have said more politely or used conventionally indirect strategy. conclusion this study reveals 15 different situations of requestive strategies that conducted by dct form. the respondents are from indonesian efl learners at department of english education in university of kuningan. there is no different treatment between male and female. this study took 25 respondents included male and female junior students. the dominant strategies used by indonesian efl learners at the department of english education in university of kuningan is query preparatory which reached 243 frequency or 64.8% of data. the second highest strategy is mild hints with 51 or 13.6% of data, the third is a mood derivable with 39 or 10.4% of data, and the forth strategies used by indonesian efl learners is obligation statement which the frequency is 28 or 7.5% of data. want statement is the fifth highest frequency used by the indonesian efl learners with reach 9 or 2.4% of data. the sixth strategy used by indonesian efl learners is a suggestory formulae with 4 or 1.1%. hedge performative with 1 or 0.3% of data. performative and strong hints are the lower strategy which used by indonesian efl learners with nothing. several of those requests used by respondents while power, social distance and ranking of imposition affect the realization of requestive strategies. in fact, not all of requestive strategies was appropriate used by respondent, but generally those requestive strategies were affected by power, social distance and ranking of imposition. almost of all respondents can use the appropriate indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 223 requestive strategies, although there are some strategies placed not in the right situation. references austin, j. l. 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(2002). requestive speech act realizations in indonesian context: an analysis of power, distance and ranking of imposition behind linguistic behaviors performed by students learning english as a foreign language. unpublished research paper. department of english education of universitas pendidikan indonesia. yule, g. (1996). pragmatics. new york: oxford university press. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 127 utilizing quipper school for improving reading comprehension of recount text siti mariam english education department faculty of tarbiyah and teacher training universitas islam negeri walisongo semarang email: sitimariam@walisongo.ac.id catur kepirianto english literature department faculty of humanities universitas diponegoro semarang email: caturkepirianto1965@gmail.com ma’rifatul fadhilah english education department faculty of tarbiyah and teacher training universitas islam negeri walisongo semarang email: marifatulfadhilah@walisongo.ac.id nafisah mardhiana english education department faculty of tarbiyah and teacher training universitas islam negeri walisongo semarang email: nafisahmardhiana-29@gmail.com apa citation: mariam, s., kepirianto, c., fadhilah, m., & mardhiana, n. (2022). utilizing quipper school for improving reading comprehension of recaunt text. indonesian efl journal, 8(1), 127-136. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v8i1.5660 received: 07-10-2021 accepted: 12-12-2021 published: 15-02-2022 introduction the way students and teachers interact has contributed to mastery of resources in obtaining information about their subjects. for exploratory strategies, teachers should put in place appropriate initiatives and steps to enable students to actively learn on their own. there is a communication procedure between teachers and students. therefore, mastery of the media is encouraged to properly build dialogue within the framework of educational methods. in the age of events, virtual media is at the forefront of knowledge acquisition. abstract: this study aims at explaining the implementation of using quipper school for improving reading comprehension of recount text and also describing the students’ engagement in the use of this digital media. this research design employed qualitative descriptive. the data collection technique used interview and documentation. to analyze the data, the researchers used data reduction, data mapping, inference, or validation. the participants of this study were the eleventh grade students and the english teacher at a public high school in semarang, indonesia. the research shows that students and the teacher have been helped in the teaching and learning process using quipper school application. students can learn reading materials with this digital medium during online learning due to the covid19 pandemic. students also enjoy discussion and interest in educational materials that are easy to implement and have easy access to the digital media. there were also interactive conversations about student learning issues to help students understand the reading content materials more easily. keywords: digital media; learning; quipper school; reading; recount text https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i2.4564 siti mariam, catur kepirianto, ma’rifatul fadhilah, & nafisah mardhiana utilizing quipper school for improving reading comprehension of recaunt text 128 digital media can provide contextual audio and visual literacy materials in an immersive and interactive way. this is also in line with improvements to the quick help technology. it is also supported by (jamil, ampa, & ilmiah, 2019 & khafaga, 2021). for the reasons above, it has become clear that auxiliary materials should be encouraged so that students can get to know each other without prejudice, without teacher involvement. digital primary-based mastering packages are required to make the deployment process powerful and environmental friendly. therefore, teachers are expected to acquire the skills to deal with epochs and learning methods. this study aims to explain the utilizing of quipper school as digital education tool in enhancing students reading comprehension of recount text. it also describes students’ participation in involving distance english learning. technical knowledge is required for teachers. however, in this situation, teachers and students have a limited area within the execution method. teachers cannot apply learning strategies like in the classroom, nor can directly track student growth. but they should have a motivation to acquire knowledge. students, teachers and learning media are the components needed for knowledge acquisition. when all components are interconnected, the learning objective can be achieved. however, due to the covid-19 pandemic, gifts for acquaintances cannot be optimally conducted, so education is completed using virtual media at home. researchers involved to conduct quipper school as virtual media are used by english teachers in online course. this validates an effort to provide an explanation of how to use the quipper school to assist students while studying at home. there is no face to face meeting offline between the teacher and students. in this case, teachers and students have limited space for ongoing processes. according to (ja’ashan, 2020; khafaga & shaalan, 2021), very rapid technical features affect many lives, and provide changes to an existence style and normal human activity. the use of digital media is also increasing rapidly, including through virtual learning. those who are interested in learning should have the potential for technical understanding based on students’ needs, or abilities also known as technical abilities. as a final result, education, including mastering gadgets that are growing to organize education more and more several developments. in line with (ajmal, alrasheedi, keezhatta, m.s., & yasir 2020; cakrawati, 2017), acquiring virtual knowledge is a machine that can help new learners study in a broader, more complete and diverse way. thanks to the convenience that the device brings, students can learn anytime, anyplace without being constrained by distance, area and time. acquaintance with text is no longer in the form of words, but is more diverse, including: textual content, images, sounds and movements. felstead (2018) asserts that the perception of digital knowledge includes physical or infrastructural elements in the form of a set of interconnected computer systems capable of sending information, whether in the form of text, messages, graphics, video or audio. this statement is also supported by (hamad, 2014; bakri, 2021) that digital learning can be interpreted as a network of personal computers that has become interconnected with multiple networks of laptop, computers at some point in the arena. based on the previous three assessments, it is possible to conclude that the acquisition of digital knowledge is a collection of computers linked to various networks around the world that can facilitate learning a wider, broader and more varied learning for beginners. digital mastery encompasses student efforts with standards of freedom, independence, flexibility, completeness, mobility, and efficiency. the precept of the utility of liberties is democratic in that it is designed to be free and is obeyed by all. especially through new learners who are heterogeneous in terms of conditions or characteristics including motivation, intelligence, teaching history, ability, and time to test. for this purpose, knowledge acquisition content, proposed program content and learning methods are specially designed. it is not limited to predefined proficiency substances, regions, distances, times, ages, genders and various non-academic requirements. the principle of independence is implemented by educational institutions whose curriculum or software allows them to learn independently through knowledge and the nature of learning. teachers are the most effective facilitators of helping or comforting the underprivileged in their studies. learning about the materials is designed to make it easy for students to study on their own. the indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 129 principle of flexibility gives beginners the flexibility to plan exercise and subject schedules, take exams or developmental tests, and access asset familiarization based on the student's ability. the precept of conformity indicates the needs of employment, the development of era and generation, or trends that stand up in society. newbies studies consistent with their very own dreams, pastimes, skills and reports. the precept of mobility allows learners to study via shifting consistent with the situations that allow the getting to know system. the precept of performance is to empower a variety of assets, which includes human assets or era that is to be had as optimally as viable in order that beginners can study. as a mastering media, there had been 3 virtual studying capabilities in getting to know subjects, particularly as a complement, supplement and substitution. there were numerous studies on using quipper school, in particular namely conducted by (bang & saekhow, 2017; agustina & cahyono, 2017; febriani, et al., 2018). the consequences of research specifically it changed into powerful digital media in teaching language skills expertise and enhance university students’ motivation in analyzing english proficiency. another has a study modified into completed through (bang & saekhow, 2017; gullen, 2018; rachma, 2021, wijanayu, hardyanto, & isnaeni, 2018), on how to teach english competencies using quipper school with computer-assisted language learning. the intention of this look at emerge as privy to factors that would motive enhancements within side english skills capabilities of university students via using computer assisted language learning (call). participatory action research (par) has become used due to the fact the technique in the studies. several exams were finished with the intention of finding out the students’ achievements using quipper school. felstead (2018) additionally conducted an observation to decide the effectiveness of hybrid technique through quipper application in teaching ict subjects. the study encouraged using mixed technique with the aid of using this application became indeed a powerful device to be used in learning ict competence for the 9th graders. quipper school can also be used as a web platform for prolonged efl learning. the goal of this study was to give teachers the tools they needed help students by combining superior analytics with a sophisticated online platform. the result not only indonesian efl teachers use the platform to overcome the limited time available to teach efl, but also enables efl students through a broad value platform to get experiences. quipper school, in line with a study conducted by (guillen, 2018; jamil, et al., 2019; rachma, 2021) can boost students' enthusiasm and their english proficiency. learning to read a recount text using quipper school is an interactional process, specifically reciprocal teaching between a teacher and students or inexperienced individuals, as well as the factors that may be present. excessive students’ achievement is the goal of education, and there are changes in students' good behavior. to achieve these objectives, a high-quality learning technique is required. using learning media is one of the study components. to overcome student learning's lack of independence, teachers must constantly innovate within the learning method. teachers can give students stimuli to encourage them to analyze independently and in accordance with mastery objectives. the use of appealing media is meant to keep students from becoming bored while they are learning. e-learning is a data-driven learning medium that teachers can use to overcome students' lack of learning independence. e-learning is an educational innovation that has made significant contributions to changes in the learning process. it means that the learning method is no longer limited to lectures with improvised media, but that learning materials can now be visualized in a variety of formats and paperwork that is more dynamic and interactive. as a result, it will be encouraged more. the researchers used quipper school digital media for this study. it is due to the fact quipper school can assist teachers and students with the elearning procedure. it is an online learning platform that allows students to learn while also assisting teachers in handling the elegance. it is now used by over four hundred thousand teachers and six million college students worldwide. more than twenty percent of the instructor's work time is spent creating assignments, correcting mistakes, and evaluating work results. quipper school relieves instructors' workload by utilizing technology to: 1) manipulate classes; 2) send assignments to students; 3) efficiently correct, read, and assess the end result of pupil work; and 4) summarize students' individual overall performance. siti mariam, catur kepirianto, ma’rifatul fadhilah, & nafisah mardhiana utilizing quipper school for improving reading comprehension of recaunt text 130 quipper school establishes a digital classroom in which interactional coaching and mastery strategies can be taught. in other words, it is a faceto-face platform that connects teachers and students to achieve teaching-learning goals through the use of internet-connected media. furthermore, the usage of quipper school allows both the teacher and the students the flexibility of learning outside of the classroom. as a result, it may be possible to update instructors' physical presence for the learning. making use students at quipper school are free to express themselves. teachers can display their students' work at any time and from any location. quipper school makes task learning more flexible and works better both synchronously and asynchronously. instructors and students have their own personal account to learn how to operate this software. teachers can design instructions based on their students' skill level, and students can contribute to the elegance by entering the code provided by the instructor. obtaining knowledge of interplay may be achieved through traveling the link to the learners about the learning materials, duties, and particular topics. interactions also can be accomplished with a message or chat. quipper school provides free educational tools and materials in the form of articles, animations, and video tutorials. teachers can download additional materials in addition to the materials already on the device. a free online platform for teachers and students in a college. this medium could be used as one of several alternatives in the learning process. quipper school offers free facilities and learning materials in the form of a wide range of articles, animations, and video tutorials. teachers can upload additional content in addition to the materials already on the device. it is a free online platform for lecturers, teachers and students. this media can be used as an alternate medium during the learning process. method the qualitative descriptive research design was used by the researchers. whereas this type of research aims to recognize the phenomena that may be found on research topics, such as conduct, idea, action, and many others, holistically and by using descriptions in the form of words and language in a natural context and utilizing various natural strategies. creswell, (2014); creswell & timothy, (2019) state that when a method becomes descriptive, it means that the researcher simply captured what happens to the object or region under examination, then explains what happened in the form of a research document in a trustworthy manner, as it is. the researchers conclude that qualitative descriptive technique is a research approach that describes what happens to the object or location based entirely on this idea by an outline in the form of phrases that are straightforward and what they are. data collection technique used interview and documentation. from this point of view, the researchers conducted an interview with a number of the students and an english teacher at a public senior high school in semarang using online media such as whatsapp and google meet. she analyzed data of recount text using quipper school at some point of the covid-19. they combined records validation with triangulation approaches in this study. the triangulation approach can be thought of as a data series method that integrates a variety of current narrative data and recording resources. the steps of evaluating the data in this study were as follows: (1) facts reducing manner because the system of selecting, summarizing, focusing the critical information and deleting the data that isn’t wished for the observation. in this step, the researchers checked all of the records collected from the interview, and documentation including recording, photos, and field notes. the purpose of this step is for filtering the records and describes it right into a sentence. the researchers also provided extra data and discard facts this is repetitive or unimportant. (2) information presentation strategy means that the data was processed to create a logical description, making the data easy to understand. according to (miles, huberman & saldana, 2014; tracy, 2013), the most prevalent forms represent facts. in the past, narrative explanation was used for qualitative research. searching for displays enables us to detect what is going on and to perform a comparable analysis or caution based on that information. the researcher tagged the data in accordance with the focus of research. then it was categorized once more. this phase allows the information to be placed in the proper location within the framework of prepared reports. (3) it is supported by (miles, huberman & saldana, 2014; tracy, 2013), completion of indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 131 drawing or checking represents the final step in learning facts. however, the recommended preliminary results are tentative and will be superseded unless full-length evidence is found that will aid the next level in the data analysis series. however, the initial conclusions drawn are supported by legitimate and consistent evidence while the researcher returns to the field to collect data. the conclusions drawn are most likely conclusions. at this level, the researchers interpret facts previously coded as variables and indicators. information such as images, recordings, or videos that explains using the form of a story and reinforces the record with evidence. the end result or position is supported by significant evidence supporting the findings of the study. results and discussion this study was conducted with the eleventh graders at a public high school in semarang during pandemic situation. interviews and documentation were used as data collection techniques. interviews were conducted via whatsapp and google meet between the researchers, the english teacher, and one student from each of the xi natural science program of 6, 7, and 9 classes, namely interviews 1, 2, and 3. the interview was expected to provide researchers with information, particularly on how quipper school can facilitate learning reading of recount text and students' attitudes toward the use of digital media. in this study, the researchers used structural interviews in which they had prepared a number of questions ahead of time. documentation could be accomplished by taking photographs while the interview was conducted. the use of quipper school to facilitate teachers in learning reading of recount text during studying from home the researchers discovered several statements about using quipper school to facilitate learning reading of recount text, particularly in personal letter materials, from the interview data with the english teacher. digital media has long been used in a public senior high school in semarang, particularly for english learning. this is based on the e-learning program that that school has implemented. teachers should be able to use technology to support the learning process in the classroom as one of the reference schools that should enroll industrial revolution 4.0 learning concepts that emphasize the use of technology. according to the interview results, distance learning related to the covid-19 pandemic is going well. this means that teachers must be proactive in managing the learning process creatively and monitoring student progress at all times, even when there is not face-to-face communication contact. english teacher prefers quipper school as one of the platforms used for online learning during the covid19 pandemic, among many digital media used to teach in semarang's public high schools. because of its ease of use and ability to save more internet quota. in terms of preparation, she usually prepares test materials that are distributed to students prior to operating the quipper platform. quipper applications include a variety of test questions based on what is taught. she first prepared the test questions based on the materials and the students' abilities before distributing them. in addition, her quipper application has a qcreate account that allows her to post her own test questions to her students. the question was sent to the student using the quipper code. this allows students to open and answer the specified test questions. in addition to ease of use, quipper also helps students evaluate. it is very easy when assessing student test results. english teacher can see each student's grades immediately after processing a question in their quipper account. according to her, using quipper school for online learning is very effective, but students initially performed poorly, but over time they became accustomed to quipper and improved their results. she used this digital media mainly for teaching reading comprehension skill of recount text. the difficulty of using quipper school is that the digital education tools only a medium for assessing. so she cannot deliver learning materials using this media. but usually she used google classroom in delivering content materials. the benefits of using this digital media are that it is simple to use and saves internet quotas, while the disadvantages are that first-time students do not perform well. based on the data presented above, we can conclude that using quipper can assist teachers in online learning during the covid-19 pandemic. teachers can provide content materials to students in the form of test questions, ensuring siti mariam, catur kepirianto, ma’rifatul fadhilah, & nafisah mardhiana utilizing quipper school for improving reading comprehension of recaunt text 132 that learning materials are not lost even when there is no offline learning. digital media in online learning during the covid19 pandemic the basic definition of distance learning, according to (ajmal, et al., 2020; bakri, et al., 2021; cakrawati, 2017; hamad, 2017) assume that teachers and students are separated in spatial dimensions and use technological resources. in this case, technology plays an important role in the learning process because face-to-face learning is not possible. the research findings also discussed the implementation of using quipper school from students’ point of view. “in the quipper school application, we are given an assignment to catch up on materials last time at school. so we are still understanding and preparing for the programmatic final assessment (pat). before class, we usually start with elearning. then, it is common for our english teacher to send us qipper codes to solve exam questions in this digital media. all of us can then use it to answer the given test questions.” (participant 1) “my teacher provides reading materials, assessment of questions and exercises through online networks such as quipper school, google classroom, and whatsapp. we usually use quipper school only for exams and google classroom to illustrate materials. in fact, the use of quipper school has textbooks that fit our class curriculum. however, if there are confusing content materials, we cannot directly inquire. then, our teacher usually uses whatsapp as a question & answer tool when they have difficult materials.” (participant 2) “i enjoy getting questions and content online using quipper, whatsapp, or google classroom”. it makes me understand recount text well”. (participant 3) from the data above, we can infer that during the covid-19 pandemic, students can use the quipper school as a digital medium or receive learning materials from the teacher, now known as online learning or distance learning. it allows students to continue learning new content materials and solving given exam questions. when solving an exam questions, students were given a quipper code sent by the teacher to use this code to solve a given exam question. according to (bang & saekhow, 2017; felstead, 2018; sulisworo, 2017), quipper school is a digital medium that is effectively used for online learning, and it is a system that helps students learn more widely and in a variety of ways. thanks to the opportunities the system provides, students can study anytime, anywhere, regardless of distance, space or time. at this time, the digital media used for online learning was quipper school, which made distance learning easy for students. “in my opinion, the digital media is appropriate for giving questions or training. however, according to me, the delivery of content materials is not effective, because we cannot ask directly about the materials which we are still confused about. usually for the delivery of our english teacher’s materials, we use google classroom or whatsapp group.” (participant 1) “each application has its own strengths and weaknesses, for example quipper school has a discussion that students can easily see after working on the questions. but in quipper school also when in the evaluation questions usually don't come out of the discussion and just direct the scores so that they cannot be used to learn if they are remedial or repeat the subchapters being taught.” (participant 2) “in my opinion, the use of the quipper platform in online learning during the covid-19 pandemic is quite effective. the teacher can use some tests because the quipper application has provided several test questions in accordance with the learning materials. in addition, teachers can also make questions according to their thoughts by using the q-create account. in the quipper application there are also free videos that match the materials being taught, but i find it difficult if there are learning materials that confusing and i can't ask directly” (participant 3) based on the data presented above, it is possible to conclude that using quipper school for online learning has been quite effective. students can use it to answer teacher-assigned test questions. however, there are some drawbacks to using it, such as the inability for students to directly ask if there is any content that is considered difficult. feedback from students on using quipper to learn to read recount texts. students, according to (bakri, et al., 2021; ja’ashan, 2020; khafaga, 2021), are one of the human components that play an important role in indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 133 the teaching and learning process. students take on the role of main subject and center of attention. students, as a part of the teaching and learning process, want to achieve a goal, have a goal, and want to achieve that goal in the best possible way. from the above data, it can be concluded that using quipper school in online learning has been quite effective. students can use it to do test questions given by the teacher. however, there are also some difficulties in using it as students cannot directly ask if there is content that is considered difficult. as a result, teachers must pay close attention to students' conditions and abilities during the teaching and learning process. the researcher discovered several responses from students who used quipper school to learn how to read a recount text from the interview data. from the interview data, the researcher found several responses from students in using quipper school in learning reading of recount text. “i think the quipper school application is interesting during learning. because using quipper is not slow and when doing the exercises there is a discussion, so if we get it wrong, we know what is right. but there is no discussion for learning english. quipper also doesn't take the time to work on the questions so we can be thorough in our work. entering the quipper application is easy and the grades we receive will automatically go to the teacher who gave the assignment, so we don't have to worry about grades.” (participant 1) “yes, i think the quipper school application is interesting. because it is easy to access the quipper school application and it has many questions that can be done in addition to the compulsory questions from school.” (participant 2) “in my mind, it's quite interesting. because quipper school provides a lot of practice questions and quipper also provides learning materials before doing the questions.” (participant 3) based on the above data, it can be inferred that the quipper school app is an attractive app for students. in addition to the communicative language used in the presentation of the reading materials, it was easily accessible and there were many questions and discussions related to the content materials being studied. from students' responses point of view during interviews, this digital media can improve students' understanding of recount text namely learning reading of personal letters. “sufficiently understands learning using quipper school, because with the practice, i can understand the content materials by independent learning at home. however, i prefer hands-on learning.” (participant 1) “quipper school more or less helps me in online learning even though i'm a difficult type for nonvisual learning.” (participant 2) “i'm not sure i understand how quipper can help me learn. perhaps i am the type of non-visual learner.” (participant 3) based on this data, the researcher concluded that the use of quipper school aided students in the learning process by allowing them to pursue learning materials that had not been delivered by the teacher. it is because direct learning was no longer possible during the covid-19 pandemic. the researcher also discovered a number of issues with using quipper school during online learning. besides students enjoyed online learning using this digital media, they also faced some difficulties, based-on their perception as follow: “i think the difficulty is watching the video presented by quipper, i didn't understand it when it was explained via video. i don't want to ask questions that i don't understand directly.” (participant 1) “i don't think there are any difficulties when i use quipper school in online learning. however, there are some disturbances when learning with quipper school, such as difficulty with csignals connection, not being able to ask anyone when there is a difficult question, and when the power goes out while doing test questions so i cannot use the internet.” (participant 2) “the difficulty is in understanding, there are some materials that difficult to understand when there is a practice question on quipper because to know the full explanation in the quipper video, you have to subscribe first.” (participant 3) based on the data presented above, it is possible to conclude that the students' reaction to using the quipper school is favorable. they are interested in using qipper school for online learning, but they have encountered issues such as losing a signal, being unable to ask difficult questions, and turning off the power. they may also lack of internet access. discussion siti mariam, catur kepirianto, ma’rifatul fadhilah, & nafisah mardhiana utilizing quipper school for improving reading comprehension of recaunt text 134 teachers and students can benefit from quipper school's assistance in learning to read recount texts. because of the advancement of advanced information and communication technologies, teachers and students now have excellent opportunities to conduct english language teaching and learning activities outside of traditional classroom settings, particularly through e-learning. some of the benefits of using e-learning methods, such as web, wiki, blog, and other e-learning platforms, to develop student language skills have been documented. during the covid19 pandemic, the use of technology or online platforms is critical for learning. these statements are also supported by (khafaga & shaalan, 2021; rachma, 2021; sulisworo, et.al., 2017; wijanayu, et.al. 2018). today's technological advancements are having an impact on the promotion of openness and the dissemination of information and knowledge to and from the rest of the world, across distances, places, spaces, and time boundaries. this has enabled distance learning. the quipper school is one of the online technologies or platforms used in distance learning. during the covid19 pandemic, it is the online platform that is currently being used in the education and learning process. students can use the quipper platform to receive new learning materials and work on test questions provided by their teachers. according to the findings of an interview with an english teacher at a public high school in semarang, the use of quipper school is extremely beneficial to her online learning process. she can create quipper accounts via email, but she only provides codes for students to use when sending test questions. the results are in line with (agustina & cahyono, 2017; bang, et.al., 2017; febrianti, et.al. 2017). similarly, students can open and work on test questions based on the learning materials being taught by using the quipper code provided by the teacher. in terms of usability, quipper school is an effective tool for online learning. teachers, like the results of the researchers' interviews with english teachers, can use the app to automatically find out their students' test results. the researchers described students' reactions or feedback after using the quipper school. they discovered that using it during online learning was well received by students. students are interested in discussing simple learning materials. they also discussed how simple it is to use the quipper app. we also go over questions that will help students understand the educational materials better. during the covid19 pandemic, the quipper app was used online or through distance learning. the basic definition of distance education, as supported by (ajmal, et al., 2020; bakri, et.al., 2021; cakrawati, 2017) assume that teachers and students are physically separated and that they use technological resources. distance learning is a type of education in which students do not have to attend school in person. in other words, the teaching and learning processes do not occur at the same time or in the same location. in this case, the quipper online platform enables students to access learning materials that are not provided by teachers. however, the researchers have also discovered some issues that the teacher and students have encountered when using the quipper application. she was unable to provide content materials directly through quipper school's online platform. she used it to test the materials taught. to provide learning materials, the teacher typically used additional applications such as google classroom. she also used whatsapp as a medium for question and answer sessions when students did not understand the learning materials. other difficulties for students included a lack of a network in tackling test questions, the impact of assignments, and the inability to ask questions directly when learning materials were confused. conclusion based on the data, quipper school made it easier for students and teachers to learn recount text, especially personal letters. first, it is an application that is effectively used for online learning. the teacher gave students only quipper codes to answer exam questions. meanwhile, students can solve exam questions using the quipper codes provided by the teacher and solve the problems according to the reading materials. the quipper school delivery process can then display students learning outcomes for completed exam questions. second, students respond wonderfully and enthusiastically to the use of digital media during online learning. students are interested in discussing learning materials that are easy to implement and easily accessible in the app. the learning activity covered a discussion of problem-solving to make it easier indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 135 for students to understand the learning materials. learning aids should encourage students to get to know each other without teachers and prejudice. acknowledgement special thanks are conveyed to catur kepirianto as second author for his proofreading this article, also to ma’rifatul fadhilah as third author for the suggestions for improving the content, last but not least for nafisah mardhiana as fourth author and an enumerator for the data collection. references agustina, e., & cahyono, b.y. 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(2018). blended learning method based on quipper school to improve concepts understanding and independence learning. journal of primary education, 7(1). http://journal.unnes.ac.id/sju/index.php/jpe siti mariam, catur kepirianto, ma’rifatul fadhilah, & nafisah mardhiana utilizing quipper school for improving reading comprehension of recaunt text 136 indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 231 the flouting of cooperative principle maxims: implications for teaching of pragmatics in efl classroom sidik indra nugraha department of english education, university of singaperbangsa karawang, indonesia e-mail: sidik.indranugraha@staff.unsika.ac.id apa citation: nugraha, s. i. (2017). the flouting of cooperative principle maxims: implications for teaching of pragmatics in efl classroom. indonesian efl journal, 3(2), 231-240. received: 15-04-2017 accepted: 18-05-2017 published: 01-07-2017 abstract: this research reports on the flouting of cooperative principle maxims in a comedy movie. the data were taken from conversational exchanges of a comedy movie entitled meet the parents, and were collected by transcribing the exchanges exposing humor occurred in the movie. the exchanges potentially flouting the maxims were analyzed in the light of grice’s cp maxims, elaborated further in thomas (1995), to look into the types of maxims flouted and the ways the maxims were flouted. the exchanges were then further analyzed as to find whether the types of verbal humor are particular to each maxim flout. the analysis revealed that the four types of maxims, i.e. quantity, quality, relevance, and manner, occurred to have been flouted so as to create humor. the quality maxim was the most commonly flouted (55.6%), whereas the least commonly flouted was the relevance maxim (6.3%). the speakers flouted the maxims in a number of different ways particular to each maxim. moreover, the analysis found that maxim flouts were relevant to the types of verbal humor. therefore, given the importance of pragmatic competence that the foreign language (fl) learners should acquire, it is suggested that pragmatics should be explicitly taught and integrated into the teaching of english. keywords: pragmatic competence, the cooperative principle, conversational exchanges, maxim flout, verbal humor introduction recently, there has been a considerable interest in pragmatic accounts of cooperative principle (henceforth cp), particularly maxim flouts. within the cp, maxim flout and subsequent implicature are relevant to any type of communication with different communicative goals (see lindblom, 2006; dynel, 2008) such as commercial advertisement (e.g. kusumarasdiyati, 2003; apriyantini, 2008), psychology (e.g. jia, 2008), political debate (e.g. smith, 1999), informal communication (e.g. brumark, 2004), and verbal humor (e.g. chadafi, 2014; dornerus, 2005). as mentioned above, maxim flout in verbal humor is the one that has given rise to extensive pragmatics research such as ones conducted by dornerus (2005) and chadafi (2014). dornerus (2005) focused on the types of maxim that are most frequently broken and the reasons the maxims were broken. it was found that the characters not only flouted but also violated the maxims, though the occurrence of maxim violations were insignificant compared to that of maxim flouts. the study also found that the relevance maxim was mostly flouted so as to create humor. chadafi (2014), however, excluded maxim violations but focused solely on maxim flout to produce verbal fun. the study explored the types of maxim flouted and the ways the maxims were flouted in a comedy movie. the study revealed that the cp maxims was flouted so as to create humor, while sidik indra nugraha the flouting of cooperative principle maxims: implications for teaching of pragmatics in efl classroom 232 the quality maxim occurred to be the most commonly flouted (chadafi, 2014). both previous studies above (i.e. chadafi, 2014; dornerus, 2005) have only covered the types of maxim flouted and the ways the speakers flout the maxims so as to create humorous situation. this leaves a potential for further analysis as to what types of verbal humor particular to each maxim flout and how they relate one another, which the present study concerns. the present study hence attempts to continue what the previous studies revealed by expanding the research problems into types of verbal humor. this research thence was focused on three research questions: 1) what types of conversational maxims are flouted?; 2) how do the speakers flout the conversational maxims?; and 3) what types of verbal humor are particular to each maxim flout? pragmatics always seems identical to austin, a philosopher who set out groundwork for pragmatics as known today (see thomas, 1995). austin, along with his influential pupil, grice, was known to be an ordinary language philosopher who argued that, in spite of the fact that language is to some extent imperfect (dornerus, 2005), people can manage to understand language “extremely effectively and relatively unproblematically just the way it is” (thomas, 1995, p. 29). in a conversation, it is supposed that the hearer arrives at the speaker’s intended meaning, indicating that the message is successfully put across (mey, 2006). in a typical communication, mey (2006) further argues, many people believe that the hearer relies his/her inference of meaning on taking literally what the speaker says through his/her words. from that, it can be inferred that as long as the speaker means what his/her words actually say, i.e. the speaker explicitly states what he means, the hearer does not need to take lots of work inferring the meaning. in a given situation, however, there are times when people mean more or different from what their words actually say (see grundy, 1996), as exemplified in [1], [2], and [3]: [1] dina: oh, yucky. what smells of old sour milk? pam: oh, poor greg got spit up on by a baby. dina: he didn’t. [2] a: is there another pint of milk? b: i’m going to the supermarket in five minutes. (davis, 2007, p. 2) [3] greg is blamed for flushing the toilet which is nearly full so that it overflows the yard. denny makes fun of him. denny : nice stench. you’re really on a roll there, bud. greg : bite me, denny. the hearer in [1] above would not find it difficult to appreciate what the speaker means since what the speaker means is exactly what her words said. in [2], however, the hearer cannot infer meaning the same way as in [1]. to mean that there is no milk but that some will be bought from the supermarket, the speaker hints at the meaning (davis, 2007). similarly, the speaker in [3] does not mean what his words literally said, that is, it is unlikely to say that the overflowing septic tank smells nice, and that causing the septic tank overflows the yard is a successful effort done by greg. therefore, the speaker means completely the opposite of what his words actually said. grice (1975) as cited in thomas (1995) distinguished implicatures into conventional and conversational implicature. conventional implicature or non-conversational implicature always carries the same implicature no matter what the context is (thomas, 1995) or “context-independent” (meibauer, 2006, p. 365). this implicature is characterized by the occurrence of particular words indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 233 which give additional meaning when they are used such as but, even, therefore, and yet (thomas, 1995, p. 57), as illustrated in [4]: [4] my friends were poor, but honest. (thomas, 1995, p. 57) the word but in [4] above “carries the implicature that what follows will run counter to expectations” (thomas, 1995, p. 57), that is, the poor is dishonest. the word but always carries this implicature no matter what the context is. in contrast to conventional implicature, conversational implicature is “context-dependent” (meibauer, 2006, p. 365), as exemplified in [5] below: [5] a: what on earth has happened to the roast beef? b: the dog is looking very happy. (levinson, 1983, p. 126) to implicate perhaps the dog has eaten the roast beef, b’s utterance need to occur in the particular sort of setting as illustrated in [5]. since the implicature is derived by considering the context in which it occurs, it is thus a conversational implicature (levinson, 1983). in william james lecture at harvard university in 1967, grice first set out the cooperative principle (cp) as a general rule of conversation in which interlocutors are expected to follow (thomas, 1995; wardhough, 2002; lindblom, 2006; mey, 2006). the underlying assumption of cp is that in most conversations “participants are cooperating with each other” (yule, 1996, p. 145). the cp together with its supporting four maxims is formulated as follows: the cooperative principle make your contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purposes or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged the maxim of quality try to make your contribution one that is true, specifically: (i) do not say what you believe to be false (ii) do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence the maxim of quantity (i) make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange (ii) do not make your contribution more informative than is required the maxim of relevance (i) make your contribution relevant the maxim of manner be perspicuous, and specifically: (i) avoid obscurity (ii) avoid ambiguity (iii) be brief (iv) be orderly (levinson, 1983, pp. 101-102) the implication of the cp and its four maxims is, that all the speaker says will be “true, have the right amount of information, be relevant, and will be couched in understandable terms” (davis, 2000, p. 2). in everyday speech, however, there are times when speakers do not always conform to the rules. as grice (in lindblom, 2006) points out, interlocutors can fail to fulfill the maxims in a variety of ways, i.e. one might violate a maxim, opt out, encounter a clash of maxims, and flout or exploit a maxim. lindblom (2006) argues that the last possibility of maxim non-fulfillment is most interesting since it leads to generation of implicature. this is a situation when a maxim is flouted or exploited in which the hearer gets alert to an implied meaning. thomas (1995, p. 63) exemplifies how a maxim is flouted, originally taken from movie splash: [6] a: do you want a coat? sidik indra nugraha the flouting of cooperative principle maxims: implications for teaching of pragmatics in efl classroom 234 b: no, i really want to stand out here in the freezing cold with no clothes on. on the face of it, b’s reply is not what a expects. for a competent language user, however, it is no longer being a problem. grice (in thomas, 1995) contends that if a maintains the assumption that b observes the cp and thus gives an answer relevant to the given question, then a will look for another level of meaning, i.e. implicature. method this study is largely qualitative. every occurrence of humor due to maxim flouts is identified qualitatively. in addition, the study is supported by some quantification to reveal trends in maxim flouts with regard to creation of humor. the main data source is a comedy movie entitled meet the parents. the movie is purposively chosen as it contains many funny scenes resulting from the characters’ witty remarks which generate a comical situation, supposedly exploiting grice’s cp maxims. the data of conversational exchanges are acquired by transcribing the whole exchanges exposing humor which occur in the movie. the transcription includes the conversational exchanges produced by the movie characters which center on greg, pam, jack, larry, and dina. these characters are selected for their considerable contributions to the production of humor resulting from maxim flouts. the conversational exchanges are analyzed as to find the possible exploitation of maxims in the light of grice’s theory of cp. firstly, the exchanges which potentially flout the maxims are identified. secondly, the exchanges are classified with regard to the maxims being flouted as well as the ways the maxims are flouted. thirdly, the exchanges are further analyzed as to find the relevant types of verbal humor particular to each maxim flout in accordance with alexander (1997) and dynel (2009). finally, the exchanges are quantified in accordance with each type of maxim flouted. results and discussion types of maxims flouted the analysis revealed that four types of maxims, i.e. quality, manner, quantity, and relevance, are flouted so as to create humor. the types of maxims flouted and their occurrences are briefly presented in table 1. table 1. types of maxims flouted no. types of maxims flouted frequency percentage 1. quality 20 55.6% 2. manner 6 18.8% 3. quantity 4 12.5% 4. relevance 2 6.3% total 32 100% flouting of quality maxim as shown in table 1 above, the speakers contribute 20 utterances to the quality maxim flout, placing the quality maxim to be the most commonly flouted (55.6%). flouting of quality maxim occurs when a speaker says something which is blatantly untrue or for which s/he lacks adequate evidence (thomas, 1995). as it turns out, the speakers flout the quality maxim not only to prompts the hearers to look for implicature, but also to generate humor, as exemplified in [1]: [1] greg teamed up with jack, larry, and denny in pool volleyball. however, the team did not expect much from greg for his poor performance and his lack of defense indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 235 technique in blocking the spike. therefore, the opponent would spot him to yield score. larry expressed his contempt in a mocking yet entertaining way saying that greg was not better than florence nightingale. jack : we’re getting creamed. larry : if florence nightingale over here would play defense. greg : larry, i missed one shot. larry : it was a big shot. to make sense the utterance (in bold print) in [1] above, it is necessary to first identify to what or whom the speaker intends to refer through referring expression florence nightingale. given the context, it can be inferred that the intended referent would be greg based on the assumption that florence nightingale and greg have, to a large extent, something in common, i.e. greg is a nurse, while florence nightingale was a nurse. in addition, the phrase play defense signifies greg’s position in the volley ball game. having identified the referent, it is now easier to examine the speaker’s intended meaning. as demonstrated in [1], larry’s utterance (in bold print) appears at first blush to be untrue, i.e. that florence nightingale can be more counted on playing defense than that of greg. however, since there is no indication of misleading or deceiving the hearer, larry thus prompts the hearer to look for another interpretation, i.e. implicature. blatantly saying something untrue, larry thus flouts the quality maxim (“do not say what you believe to be false”). this may give rise to implicature that greg was bad at playing defense. larry’s flouting maxim utterance is inherently clever and thus potentially leads the hearer to laughter. flouting of manner maxim from the analysis, it is revealed 6 utterances (18.8%) flouts the manner maxim. the manner maxim requires a speaker to be “perspicuous” manifested in the four sub-maxims, i.e. “avoid obscurity of expression, avoid ambiguity, be brief, and be orderly” (levinson, 1983, p. 102). flouting of manner maxim in which the speaker gives an ambiguous expression is exemplified in [2]: [2] greg went upstairs to danny’s room to borrow some of his clothes. he commented on denny’s room arrangements including a poster of female rap singer l’il kim. greg: oh, li’l kim. she’s phat. p-h phat. the bold expression is pronounced /fæt/. this pronunciation possibly leads to two words with the same sound but different meanings (homophone) (see alexander, 1997; dynel, 2009), i.e. fat which means “covered with, having much, fat” (oxford advanced learner’s dictionary of current english), and phat which means “excellent” according to black slang. even if the speaker later clarifies that he intends to mean excellent by adding “…p-h phat.”, but nevertheless it is obvious that his intention is to induce humor by favoring such word instead of another least ambiguous one. therefore, of this blatant ambiguous expression, the speaker flouts the maxim of manner (“avoid the ambiguity of expression”). flouting of quantity maxim the findings revealed that 4 utterances (12.5%) flouts the quantity maxim. the quantity maxim is flouted when a speaker blatantly gives more or less information than the situation requires (thomas, 1995). as exemplified in [3], the speaker flouts the quantity maxim by giving less information than the situation requires: [3] greg was blamed for flushing the toilet so that the nearly full septic tank was overflowing the lawn. however, he insisted that it was not him but jinx, the cat. greg : jack, i told you. it wasn’t me. it was jinx. jack : focker, i’m not gonna tell you again! jinx cannot flush the toilet. he’s a cat for christ sakes! sidik indra nugraha the flouting of cooperative principle maxims: implications for teaching of pragmatics in efl classroom 236 larry : the animal doesn’t have thumbs, focker. it is observed in [3] that larry’s response must be uttered for some other purposes rather than its literal meaning, preventing it from a meaningless utterance since what the speaker means is already known by the hearers, i.e. no animals have thumbs (see grundy, 1996). larry’s “self-evidently true” (grundy, 1996, p. 76) flouts the maxim of quantity, and thus invites the hearer to look for an implicature. flagrantly withholding the information required, larry flouts the quantity maxim only to implicate that the addressee, i.e. greg, is under delusion that cats flush the toilet. yet, this quantity maxim flout is seriously entertaining. flouting of relevance maxim it is revealed that 2 utterances (6.3%) potentially flouts the relevance maxim. the relevance maxim is flouted when a speaker makes a response or observation blatantly irrelevant to the topic in hand (thomas, 1995), as exemplified in [4]: [4] greg had to get home quickly. he drove larry’s car and rushed to get ahead of jack. he drove so fast yet badly that people got uncomfortable inside the cabin. larry even irritably said that he were not really sure if greg had handed a driver license. debbie : what a fun ride. bob : who gave him the keys? larry : okay, we we’re out. linda : yeah, we’ve had enough excitement. larry : i wonder if he has a license. bob : yeah, a license to kill. it is observed in [4] that the speaker makes a response which is blatantly irrelevant to the subject in hand, i.e., instead of driving license, the speaker abruptly changes the subject of talking to killing license. however, it is obvious that there is nothing on the speaker’s part intending to be uncooperative since the hearer would correctly assumes the speaker’s intended meaning, i.e. greg is driving like a maniac. therefore, the speaker flouts the maxim of relevance. as it turns out, flouting the maxim, the speaker intends to jocularly engage his interlocutor in humor by teasing greg for his mad driving car. the relevance maxim is the least frequently flouted which accounts for 6.3% of the total utterances. the ways the speakers flout the maxims the analysis reveals six ways the speakers flout the maxims as presented in table 2 below. table 2. the ways the speaker flout the maxims no. the ways the speakers flout the maxim frequency percentage 1. saying something untrue 17 53.1% 2. saying something for which the speakers lack adequate evidence 3 9.4% 3. making obscure expression 1 3.1% 4. making ambiguous expression 5 15.6% 5. giving less information than the situation requires 4 12.5% 6. making a response or observation obviously irrelevant to topic in hand 2 6.3% total 32 100% it is revealed that the speakers flout the maxims in a number of different ways particular to each maxim. the first two occurs particularly when the speakers flout the quality maxim. 3 and 4, on the other hand, appears to be particular to indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 237 manner maxim flout. finally, 5 and 6 are commonly found in quantity and relevance maxim flout respectively. saying something untrue the way the speaker flouts a maxim by blatantly saying something untrue is commonly found in quality maxim flout, accounting for 53.1% of the total ways listed. it is exemplified in [5] as follows: [5] greg told pam that her father, jack, had just interrogated him with polygraph machine. pam said that jack was in the cia for 30 years. greg: it’s wonderful i’ve actually got a cia spy-hunter on my ass. as demonstrated in [5], what the speaker means is completely the opposite of what his words actually said, i.e. there can never be in the world that one is pleasant for being spied by the cia without any obvious reasons. this opposite results in irony. the irony appears to be obvious particularly in the word wonderful, the intended meaning of which exposes a complete opposite, i.e. displeasure. blatantly saying something untrue, the speaker thus flouts the maxim of quality (“do not say what you believe to be false”). this may give rise to implicature that the speaker, greg, is totally annoyed by jack’s suspicion on him. despite its subtle humor, this irony is inherently clever and thus potentially leads the hearer (and the movie audiences) to laughter. saying something for which the speakers lack adequate evidences in addition to saying something untrue, the quality maxim is flouted when the speakers blatantly say something for which they lack adequate evidences. it constitutes 9.4 % of the total ways the maxims flouted. flouting the quality maxim by saying something for which the speaker lack adequate evidence is exemplified in [6]: [6] for house safety, jack installed some cameras hidden in furniture and stuffs inside the house. when greg looked around, he spotted an antique vase and said amusingly if it had camera inside. greg: oh, that’s a lovely vase. that’s great. let me guess, jack. is that one of your secret cameras too? boogah … woogah … woogah! it is observed in [6] above that what greg says is something he himself is not really sure about obviously when he says let me guess jack. in addition, the following statement is that one of your secret cameras too? bears an idea of an unsupported statement (cruse, 2000, p. 356). blatantly saying something for which he lacks adequate evidences, greg thus flouts the quality maxim. however, this quality maxim flout is seriously funny. making obscure expression this way of flouting maxim particularly deals with the manner maxim flout (“avoid obscurity of expression”), constituting 3.1% of the total ways analyzed. flouting of manner maxim in which the speaker blatantly makes an obscure expression is exemplified in [7]: [7] greg and pam were visiting pam’s parents, jack and dina byrne. dina was so surprised to meet pam. dina : where’s my “wittle” girl? pam : mommy! mom! you look so beautiful. on the face of it, the bold expression produced by dina potentially obscures the hearer, i.e. pam, since this invented word is nowhere else found in any common dictionary entry. the word wittle may be formed by combining the word wit to the end part of the word little, the word formation of which is called “blending” (yule, 1996, p. 66; dynel, 2009, p. 1287). therefore, the speaker flouts the manner maxim of the subsume “avoid obscurity of expression”. sidik indra nugraha the flouting of cooperative principle maxims: implications for teaching of pragmatics in efl classroom 238 making ambiguous expression ambiguity expression largely deals with flouting of manner maxim. it specifically fails to fulfill the second subsume of the manner maxim, i.e. “avoid the ambiguity of expression”. the analysis reveals 5 utterances (15.6%) flouts the maxim of manner in this way. the example of which is exemplified in [8] as follows: [8] pam and greg visited pam’s parents, jack and dina. pam called jack “flapjack”, while jack called her “pamcake”. pam : hi, daddy! jack : hi! sweet pea! i missed you so much, pamcake. pam : i missed you too, flapjack. it is observed in [8] that the speakers ambiguously use the words in bold print to call each other’s name, i.e. pamcake for pam and flapjack for jack, while those words are also phonetically similar, i.e. homophone and homonym respectively (see alexander, 1997), to a type of dish pancake. blatantly producing potentially expressions, the speakers thus flout the maxim of manner (“avoid ambiguity of expression”). however, it is obvious that producing such potentially ambiguous expressions, the speakers attempt to appeal their interlocutors humorously. giving less information than the situation requires this way of maxim flout specifically relates to the quantity maxim, constituting 12.5% of the total findings. the quantity maxim requires a speaker to give the right amount of information to the situation requires (thomas, 1995). flouting the quantity maxim by giving less information than the situation requires is exemplified in [9]: [9] while enjoying dinner, jack talked about greg’s hometown where he grew up. jack said that greg must’ve had fresher vegetables than that of the served ones since he grew up in the farm. but, pam interrupted saying that greg grew up in detroit. jack: you must’ve had vegetables fresher than that, grow up in a farm, greg. pam: dad, uh, greg grew up in detroit. jack: he told me he grew up on a farm. as demonstrated in [9] above, the speaker fails to give the right amount of information, i.e. giving less information than the hearer needs regarding greg’s hometown detroit, and thus flouts the quantity maxim. the speaker deliberately withholds the information to implicate that it is hardly found farmlands in detroit as a matter of fact that detroit is prominently known as an industrial city. this type of maxim flout also contributes to creating humor. making a response or observation obviously irrelevant to the topic in hand this way of maxim flout particularly concerns with the relevance maxim, accounting for 6.3% of total findings. the relevance maxim simply requires the speaker to give a relevant response or observation to the topic in hand (thomas, 1995). the example of which is exemplified in [10] as follows: [10] when greg in a market, he asked the shopkeeper for a bottle of the most expensive champagne. greg : … and what’s you’re the most expensive bottle of champagne? shopkeeper : mumm’s. it’s on sale for $13.59. greg : really? that’s it? you don’t have, like, $80, or, a nice, like, $100 a bottle of something? shopkeeper : you can have a whole bunch of mumm’s. it is observed in [10] that what the shopkeeper says (in bold print) is not what greg expects. instead of saying no for the exact answer, the shopkeeper turns to be indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 239 “lengthy”. however, this has nothing to do with flouting of manner maxim whereby the shopkeeper fails to be brief. rather, this is the case where the speaker, for the sake of humor, blatantly fails to give the hearer a relevant answer by pretending to misunderstand the question as if greg intends to buy mumm’s with the amount of money greg mentions instead of asking whether the shopkeeper sells champagne which costs that amount of money. blatantly failing to give relevant answer, the shopkeeper thus flouts the maxim of relevance. regarding the findings and their respective discussions of the ways the speakers flout the maxims, it can be concluded that the speakers flout the maxims in a number of different ways particular to each maxim. the speaker flouts the quality maxim by blatantly saying something which is untrue or for which s/he lacks adequate evidences. on the other hand, the speaker flouts the manner maxim by blatantly giving ambiguous and obscure expression. the quantity maxim flout occurs when the speaker gives less information than the situation requires, whereas the relevance maxim is flouted when the speaker makes a response or observation blatantly irrelevant to the topic in hand. verbal humor and maxim flouts from the analysis, it is found that maxim flouts are also pertinent to types of verbal humor specific to each maxim flout. based on alexander (1997) and dynel’s (2009) categorization of verbal humor, it is revealed eight types of verbal humor specific to each maxim flout as presented in table 3 below. table 3. types of verbal humor no. types of verbal humor frequency precentage 1. irony 8 25% 2. exaggeration 4 12.5% 3. witticism 3 9.4% 4. neologism 1 3.1% 5. pun 4 12.5% 6. allusion 1 3.1% 7. subversive humor 4 12.5% 8. interactional pun 2 6.3% total 32 100% the occurrence of the types of verbal humor as listed in table 3 above can lead to a certain extent predicted from maxim flouts. it is revealed that some types of maxim flouts appear to lead to certain types of verbal humor. for example, the first type of quality maxim flout, i.e. the speaker blatantly says something untrue, leads to the occurrence of irony and exaggeration. the second type of quality maxim flout, i.e. the speaker says something he or she lacks adequate evidences, tends to lead to the occurrence of witticism. while the first type of maxim of manner flout, i.e. the speaker is being obscure, is relevant to neologism, the second type of manner maxim flout, i.e. the speaker is being ambiguous, is pertinent to pun and allusion. it is also found that the first type of quantity maxim flout, i.e. the speaker gives less information than the situation requires, appears to be particular to subversive humor. finally, the maxim of relevance is particular to interactional pun. conclusion the conclusions refer to the research findings and discussion in accordance with the research problems mentioned above. first, regarding the first research problem, i.e. the types of maxims flouted, sidik indra nugraha the flouting of cooperative principle maxims: implications for teaching of pragmatics in efl classroom 240 it can be concluded that the four types of maxims, i.e. quality, quantity, relevance and manner, occur to have been flouted by the speakers so as to create humor in the movie discussed. with regard to the second research problem, it is revealed that the speakers flout the maxims in a number of different ways particular to each maxim. the speakers flout the quality maxim by saying something which is blatantly untrue or for which s/he lacks evidence. on the other hand, the speakers flout the manner maxim by being ambiguous and obscure. moreover, the quantity maxim flout occurs when the speakers give less information than the situation requires, whereas the relevance maxim is flouted when the speakers make a response which is blatantly irrelevant to the topic in hand. finally, regarding the third research problem, it is found that maxim flouts are also relevant to the types of verbal humor particular to each maxim flout, for example, irony, exaggeration, witticism, pun, allusion, neologism, subversive humor, and interactional pun. references alexander, r. (1997). aspects of verbal humor in english. tubingen: gunter narr. apriyantini, e. (2008). the flouting to observe grice’s cooperative principles maxims in tv cellular operator advertisement. unpublished undergraduate thesis. indonesian university of education, bandung, indonesia. brumark, å. (2004). non-observance of gricean maxims in family dinner table conversation. södertörns hogskola university college working paper, 4, 1-44. chadafi, m. (2014). the floats of grice conversational maxims in “1001 jokes” humor book by richard wiseman. unpublished magister thesis. muhammadiyah university of surakarta, indonesia. retrieved from http://eprints.ums.ac.id/31493/12/naskah_ publikasi_ilmiah.pdf cruse, d. a. (2000). meaning in language: an introduction to semantics and pragmatics. manchester: university of manchester. dynel, m. (2008). there is method in the humorous speaker’s madness: humor and grice’s model. lodz paper in pragmatics/special issue on humor, 4(1), 159-185. dynel, m. (2009). beyond a joke: types of conversational humor. language and linguistics compass, 3(5), 1284-1299. dornerus, e. (2005). breaking maxim in conversation: a comparative study of how scriptwriters break maxims in desperate housewives and that 70th show. unpublished postgraduate dissertation. karlstad universteit, karlstad, sweden. grundy, p. (1996). doing pragmatics. new york: cambridge university press. jia, l.i. (2008). the violation of cooperative principle and the four maxims in psychological consultant. canadian social science, 4(3), 87-95. kusumarasdiyati. (2003). a pragmatic analysis of verbal offers used by snack vendors in malang. in r. b. cribb (ed.) asia examined: proceedings of the 15th biennial conference of the asian studies association of australia, canberra, 29 june-2 july, (1-12). canberra, australia, asaa. levinson, s. c. (1983). pragmatics. cambridge: cambridge university press. lindblom, k. (2006). cooperative principle. in j. l. mey (ed.), concise encyclopedia of pragmatics (pp.151-158). oxford: elsevier ltd. mey, j. l. (2006). pragmatics: overview. in j. l. mey (ed.), concise encyclopedia of pragmatics (pp. 786-797). oxford: elsevier ltd. moron, r.g., cruz, m.p., amaya, l.f., & lopez, h.o.m. (2009). introduction: incorporating pragmatics to foreign/second language teaching. in moron, reyes gomez et al. (eds.), pragmatics applied to language teaching and learning (pp. vii-xxx). cambridge: cambridge scholars publishing. smith, c. (1999). political debate language and grice’s cooperative principle. studies in language, 15(1), 349-361. thomas, j. (1995). meaning in interaction: an introduction to pragmatics. harlow: pearson education. wardhough, r. (2002). an introduction to sociolinguistics. oxford: blackwell publishing company. yule, g. (1996). pragmatics. oxford: oxford university press. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 1 students’ perspective on motivating efl online learning practices erna iftanti english education department, uin sayyid ali rahmatullah tulungagung, indonesia email: erna.iftanti@iain-tulungagung.ac.id joko tri prastiyo english education department, uin sayyid ali rahmatullah tulungagung, indonesia email: prastiya 19@gmail.com rany raissa palupi english education department, uin sayyid ali rahmatullah tulungagung, indonesia email: ranyraissapalupi96@gmail.com apa citation: iftanti, e., prastiyo, j. t., & palupi, r. r. (2022). students’ perspective on motivating efl online learning practices. indonesian efl journal, 8(1), pp. 1-12. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v8i1.5582 received: 07-09-2021 accepted: 12-11-2021 published: 30-01-2022 abstract: research has so far focused on challenges and problems encountered by either students or teachers about online learning. meanwhile, research on finding out their positive and inspiring efl online teaching and learning is not much given attention yet. thus, to contribute to the previous related studies, this study is aimed at finding out the motivating efl online learning practices from the students’ view. the data of this research were collected from conducting online survey through a google link to 174 students of english department, uin sayyid ali rahmatullah, tulungagung, indonesia who have experienced the shift platform of learning from offline to online. they were then interviewed at random. the results of this study reveal that the motivating efl learning practices can be interchangiably carried out synchronously through their most favorable online application and asynchronously. teacher-related factors and learning materials are also perceived to be the important elements to create motivating online teaching practices. these research results are pedagogically implemented to build an effective efl online teaching and learning. keywords: students’ perspective; motivating online learning; motivating online teaching. introduction the outbreak of covid 19 pandemic has led to significance changes in education, namely the changing platform from fully offline in the classroom for instructional practices to online or distance learning. in this context, technology is proved to be significant to support the efl learners’ communicative language (abbas & elttayef, 2019). still, this online learning platform in one hand brings about some benefits, in the other hand, it leads to some disadvantages such as intense stress on students (moawad, 2020), lack of direct interaction between learners and teachers (sepulveda-escobar & morrison, 2020), considerable cost (bahasoan, ayuandiani, mukhram, & rahmat, 2020), difficulties of making connection with others (reedy, 2019), network and connection problems (cahyani,, suwastini, dantes, jayantini, & susanthi, 2021). in indonesian context, students’ opinion about online learning has been investigated into two classifications. the first is study about the students’ perspective on non-english department towards online learning, for example, krishnapatria (2020) who investigated international business students’ view about the implementation of e-learning. the second, studies on the perspective of students about online learning which are categorized on some different themes of research, such as problems and challenges encountered during online learning. take for example, hasibuan (2021) studied about the obstacles encountered by students during online learning; octaberlina & muslimin (2020) explored efl students’ perspective towards online learning barriers. nartiningrum & nugroho (2020) investigated the efl students’ challenges during online learning. the other category is a study on efl students’ perspective on media used during mailto:erna.iftanti@iain-tulungagung.ac.id mailto:ranyraissapalupi96@gmail.com https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i2.4564 erna iftanti, joko tri prastiyo, & rany raissa palupi students’ perspective on motivating efl online learning practice 2 online learning. rojabi (2020) exploring efl students' perception of online learning via microsoft teams and he found that microsoft team which is considered as something but the interaction and learning environment motivated students to participate in online learning. hz and daulay (2021) also studied efl students’ perspectives on online learning media i.e.: zoom cloud meeting. unlike, those previous studies, it is hardly found a study which specifically ferret out the students’ opinion about motivating efl online practices during covid 19 pandemic. there have been some related previous studies investigating efl students’ opinion about online learning. kaufmann and vallade (2020) focused their research on online learning environment which specifically explored students’ perception of loneliness in online classroom. this study exemplified the significance of the roles of the instructors in building and maintaining rapport and climate. the other study conducted by afrin (2020) with the research setting in bangladesh explored the feedback of both efl teachers and students in the perspectives of developing countries. the study which was done through a survey focused on finding out the problems faced by teacher and students online learning and how to overcome the problems for an effective teaching and learning (muthuprasad, aiswarya, aditya, & jha, 2021) carried out a study on students’ preference about online learning in india found that they prefer to use smart phone for online learning. from the above reviewed previous studies, it is hardly found a study which specifically focused on investigating the efl learners’ views on what efl online learning practices which are motivating. therefore, it is essential to investigates the motivating efl learning practices in order to fill in the gap of the previous studies. moreover, this present research is important to contribute to creating a more joyful efl online learning so that efl learning objectives can be more successfully achieved. in addition, regarding the results of previous studies that learners as one of the main components of instruction, then this study is conducted in response to both the social and literature facts on complexity of weakness and strengths of efl online learning. thus, this article portrays students’ views on finding out what make them keep motivated to attend online learning. this research is conducted by referring to some related theories, namely online learning application, motivating online learning practices, and motivating teaching practices. online learning application online learning in this context is defined as teaching and learning activities which involve computers, mobile phones and interactive networks simultaneously. thus, media and online learning application are among the important components of conducting online teaching and learning practices, in addition to teachers, students, curriculum, syllabus, learning materials, and internet accessibility. online learning which is carried out either synchronously or asynchronously rely much on the use of learning application which is defined as software for learning process realization in the virtual space. lim and kim (2003) defined “application of learning” as the degree to which learners use and apply learned knowledge and skills during instruction or to current jobs. learning application is also viewed as media employed to support the instructional practices (hz & daulay, 2021). in this context of study, earning application refers to any application, media, or tool used to support the online teaching and learning activities. it supports the flexibility and concede challenges and opportunities for both teachers and students (abdulrahman, basalama, & widodo, 2018). learning media refers to everything either physical or technical worthy in the learning process and it is helpfull for teachers to deliver instructional materials to students so that the learning objectives can be achieved. there are various kinds of learning application and media. the most usable learning media by the teachers and students are zoom cloud meeting and whats-app (hz & daulay, 2021), google hangouts, google classroom and lms (moodle) for course management and assessments (almusharraf & khahro, 2020), google doc (khalil, 2018). motivating online learning practices online learning practices are instructional activities conducted by making use of internet and web and the term motivating in this context of research refer to a theory of self-determination (sdt). it is defined as a broad framework for understanding factors that facilitate intrinsic motivation, autonomous extrinsic motivation, and psychological wellness, all issues of direct indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 3 relevance to educational settings (ryan and deci, 2020). they further explain that sdt assumes people are inherently prone toward psychological growth and integration, and thus toward learning, mastery and connection with others. however, these tendencies of proactive human are not seen as automatic. they require some supportive conditions to be robust. there are three fundamental needs i.e.: autonomy, competence and relatedness. autonomy is a sense of initiative and ownership in one’s deeds. it is supported by experiences of interest and value and undermined by experiences of being externally controlled, whether by punishments or rewards. competence is the feeling of mastery which is a sense that one can grow and succeed. the need for competence is achieved within a well-structured environment which afford positive feedback, opportunities for growth, and optimal challenges, meanwhile, relatedness is connection and a sense of belonging. this is facilitated by the conveyance of caring and respect. the continuum of human motivation included in sdt outlines a range of different types of extrinsic motivation and the underlying psychological concepts of autonomy, competence and relatedness (hartnett, 2016). as accordance to sdt, motivation is built on the fundamental premise of learner autonomy. hewson (2018) found the importance of students’ emotional engagement, motivation and behaviour behind the screen for online learning. (hartnett, 2016) further revealed that motivation has been identified as a key factor in developing and sustaining a sense of community as well as learning and achievement in online contexts. motivating teaching practices teaching and learning in a virtual learning environment has been taken into account as an alternate method for several decades to tackle limitations of traditional classroom instruction and to fulfill diverse learning and instructional needs from teachers and students. since the outbreak of covid-19 pandemic. since motivation is as the powerful engine of learning, teachers should conduct motivating teaching practices which further lead to helping learners to be motivated. teachers’ potential to promote learners’ motivation is mostly centered on relatedness or meaningful teacher-student relationships (muñoz & ramirez, 2015). optimally (intrinsically or autonomously) motivated faculty may be more likely to utilize teaching best practices as their high engagement facilitates innovation and excellence (stupnisky, brckalorenz, yuhas, guay, 2018). they further state that there are four teaching best practices which include: instructional clarity, higher order learning, reflective and integrative learning, and collaborative learning. positive students’ outcome can be yielded from the instructors who organize and communicate information in the classroom effectively. bellon and oates (2002) found some components which are meaningful to develop motivation in online courses are to create interaction between students and teacher, interest in the course content, an organizational structure, and a sense of personal connection. wright (2017) found that explanatory videos used in tandem with adequate pre-online-lesson-in class explanation and post-online-lesson follow up enable teachers ample time for student questions and rule clarification. a synchronous learning environment with more timely feedback would also provide opportunity to support student understanding. besides, keeping in touch with inservice teachers and making interesting materials give positive impact on online teaching and learning (mahpudoh, 2021). method this is descriptive quantitative research with survey as the main research design. the data for this research are the efl learners’ perspective about motivating online learning practices. those data were collected through an online questionnaire survey with this link https://forms.gle/xirk7vjtdygwe. the participants were students of english department of uin sayyid ali rahmatullah tulungagung staying in the third semester. there are four classes: 3a (45 students), 3b (48 students), 3c (44 students), 3d (41 students), and 3e (38 students). thus, the total population is 216 students. by considering that all population have the same chance to be selected as the respondents of this survey, the sample was selected under the criteria of those who are willing to fill out the questionnaire. this criterion was taken so that the information put in the survey was believed to be reliable and valid. the data for this research are https://forms.gle/xirk7vjtdygwe erna iftanti, joko tri prastiyo, & rany raissa palupi students’ perspective on motivating efl online learning practice 4 about students’ opinion and claim on the most interesting online learning application and motivating online efl learning and teaching practices. the data collected from the survey are in the form of both quantitative and qualitative. the quantitative data were analyzed quantitatively to percentage number showing the tendency of the respondents’ perspective. subsequently, this percentage was then qualitatively analyzed to draw a conclusion concerning with the research objectives, namely the most favorable online learning application which the respondents perceive as motivational learning tool meaningful to build their learning motivation. moreover, the qualitative data collected from open ended items of the survey and interview were analyzed descriptively as the steps provided by huberman (2000). the first step is data reduction which means to reduce any information which is not related with the purposes of the research. only information which tells about the research purposes which was considered as the main data to be analyzed. then, the analysis was done through restating the data found from either survey or interview. subsequently, it was described qualitatively to find out the pattern and tendency of the data. finally, it was interpreted by referring to some related theories in order to reveal points beyond the findings. results and discussion there are three important findings resulted from this study, namely the most favourable online learning application, motivating online learning activities and motivating online teaching practices. the most favorable online learning application online learning activities are conducted by means of computers or mobile phones through various online learning application, such as google classroom, edmodo, moodle, schoology, google meet and interactive network simultaneously. this study reveals that most of the respondents 58.8 % (104 out of 174 respondents as seen in diagram 1) claimed google classroom as the most interesting and easiest learning application for some reasons, i.e., they can write comment, upload files, send assignments, fill out their attendance, and save quota. diagram 1. the most interesting online learning application it is considered as a friendly learning application, because even though students are in a poor internet connection, they keep being able to attend the learning activities as can be seen in the following quoted students’ statements: “yes, because it's easy to upload my file.” (elrahma) “…because in my opinion in google classroom we can also discuss by commenting, sending assignments, and filling out the attendance list. during this pandemic, it will be easier to save quotas and make it easier for those who live in places that have poor signal quality.” (siti achya). indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 5 in line with this, some previous studies proved that google classroom is a good and easy-to-use tool, most of its features have not been used to its full capability (jakkaew & hemrungrote, 2017); is perceived to be the most popular among students (amalia, hidayati, rosyani, ikasari, handayani, yunita, & isnaeni, 2020; fitriningtiyas, umamah, & sumardi, 2019, sudarsana, putra, astawa, & yogantara, 2019) and is considered effective and good in the areas of ease of access, perceived usefulness, communication and interaction, instruction delivery, students’ satisfaction towards the google classroom’s learning activities (shaharanee, jamil, & rodzi, 2016) and effectiveness of timing (okmawati, 2020). the second most favorable online learning application is google meet. the students considered this application as appropriate learning tool to meet and conduct learning practices virtually so that teachers’ explanation and class discussion can be easily and clearly understood. it is perceived to be helpful and interesting media with which they can share instructional materials and the other important files. this is clearly stated in the student’s quoted statement below: “in my opinion, the most interesting online application for me to support mu ef learning practices are google meet and zoom. why? because in that platform we can discuss face to face and i sure that it more be clearly and easy to understand. other than that, i think google classroom also interesting and quite helpful in sharing the material.” (rizky putri) this finding is parallel with the previous studies showing that google meet is amongst the most popular teleconference application (gauthier & husain, 2020; sevilla, 2020). the third most favorable learning application is schoology. even though most of the respondents (71.3%) stated that this application is considered new for them (see diagram 2), there are 26 respondents (14.9%) who claimed that they recognized, familiar and feel comfortable to use this application. diagram 2. schoology as new online learning application it gives students new experiences of using and making use of new online application to support their instructional activities. this finding is explicitly reflected in the students’ statement below. “schoology offers many features or facilities that can be enjoyed and are interesting and are very helpful in the learning process, both facilities for teachers and students who are guided. in addition, i can get new experiences with the new features of the application i use.” (kayla) this indicates that digital generation who are easily adapted with technology do not encounter too much problem with technology advancement. they are sophisticated to utilize technology (spangler, kohun, rodi, & delorenzo, 2015). in short, the findings of the questionnaire survey ferret out that there are three most popular and interesting online learning application, namely google classroom, google meet, and schoology which are considered as making them be motivated to attend the online learning for various reasons. in addition, it is found the other online learning tools erna iftanti, joko tri prastiyo, & rany raissa palupi students’ perspective on motivating efl online learning practice 6 namely e-learning, zoom, duolingo, and cake that they prefer to use for a certain reason as seen in table 1. table 1. students’ preference on the use of online learning application no. online learning application quantity reason of preference 1. google classroom 104 respondents (59.8 %) students can comment, send assignments, upload files, fill out the attendance list, save quotas, and friendly connection for those living in a poor connection 2. google meet 30 respondents (17.2%) students and teachers can conduct direct online face to face discussion, economical/free, easy, and simple 3. schoology 26 respondents (14.9%) interesting and helpful features 4. e-learning 9 respondents (5.2%) no exact reason found 5. zoom 4 respondents (2.3%) clear and easy fitures; virtual meeting 6. none of them 1 respondent (0.6%) (kahoot, duolinggo, whatsapp, telegram simultaneously used with the other mention learning application) motivating online learning activities there are two important findings related to what motivating online learning activities: learning platform and learning activities. firstly, it is found that they prefer to have both synchronous and asynchronous learning platforms. as can be seen in diagram 3 that 93.7% respondents agree with using both learning platform. to attend virtual meeting is helpful for them to get clearer teachers’ explanation. this is clearly stated in this students’ quoted statement: “i enjoy online english learning practices if they are conducted both via gmeet or zoom so that my lecturers can explain the materials…”. this finding supports basilaia and kvavadze (2020) who found the students’ preference on the integration of google meet (synchronous) and google classroom (asynchronous). diagram 3. students’ opinion on the use of both synchronous and asynchronous for their online learning secondly, explaining the materials virtually is not sufficient without opening discussion session for students to clarify and ask some points of their interest. thus, motivating online learning is built if teachers explain virtually and open discussion session. it was found that there are 142 out of 174 respondents (81.6%) (see diagram 4) declared that they enjoy online learning if the teachers explain the learning materials virtually, open discussion session, give some exercises at every topic of discussion completed at a flexible time, and the students are acknowledged with the course outline (see table 2). this finding is also clearly stated in the respondents’ statements below: indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 7 “material explained by lecture and some questions or presentations.” (difani) “…the teacher explains in an easy and understandable way.” (alief) “explained by the lecturer and then presented and tested in every material” (rofa) diagram 4. students’ motivating learning activities and teacher’ teaching practices table 2. motivating online learning activities no motivating learning activities percentages 1. if they get sufficient virtual explanation about the materials and involved in the discussion session provided by the teachers 81.6% 2. if they are able to do some exercises at every topic of discussion given by their teachers 48.3% 3. if they are acknowledged with course outline shared by the teachers at the beginning of the semester 38.5% 4. if they are able to do and complete the tasks at their flexible time provided by their teachers. 28.7% motivating online teaching practices. this study found 8 important motivating online teaching practices:1) teachers’ virtual explanation, 2) supplementary knowledge, 3) online discussion, 4) online interaction, 5) doing exercises, 6) teachers’ feedback, 7) a humorous, friendly, and pleasant teacher, and 8) learning atmosphere. firstly, most students claimed that learning english through online platform should be conducted by giving them virtual explanation. this technique is believed to be motivating so that they can clearly understand and implement the materials well, as clearly stated in the respondent’s statement: “for me, to understand the material teachers should explain the materials virtually … so students can understand and implement the material well.” (tesya) it was also found that explanation given in brief accompanied by repetition will strengthen the students’ engagement in the online learning activities, as reflected in this student’s statement that: “a brief explanation and accompanied by repetition of the material explained to students in response that students already understand what is being explained” (waqia) secondly, providing supplementary materials is able to create a motivating online learning atmosphere, as explicitly stated in the respondent’ statement that “providing useful supplementary knowledge beyond the subject matter being taught” (elinda). the teaching materials are expected not to be taken from one main sources. they expect to have some additional related teaching materials. to learn various learning erna iftanti, joko tri prastiyo, & rany raissa palupi students’ perspective on motivating efl online learning practice 8 resources will enhance the students’ knowledge and learning experience. thirdly, motivating online teaching practices is online discussion. by getting involved in the discussion session opened by the teachers, the students can discuss their difficulties, ask for confirmation on some missing parts, even give and share their understanding to their classmates. “explain the material virtually and open discussion session.” (rahma). thus, this online open discussion is taken into account as the essential factors which can create motivational teaching activities. fourthly, a motivating efl teaching practice can be built through online interaction between either teacher-students or students-students. this is reflected in the respondent’s quotation “in the teaching practice there an interaction from one to the other and i feel it's a good interaction that share each other knowledge.” (rizka). to create an online interaction through sharing each other is meaningful to conduct not only motivating online teaching practices but also to improve their understanding during online teaching and learning. this is in line with the concept of collaborative and cooperative learning with which both teachers and students will take some benefit. collaborative learning (cl) as defined by laal & ghodsi (2012) is teaching and learning approach which involves groups of learners working together to solve a problem, complete a task, or create a product proved to result in some benefits namely social, psychological, academic, and assessment benefits. weizheng (2019) proved that teacherstudent interaction in efl class can create an equality and harmony atmosphere and encourage the students to involve in the teaching activities. the fifth significant element which can create motivating online learning is doing exercises. it was found that doing exercise related to the materials explained on the day can help learners to improve their english skills, as stated clearly in the student’s quoted statement: “explain the material and give an exercise, so my english skills will grow” (depi). doing exercises or assignments after explaining the materials is believed to be useful to review materials so that they get an enrichment by doing some related assignments. this can be seen in the students’ quoted statements: “the teaching practices that i like is the lecturer explains our material face to face and give me an assignment to review the material that i get in that day” (feni) “by explaining the material and then trying to do some tasks to test the extent to which we understand the material even though not every meeting.” (lailatul) the sixth motivating element is teachers’ feedback. it was found that feedback given after the discussion session is essential to build an online motivating learning atmosphere. this is explicitly stated in the student’ quoted statement: “i enjoy all the teaching practices that give participants enough time to discuss and lecturers provide feedback. (rizky) “classroom discussion and the feedback after learning session.” (yuni) this empirical data declares that discussion session given following the teachers’ lecturing then providing the students with teachers’ feedback can make the students enjoy to attend the efl online teaching and learning. the students’ joy of attending the instruction indicates motivating learning. moreover, teachers who can give positive feedback can lead to building fun and interesting learning atmosphere. “fun class and positive feedbacks.” (yofania) the seventh key element of motivating efl teaching is related teacher’s characteristics namely humorous, friendly, and pleasant. students perceive teachers who can carry out interesting way of teaching can create joyful learning atmosphere so that the students are interested. it was found that humorous teachers are thought to contribute to building motivating online learning. this can be clearly found in the student’ s quoted statement: “interesting lecturers when teaching, not awkward towards students. have a sense of humour but still serious when it's time to study. explain in detail before giving assignments.” (novi). teachers who are able to explain patiently and pleasantly are perceived to be energizing factor which creates motivating learning atmosphere. rantala & määttä (2012) proved that teachers can provide circumstances that are favourable to the joy indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 9 of learning. this finding is also supported by martin, budhrani, kumar, & ritzhaupt (2019) who found that online instructors take on several roles at different times of the course, not only as a course designer, facilitator and a mentor, but as “cheerleader,” and even a “rule-setter” of the efl instruction as well. additionally, the nature, type, and tones of tutor communications in his class can greatly help to create a caring, encouraging, and trusting environment (peacock & cowan. 2019). the eighth important element of motivating teaching practices is learning atmosphere. it is believed to be influential factor which can create efl learning motivating. teaching with a certain condition such as relax but keeping serious on the materials to be learnt is beneficial to be motivating teaching activities. it is claimed that motivating teaching practices which motivate students to learn online is demonstrated in a cheerful and blessing online atmosphere. this fact can be clearly seen in the student’s quoted statement. “relax but serious class, we discuss the material thoroughly in a cheerful vibe and blessed class:).” (khodiyoh) in conclusion, this study found that there are some essential elements which are perceived to build efl online learning motivation. those factors cover teaching technique, learning materials, teaching and learning atmosphere, teachers’ feedback, and teachers’ characteristics. concerning with teaching technique, the students believed that motivating efl online learning can be created by providing them with virtual explanation about the learning materials which are followed by conducting online discussion and exercises. moreover, they claimed that giving the students supplementary materials in addition to the main instructional materials is perceived as motivating online learning factor. meanwhile, the teaching and learning atmosphere that make students enjoy attending online learning is the one which is relax, cheerful, blessing, but keeping on serious mode of learning so that the instructional objectives can be well achieved. in addition, teachers’ feedback plays a very important role to create motivating efl online learning. moreover, friendly, humorous, and pleasant teachers are perceived to be among those which contribute to build motivating online learning. conclusion the result of this study demonstrates two important students’ perspectives on motivating efl online learning. they are related with the most favourable online learning application and motivating online learning and teaching practices which make the efl students’ get involved in their online learning. firstly, this study reveals that there are three most interesting and popular online learning application among the students, namely google classroom, google meet, and schoology. secondly, motivating online learning practices can be built for two conditions. they are learning platform and learning activities. conducting both synchronous and asynchronous online learning practices is perceived to be motivating for the students. then through this learning platform, teachers are able to upload and explain the instructional materials and conduct discussion and question-answer session as well. moreover, there are teacher-related factors and learning materials which are perceived by the students to be able to create motivating online teaching practices. the first covers teaching technique, teaching and learning atmosphere, learning material, teachers’ feedback, online discussion, online interaction, and teachers’ characteristics. the latter is providing the students with the main topic of instruction and equipped with supplementary materials to enrich their knowledge about the lesson. the research result is pedagogically implemented to create motivating efl online learning practices. still, this study was conducted in the level of higher education for a relatively small number of populations, then it is suggested for further researchers to conduct research at the same level of education with a more number and coverage of population from various types of colleges. it is also suggested to carry out a study on the same topic at different level of education such as secondary and elementary levels of education. acknowledgement we would like to gratefully acknowledge funding provided by rector of uin sayyid ali rahmatullah tulungagung, indonesia. we also thank the 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(2017). blended learning: st+udent perception of face-to-face and online efl lessons. indonesian journal of applied linguistics, 7(1), 64-71. doi: dx.doi.org/10.17509/ijal.v7i1.6859 https://doi.org/10.1177%2f1477878515593885 erna iftanti, joko tri prastiyo, & rany raissa palupi students’ perspective on motivating efl online learning practice 12 indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 199 pedagogical competence of english teachers with non-english educational background in kuningan regency: problems and solutions rila nurfadillah university of kuningan, indonesia nurfadillahrilla@yahoo.com apa citation: nurfadillah, r. (2015). pedagogical competence of english teachers with non-english educational background in kuningan regency: problems and solutions. indonesian efl journal, 1(2), 199-211 received: 22-12-2014 accepted: 07-04-2015 published: 01-07-2015 abstract: this paper analyzed pedagogical competence of junior high school english teachers with non-english educational background in kuningan. the method was qualitative research and the data were structured observation, questionnaire, and interview. in this research, the respondents were nine english teachers with non-english educational background in different school, and were chosen by convenience sampling. based on the findings of the research, english teachers with non-english educational background only have done the indicator number: (1) mastering learners’ characteristics from the physical aspect, moral, spiritual, social, cultural, emotional, and intellectual; (2) mastering the theory of learning and the principles of educated learning; (3) developing the curriculum associated with the lessons; (6) facilitating learners’ potential to actualize their potential; (7) communicating effectively, empathic, and polite with learners; (8) conducting the assessment, the process evaluation, and the learning outcomes; and (9) utilizing the results of assessment and evaluation. then, the teachers were indicated as teachers who are not maximum in the indicator number; (4) conducting educated learning; (5) utilizing information and communication technology for learning, and (10) doing a reflective action to improve the quality of learning. the main problem of english teachers with non-english educational background is pronunciation because they were confused in saying something in english. there are also the solutions of all the problems like joining mgmp or teacher’s forum. keywords: pedagogical competence, english teachers with non-english educational background, efl classroom, problems, solution. introduction the regulation in republic of indonesia number 20, 2003 on national education system, chapter i, verse 1, states that: pendidikan adalah usaha sadar dan terencana untuk mewujudkan suasana belajar dan proses pembelajaran agar peserta didik secara aktif mengembangkan potensi dirinya untuk memiliki kekuatan spiritual keagamaan, pengendalian diri, kepribadian, kecerdasan, akhlak mulia, serta keterampilan yang diperlukan dirinya, masyarakat, bangsa dan negara. (education is conscious efforts and planned to establish learning situation and learning process, so that learners in active develop themselves to have spiritual strength, religion strength, self-controlled, behavior, cleverness, and skill which are needed by themselves, nation, and country.) jalal et al. (2009, p. 5) clarifies that the quality of education plays a crucial role in determining a nation’s competitiveness. thus, most societies and governments have promoted strategies to improve the quality of education. one of the important things that people need in this world is education. all the potential and talents are expected to lead to a change for the better. these changes are expected to have an influence on national education goals which are implemented towards the process and outcomes of education provision itself either by knowledge or understanding, because routledge and paul (2010, p. 8) argues that mailto:nurfadillahrilla@yahoo.com rila nurfadillah pedagogical competence of english teachers with non-english educational background in kuningan regency: problems and solutions 200 education suggests not only that what develops in someone is valuable but also it involves the development of knowledge and understanding. to implement all the provisions regarding education in indonesia, the government has made the regulation of national education system (uu ri no.20/2003), the regulation of teachers and lecturers (uu ri no.14/2005), the regulation of teacher’s academic qualification standard and teacher’s competence (uu ri no.16/2007), and so on. particularly in indonesia, the national education serves to develop the ability, character, and civilization of dignity in the context of the intellectual life of the nation. under the regulation in the republic of indonesia number 20, 2003 on national education system chapter ix, the national education standards article 35 defines “standar nasional pendidikan terdiri atas standar isi, proses, kompetensi lulusan, tenaga kependidikan, sarana dan prasarana, pengelolaan, pembiayaan, dan penilaian pendidikan yang harus ditingkatkan secara berencana dan berkala”. national education standards consist of content standards, processes, competence of graduates, educational staff, facilities and infrastructure, management, financing, and valuation of education must be improved periodically. according to evans et al. (2009, p. 4), governments are expected to hold schools and teachers accountable for educational quality. educators are community members who are devoted and raised to support education. so, educators included into the teaching staff were qualified as teachers, counselors, tutors, trainers, instructors, facilitators, and other designations according to their specialization, as well as participating in education sector (the regulation of the republic of indonesia number 20, 2003 on national education system chapter i, verse 1). the teacher itself, as harmer (2001, p. 57) states, has some roles such as controller, organizer, assessor, prompter, participant, resource, tutor, and observer. in fact, there are teachers who teach a subject that is not accordance to what they received from their college. besides that, there are teachers who can master the material, but they always face the situation when they feel so confused to teach. rosyid (2013, p. 2) explains that this phenomenon is not a secret in some educational systems, especially for private school. as a professional, teacher is a job or activity conducted by a person and become a source of income that requires expertise, skills, or skills that meet certain quality standards or norms and require professional education. professionals are also characterized by the ability of self-honesty. thus, the characteristics of professional teachers are mastering the material, structure, concept, and idea related to the subject, mastering competency standard and elementary competence, developing the material creatively, developing selfprofessionalism with doing reflective action, and using information and communication (the regulation of the republic of indonesia number 16, 2007 on teacher’s academic qualification standard and teacher’s competence attachment). based on the regulation of the republic of indonesia number 14, 2005 on teacher and lecturer chapter i, verse 1, competence is a set of intelligent actions and full responsibility to perform the duties in accordance with the specific job. this include pedagogical competence (understanding learners, making lesson plan, implementing learning process, designing and implementing learning evaluation, and developing learners to actualize its potential), professional (mastering substance related to scientific field of study, mastering the structure and scientific method), personality (having steady and stable personality, mature, wise, dignified, noble, and be a role model), social (creating communication and interaction effectively with students, fellow teachers, staff, parents/guardians of students, and society). this regulation is similar to brown (2001, p. 430) that there are good language teaching characteristics: technical knowledge, pedagogical skill, interpersonal skills, and personal qualities. such characteristics are indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 201 shown in teachers’ preparation, presentation, execution or methods, personal characteristics, teacher and students interaction. the role of teacher is the role as a “critical pedagogue” that serves to highlight the fact that teachers are not merely a language teacher. a teacher is more than that (brown, 2001, p. 443) because teachers are the agents for change in a world in desperate need of change. with the existence of the system in national education and tefl (teaching english as a foreign language), teachers of english whose backgrounds are english educational and non-english educational can do their job differently because roundness of knowledge, skills and attitudes in the form of intelligent action and full responsibility in performing the duties of a learning agent. by the description above, the researcher is interested to make research about the pedagogical competence of english teachers with non-english educational background in teaching and learning process. thus, this would be useful also in order to find their problems and solutions in teaching english. method according to creswell (2009, p.1), research designs are plans and the procedures for research that span the decisions from broad assumptions to detailed methods of data collection and analysis. in this study, the qualitative approach was used. qualitative research is a means of exploring and understanding the meaning the meaning individuals or groups ascribe to a social or human problem (creswell, 2009, p. 1). the process of research involves emerging questions and procedures; collecting data in the participants’ setting; analyzing the data inductively, building from particulars to general themes; and making interpretations of the meaning of the data. the final written report has a flexible writing structure. those who engage in this form of inquiry support a way of looking at researcher that honors an inductive style, focus on individual meaning, and the importance of rendering the complexity of a situation. the approach of this research was descriptive study. fraenkel and wallen (2009, p. 14) said that “descriptive studies describe a given state of affairs as fully and carefully as possible”. he adds the example of descriptive studies in education include describing the behaviors of teachers, administrators, or counselors. the researcher chose this approach because this research described the pedagogical competence of english teachers with non-english educational background. the description of phenomena is the starting point for all research endeavors. table. 1. english teachers based on education, youth, and sport agency in kuningan 2014/2015 teachers educational background level of education total (%) junior high school (%) senior high school (%) vocational high school (%) english education 185 (91,13) 52 (86,67) 109 (88,62) 344 (89,12) non-english education 18 (8,87) 8 (13,33) 14 (11,38) 42 (10,88) total 203 (100) 60 (100) 123 (100) 386 (100) the larger group to which one hopes to apply the results is called the population (fraenkel and wallen, 2009, p. 90). there are eighteen junior high school english teachers with non-english educational background in junior high school based on the data from education, youth, and sport agency in kuningan regency above. a respondent in a research study is the group on which information is obtained (fraenkel and wallen, 2009, p. 90). in this study, respondents were selected by convenience sampling. on occasion, based on rila nurfadillah pedagogical competence of english teachers with non-english educational background in kuningan regency: problems and solutions 202 the previous knowledge of a population and the specific purpose of the research, the researcher uses a convenience sample because there are individuals who conveniently are available for study (fraenkel and wallen, 2009, p. 98). the total numbers of respondents were nine english teachers who have non-english educational background with different school. the data collection steps included setting the boundaries for the study collect information through unstructured or semi structured observations and interviews, documents, and visual materials, as well as establishing the protocol for recording information. these were three data collection techniques that were taken by the researcher based on the creswell (2009). qualitative observations were those in which the researcher takes field notes on the behavior and activities of individuals at the research site. data were collected by gathering field notes. the researcher made an observation in the teaching-learning process in the class room for two times and each observation lasted eighty minutes. there were some check lists in the observation form that consists of aspects of pedagogical competence. it is done from may 20th until august 12th, 2015. in a questionnaire, the subjects respond to the questions by writing or, more commonly, by marking an answer sheet. selection items on questionnaires include multiple-choice, true-false, matching, or interpretive-exercise questions. supply items include short-answer or essay questions (fraenkel and wallen, 2009, p. 123). in this research, researcher used marking an answer sheet questionnaire. all respondents were given some questions in the questionnaire form consisted of aspects of pedagogical competence. for analyzing the questionnaire, the researcher used likert scale. it is the instrument to measure how often teacher do every single aspect of pedagogical competence. the researcher used checklist form with four variables answer of the statements. interview was conducted in the form of an unstructured open ended interview and take interview notes, conduct an unstructured open ended interview, audiotape the interview, and transcribe the interview, conduct a semi structured interview, audiotape the interview, and transcribe the interview, conduct a focus group interview, audiotape the interview, and transcribe it, and conduct different types of interview: email, face-to-face, focus group, online focus group, telephone interviews. in this research, all respondents were asked to answer the same questions noted in the interview sheet. the interview consisted of aspects of pedagogical competence. the interview process of all respondents has been done for once. creswell (2009, p. 150) stated about discussion of the plan for analyzing the data might have several components. the process of data analysis involves making sense out of text and image data. it involves preparing the data for analysis, conducting different analyses, moving deeper and deeper into understanding the data (some qualitative researchers like to think of this as peeling back the layers of an onion), representing the data, and making an interpretation of the larger meaning of the data. results and discussion this research presented pedagogical competence of english teachers with nonenglish educational background in kuningan regency. because of the limitation of the research, the researcher made the description about pedagogical competence and problems and its solutions of junior high school english teacher with non-english educational background. after the researcher got the data of population, there were 9 english teachers with non-english educational background confirmed as the respondents of the research, they were smpn 1 kuningan and smpn 4 kuningan that located in the center of regency, smpn 1 cigugur in the west of regency, smpn 2 kramatmulya that can be reached in the north of regency. but, from smpn 2 cimahi, smpn 1 cibeureum, smpn 2 cibeureum, smpn 1 ciwaru, and smpn 1 indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 203 ciawigebang are located far away to the east of the center of regency. english teachers from smpn 1 kuningan, smpn 4 kuningan, smpn 1 cigugur, and smpn 2 kramatmulya are english teachers whose background is s-1 economics education. the background of english teacher from smpn 2 cibeureum is s1 catering education. then, english teacher from smpn 1 ciawigebang is s-1 economy and management. followed by english teacher from smpn 1 ciwaru who graduated from s-1 accountancy, english teacher from smpn 2 cimahi is s-1 biology, and english teacher from smpn 1 cibeureum is s-1 indonesian education. this research was done in all schools from may 20th until august 12th, 2015. the researcher also provided the result of questionnaire that given to all respondents in order know the existence of ten indicators of pedagogical competence and also observation worksheet and the result of interview to add some information of the data from the questionnaire. in addition, all the results here were used for describing problems and solutions that faced by english teachers with non-english educational background. pedagogical competence which is the ability of teachers in the management of learning, based on the regulation of teacher’s academic qualification standard and teacher’s competence (uu ri no.16/2007) includes ten indicators. the results of research which have done collected based on the questionnaire, interview, and classroom observation can be presented as follows: table 2. pedagogical competence of english teachers with non-english educational background no pedagogical competence always (%) often (%) seldom (%) never (%) total (%) mastering learners’ characteristics from the physical aspect, moral, spiritual, social, cultural, emotional, and intellectual 1 understanding the characteristics of learners relating to the physical aspects, intellectual, social-emotional, moral, spiritual, and sociocultural background 3 (33,33) 5 (55,56) 1 (11,11) 0 (0) 9 (100) 2 identify potential learners the subjects of teaching 3 (33,33) 6 (66,67) 0 (0) 0 (0) 9 (100) 3 identify initial stock-teaching participants students in the subjects of teaching 1 (11,11) 2 (22,22) 6 (66,67) 0 (0) 9 (100) 4 identify the learning difficulties students in the subjects of teaching 1 (11,11) 7 (77,78) 1 (11,11) 0 (0) 9 (100) mastering the theory of learning and the principles of educated learning 5 understanding the various theories of learning and principles of learning educate related subjects of teaching 1 (11,11) 5 (55,56) 3 (33,33) 0 (0) 9 (100) 6 applying a variety of approaches, strategies, methods, and techniques of learning which educate creatively in the eye of teaching lessons 2 (22,22) 5 (55,56) 2 (22,22) 0 (0) 9 (100) developing the curriculum associated with the lessons 7 understanding the principles curriculum development 1 (11,11) 3 (33,33) 5 (55,56) 0 (0) 9 (100) 8 determining learning objectives of teaching 3 (33,33) 6 (66,67) 0 (0) 0 (0) 9 (100) 9 selecting learning materials associated with the experience of teaching learning and learning objectives 2 (22,22) 5 (55,56) 2 (22,22) 0 (0) 9 (100) 10 reforming learning materials correctly in accordance with the approach selected and characteristics of learners 1 (11,11) 6 (66,67) 2 (22,22) 0 (0) 9 (100) 11 developing indicators and instruments assessment 2 (22,22) 3 (33,33) 4 (44,44) 0 (0) 9 (100) rila nurfadillah pedagogical competence of english teachers with non-english educational background in kuningan regency: problems and solutions 204 conducting educated learning 12 understand lesson plans principles 0 (0) 5 (55,56) 4 (44,44) 0 (0) 9 (100) 13 developing lesson plans components 0 (0) 4 (44,44) 5 (55,56) 0 (0) 9 (100) 14 arranging a complete lesson plans 0 (0) 4 (44,44) 5 (55,56) 0 (0) 9 (100) 15 doing educated learning in the class, laboratory, or field 0 (0) 4 (44,44) 5 (55,56) 0 (0) 9 (100) 16 doing educated learning in the laboratory based on the standard of safety 0 (0) 1 (11,11) 5 (55,56) 3 (33,33 9 (100) 17 doing educated learning in the field based on the standard of safety 0 (0) 3 (33,33) 6 (66,67) 0 (0) 9 (100) 18 using another source of learning to push the learners in having an achievement 1 (11,11) 7 (77,78) 1 (11,11) 0 (0) 9 (100) utilizing information and communication technology for learning 19 using information and communication technology (ict) in teaching activities 1 (11,11) 1 (11,11) 6 (66,67) 1 (11,11 9 (100) facilitating learners’ potential to actualize their potential 20 providing a variety of activities learning to encourage learners getting achievement optimally & actualize learners’ creativity potential 0 (0) 6 (66,67) 3 (33,33) 0 (0) 9 (100) communicating effectively, empathic, and polite with learners 21 understanding the strategy of communication effectively, empathic, and polite with learners with oral, written, or another type 0 (0) 7 (77,78) 2 (22,22) 0 (0) 9 (100) 22 building strategy of communication effectively, empathic, and polite with learners 0 (0) 6 (66,67) 3 (33,33) 0 (0) 9 (100) conducting the assessment, the process evaluation, and the learning outcomes 23 making assessment to know how far the learners master the material 2 (22,22) 7 (77,78) 0 (0) 0 (0) 9 (100) 24 develop assessment instruments, the process evaluation and learning outcomes 2 (22,22) 5 (55,56) 2 (22,22) 0 (0) 9 (100) 25 make administration of process evaluation and learning outcomes sustainable by using various instruments 3 (33,33) 6 (66,67) 0 (0) 0 (0) 9 (100) utilizing the results of assessment and evaluation for learning 26 using assessment information and evaluation to determine mastery learning 3 (33,33) 6 (66,67) 0 (0) 0 (0) 9 (100) 27 communicating the results of the assessment and evaluation to stakeholders 3 (33,33) 6 (66,67) 0 (0) 0 (0) 9 (100) doing a reflective action to improve the quality of learning 28 conduct a reflection of the learning that has been implemented 0 (0) 4 (44,44) 5 (55,56) 0 (0) 9 (100) 29 utilize the result of reflection for improvement and development 0 (0) 4 (44,44) 5 (55,56) 0 (0) 9 (100) 30 conduct class action research to improve the quality of learning and teaching 0 (0) 2 (22,22) 5 (55,56) 2 (22,22 9 (100) table 3. the data from classroom observation aspect observed yes (%) no (%) total (%) i. introduction activities indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 205 a. apperception 1. linking learning materials with learners’ experience or previous material 11 (78,57) 3 (21,43) 14 (100) 2. asking challenging questions 10 (71,43) 4 (28,57) 14 (100) 3. delivering the benefits of learning materials 0 (0) 14 (100) 14 (100) 4. linking the material with everyday life 12 (85,71) 2 (14,29) 14 (100) 5. providing motivation associated with the material being studied 3 (21,43) 11 (78,57) 14 (100) 6. presenting the lesson objectives 6 (42,86) 8 (57,14) 14 (100) 7. delivering learning activities plan 6 (42,86) 8 (57,14) 14 (100) ii. main activities a. mastering learning materials 1. the ability in relating the material to the learning objectives 11 (78,57) 3 (21,43) 14 (100) 2. the ability to link the material with relevant knowledge, science and technology development, and real life 12 (85,71) 2 (14,29) 14 (100) 3. presenting the material in a systematic (from easy to difficult, from concrete to abstract) 11 (78,57) 3 (21,43) 14 (100) b. the application of model/learning methods 1. implementing learning process in accordance with the competence to be achieved 11 (78,57) 3 (21,43) 14 (100) 2. facilitating the students to carry out exploration activities, elaboration and confirmation 13 (92,86) 1 (7,14) 14 (100) 3. implementing a systematic learning 9 (64,29) 5 (35,71) 14 (100) 4. the suitability of material with models/methods 11 (78,57) 3 (21,43) 14 (100) 5. make the assessment of learning process 4 (28,57) 10 (71,43) 14 (100) 6. implementing contextual learning 6 (42,86) 8 (57,14) 14 (100) 7. implementing learning that allows the growth of a positive character (nurturing effect) 11 (78,57) 3 (21,43) 14 (100) 8. implement learning based on the planned time allocation 3 (21,43) 11 (78,57) 14 (100) c. utilization of sources/media in learning 1. showing skills in selecting resources in learning 8 (57,14) 6 (42,86) 14 (100) 2. showing skills in using the appropriate instructional media 4 (28,57) 10 (71,43) 14 (100) 3. generate an interesting message 6 (42,86) 8 (57,14) 14 (100) 4. involving learners in the use of instructional media 6 (42,86) 8 (57,14) 14 (100) d. the involvement of students in learning 1. create an active participation of learners 14 (100) 0 (0) 14 (100) 2. responding students’ participation positively 14 (100) 0 (0) 14 (100) 3. showing an open attitude towards the students' responses 14 (100) 0 (0) 14 (100) 4. creating interpersonal relationships conductively 14 (100) 0 (0) 14 (100) 5. creating cheerfulness and enthusiasm of students to learn 14 (100) 0 (0) 14 (100) e. the use of language rila nurfadillah pedagogical competence of english teachers with non-english educational background in kuningan regency: problems and solutions 206 1. using a spoken language clearly and fluently 11 (78,57) 3 (21,43) 14 (100) 2. using good and right written language 10 (71,43) 4 (28,57) 14 (100) 3. using the right language 9 (64,29) 5 (35,71) 14 (100) iii. closing activity a. closing learning process 1. reflect or make conclusion with learners 8 (57,14) 6 (42,86) 14 (100) 2. provide oral or written tests 12 (85,71) 2 (14,29) 14 (100) 3. collect the work as a portfolio 3 (21,43) 11 (78,57) 14 (100) 4. carry out a feedback by giving following activities and tasks enrichment 5 (35,71) 9 (64,29) 14 (100) mastering learners’ characteristics the first pedagogical competence that must be mastered by the teacher is to understand the characteristics of learners. teachers must understand the personality development principles of students in order to actualize the potential of the students (evanita, 2013, p. 34). teachers with nonenglish educational background have done mastering learners’ characteristics by understanding the characteristics of learners relating to the physical aspects, intellectual, socio-emotional, moral, spiritual, and sociocultural background, identifying potential learners and identifying the learning difficulties of students. but, sometimes teachers with non-english educational background identify initial stockteaching students in the subjects of teaching. it can be seen in the results of research. understanding the characteristics of learners is important because it relates to development of learners which includes aspects of physical, moral, spiritual, social, cultural, emotional, and intellectual based on the regulation of teacher’s academic qualification standard and teacher’s competence (uu ri no.16/2007). teachers with non-english educational background mastering learner’s characteristics by personal approach gave more chance to the students who are less in the learning process, made a test or pre-test, and also gave more attention. this can be related to the theory of mulyasa in mahfudhoh (2011, p. 17) that in understanding the students, teachers need to give special attention to individual students’ differences, among others. in another case, some teachers said that a teacher have to know the name of student one by one, always be in the class room when the subject is scheduled, made a face to face communication, made a cooperation with counseling teachers, and saw the needs of students. it is very useful because identification of needs is aimed to engage and motivate learners in learning activities as part of life and they feel it (mahfudhoh, 2011, p. 20). but, the result of classroom observation showed that english teacher with nonenglish educational background have not done some aspects in delivering the benefits of learning materials, providing motivation associated with the material being studied, presenting the lesson objectives, and delivering learning activities plan. so, it was not proved that the teachers mastered learners’ characteristics from the physical aspect, moral, spiritual, social, cultural, emotional, and intellectual because a teacher who has not known the characteristic of learners, the teacher could not do the aspects mentioned above. mastering the theory of learning and the principles of educated learning this aspect talks about understanding various theory of learning and the principles of educated learning. english teachers with non-english educational background often understand this indicator well. it is very important because brown (2001, p. 430) says indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 207 that teachers should understand and use a wide variety of techniques. the interview showed english teachers with non-english educational background use more lectures at most. but, there are other methods like discussion, so it stimulates interaction, cooperation, and teamwork in the classroom (brown, 2001, p. 430). this indicator was strengthened by the result of classroom observation that english teachers with non-english educational background have done some aspects in mastering learning materials and the application of model/learning methods. brown (2001, p. 14) also adds that method is described as an overall plan for systematic presentation of language based upon a selected approach, teachers here have developed the methods as well they use talking stick, ask students to bring dictionary in every single english lesson, giving reward, and make own method. developing the curriculum associated with the lessons the result showed that english teachers with non-english educational background sometimes understand the principles curriculum development. the teachers also develop indicators and instruments assessment just a little. so, it can be interpreted that teachers do not understand to the curriculum is. mahfudhoh (2011, p. 19) says that curriculum is a set of plans and arrangements regarding purpose, content, and learning materials, as well as the means used as guidelines for the implementation of learning to achieve educational goals. on the other hands, english teachers with non-english educational background can determine learning objectives of teaching, select learning materials associated with the experience of teaching learning and learning objectives, and reform learning materials correctly in accordance with the approach selected and characteristics of learners. so, the teachers at least know about the material, objectives, and characteristics of learners to improve english language teaching. it shows from the teachers who take a look from the internet, make a module, and give some exercises. but, the teachers said that the development of curriculum and material are taken from syllabus and textbook. it proves that in developing the curriculum and material, teachers should take a look again to the regulation of teacher’s academic qualification standard and teacher’s competence (uu ri no.16/2007). conducting educated learning this indicator explains about lesson plans and the place of learning as the regulation of teacher’s academic qualification standard and teacher’s competence (uu ri no.16/2007) states. english teachers with non-english educational background often use another source of learning to push the learners in having an achievement and understand lesson plans principles. but, sometimes english teachers with non-english educational background develop lesson plans components, arrange a complete lesson plans, do educated learning in the class, laboratory, or field, do educated learning in the laboratory based on the standard of safety, and doing educated learning in the field based on the standard of safety. that is not enough if the teachers just do these points in sometimes. it proves that although always make lesson plans for a year or a semester, the teachers not pay attention about selecting information to teach in a lessons, teachers need to think about what level the students are at and how well the lesson fits into what they already know and what they need to know as stated by maxom (2009, p. 49). utilizing information and communication technology for learning this indicator describes that teachers should use information and communication technology (ict) in teaching activities. unfortunately, english teachers with nonenglish educational background not often use the information and communication technology (ict) for learning. suryana (2013, p. 24) concludes that ict-based learning teaching on the curriculum is required and rila nurfadillah pedagogical competence of english teachers with non-english educational background in kuningan regency: problems and solutions 208 needed to be applied in the teaching-learning process. in fact, based on the result of classroom observation, english teachers with nonenglish educational background have not used sources/media in learning. those are the aspects that can be related to the information and communication technology for learning. the teachers just use blackboards and textbooks. so, there are just a few teachers who use the projector, speakers, tape recorder, a laptop, and a language laboratory. the teachers is required to know more about this point because adapts textbook material adding by other audio, visual, and mechanical aids creatively is very useful as brown states in 2001 (p. 430). facilitating learners’ potential to actualize their potential based on the regulation of teacher’s academic qualification standard and teacher’s competence (uu ri no.16/2007), teachers should provide a variety of activities learning to encourage learners in getting achievement optimally and provide a variety of learning activities to actualize learners’ creativity potential. english teachers with non-english educational background here have been provided a variety of activities learning to encourage learners getting achievement optimally and actualize learners’ creativity potential by allowing students in some english competitions, invited to an english dialogue, become peer tutoring, invited in singing in english, and asked to use the english language in sending short message service. it proves that teachers must be able to act as a facilitator, motivator, and mentors who give more opportunities to students to seek, cultivate own information, and also follow some competition (hamzah in mahfudhoh (2011, p. 25)). communicating effectively, empathic, and polite with learners one of the points of pedagogical competence is communicating effectively, empathic, and polite with learners. it means that a teacher should understand every strategy of communication and being effective, empathic, and polite (the regulation of teacher’s academic qualification standard and teacher’s competence (uu ri no.16/2007)). english teachers with non-english educational background think that effective communication in teaching is using indonesian-english mixed because students would not understand if the teachers use english full. it was proved in the classroom observation that teachers did not use the right language that was english. but, based on the theory of maxom (2009, p. 9), even though students inevitably speak in their mother tongue from time to time, teacher can respond in simple english, with gestures or pictures. conducting the assessment, the process evaluation, and the learning outcomes the regulation of teacher’s academic qualification standard and teacher’s competence (uu ri no.16/2007) states this indicator is about conducting the assessment, the process evaluation, and the learning outcomes. english teachers with non-english educational background here always use pretest, daily tests, midterm test, final test, processes, project, exercises, homework, liveliness, remedial, personality, attitudes, practices, and attendance. in fact, based on the result of classroom observation, there are just a few teachers who have made the assessment of learning process. those are suitable as harmer (2001, p. 321) states that there are placement tests, diagnostic tests, and progress or achievement test. the teachers have done placement tests by pre-test. teachers have done diagnostic tests by daily tests exercises, homework, liveliness, practices, and remedial. the last, teacher used midterm test and final test for deciding students’ progress and students’ achievement. utilizing the results of assessment and evaluation for learning english teachers with non-english educational background often use indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 209 assessment information and evaluation to determine learning mastery and communicate the results of the assessment and evaluation to stakeholders. the teachers use the results of assessment and evaluation for giving more attention to students who have less ability in english, giving, remedial, tasks, stabilization, speed and exercise to whom the scores are less than minimum criteria. the results of assessment also used for filling the contents of students’ report book. this also related to harmer (2001, p. 321) that there are placement tests, diagnostic tests, and progress or achievement test. those are useful for the teachers because this indicator is about utilizing the results of assessment and evaluation for learning. doing a reflective action to improve the quality of learning in the regulation of teacher’s academic qualification standard and teacher’s competence (uu ri no.16/2007), this indicator mentions that a teacher should conduct a reflection of the learning that has been implemented, utilize the result of reflection for improvement and development, and conduct class action research to improve the quality of learning and teaching. the result of research showed that english teachers with non-english educational background do not pay more attention to this indicator. based on the result of classroom observation there are just a few teachers who have done a reflective action to improve the quality of learning. whereas, fatlin (2010, p. 3) states reflection activity is a very important activity to be implemented because it will control the actions of the teacher, the teacher can see what still needs to be repaired, improved or maintained. here, the teachers just do the reflective action by making conclusions, asking the materials described, and asking whether the students have understood or not. at least, the teachers have given optimal feedback to students as brown (2001, p. 430) states. teacher’s problems english teachers with non-english educational background have some problems of pronunciation, communication, facilities, children are afraid of english, vocabulary, and innovative learning method. but, the main problems are pronunciations because they were confused in saying something in english. it proved in the result of observation that the teachers said glass /gles/, it must be /gla:s/; expression /ekspre∫n/, it must be /ik’spre∫n/; laugh /lagh/, it must be /la:f/, triangle /traingle/, it must be /’traiaeɳgl/, and etcetera. maxom (2009, p. 24) states that teachers are likely to feel embarrassed for pronouncing the words and discouraged by grammar rules and differences from teachers' mother tongue. so, the teachers should push themselves to be good in english. teacher’s solutions english teachers with non-english educational background also have some solutions to face the problems like coming to mgmp, joint a training, learning before teaching, joint plpg, and seminars. those are very useful because brown (2001, p. 430) explains that keep up with the field through regular reading and conference/workshop attendance are not the useless things. the teachers also made discussions with other teachers. as brown (2001, p. 430) states that teachers have to seek opportunities to share thoughts, ideas, and techniques with colleagues. the teachers often open the dictionary, chatting with native speaker, got some courses, watched some movies, and gave motivation to students. harmer (2001, p. 51) states that motivation is some kind of internal drive which pushes someone to do things in order to achieve something. conclusion english teachers with non-english educational background have not done all ten indicators of pedagogical competence: (1) mastering learners’ characteristics from the physical aspect, moral, spiritual, social, cultural, emotional, and intellectual; (2) mastering the theory of learning and the principles of educated learning; (3) developing the curriculum associated with the lessons; (4) conducting educated learning; (5) utilizing information and rila nurfadillah pedagogical competence of english teachers with non-english educational background in kuningan regency: problems and solutions 210 communication technology for learning; (6) facilitating learners’ potential to actualize their potential; (7) communicating effectively, empathic, and polite with learners; (8) conducting the assessment, the process evaluation, and the learning outcomes; (9) utilizing the results of assessment and evaluation; and (10) doing a reflective action to improve the quality of learning. english teachers with non-english educational background only have done the indicator number (1), (2), (3), (6), (7), (8), and (9). then, the teachers indicated as teachers are not maximal in the indicator number (4), (5), and (10). english teachers with non-english educational background have some problems of pronunciation, communication, facilities, students’ reluctance to english, vocabulary, and innovative learning method. but, the main problem is pronunciation because they were confused in saying something in english. english teachers with non-english educational background also have some solutions to face the problems like coming to mgmp, consulting to dictionary, joint a training, chatting with native speaker, got some courses, learning before teaching, joint plpg, seminars, made discussions with other teachers, watching some movies, and gave motivation to students. english teachers with non-english educational background said that the placement of them are caused by a lot of classes in the school, feeling to have ability to teach english, and no more chance to teach the lesson based on appropriate background. based on the regulation of teacher’s academic qualification standard and teacher’s competence (uu ri no.16/2007), professional english teachers must have english educational background with all ten indicators of pedagogical competence. so, government must be aware that linearity of teacher’s educational background is very important. mismatched teachers should be aware that the capacity of them is not accordance with the subject that the teachers taught. so, the teachers should take a study again in department of english education and join some training, seminar, and support teachers’ forum. then, government and headmaster must or should be consistent and professional in recruiting teacher as mandated by the regulation and maximize the teachers’ supervision. and for researchers, please be reassessed more this research by conducting advance research. because there are other three competences that should be mastered by the teachers, there are personal, interpersonal, and social, so the researcher can make those three competences to be the problem of the research. references brown, h. d. (2000). principles of language learning and teaching. new york: longman. brown, h. d. (2001). teaching by principles, second edition. california: longman. creswell, j. w. (2009). design qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods approaches, third edition. california: sage publications inc. evanita, e. l. (2013). analisis kompetensi pedagogik dan kesiapan guru sekolah menengah atas dalam mendukung implementasi kurikulum 2013. semarang: universitas negeri semarang. evans, d., tate, s., navarro, r., and nicolls, m., (2009). teacher education and professional development in indonesia. aguirre division of jbs international, inc. fatlin, n. a. (2010). refleksi. makassar: universitas muhammadiyah makassar. fraenkel, j. r., & wallen, n. e. (2009). how to design and evaluate research in education, seventh edition. new york: mcgraw-hill higher education. harmer, j. (1998). how to teach english. new york: pearson education limited. harmer, j. (2001). the practice of english language teaching. third edition. new york: pearson education limited. jalal, f., samani, m., chang mae, chu., stevenson, r., ragatz, a., negara, s. (2009). teacher certification in indonesia. jakarta: departemen pendidikan nasional republik indonesia. mahfudhoh, f. (2011). analisis kompetensi pedagogik mahasiswa setelah menempuh mata kuliah praktek pengalaman lapangan i. surabaya: uin sunan ampel. maxom, m., (2009). teaching english as a foreign language for dummies. chichester: wiley. regulation of the republic of indonesia number 20, 2003, on the national education system. regulation of the republic of indonesia number 14, 2005, on the regulation of teachers and lecturers. regulation of the republic of indonesia number 16, 2007, on the regulation of teacher’s academic qualification standard and teacher’s competence. indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 211 rosyid, a. (2013). kompetensi pedagogik guru bahasa arab berlatar belakang non-pendidikan bahasa arab dalam pembelajaran bahasa arab di mts negeri maguwoharjo yogyakarta. yogyakarta: universitas islam negeri sunan kalijaga. suryana, y. (2013). teachers’ perception on ict-based english teaching. english review: journal of english department, 2(1), 18-25. indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 83 the efl students’ reaction in english teaching materials: an analysis of gender representation in english textbook hendriwanto department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education, university of swadaya gunung jati, indonesia e-mail: hendriwanto46@gmail.com apa citation: hendriwanto. (2018). the efl students’ reaction in english teaching materials: an analysis of gender representation in english textbook. indonesian efl journal, 4(1), 83-88. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v4i1.887. received: 19-11-2017 accepted: 25-12-2017 published: 01-01-2018 abstract: the role of teaching materials plays major contribution to the language development. the published materials bridge the content and the practice in the classroom. from the analysis it was found 25 images which represented the gender role in which man dominated in all chapters. the representative of image in the textbook employed the role of social background of what student perceived in the course book. the students perceived that the three images could represent their want. however, most images did not show students’ daily activities. in addition, the findings showed that students’ responses to the images in the textbooks had controversy related to the role of man and woman in the reality. keywords: gender analysis, teaching materials, textbook analysis introduction the role of teaching materials plays major contribution to the language development. tomlinson (2009) purpose that teaching materials should give the student the opportunity to practice the language in their daily life particularly in all activities related to what they need as to language for survival life. however, the adapted materials are still major troubleshoot for any relation in teaching especially for senior high school in indonesia. teaching materials as a mean to guide students to achieve the learning objective appears to be essential component in learning english. teaching materials provide the challenge for the teachers and students to calibrate what their representation in all images they put. tomlinson (2010) argued that teaching materials should use selected images in order to give optimum effect. in line with this, yang (2016) explored the importance of imagery in textbook in promoting the student characteristic. however, in indonesian context, teaching materials have not been investigated in more detail related to the gendered analysis from students’ perception. for example, the theme in one of the topics of chapters provided the related topics about nationality, culture, and education. it means that the course book remains the slot of investigation in any aspects of study. the discussion of course book analysis has had a long history in the context of language learning. more recently, the amount of published course book has made the critics in any area even frequent. some writers used the gender perspective as the tool of analysis to investigate the role of gender bias of image in the course materials. many scholars have also conducted visual analysis in the textbook (azisah & vale, 2008; bahman & rahim, 2010; benham & mozaheb, 2013). the analysis of visual in the textbook showed that gender analysis can be found in numerous of the study. the reason why textbook tend to select man or woman as the representation was a major investigated. hendriwanto the efl students’ reaction in english teaching materials: an analysis of gender representation in english textbook 84 analyzing textbook was not merely putting checklist with the appropriate guideline rather than analyzing discourse of the text in the teaching materials. to date, most teaching materials analysis was focused on checklist-oriented rather than analyzing what the image represented in the textbook. to fulfill this gap, the two research questions are proposed; how students perceived the image in materials and what materials give to the context of english learning in gender representation. method the participants of this study were students in a senior high school who have been learning english as their foreign language for seven years. they were participating as member of english association in school. they read teaching materials from the teachers which are accessible in the library and the classroom. besides, they also have access to read any ematerials as learning resources. the data were collected from english textbook used and other empirical resources such as interview, transcript, and media for analysis. the selected images taken from english textbook for senior high school which demonstrated the role of gender are presented in table 1. as the table shows, the representation of the image was the balancing in each part of the textbook. it is likely that image enacted the role of social representation. textbook and teachers as user of the social product involve a set of artifacts in certain social interaction. this is prior data that convey what the images have featured in gender analysis. table 1. categories of images taken from english textbook no category amount gender 1 hobby 12 woman 2 learning 5 woman and man 3 daily activity 8 man results and discussion the published materials bridge the content and the practice in the classroom. from the two textbooks, there were 25 images represented the emotional intelligence. from 25 images, it was revealed that the man in the textbook dominated in all chapters. by investigating the existence of each image in the part of text book, we can know the rule of some specific idea of how gendered-text represents the rule of learning atmosphere. in this occasion, leaving the image as social function is more embedded in some culture instead of what the image devotes. we can know a lot of social activities by seeing the images in learning materials. therefore, the learning materials showed that both man and woman have equal opportunity to get job or chance to go to school. table 2. teacher and students’ perceptions learning materials the interview of teacher devotes the task students perception unit 1 this chapter, i think it is not good choice for me since i need a lot of resources that it is not easy to find. when i looked my learning objective again, i remembered that the choice of man or woman as an example is one of the representation of social practice. when i read this section, i remember of my teacher suggestion that if we as student for next generation, we have to have a big dream. unit 2 deciding to use man or woman as example of what we are going to teach is certain barrier consideration. it relates to what extent that teacher enables this is what i need to deploy a man or woman as my reading assignment when i get the task from the teacher. indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 85 materials in their pedagogical imagine. unit 3 what i am going to share in this teaching material to my student is that i can catch while my student perceived that they learn separately with their context. i learn a lot from this teaching material since i have perceived that my role in english learning as learner devotes my decision to find my opportunity. the teacher articulates the component of what teaching materials did not have special consideration in interplaying the reduction of teaching materials. as we investigated, the teacher reaction towards teaching materials, we get hold of any kind of teacher’s perspective to apply these teaching materials in the classroom. furthermore, some certain behavior of teacher gained is that we have seen that teacher looked at the imagery in teaching materials as to devoting social interaction in the real situation. the relation of image as social semiotic can be deployed by genre as a tool for analyzing text. this text conveys making meaning between teachers and students. therefore, the two pictures in teaching materials represent language use in the world. teachers accomplish the related view of genre text and ideological intervention in the textbook. students were able to learn what they got from teachers’ materials in which the content of this subject interpose them with the store of learning language. this is the way they learn from what organization of learning experience such as emotion, culture, and gender. these features predict the situation of what we need as gender approach in teaching language learning. in unit 1, teaching materials entailed the performance of gender choice in which image showed any particular content. student perceived that image in the textbook can be arranged to be teaching media as to the favorite of choice in any classroom assignment. this is what we call by the term of engagement in situated condition such as the barrier of learning language as foreign language. in unit 2, teaching materials provided the new terms of optional choice whether man or woman represents the teaching materials. having enacted the student through teaching materials, students preferred to convey what the situation in learning language want as a mean to accomplish the general notion of gender choice. in unit 3, teaching materials devoted the rule of language composition in order to serve materials content of teaching instruction. to date this composition gendered text. the three major images relate to empowering the component of rejected or accepted culture as social backbone of learning english for different student background. the students’ hope of their dream in the future representing the images in the english teaching materials, students owe the hoping to acquire what they want to be. the images below showed that woman is drawing the picture with a girl image. the image of a girl who has a hobby in drawing demonstrated that it is rare job for woman in the reality as can be seen from students’ reaction. hendriwanto the efl students’ reaction in english teaching materials: an analysis of gender representation in english textbook 86 the first picture showed that to be a painter was not merely the profession for man. however, a painter was perceived as professional job for those who want to have valuable activity in leisure time. in teaching reading, the role of picture play pivotal aspect in which image demonstrated the selected gender whether man as profession or woman as object of profession. student response: “i think when i want to be an artist in special art, i have to think twice since i have no guarantee my future life to be an artist” (student 1) the data showed that an optional job in their future life after they got an official job. they need to have guaranteed insurance for what they work for and what they can get benefit. students give the responses to the picture in the textbook relating with what their dream in the future. it is imperative to analyze the way students want after they graduated from the school and the teaching materials in the classroom. the images send the implied meaning that women have good chance to reach any kind of job position. this seems to be in line with writer of the textbook that woman was delegated to be an alternative decision maker. particularly in teaching materials analysis, one of the three images showed that gendered text in the english textbook is to establish students’ awareness that man and woman have the capacity to know and develop their potential in life. similarly, student responds that awareness of building their capacity as means to realize their potency in learning english as communication tool. as such, student’s reaction to the images in the text of gendered choice appears to look at the method of building competence. conversely, it is likely that written text and images presence occurs in back and forth in reality of student’s background especially in man and woman separation. for example, in the images of a girl who is drawing on the canvas, it is that the image appears to represent the students’ background. indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 87 in the second picture, the actor, rahmi, had an excellent job to be writer for the new book. this kind of job was not too popular in any area especially for indonesian. few students had no experience in major dream to be writer for writing novel, scientific book, and also other works of creative writing. this image, however, performs the overview of situational fact that was not too related with the reality. having a dream to be a writer seems to be unnatural for some students. student felt that they actually need to improve their situation in their daily life activities such as learning management and doing some activities related to the finding of their journey in their life. students response reading a lot of the book can be a good writer, but i do not really want to be a writer. in my family, no member of my family wants to be a writer as their profession. (student 2) in the third picture, man and woman were playing a ball game in which the actor throws the ball to each other. however, the position among player was divided into two sides, left and right in face to face interaction. the girls were in the left side, while the boys were in the right side. this implied that the two genders should be separated into two different sections to devote the gendered classification. therefore, the textbook in major learning materials persist many components of teaching. overall, the textbook’s image employed a gender vision of the students’ reality in the school in which they correlate the distance between man and woman. for the students, taking the role of women task was responsible for what they need to perform. as fould (2013) argued that students demonstrated the identity of gender in reality. hendriwanto the efl students’ reaction in english teaching materials: an analysis of gender representation in english textbook 88 the main idea of what every textbook devote to the message of what social need is that carrying out them adequate reason to do so. in fact, data showed that students do not aware at the beginning of learning. rather than devoting them into main message, it is not merely deduction to adapt it into our teaching materials. further investigation leads us into a discussion of what the teaching materials bearing for students. the more detail the investigation, the more we have a gestalt to what extent the role of major contribution of what the materials confer. material as a main learning tool has been neglected by the teacher to select what are the appropriate materials that contribute to student learning. in this case, teacher was trying hard to find the mostly adapted materials so that the student is able to follow what they need. thus, investigating materials requires any case for likely engagement of enactment. the three images discussed above teach about gender representation as multiple meaning in collaborating the new idea. man was selected in the part of teaching english textbook since the two activities in the context are usually done by man. meanwhile, woman was only displayed when there is activity that can be done by woman. therefore, the consequence of choice between man or woman was ideological perspective. prior to inviting teacher to come to the class, it is very necessary for teacher to have philosophy of what language is and how they can teach language. in the picture of playing ball, it gives an overview that there is no space between western ideological and how they teach the language. this picture delivers what the student gives in image as social representation. in the second picture, words are used to tell relating to the profession of writers or artist. it shows that woman have a good opportunity in these two professions. in addition, the picture of reading book in which the reader show ability to read more and more showing their capacity. thus, what the analysis gives to the fully guided into the dissemination. conclusion the representative of image in the textbook employed the role of social background of what student perceived in the course book. the students perceived that the three images could represent their want. however, most images did not show students’ daily activities. in addition, the findings showed that students’ responses to the images in the textbooks had controversy related to the role of man and woman in the reality. social justice and social practice can be perceived in those teaching materials as to giving what every teacher wants. student as a user considers to read or not to read, but students exactly need some special issues in gender. learning english as foreign language yield magnitude why learner wants to learn. references azisah, s., & vale, c. (2008). gender mainstreaming in islamic primary schools in south sulawesi, indonesia: a textbook analysis. review of indonesian and malaysian affairs, 42(1), 55-79. bahman, m., & rahim, a. (2010). gender representation in efl materials: an analysis of english textbooks of iranian high schools. procedia social and behavioral sciences, 273–277. benham, b., & mozaheb, m. a. (2013). the depiction of men and women within iranian high school efl textbooks, tested against islamic custom. journal of beliefs and values, 34(1), 100104. doi: 10.1080/13617672.2013.760253. tomlinson, b. (2009). materials development for language teachers. modern english teacher 8(1), 62-68. tomlinson, b. (2010). connecting the mind: a multidimensional approach to teaching language through literature. the english teacher 4(2), 104-115. yang, c. c. r. (2016). are males and females still portrayed stereotypically? visual analyses of gender in two hong kong primary english language textbook series. gender and education, 28(5), 674-692. doi: 10.1080/09540253.2015.1103839. indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 173 a comparison of the speech styles of nigerian and chinese efl learners in malaysia pauline mackenzie centre for english language studies, faculty of arts, sunway university, selangor e-mail: mackenzie412@gmail.com kuang ching hei department of english language, faculty of languages and linguistics, university of malaya, kuala lumpur e-mail: kuangch@um.edu.my apa citation: mackenzie, p. & hei, k. c. (2015). a comparison of the speech styles of nigerian and chinese efl learners in malaysia. indonesian efl journal, 1(2), 173-188 received: 24-11-2014 accepted: 12-05-2015 published: 01-07-2015 abstract : this paper focused on the speech styles of two groups of learners, nigerian learners with english as their official language and chinese learners with english as a foreign language studying in malaysia. a questionnaire was developed to extract personal details while a classroom task was given to gather data. consent was given voluntarily. spoken data were recorded, transcribed verbatim and then analyzed and findings were further substantiated by an interview. analysis showed that nigerian learners are less prone to using fillers as compared to chinese efl learners. this implied that chinese efl learners were less comfortable in using english. both nigerian and chinese learners used the same amount of intensifiers suggesting that they do not feel passionate when talking about themselves, as the task demanded. the findings of this study will enable foreign language learners to understand themselves better and assist local teachers and classmates to be more tolerant when communicating with them as it can help to minimize misunderstandings. nonetheless, further research may be required to verify the findings. key words: speech styles, fillers, intensifiers, nigerian, chinese, efl learners introduction as globalization takes place, it is inevitable for internationalization to co-occur where students from one country pursue further education in another. it is also good to recruit foreign learners as their presence can broaden the significance of education as well as introduce new cultures and knowledge which can enhance further mutual understanding of each other. with the influx of more foreign students, it is imperative that locals, particularly those in the education line, be given more information about the new residents coming to reside in the country so that miscommunication and misunderstandings can be mitigated before they explode to involve violence. observations show that malaysia has many chinese and nigerian students studying in local institutions of higher learning and some experiences with nigerians suggest that they have a peculiar way of communicating even though they are competent in the english language. in contrast, it was also observed that chinese students from mainland china seem to be struggling with using the english language especially when interacting among locals. it appears that some locals find it uneasy interacting with these two groups of students, hence there is a need to conduct an exploratory study in order to extract some evidence which can be used to support the observations. specifically, there is a need to study how these two groups of students differ in the way they communicate their meanings and to what extent can their differences be bridged. the selection of these two nationalities was made based on the misunderstandings (e.g. providing answers not related to questions asked) or miscommunications (e.g. giving wrong information to friends) which had occurred within the class in which the researcher was conducting as their english language lecturer. mailto:mackenzie412@gmail.com mailto:kuangch@um.edu.my pauline mackenzie & kuang ching hei a comparison of the speech styles of nigerian and chinese efl learners in malaysia 174 it was also noted that students of these two nationalities rarely communicate with each other as they could not understand each other. this study is restricted to looking at two selected linguistic features only, based on lakoff’s (1973; 1975) work. this study aims to identify the speech style differences of learners from two nationalities: nigerian and chinese efl learners. specifically, it aims to explore the linguistic differences in their spoken utterances in terms of: 1) fillers and 2) intensifiers. every individual has their own peculiar manner of speaking and among cultural groups; some differences are more announced than others. in the malaysian context, it is noted that malay speakers tend to be indirect (see asmah haji omar, 1992, 1995; jamaliah mohd ali, 1995, 2000) whereas chinese speakers tend to be direct (see david & kuang, 1999; kuang, 2002). other studies have also noted some gender differences in oral interactions. tannen (1990) notes that men and women speak in differently because of the way they are brought up. tannen (ibid.) adds that “we need to identify and understand these differences to avoid misunderstandings” (p.17). like tannen (1990), reiman (2006) believes that communication gaps occur due to the different communication styles among humans. reiman (2006) mentions that problems in communication happen when the intended message is not conveyed properly or when the speakers have been misunderstanding. focusing on cultural differences ahmad al-issa (2003) says that when people from different cultures interact, they often bring culturally inherited sets of constraints to monitor and evaluate their own speech as well as the speech of others. these sets of constraints consist of values, preferred communication styles, expectations and interpretations which affects communication. for example, when two people from different backgrounds talk to each other, certain things such as their opinion on a certain issue can cause them to feel uneasy with each other if they do not have the same opinion on the said issue. since language cannot be separated from the culture of the person, second language (l2) learners who are speaking in a target language (l2) may have been influenced by their native language (l1) background. consequently, they may discover that using l2 can become a great challenge (bardovi-harlig & hartford, 1990; eisenstein & badman, 1986; olshtain & cohen, 1983) as their messages may likely be misinterpreted, and their speaking styles or behavior may also influence what others think of them. all these information suggest that communication can be affected by many factors including situation, culture, gender and many others. coupland (2007) suggests that style is a way of doing something and speech styles consist of items such as phonological, morphological, syntactical and lexical items. according to his framework (2007), styles carry social meanings when they are used. often, they are used as strategy to show social differences which enables speakers to construct identity of the speakers so that they become accepted by the target community. for example, in schools, students may talk like their friends in order to be accepted by the group of friends. the reason for english language learners to accommodate depends on the degree to which they want to be accepted into the society of the said country. wide (2010) says that, if an individual moves to a new place where the surrounding is unfamiliar, he or she would likely have a high need for social approval; thus, speaking style would be important. giles (1973) says that people tend to change their speech characteristics (accent, pauses, speech rate) during interactions to achieve certain goals. speech shift are changes made by a person when speaking that can have different circumstances depending on the context of interaction (giles, mulac, bradac & johnson, 1987). he also says that there are factors which influences speech choices and it includes the place where the conversation occurs, (classroom as opposed to canteen), the topic of the conversation itself (academic as opposed to shopping) and also the kind of interlocutors (teacher vs. student as opposed to friend vs. friend) (giles & smith, 1979). indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 175 speech styles can also be evaluated through pauses and language intensity (giles & street, 1985). street & hopper (1982) says that the extent to which the quality of the speaker’s language toward a subject which deviates from neutrality is language intensity. street & giles (1982) continue to say that, when a person becomes more emotional about the subject he/she is talking about, the language used becomes more intense. for example, when a speaker is talking about a topic which they really like, they tend to speak more passionately and aggressively about the topic compared to a topic which they dislike. therefore, the language used will be more intense and emotional compared to when talking about a topic which they do not fancy. they also mentioned that people tend to converge more on vocal intensity when they are aware that they have similar attitudes (street & giles, 1982). these similarities then tend to draw speakers together and indirectly, it promotes harmony and tolerance with one another. erickson, lind, johnson and o’barr (1978) argue that speech style is linked to social power and status. they say that lowstatus people generally use powerless speech style with the use of intensifiers, hedges, hesitations, hypercorrect grammar, questioning forms, polite forms and gestures. however, (bradac & mulac, 1984; hosman, 1989; hosman & siltanen, 1994) suggest that intensifiers may not be perceived as powerless and may even have powerful connotations in certain contexts as they may indicate certainty or control (hosman & siltanen, 1994; mcmullen & pasloski, 1992). bradac, mulac & thompson (1995) says that when components of powerful and powerless speech styles are examined, intensifiers were found to have occurred more frequently than hedges or hesitations, with intensifiers being used more by women and hedges by men. therefore hedges and intensifiers should not be regarded as “powerless language”. according to smith, siltanen & hosman (1998), a powerless style is characterized by the presence of language features such as hedges (‘sort of’, ‘kind of’), hesitations (‘um, er’), intensifiers (‘surely’, ‘certainly’), polite forms (‘yes sir’, ‘please’), tag questions (‘pass me that, won’t you’), and deictic phrases (ones indicating location or direction, such as ‘over there’) whereas a high power style does not have any of these features. they continue to say that the use of hedges may suggest that the speaker is uncertain about the position they are advocating which causes the listener to scrutinize message arguments more carefully (smith, siltanen & hosman, 1998). therefore, messages that are presented in an uncertain way may affect the message processing differently than an argument with the same strength but presented in a speaker certainty way (smith, siltanen & hosman, 1998). a speaker using powerless speech style indicates a lack of confidence or certainty (parton, siltanen, hosman & langenderfer, 2002). erickson, lind, johnson & o’barr (1978) said that powerless speech may be too costly for listeners as it makes them work harder to understand what the speaker is saying. stylistics, according to crystal (1971), refers to the linguistic study of systematic, situationally-distinctive, intra-language variation. by ‘situation’ he refers to the subset of non-linguistic variables which a native speaker can intuitively identify as linguistics features in an utterance. ‘feature’ however, refers to any amount of speech or writing which may be singled out from language and discussed (word, morpheme, sentence, structural relationship and others). they include features such as hesitations, tag questions, hedges, disclaimers, intensifiers and formal addresses. stylistic features influence how a speaker is evaluated both positively and negatively when speaking (fragale, 2006). fillers are words or sounds that fill up a gap in an utterance (cappelli, 2008). in english, the most common filler sounds are er, uh and um. fillers can also occur at different positions in a sentence. when a speaker takes a longer time to produce an utterance, he/she might lose the listener’s attention but if he/she rushes to produce an utterance that is defective, he/she risks being misunderstood (clark & brennan, 1991). so, the speaker may signal the delay of producing a word or phrase by using a filler pauline mackenzie & kuang ching hei a comparison of the speech styles of nigerian and chinese efl learners in malaysia 176 such as um, er and uh (clark, 1994; smith & clark, 1993) in the beginning of their utterance. there is evidence that fillers can perform a warning function to warn his or her listener about the delay in producing a word or phrase by uttering fillers; speakers answering general knowledge questions display accurate information about their mental search processes (brennan & williams, 1995; smith & clark, 1993); which are, they will pause longer and use more fillers before giving an answer which they lack confidence in (and is likely to be incorrect) than before they give an answer that they have a strong feeling about (and that is more likely to be correct). they even pause longer and use more fillers before a non-answer (e.g., i don’t know), when actually they do know the answer but are just unable to recall it at the moment of speaking. listeners can use this metacognitive display to judge how likely it is for the speaker to know the correct answer (brennan & williams, 1995). intensifiers are adverbs that enhance adjectives and adverbs and come before the words they modify. in graddy’s (2006) study, the amount of intensifiers used by both male and female was less when compared to the amount of qualifiers used. only minor differences in the use of intensifiers were evident when the male and female usage was compared. female students used slightly more intensifiers than males. the word ‘very’ was used more by men in fahy’s (2002) study. however, in graddy’s (2006) study women used more of this word. women also used the intensifier ‘less’ more than men. method this study looks at the sociolinguistic theory of lakoff (1973, 1975) who talks about speech style, differences of speech and gender differences in speech. lakoff’s model indicates that there are a number of characteristics to focus on when studying speech styles and table 1 illustrates. table 1: features and examples in speech styles no types examples 1 questions a. tag questions e.g. they didn’t hit you did they? b. wh-questions e.g. what’s your name? 2 fillers umm, uh, ah, mm 3 hedges a. phrase type e.g. i think/assume/guess, i mean b. adverbial e.g. maybe, probably, relatively, generally c. adverbial used with the negative e.g. (not) really, (not) necessarily, (not) very d. generalized adjunct e.g. or something, or whatever, sort of, kind of 4 intensifiers sub-modification: so, very, etc. 5 affirmatives yeah, ok, all right, oh, well in utterance-initial position 6 adjective types wonderful, darling, lovely source: lakoff’s study (as cited in michael, a. s., chone, l. s., muthusamy, c., & veeravagu, j. (2010). from the examples above, only two types of linguistic features which are fillers and intensifiers will be the focus of this study. the participants were 10 male nigerians and 10 male chinese learners’ sourced from a private tertiary education institution. the learners’ were in their last semester of the english program offered by a public institution of higher education. all learners have gone through four semesters of english courses (see appendix a) offered. the four levels of english courses that they have gone through are proficiency skills in english, academic english, english for research foundation and english for integrated skills. the average age of the learners is 23.2 years old for the learners form nigeria. majority came from the northern part of nigeria. eighty percent of the learners’ first language is the hausa language and the remaining 20 percent is the kanuri and yoruba language. indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 177 as for the learners from china their average age is 21.8 years old; forty percent of them came from the center of mainland china which is the sichuan province and another 10 percent came from the henan province. their first language is mandarin and information was retrieved from the questionnaire (see appendix b). another 40 percent of the learners came from the east and south of china which were hebei, fujian and shandong province. table 2: demographic factor of nigerian and chinese learners nigerian background information chinese background information n1 age: 26 north nigeria c1 age: 22 hebei province n2 age: 24 c2 age: 21 henan province n3 age: 24 west nigeria c3 age: 21 sichuan province n4 age: 20 north nigeria (kano state) c4 age: 21 hebei province n5 age: 23 north nigeria c5 age: 22 sichuan province n6 age: 22 north nigeria c6 age: 21 sichuan province n7 age: 23 north nigeria (adamawa state) c7 age: 22 fujian province n8 age: 19 north nigeria (katsina state) c8 age: 23 n9 age: 27 c9 age: 23 shandong province n10 age: 24 north nigeria c10 age: 22 sichuan province the research took the following sequence. the materials and instruments needed were prepared. next, the researcher asked the principal of the language centre for permission to carry out the study on the students. after that, the researcher informed the subjects of her intention to carry out the study. following that, consent forms (appendix c) were distributed to the learners’ by the researcher. the researcher explains what they would be required to do and that findings will be shared with them. they were also given a chance to clarify the nature of study. the questionnaires were then distributed to the learners. the questionnaire consists of 17 questions (see appendix b). the purpose of the questionnaire was to find out the profile of the learners’ background. participants were given the opportunity to ask questions if they did not understand or if they were not clear on certain things. all questionnaires were then collected on the spot and processed accordingly. prior to the collection of data, an appointment was set with the learners to meet up on a weekday (2011) to conduct the recording session of their speech. all the 20 learners had their own individual time slot (see appendix d). 1. they would enter the discussion room and have a seat. 2. they were also given some time (around one or two minutes) to prepare themselves (to get familiar with the surroundings and to get ready to begin their speech). 3. when they are ready they would begin their speech on “my family” and their speech would be recorded by using a smartphone. the title “my family” was chosen as it was something familiar to the learners. pauline mackenzie & kuang ching hei a comparison of the speech styles of nigerian and chinese efl learners in malaysia 178 4. all speeches recorded were transcribed (see appendix e) according to the utterances. the study does not focus on volume, pitch and non-verbal cues because of the constraints of time, space and also because the researcher did not video tape the learners during data collection as the learners did not let her video tape them. this study is also constrained by the number of nigerian and chinese learners the researcher had access to. hence, the researcher approached learners who are readily available to her. results and discussion the data presented here were collected to answer two research questions. the research questions explored were: i. what are the speech styles of nigerian and chinese efl learners? ii. how are the speech styles of the nigerian learners different from the chinese efl learners in terms of: a) fillers and b) intensifiers? speech style of nigerian learners coupland (2007) says that speech styles are often applied as a strategy to signal social differences which enable the speaker to construct his/her own identity so that they become accepted by the target community. however, the section below only focuses on the speech styles of learners’ from nigeria. as stated earlier, fillers enable conversations to run smooth whenever speakers are trying to retrieve information for some reason. however, not all speakers use fillers (juan, 2006). studies by clark (1994) and smith & clark (1993) have validated that fillers help to buy time to think, of what is going to be said next. examples are words such as ‘um’, ‘ah’, ‘mm’, ‘er’ and so on. figure 1. percentage of fillers used by nigerian learners findings showed that fillers were employed by the learners from nigeria and china. figure 1 shows the amount of fillers used by the nigerian learners in their speech on “my family”. it is found that 80 percent of the learners had used fillers in their speech. the total amount of fillers used was 47. further analysis showed that the highest amount of fillers was used by n4 which is 38.3 percent followed by n1 which used 14.9 percent of fillers. n7 used 12.8 percent and n6 10.6 percent. n8 and 9 used four fillers each which is 8.5 percent. n5 used 4.3 percent of fillers. learners n2 and n10 did not use any filler in their entire speech. this indicates that the extent of fillers used can vary between speeches and that it is not a ‘rigid’ characteristic of nigerian speakers. to further illustrate, examples are provided in table 3. table 3. example of fillers used by nigerian learners n1 : my name is err..musa… (utterance 2) : i er..student from nigeria (utterance 3) : i , i’m erm belong to the hausa tribe…..(utterance 4) n3 : so, erm… my dad’s name is……(utterance 5) n4 : er assalamualaikum my name is er hussaini…(utterance 1) : i come from er i come from africa, africa, nigeria nigeria from kano state (utterance 2) : er my tribe is hausa and er i come from a family of nine (utterance 3) n5 : then my siblings, among er.. my er.. our family i’m the only person that went out abroad to study (utterance 13) n6 : and er.. that time my father got married at the age of 25 years and met my mother when he was 24…(utterance 4) : so er.. the my father, my mother’s brother is the district head office rural area so the well known and very popular person (utterance 6) : my father …school …attended this er.. degree programme (utterance 20) indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 179 n7 : er..i’m a nigerian from the northern part of nigeria… (utterance 2) : er.. my mom is currently in nigeria working…(utterance 3) : arr.. i live in a family of six which i’m the first family that…(utterance 4) n8 : that’s erm.. katsina state (utterance 4) : erm..i’m a christian (utterance 6) : erm..erm.. i have my dad’s name is thomas (utterance 10) n9 : good afternoon my lecturer and er.. my name is…(utterance 1) : er.. i come to malaysia to er.. study b.i.t. (utterance 2) : er.. i’m here almost three years in malaysia (utterance 3) the table above shows that most of the time, the ‘er’ filler is being used by nigerian learners in the beginning of a sentence. however, there are also instances when the use of fillers (er, erm) are found in the middle of a sentence. this finding supports what froehlich (2010) says that is; in english, the most common filler sounds or words are er, uh and um. he also says that fillers can occur at different positions in a discourse which supports some examples given. by looking at the data transcribed (appendix e), it can be said that the reason for the use of most fillers are because the learners pause before saying an important idea which helps signal that whatever said next is significant (devito, 2006). for example, n1: my name is err..musa… (utterance 2), i er.. student from nigeria (utterance 3). this shows that after introducing himself it is appropriate to talk about where he is from. another reason why nigerian learners’ use fillers is because they would like to pause at transition points to signal that they are moving from one part of the speech to another which would help the listeners separate the main issues discussed (devito, 2006). for example, n7: er.. my mom is currently in nigeria working…(utterance 3), arr.. i live in a family of six which i’m the first family that… (utterance 4). this shows that the speaker is going to move from talking about his mom to talking about his siblings. as discussed earlier, intensifiers are adverbs that enhance adjectives and adverbs and they come before the words they modify. in this case focus is given to words that heighten the intensity of other words such as ‘very’, ‘so’, ‘most’ and others. figure 2. percentage of intensifiers used by nigerian learners this study found that the use of intensifiers is not a common feature of the 10 nigerian learners. statistics are provided in figure 2. looking at the graph above, it can be seen that 40 percent of the nigerian learners do not use intensifiers in their speech. in this scenario, n6 used the most intensifiers in his speech. he used six intensifiers which is 46.1 percent of the total. he uses it to enhance the following words in his speech (example: very popular person). the next common statistic came from n3 and n9 who both used equal amount of intensifiers which is 15.4 percent each followed by n1, n4 and n7 with 7.7 percent. data indicate that speakers n2, n5, n8 and n10 did not use any intensifier at all. examples are displayed in table 4. table 4. example of intensifiers used by nigerian learners n1 : so er actually malaysia is very nice country to me but some people still some people are complain about malaysia (utterance 11) n3 : …… but now its kinda very expensive 2.8, 2.9 (utterance 16) : but it’s ok i’m almost done so nothing much to worry about (utterance 17) pauline mackenzie & kuang ching hei a comparison of the speech styles of nigerian and chinese efl learners in malaysia 180 n4 : and this er.. biotech i’m not practicing anything but er.. my mother force me to just do it because she ar.. she accompany me here. (utterance 11) n6 : so er.. the my father, my mother’s brother is the district head office rural area so the well known and very popular person (utterance 6) : in that way …in your relationship coz that make you familiar and make the relationship very strong to keep on going for the rest of your life (utterance 19) : his major was commerce and then he went on and attended his masters and he worked at the bank for almost 20 years…(utterance 21) : so and erm i came to malaysia in 2008 and the reason is because nigeria education is quite good but the problem is they represent a lot of strike (utterance 23) : er so that’s pretty much about me (utterance 29) : thank you very much… (utterance 30) n7 : so and my country nigeria is very famous country in africa which is we call it the heart of africa (utterance 12) n9 : so i’m just eager to go back and meet my children because they are missing me (laughs) (utterance 7) : thank you very much. (utterance 11) the table above shows that, the intensifier ‘very’ is being used frequently by nigerians. the findings here support those findings by fahy (2002) who says that the word ‘very’ is used more by men. however, this statement cannot be generalized as this study only looks at the speech styles of nigerian males. in this study, no comparison can be mentioned for women nigerian speeches. there are also instances of other intensifiers being used and they include ‘almost’, ‘pretty’ and ‘quite’. most of the intensifiers used by the nigerian learners’ were used before an adjective rather than before an adverb. for example, n1: “very nice country”, n3: “very expensive”, n6: “very popular person” and n7: “very famous country”. by using intensifiers in their speech, it seems that the nigerian learners are experiencing a passionate description about the topic spoken (street & hopper, 1982). speech styles of chinese efl learners as said before, this section will begin by focusing on the chinese efl learners’ usage of fillers. having discussed the nigerian learners’ speech style, the section below focuses on the learners’ from china. fillers fill up a gap in an utterance (cappelli, 2008) and may occur at different places in a discourse (devito, 2006). figure 3. percentage of fillers used by chinese learners statistics are presented in figure 3 and analysis shows that not all the chinese learners used fillers in their speech. the total amount of fillers used was 155 which were more than the nigerians (47 fillers). this shows that the chinese are seen as unprepared and or nervous compared to the nigerians as devito (2006) says that people who use fillers are seen as being hesitant, unprepared and unsure of themselves. figure 3 indicates that, the highest amount of fillers used was by c5 which is 20 percent, followed by c1 and c9 respectively with 16.1 percent each. next is c3 with the use of 21 fillers which is 13.6 percent. c6 used 11.6 percent of fillers in his speech. c10 used 13 fillers which results to 8.4 percent. c7 used 7.1 percent of fillers followed by c2 which is 3.2 percent and c4, 2.6 percent. the lowest amount of fillers used was by c8 which is only 2 fillers with the amount of 1.3 indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 181 percent. the amount of fillers used may be due to the fact that chinese learners’ find it difficult to choose the right word (see appendix b) hence, they find a need to delay their speech (schachter, christenfeld, ravina & bilous, 1991). the section below illustrates some of the examples detected in their speech. table 5. example of fillers used by chinese learners c1 : er..hello teacher (utterance 1) : er..i come from china, hebei province… (utterance 3) : er..it’s a small city my hometown(utterance 4) c2 : er.. i come from china (utterance 2) : er..i was born in henan province (utterance 2) : erm..my mother, father, my brother and myself (utterance 7) c3 : erm my name li bo (utterance 1) : er i live in sichuan province chengdu city (utterance 4) : er..my family my family my family er.. has a my father, my mother and i (utterance 5) c4 : er i’m now study malaysia (utterance 4) : er..my sister is a nurse (utterance 9) : er.. er….(utterance 10) c5 : erm my name is yangyang. (utterance 2) : mm..there are three people in my family my father, my mother and i (utterance 4) : er my er i come to here i come to here in malaysia study for business finance because of is i no want to go here but in china some people say that at at at this college is good so good er have anything but anything have so i with my friend join join join er university such as …..(utterance 5) c6 : er mm my name is xu ji hong (utterance 1) : er i’m from tze chuan province china (utterance 4) : so i have four person in my family er my father, mother, brother and i (utterance 7) : er.. (mumbling).. (utterance 8) c7 : ya take er music and performing (utterance 7) : i er now i want to talk about my family (utterance 10) : they er in college at china (utterance 13) c8 : er..my mother also (utterance 5) : mm..so i only one child (utterance 6) c9 : er now i am 23 years old (utterance 2) : er my hometown name is er…..(utterance 4) : er there are 11 000 people in my hometown er but er there ar are 8 er 8000 people have er same family name (utterance 5) c10 : er the sichuan province in west in the china and this is beautiful city called chengdu because the city er people call the city er abandoned city (utterance 3) : so it er have a er food have a special place and the people is very hot and er kind (utterance 4) : so my family er three people my mom and dad (utterance 6) the examples above show that the filler that is most used by the chinese efl learners is the ‘er’ filler and this finding supports what devito (2006) says about the common english fillers being ‘er’, ‘uh’ and ‘um’ respectively. as can be seen, the fillers used by the chinese learners’ not only occur at the beginning of the utterance but also at different positions in the utterance such as in the middle of the utterance (devito, 2006). the position where most of the fillers occur is at the beginning of the sentence and this finding has been verified by boomer (1965) and shriberg (1996) who both say that fillers are more likely to occur in this position as this is where speakers are planning of what to say. the focus of this study also looks at words that heighten the intensity of other words such as ‘very’, ‘so’, ‘most’ and others. therefore, intensifiers which are adverbs that enhance adjectives and adverbs that come before the word they modify will be discussed further. pauline mackenzie & kuang ching hei a comparison of the speech styles of nigerian and chinese efl learners in malaysia 182 figure 4. percentage of intensifiers used by chinese learners figure 4, indicates the amount of intensifiers used by each chinese learner in their speech. the learner who used the most number of intensifiers in his speech is c5. he used six intensifiers in his speech which amounts to 46.1 percent. c10 used 23.1 percent of intensifiers and c9 15.4 percent. c4 and c6 used only one intensifier each. five learners, which are c1, c2, c3, c7 and c8, did not use any intensifier in their speech. even though 50 percent of learners did not use intensifiers in their speech, it cannot be generalized that there is no significant difference between men and women in terms of the usage of intensifiers in their speech (nemati & bayer, 2007). further studies should be carried out to find out if some men use intensifiers because of certain things they wish to portray or if certain men just do not use any intensifiers at all regardless of what they wish to portray. examples of the intensifiers used are illustrated in table 6. table 6. example of intensifiers used by chinese learners c4 : malay…why i come come to malaysia is malaysia is malaysia is very beautiful (utterance 5) c5 : but my but my housemate he is very good (utterance 8) : so i’m more confident in this college (utterance 14) : first one is football, second one is snooker er because of here is so boring so i i cannot talk about this with my friends er not like people in china (utterance 17) : you are so good (utterance 24) : we are very happy and er so we always make aarrr game (utterance 26) : so it is interesting and you are the most beautiful teacher er in my life. (utterance 27) c6 : er er he is very busy and er sometimes he cannot sleep even for three hours one day when he is in a busy day. (utterance 15) c9 : erm erm i i i study in malaysia because erm malaysia is very near er to my hometown er and i can i can learn er..more very little money (utterance 11) c10 : so it er have a er food have a special place and the people is very hot and er kind (utterance 4) : so we live together and erm they are very good (utterance 8) : er so why i am studying music coz i think er the world have a many different languages so much but music is the one language for the world.(utterance 10) by looking at table 6, it can be concluded that males do use the intensifier ‘very’ most of the time (fahy, 2002) and both nigerian and chinese efl learners’ use the word ‘very’ frequently. it can also be seen that the word which the intensifiers modify are adjectives. examples can be seen in c4’s speech: “very beautiful”, c5: “very happy”, c6: “very busy”, c 10: “very hot” and others. the chinese learners’ use a variety of other intensifiers in their speech compared to the nigerians. the chinese use words such as more, so, and most. examples are: c5: “more confident”, “most beautiful” and c10: “so much”. differences in speech style of nigerian and chinese efl learners this section states some information which can help to state the differences of the two groups of learners. in terms of fillers found it was clear that the chinese learners’ use it more pauline mackenzie & kuang ching hei a comparison of the speech styles of nigerian and chinese efl learners in malaysia 184 frequently as compared to the nigerians. a further description will be given below. figure 5. percentage of fillers used by nigerian & chinese learners as stated in the pie chart above, chinese learners use fillers at a much higher frequency in their speech which is 77 percent as compared to nigerian learners which is only 23 percent. filled pauses are hesitant sounds made to indicate uncertainty or simply to maintain control of the conversation by thinking of what to say next (cappelli, 2008). since the nigerian learners used less filler in their speech, it shows that they are more proficient in the language as they do not hesitate when speaking. they do not need to buy some time thinking of what to say before they start speaking. this also shows that nigerian learners are more comfortable as compared to chinese in using the english language. as devito (2006) says, pauses are seen as ineffective as it weakens your message. if used, the speaker would be perceived as hesitant, unprepared and unsure of yourself. nigerians tend to appear more confident compared to the chinese probably because apart from their own mother tongue they tend to use english as a language for them to communicate daily with college friends and also to help them buy food especially in malaysia, as the questionnaire information has shown. all 10 of them agreed that they use the english language to complete assignments, to facebook, to write letters and emails (see appendix b). other than that, they also agreed that english is used when travelling and also to make friends (see appendix b). apart from that they also have more experience using the language as many of them have been to english medium schools for at least 12 years (see appendix b). in that regard, they could be considered to be proficient in the language. as the chinese learners use the powerless speech style, they are seen as less confident and unsure of themselves. this supports what parton, siltanen, hosman & langenderfer (2002) say. what is interesting is that even though the nigerian learners are considered to be proficient, some of them faced some difficulties when speaking in english. two found it difficult to construct sentences whereas one of them found it difficult to pronounce certain words and another sometimes find it difficult to find the right words when he speaks (see appendix b). the difficulties faced by the learners support what bardovi-harlig & hartford, (1990), eisenstein & badman, (1986), olshtain & cohen, (1983) have said about l2 learners. that is, learners’ may also find it hard to send and receive messages using their l2 regardless of their proficiency level, depending on context, speakers and topic of conversation (yuan, liberman & cieri, 2006). in this regard their fluency was possibly affected by the task because they were asked to give a speech which was recorded and they were also the only one present in the room apart from the researcher. as for the chinese learners, they are found to be less confident which means that they appeared not prepared and they hesitate a lot before speaking probably because they used their own mother tongue most of the time in their daily lives as information in the questionnaire indicates. this finding supports previous research of brennan & williams (1995); smith & clark (1993) where they say that people tend to pause longer and use more filler before giving an answer, suggesting a lack of confidence (brennan & williams, 1995; smith & clark, 1993). speakers who used their first language frequently to communicate with others such as their parents, relatives, friends and many more tend to fall under this category where they are seen as less confident. it is clear that the chinese learners’ use english as a final choice, i.e. when it is really necessary, for example, to complete assignments and write reports related to studies (see appendix b). apart from that information from the questionnaire also illustrates that they have indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 185 less experience using the language since many of them have only been to english medium schools for 6 years as compared to the nigerians (see appendix b). from the questionnaire, all ten learners also indicated that they have difficulties when speaking in english (see appendix b). this information explains why the learners face difficulty in the pronunciation of words (see appendix b). this may be due to the lack of practice and exposure to the language (see appendix b). they also do not have adequate vocabulary for conversing which makes it difficult for them to deliberate using the language. nevertheless, the information gained does not support what schachter, christenfeld, ravina & bilous (1991); schachter, rauscher, christenfeld, & crone, (1994) say which is that speakers who use more filler in their speech tend to have a larger range of vocabulary to choose from. this study had shown that chinese efl learners may know what they would like to convey but they were hampered by the lack of vocabulary to say what they want and need to say. this gap leaves them struggling during a conversation to convey the message. ultimately, chinese learners’ would use any word they know just to convey enough information as the study illustrates. this information supports what devito (2006) says: that if the words you use are able to convey your message it means that it was a successful speech. the chinese learners used more filler to expand on their speech. fillers helped them to think of what they would like to say as well as how to construct the sentence before actually saying it (cappelli, 2008) but in this study, the chinese efl learners were eventually defeated by their lack of practice in using the english language. in a nutshell, it can be said that learners tend to use fillers when they find it difficult to get the right words and when this occurs, there was a greater need to delay their speech (schachter, christenfeld, ravina & bilous, 1991) and ultimately they filled up their utterances with pauses and fillers. street & hopper (1982) say that language intensity can be another way of evaluating speech styles. the language used will get more intense as the speaker gets more emotional when he/she is speaking. figure 6. percentage of intensifiers used by nigerian & chinese learners figure 6 demonstrates that the nigerian learners used the same amount of intensifiers as the chinese learners. no deduction could be made of this finding since four learners from nigeria and five learners from china did not use any intensifier. even though many linguists mention that men tend not to add decorations to their speech the way women do (murphy, 2006), there are instances in this study which differed. for instance, many intensifiers were used in these efl learners’ speeches. learners tend to use intensifiers to make something sound more or less exciting and these adverbs can portray the listener's feelings about the concept (robert, 2011). it also seems that learners from both nigeria and china use intensifiers most frequently in front of adjectives rather than adverbs. only a few instances of intensifiers were used in front of adverbs. for example, n9 where he said “thank you very much”, c9 “…very little money” and c10 “….so much but music…” the results of the four nigerian and five chinese learners (n2, n5, n8, n10, c1, c2, c3, c7 and c8) who did not use intensifiers support the findings or opinion of larner, (2009) which states that intensifiers are characteristic of feminine language and men tend to make use of fewer intensifiers because men detract from the primary content of a statement and make it less persuasive or realistic by exaggerating and adding emotional content to it. the researcher found that n6 used a rather strong expressive in his speech when he said “….this kind of mentality you have back in…...” it sounded like the speaker was very angry or upset about it. this supports what kramer (1974) says that pauline mackenzie & kuang ching hei a comparison of the speech styles of nigerian and chinese efl learners in malaysia 186 males use stronger expressive when they are angry or exasperated. another study by kuha (2005) states that there is no clear pattern which says that women use more intensifiers in their speech. she suggests that both men and women use intensifiers at roughly similar frequency and this need to be further verified for nigerian and chinese learners who are females. conclusion chinese learners use more fillers as they are unsure about what to say (smith, siltanen & hosman, 1998). it also shows that they hesitate a lot before saying something (devito, 2006). this is because the learners use very minimum english in their daily lives and only if they are required to (appendix b). and because they do not use the language often, they do not have sufficient vocabulary to appear confident when giving their speech. the nigerian learners are more confident compared to the chinese learners hence the use of less fillers. nigerian learners are exposed to the language way earlier in their life compared to the chinese (appendix b). hence, they are more proficient in the language. they do not hesitate much when speaking. this is because they are quite comfortable when using the english language as they often communicate with friends in english as well as in their daily lives (appendix b). as for the use of intensifiers, both the nigerian and chinese learners’ use the same amount of intensifiers in their speech. they use intensifiers as they want to show the degree of intensity of a certain word. it cannot be said that all males use intensifiers in their speech as 40 percent of the nigerian learners’ and 50 percent of the chinese learners’ did not use intensifiers in their speech. some recommendations are offered as guidelines for consideration and possible application by future researchers who would like to carry out a similar research of speech styles. 1. instrument to record speech it could be seen that some of the learners were uncomfortable as there was a mobile phone in sight which is recording their speech. may be the device should be hidden so that the learners will actually feel like it is their normal environment. 2. environment when the learners were called into the discussion room one by one to give their speech there was rather a lot of pressure on them. this might have an effect on their performance. the researcher should just record their speech during their class presentation in front of their friends where they might feel more secure as there is support from their peers. 3. length of speech before the recording session takes place the researcher should give the learners a minimum time frame for their speech. this is to make sure that the length of speech is rather standardized. acknowledgements many people have helped in so many ways to complete this research. it would not have been possible without their support and help. therefore, i would like to express many thanks to all but in particular associate prof. dr. kuang ching hei for her patience and her valuable and constructive suggestions during the planning and development of this project. i would also like the opportunity to thank my family and friends for always keeping my progress on schedule and for always being there to support and encourage me throughout the years. references ali j. m. 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(1990). you just don’t understand: women and men in conversation. new york: william morrow. wide, s. (20 april 2010). second-language and the accommodation theory. retrieved from http://ezinearticles.com/?second-languageand-the-accommodation-theory&id=4146267 yuan, j., liberman, m. & cieri, c. (2006). towards an integrated understanding of speaking rate in conversation. proceedings of interspeech 2006, pp. 541-544. indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 215 students’ interest in general english class and their reaction towards teaching methods maya lisa aryanti department of economics, faculty of economics, university of widyatama, indonesia e-mail: maya.lisa@widyatama.ac.id apa citation: aryanti, m. l. (2017). students’ interest in general english class and their reaction towards teaching methods. indonesian efl journal, 3(2), 215-224. received: 03-05-2017 accepted: 23-06-2017 published: 01-07-2017 abstract: this article discusses about a few points which make the students interested in learning general english, students’ reaction on teaching method used by the lecturers, and additional description used to explain certain materials. this study is important because teaching non english department students is challenging. this study is included into a qualitative research. the used theories are teaching-learning theories. hence, the theories of research methodology and a few linguistic theories are taken. general english remains basic english course given either in the first semester or in the second one. through this research, it appears that discussion method and lecture method are still needed. however, the students will be more delight if learning process is supported by visual media or if they often get challenges. further, general english materials still continue being developed as new curriculum is released. keywords: general english, teaching method, students’ reaction introduction general english is an english lesson taken in the first or second semester for non english department students. it is challenging for the lecturer because suitable teaching methods, the ability to understand students’ capability in understanding materials provided in the module, and the teacher’s will to understand the students’ interest are required. for students, it is challenging because they have a chance to improve their english and they can measure their ability through exercises in general english class. students’ interest in general english class is different because it is affected by their needs, their capacity, and their goal which are also heterogeneous. therefore, different teaching methods and teachers’ willingness to develop their linguistic skills are needed to motivate their students. teaching method is a method used for teaching. surya (2004, p. 78) states that “teaching method which is used by the teacher should be varies in accordance to the purposes and taught materials. by using various teaching methods, the teacher does not only use one method but also other relevant methods in turns.” further, pidarta (1990, p. 19-21) mentions at least eight teaching methods. it includes; giving a lecture, involving either a practitioner or an expert, involving the students in question-answer activity, involving students in a discussion, sharing experience, field study, the use of projector, and giving a number of tasks which later will be discussed and will convince feedback. beside the teaching method, learning media is also needed to help the teacher to deliver the material and also maya lisa aryanti students’ interest in general english class and their reaction towards teaching methods 216 to make the students more interested in the teaching and learning activity. pidarta (1990, pp. 23-24) systematically lists learning media as: mass media, such as newspaper, flyers, brochures, and magazines, other books out of the used textbooks as their basis, the results of research, experts/practitioner/panel, society or schools where the cases were taken, images, photos, slides and the projector, cassette-video along with its television, calculator, and computer. however, pidarta (1990) notes that some lecturers may not use all of these media because the usage depends on the lectures’ personality and the material they deliver. during general english class, discussion may take place and there must be some feedback. mortiboys (2005, pp. 40-41) state that on courses where participants have been learning a skill, create the chance for one to perform a skill (learner a) and for another to observe the performance (learner b). guide b in the principles of giving effective feedback, which include: start with the positive, sandwhich the negative between the positive, confine his/her feedback to the amount the recipient can handle rather than the amount he/she would like to give, make sure the feedback is something the recipient is in a position to act on, make observations not inferences, be specific rather than generalizing, and leave the recipient feeling motivated. students’ inteligence is difference from each others. hence, their types of learning must be different. mortiboys (2005, pp. 36-37) proposes seven types of learning activity that suit each intelligence. they are: linguistic, logicalmathemathical, spatial/visual, bodily/kinaesthetic, musical/auditorial, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. linguistic responds well to learning activities which involve a variety of text and auditory stimulus, the chance to talk through new concepts, public speaking, creative writing, and verbal debate. logical mathematical responds well to learning activities which involve; using abstract symbols to represent concrete objects and concepts, seeing patterns in ideas and relationships, solving logical puzzles and working out sequences, cause and effect analysis, calculating, and estimating. spatial/visual responds well to learning activities such as those which involve; imagining, drawing, designing, consrtuction, painting, and mindmapping (deporter, reardon, & singernourie). bodily/kinaesthetic responds well to learning activities such as those which involve; movement, touch or other physical experiences, hands-on projects, role play, and working with objects. musical/auditorial responds well to learning activities such as those which involve; working with sounds and keeping rhythm (deporter, reardon, & singer-nourie, 1999). interpersonal responds well to learning activities such as those which involve; cooperative learning, considering issues from a range of perspective, interpersonal problemsolving, giving feedback, receiving feedback, and active listening. intrapersonal responds well to learning activities such as those which involve; time for reflection, self-assessment, feelings responses, and developing selfawareness. in addition to the seven learning activities stated above, surya (2004, p. 78) classifies learning methods into four, namely: lectures, self-study, concurrent learning, and collaborative learning. lectures is a learning model which is conducted by following lectures from the lecturers. the main characteristics of this learning method is the students listen to the explanation given by lecturers, activities and environment controlled by the lecturers, retrieved knowledge depending on the ability of the students in accepting the material delivered by indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 217 the lecturers, lack of technology support, and lasting in authoritative atmosphere. the second learning model is selfstudy. it is conducted by the students independently in the rest of the activity. the characteristics of this model are; focusing on one’s thought, self-directed process, the content of the knowledge in a form of reflection and integrity, using multimedia, and internal self-estimate. the third learning model is concurrent learning. this model is conducted by the responsibility endured by the learners solely but in togetherness atmosphere with the others and interact to each others either directly or indirectly. the characteristics of this model are; the learning activity is conducted participatively, in an open forum, in circumstance where everyone respects each others, in which material is in its perpective, and democratic atmosphere supported by technology. the fourth learning model is collaboratice learning. this model is conducted collaboratively, that is: collaboration in which learners help each other in a team. the characteristics of this model are; the learning activity is conducted through a cooperation to get concensus, the availability of various values and value mutual understanding, the decision made based on the agreement made by the members or based on value determined by the members of a team. briefly, there are three points highlighted why this research needs to be conducted. for the lecturers, this research is expected to be able to improve their ability to teach or to choose appropriate approach while lecturing, to convince the lecturer to consider using appropriate media, and to develop teaching design for general english class. for the students, this research is expected to enable them to improve their english skills which has not developed yet. for those who was not interested in english, this research is expected either to move or to motivate them. method this case study discusses about how teaching methods used by the lecturer affects the students’ interest in general english class. this situation fits to a theory formulated by heigham and croker (2009) which states that for a qualitative researcher a ‘case’ can be seen as a bounded system comprised of an individual, institution, or entity and the site and context in which social action takes place, the boundaries of which may not be clear, and are determined by the scope of the researcher’s interests. the participants of this research are several students who come from faculty of economy, faculty of business and management, and faculty of language for the period of september-december 2014. the data for this study were taken from questionnaires given to the students. two questions in the questionnaire were adapted from ikad form. in addition, fifty three indicators used to mark students’ answer had been spread before conducting this study. however, only twenty eight were taken and were reliable. further, the questionaires were analyzed by following these steps: 1) listing all answers in accordance to the questions, 2) calculating some similar answers by using sticks, 3) reclassifying the answers and making some new labels where it is necessary, and 4) rephrasing the new classification in order to make the explanation understandable. results and discussion in this section, the analysis results of the questions listed in the questionnaires maya lisa aryanti students’ interest in general english class and their reaction towards teaching methods 218 which are given to the students are discussed. the first set of questions relates to students’ interest/personal motivation. the first question demands the students to answer the question shortly. while the second question demands the students to write down their thoughts even though in fact most of them expressed their wish. the second set of questions relates to teaching method used by the lecturer. the first question demands the students to answer how the teaching method conducted by the lectuerer was and whether it is understandable or not. hence, their answers are varies and depend on their view and their experience in class. the second question demands the students to express their thought about ‘innovative teaching method’. the third question relates to additional context or description to help the students to understand the material. the students were asked wheteher or not the addition is sufficient or not to help them to understand the topic which was being discussed. table 1. questions related to students’ interest/personal motivation no questions responses total 1. are you interested in learning general english? yes 25 not really 7 a little 2 no 1 2. what did you expect in the first and second meetings of general english? the introduction of subjcets/syllabus/ curriculum 2 interesting 1 to deepen english sentence structure 1 holiday 1 do not hope anything 3 grammar 1 enable to master english grammar 1 expect to understand all subjects in general english 4 wish to have enjoyable learning 1 hope to get motivation which urges the students to study 1 want to master the subjects in general english immediately 2 the lecturer is expected to be able to deliver the materials clearly 1 want to deepen basic english skills 1 prioritizing conversation 1 discuss the importance of english 1 the lecturer is expected to teach by using power point 1 want to be able to speak english fluently 1 toefl 1 want to have a lot of discussion 2 the lecturer is expected to deliver some new interesting materials 1 the lecturer is expected to deliver materials digestively and effectively 1 want to experience more attractive teaching 1 indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 219 and learning method want to experience atractive and dynamic teaching method 1 want to experience proper and atractive teaching method 1 want to measure english proficiency of the students 1 based on the students’ answers presented in the table above, in the first and the second meetings of general english class, the students mostly expected to be able to improve their english competence, to experience new teaching-learning process, to have motivation/encouragement from the teacher, and to be introduced to lecture material, sylabus, and curriculum more deeply. the students who are interested in improving their english competence usually hope to be able to converse in class or to have a conversation class. meanwhile, the others wish either to be able to deepen their knowledge on basic english grammar or to try toefl. the students’ english competence can be improved by writing some free writings or by trying to create some english sentences (usually five sentences) with different tenses. by doing these activities, the students were encouraged to open dictionaries to find certain words which they have not yet recognized. in general english class, the students were often involved in discussion. first of all, they were given some simple questions related to the topic which was going to be explained. these simple questions are often addressed as ‘warming up’. for instance: when they are going to learn subject and verb agreement, they were asked to judge which one of the following sentence has a proper subject-verb agreement; 1. she is a huntress vs. she are a huntress. 2. a water is being ordered vs. a bottle of water is being ordered. if their answer for the first question is she is a huntress and for the second question is a bottle of water is being ordered, then their answers are correct. hence, it can be assumed that they have known the basic of s-v agreement and the lecturer can either give deeper explanation or move to another point of the topic. after giving those simple questions and the theories, module-based exrecises were given and the students were asked to finish it within a few minutes. afterwards, they will be involved in a discussion. during the teaching and learning process, power point was not used. the lecturer relied on the white board and markers. in term of motivation, the students tend to make a high ept score (that is 500) as their target. regarding this, they often get reminded that they will regret if they only hope to get high score. therefore, they were encouraged to think the importance of learning english for their future. in the first and second week of the lecture, the students expected to be introduced to lecture material, sylabus, and curriculum more deeply because most of them generally graduated from senior high school with a little understanding about english grammar. they generally recognised english topics (e.g: tense types, passive voice, and active gerund and infinitive) but they have not yet recognised other materials, for examples: s-v agreement (more maya lisa aryanti students’ interest in general english class and their reaction towards teaching methods 220 advance level), parts of speech, dependent clauses, passive gerunds, and infinitives. table 2. questions related to teaching method used by the lecturer no questions responses total 1. how was teaching method conducted by the lecturer? is it understanable? easy to understand 7 quite good 6 good and tactful 4 understandable but a bit boring 5 quite attractive, quite audible, but rather boring 1 good but sometimes complicated 1 quite good 1 quite clear and flexible but a bit boring 1 poor 2 monotonous 2 fair 1 good 4 very good 2 quite motivational because the students have some chances to ask 3 less interactive 1 plain, tend to be dull 1 too stiff 1 still need to be improved because there are some students who do not understand english 1 2. what do you think of “innovative” teaching method that should be applied in general english class? do not be too formal 2 slow and gradual material delivery 1 games are needed 4 providing a quiz once a week 1 entertaining the students 1 providing some intriguing words as examples and discussing them with the students 1 studying while playing with some words 2 just the way you are 1 it will be great for the lecturer if she let her students converse in english among themselves 1 joke is needed 4 practices for examples singing and conversing in english 2 students’ debate is needed 1 material delivery should be clearer in the future. 1 speaks slowly please 1 the students should be given some opportunities to answer questions before the class more often 1 give quizes in form of games in every meeting in the first ten minutes and the result of the quizes give contribution to 1 indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 221 marking system. making discussion groups to discuss about current situation 4 ‘questions and answers activity’ concerning to dialy routines (depending their backgrounds, jobs, etc) is needed among the students 1 explain simple thing but it can be understood 1 use power point and video/music as teaching media 4 do not discuss theories too much 1 talk to the students in english and direct them so that they understand the materials given by the lecturer 1 english conversation is needed 1 always give module-based practices in order that the students do not get bored 1 many examples of various sentences and of various questions should be abundance. 1 based on the answers, teaching methods used by the lecturer convinced various reactions; fourteen students say that the teaching method used by the lecturer is very good, twelve students state that teaching method used by the lecturer is pretty good, nine students answer that teaching method used by the lecturer is good, eight students consider that teaching method used by the lecturer is bad, and only one student state that teaching method used by the lecturer is fair. here, the lecturer uses both lecturing method and giving a number of tasks which later demand feedback. the lecturer uses lecturing method because the students need to know some new theories. while lecturing, the lecturer often uses either part of movies or part of a song to give an interesting illustration. for example: 1) the lecturer quotes and writes on the white board marisha’s line from the movie van hellsing to illustrate the use of infinitive: “do you like to fly, ana?” 2) the lecturer quotes and writes on the white board dr. tutopolus’s line from the movie godzilla to illustrate countable plural noun without ending-s: “where are the fish?” or 3) the lecturer quotes and writes on the white board the title of frozen popular theme song: let it go to illustrate the formulation of let+ object pron+v base. as it has been mentioned above that after giving simple questions and theories to the students, module-based exercises were given and the students were asked to finish it within a few minutes. afterwards, they will be involved in a discussion which later they get some feedback if the material has already been recognized. before the discussion began, the students were encouraged to write their answers on the white board. they became brave and were eager to write their answer after the lecturer assured them that they would not get chastised or got zero score because of their mistakes. the lecturer decided to use this kinaesthetic in order to prevent the students getting bored or falling asleep in the class. however, a few students seemed unconvinced with this method because they expected either to experience a maya lisa aryanti students’ interest in general english class and their reaction towards teaching methods 222 concurrent learning where they could form a group discussion to discuss current issue in the society or to experience a collaborative learning where they can communicate with each others by asking their fellow about their activity. they might be interested in taking a role or interested in game but these would be completely kinaesthethic which probably would distract their concentration in learning process. the teacher used lecturing and self study method mostly in the class because the students still needs to learn a few concepts. however, based on the students’ opinions, innovative teaching methods were also applied. they include; 1) practice: some students wish to converse in english either with their friends or with their lecturer while the others wish to learn english by singing certain songs or by experiencing relevant practices, 2) interesting learning media: the students who wish to experience effective teaching-learning process expresses that they want the teacher to use power point, 3) jokes: certain students need certain jokes to raise their spirit to learn, 4) moderate information delivery: some students need some information explained in a slow and rhytmic voice, and 5) providing challenges: some students need to get some challenges. the challenge can be in a form of pop quizes, debate, question and answer game among the students, etc. table 3. questions related to additional context or description to help the students to understand the material question responses total responses did your lecturer give sufficient description/ additional sentences on the materials? yes 28 not really 1 no 1 the following are the students’ reaction towards whether or not the lecturer give sufficient description/additional sentences on the materials; twenty eight students give positive respond and only one student is not sure whether or not the lecturer gave him/her sufficient description/ additional sentences on the materials. besides, the similar result is shown for a negative answer. during the teaching and learning activity, the lecturer gives additional description when the students are confused and do not understand about certain topics. the following examples will give illustration about how the lecturer gives sufficient description/additional sentences on the materials: 1. water boils at 100 degrees celsius. answer: right 2. the water boils. can you turn it off. answer: wrong 3. look! that man tries to open the door of your car. answer: wrong 4. can you hear those people? what do they talk about? answer: wrong 5. the moon goes round the earth. answer: right 6. i must go now. it gets late. answer: wrong 7. i usually go to work by car. answer: right 8. ‘hurry up! it’s time to leave.’ ‘ok, i come.’ answer: wrong 9. i hear you’ve got a new job. how do you get on? answer: right 10. shhhhh! sheila sleeps. don’t make much noise. answer: wrong 11. ‘______________(you/listen) to the radio?’ ‘no, you can turn it off.’ indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 223 12. ‘______________(you/listen) to the radio everyday?’ ‘no, just occasionally.’ analysis: sentence number 1 and number 5 must use simple present because everyone knows, admits, and accepts the truth that water boils at 100 celcius and the moon goes round the earth. number 7 must use simple present because there is a word “usually” which is generally used to describe habit or daily routine. number 9 must use simple present because the the speaker asks about one’s condition. sentence number 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 10 are considered wrong because the sentences should use present continuous tense because all events illustrated in the sentence in every number are the events which are occuring. this can be seen from situational context given in each number. if the students have adequate vocabularies and personal experience and try to imagine themselves in the situation depicted within the provided sentences, they will be able to understand the context. the same case stand for sentence number 11 and 12. if the students have adequate vocabularies and personal experience and try to imagine themselves in the situation depicted within the provided sentences, they will be able to conclude that they must use present continuous tense to answer question number 11. to answer number 12, the students can consider the words “everyday” and “occasionally” as keywords to detemine tense type which must be used. conclusion general english remains the first basic english lesson in either the first or the second semester. through this research, it is revealed that lecturing method and discussion method conducted between the lecturer and the students are still needed. however, the students will be more delight either if the learning process is supported by visual media or if they often get challenged. thus, in class, there are some times where the students have opportunities both to review what they have studied in both junior and senior high school and to show their ability to use their english writing skill properly. references deporter, r., reardon, & singer-nourie. (1999). quantum teaching: orchestrating student success. boston: peason education company. heigham, & croker. (2009). qualitative research in applied linguistics: a practical introduction. united kingdom: palgrave macmillan. mortiboys, a. (2005). teaching with emotional intelligence: a step-by-step guide for higher further education professionals. new york: routlege. pidarta, m. (1990). cara belajar mengajar di universitas negara maju. jakarta: bumi aksara. surya, h. m. (2004). psikologi pembelajaran dan pengajaran. bandung: pustaka bani quraisy. maya lisa aryanti students’ interest in general english class and their reaction towards teaching methods 224 drummer a drummer, sick of all the drummer jokes, decides to change his instrument. after some thought, he decides on the accordion. so he goes to the music store and says to the owner, "i'd like to look at the accordions, please." the owner gestures to a shelf in the courner and says, "all our accordions are over there." after browsing, the drummer says, "i think i'd like the big red one in the corner." the store owner looks at him and says, "you're a drummer, aren't you?" the drummer, crestfallen, says, "how did you know?" the store owner says, "that 'big red accordion' is the radiator." (source: http://www.study-express.ru/humour/funny-stories.shtml, picture: www.google.co.id) http://www.study-express.ru/humour/funny-stories.shtml indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 93 conversational implicature of indonesian students in daily conversation annisa martini department of english education, faculty of teachers training and education, university of kuningan email: annisamartini@gmail.com apa citation: martini, a. (2018). conversational implicature of indonesian students in daily communication. indonesian efl journal, 4(1), 93-100. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v4i1.889. received: 22-11-2017 accepted: 28-12-2017 published: 01-01-2018 abstract: the research examined conversational implicature of indonesian students of english education department in university of kuningan in the daily conversation. the reason of choosing this topic was based on the problem in which people frequently produce utterances which are not informative or provide less or too much information as required in their daily conversation. this qualitative research used observation and recording to collect the data needed. as result, this research found 80 utterances indicating conversational implicature which consist of 32 utterances (40%) belonging to generalized conversational implicature and 48 utterances (60%) belonging to particularized conversational implicature. in conclusion, the utterances contain two types of conversational implicature and its function in conversation causing different assumption based on tsuda’s theory such as violation of grice’s cooperative principle, power and solidarity and joking indirect conversation. however, the functions itself are influenced by interpretation of the researcher as the listener or a reader. keywords: conversational implicature, daily conversation, functions of conversational implicature, indonesian students introduction conversational implicature is the basic assumption in conversation in which the participants are adhering to the cooperative principle and the maxims (yule, 1996). maxim is an assumption to use utterance in information that provided by speaker or writer. grice (1975) considers these maxims as unstated assumptions in conversations. the assumption is then elaborated into four subprinciples of maxim, there are maxim of quantity, maxim of quality, maxim of relevant, and maxim of manner. first, in maxim of quantity, people are required to give contribution as informative as is required and do not make their contribution more informative than is required. second, maxim of quality asks people to make their contribution that is ture, do not say what they believe to be false, and do not say that for which they lack adequate evidence. third, in maxim of relevant, people are required to make their contribution which is relevant. last, in maxim of manner, people are required to avoid obscurity of expression, avoid ambiguity, be brief, and be orderly. on the other hand, yule (1996) states that the expectations of cooperative principle does not have an appropriate what is being uttered. this statement describes the implicature that the speaker flouts the grice’s maxim in an utterance. conversational implicature is the basic assumption in conversation is that, unless otherwise indicated, the participants are adhering to the cooperative principle and the maxims (yule, 1996, p. 44). when the speakers are giving the message to the interlocutor, the listeners can conclude what the speakers said. conversational implicatures have two kinds; generalized conversational implicature and particularized conversational implicature. yule (1996) explains that “a generalized mailto:annisamartini@gmail.com annisa martini conversational implicature of indonesian students in daily communication 94 conversational implicature occurs when no special knowledge is required in the context to calculate the additional conveyed meaning” (p. 45). in this kind of implicature, the speaker gives the utterance, but the listener just respond a part of the utterance. in addition, yule (1996) states such inferrences are required to work out of the delivering meanings which result from particularized conversational implicature. the inferrence of utterance totally is not going on the context. tsuda (1993) explains that functions of conversational implicature is a framework of indirectness conversation that has three functions of indirectness conversation. there are violation of grice’s cooperative principle, power and solidarity, and joking as indirect expression. accordingly, the study focuses on analyzing the types of conversational implicature made by indonesian students in their daily conversation and the function constructed constructed by indonesian students in their conversational implicature. method this qualitative research involved 16 english department students to be the participants. the research concerns in natural context such as when the students use their language in their daily conversation. the data were collected through observation and recording. it purposes to analyze how the conversational implicature is conducted in natural context and determine the types of conversational implicature and its function. the researcher then presents 40 data selected from the recording in which 20 data belonging to generalized conversational implicature and 20 data belonging to particularized conversational implicature. in addition, the researcher analyzed the function of conversational implicature. the steps in analyzing the data include transcribing the recording, identifying the data transcription, coding on the list where it is indicated as the type of conversational implicature, making the occurrences precentage of the types of conversational implicature, and describing the function of the utterance that has conversational implicature. to calculate the percentage of the frequency of conversational implicature, the researcher uses the following formula by subana (2000): fk rel = x 100% fk rel = frequency of relative cumulative (the result of precentages) fk = frequency of cumulative (the number of occurences of conversational implicature types) ʃf = frequency of total (the number of the whole occurences of conversational implicature types) results and discussion types of conversational implicature from six recordings, the researcher found 80 utterances belonging to the two types of conversational implicature, namely generalized conversational implicature and particularized conversational implicature. the percentage of each type of conversational implicature is presented in the table below. table 1. types of conversational implicature identified no. types of conversational implicature frequency precentage (%) 1. generalized conversational implicature 32 40% 2. particularized conversational implicature 48 60% total 80 100% from the table, it can be seen that there are found 80 data of conversational implicature consisting of 32 data or 40% belonging to generalized conversational implicature and 48 data or 60% belonging to particularized conversational implicature. annisa martini conversational implicature of indonesian students in daily communication 94 generalized conversational implicature data #1 ismi :“yang di kelas tuh siapa aja, yang marry, alex?” (who are in the class, marry, alex?) mimi : “gak ada alex. oh maksudnya alex kelas ini?” (there is no alex. oh, you mean alex in this class?) ismi : “he’eh kelas ini.” (he’eh this class.) mimi : “ada, iya. teteh suka sama alex?” (yes. do you like alex?) (context) in the second floor, ismi asked mimi to call marry and alex who would be the participants of her research. but, in the middle of conversation, mimi asked ismi’s feeling to alex. the conversation between ismi and mimi can be categorized as generalized conversational implicature because it does not have special background knowledge about its context. ismi asked about a student named alex. mimi firstly said that there is no student named alex, but she then realized that there is a student named alex in that class. nevertheless, mimi suddenly asked ismi’s feeling to alex. the function of “yes. do you like alex?” is to make a tease for ismi or mimi wants to know ismi’s feeling to alex. this has flouted the maxim of quantity because mimi gives more information than it is required. data #2 ismi : “cik atuh marry mau panggil sini dong. mau ada perlu sih sebenernya mau penelitian.” (please, call marry. i need her for my research) mimi : “kenapa gak ke kita aja gitu, kita kan pinter.” (why don’t do it to us, we are smart.) ismi : “boleh boleh, ke kalian aja ya. penelitiannya meneliti short story, kalau kalian mau...” (well, sure. i’ll involve you in this research. the research is going to observe about short story, if you want...) (context) ismi was excited that mimi has offered herself to be volunteer of ismi’s research and ismi was little bit happy because mimi wanted to be her participant. the utterance “well, sure. the research is going to observe about short story, if you want...” includes as generalized conversational implicature because ismi’s utterance does not have background knowledge about mimi’s statement. the statement explains that mimi and her friend are smart too, but ismi did not know it. so, ismi was very excited when mimi offered herself to be the participant in ismi’s research. furthermore, this is the flout of maxim quantity because ismi added more information that is not required by mimi. indeed, for the function of this impicature is that ismi was very excited when heard mimi requested to be a participant of her research although ismi did not ask mimi before. data #3 mimi :“enggak mau lah teh ke marry aja sama ratna.” (i don’t want to do that, just ask marry and ratna) ismi :“ia nanti panggilin dong marry dulu aja marry yah?” (please call marry then, okay?”) (context) ismi asked mimi to call marry since mimi do not want to be the participant in her research. the underline statement is included into generalized conversational implicature because when mimi said that she would like call marry and ratna, ismi only needed marry who would be participant and she ignored ratna as an option in mimi’s statement. the function of implicature is ismi asked mimi to call marry because she just needed marry who is one of the smartest students in the class. indeed, for ismi’s utterance, it includes the flout of maxim quantity because ismi makes a contribution in her utterance more than as requested. data #4 cathy : “he’eh sih. nanyanya yang banyak. nanya apa aja. terus ngasih apa teh gitu ke pihak anaknya enggak?” indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 95 (he’eh. asking more questions. asking anything. do you want to give them something?) alin : “nanti atuh itu mah.” (we’ll see.) cathy : “tapi mau kamu?” (but, do you want to do that?) alin : “kayanya mau da objeknya juga cuma satu. kalau misalkan objek akunya banyak anak-anak di kelas paling ke gurunya, ini mah objeknya cuma satu ya mungkin ke gurunya.” (probably, i will do it because it is the only one object. if my object is a lot of children in the class, it will be conducted to the teacher, but this is the only one.) (context) the underline gives the explanation of alin’s utterance. alin attempted to explain about how the way to interview to the teacher or students. the underlined utterance means that alin gives the example about for whom she will give the gift after doing observation. the function of “i think i will do it because it is the only one object. if my object is a lot of children in the class, it will be conducted to the teacher, but this is the only one” is generalized conversational implicature for the reason that essentially cathy does not need alin’s details. indeed, it indicates as flout of maxim quantity because alin has added information more than cathy’s assumption such as alin informs the participants who will be given a gift in supporting her observation. data #5 alin : laporan ppl pada udah ya kalian?” (have you finished the report of ppl?) cathy : “udah.” (yes, i have.) dinda : “tapi yang softcopynya aku belum.” (but, i haven’t done the softcopy.) (context) dinda’s uttearance illustrates that she had accomplished the report, but she had not already collected her task in softcopy. dinda says “but, i haven’t done the softcopy” in the conversation showing dinda’s utterance is generalized conversational implicature because the utterance refers to alin’s question. alin asks to her friends about ppl report, but then dinda suddenly says she has not collected the softcopy report yet. in the conversation, alin has known about the report in softcopy and hardcopy but she does not put the option because they have understood the context. dinda says “but, i haven’t done the softcopy” because she had already finished and collected the hardcopy, not the softcopy. this utterance then flouts the maxim of manner. particularized conversational implicature data #6 ismi : “udah ngobrol sama alex sih, alex mau. nah marry mau enggak?” (i have talked to alex, and he agreed. how about you?) marry : “ia, yah mau teh.” (yes, i will.) ismi : “baik banget, ih dia baik banget.” (very kind, she’s very kind.) (context) ismi gave the compliment to marry because marry had been ready to be a participant in her observation. the utterance “very kind, she’s very kind” is the particularized conversational implicature because the utterance works out of the context. when marry said that she was ready to help ismi but ismi gave the respond about marry’s character which it absolutely does not have relation to marry’s utterance. it has implicit with what was conveyed in the message. it flouted the maxim of relevant because ismi has added the information that is not relevant and it was not informative for the answer. moreover, the function of the implicature that ismi intended to persuade and gave the expression of compliment for marry so that marry would like to help her. data #7 ismi : “ini ada short storynya. itu dari bahasa inggris nanti ditranslatein ke bahasa indonesia nanti kirim lewat e-mail aja.” annisa martini conversational implicature of indonesian students in daily communication 96 (this is the short story. it is written in english so that you should translate it into bahasa and send the result via e-mail.) marry : “iya.” (yes.) ismi : “wah, bapaknya udah masuk...” (wah, the lecturer has entered...) marry : “ini buat marry sendiri gitu?” (is this for me?) (context) ismi wanted to close the conversation because there was a lecturer who come in the class. ismi’s utterance comprised the particularized conversational implicature because ismi’s utterance has worked out of the context. for instance, the utterance “wah, the lecturer has entered...” has flouted the maxim of relevant because it has conveyed the meaning that is not informative and related within the context being spoken. when they were talking about ismi’s observation, ismi responded about the lecturer who come into the class to teach b class. the function of “wah, the lecturer has entered...” is ismi wanted to close the conversation for the reason that there is a lecturer who come to the class and she was hurry up to end the explanation. nevertheless, marry still asked her about some pieces of paper in her hands. data #8 alin : “yaiya atuh pas ngerecord kan interview.” (yes, i was interviewing when i did the recording.) cathy : “mmm, ya diini direkam.” (mmm, yes it was recorded.) alin : “nanti diketik lagi. ia, kan cuma ada 3 orang.” (then it will be typed again. yes, there were 3 persons.) (context) alin told cathy the next step after interviewing and then informing the number of her participant. alin’s utterance attempts to explain that she will transcribe after recording the conversation. the utterance “then will typed again. yes, there are 3 person” belongs to particularized conversational implicature because when cathy’s statement just “mmm, recorded”, alin responds out of cathy’s statement. moreover, the utterance “then will typed again. yes, there are 3 person” means that alin has known what should she do in her observation. she emphasizes that she will be able do the next step and also informs the number of the participant that is not required by cathy as the speaker. the utterance then flouts the maxim of relevant because what is being spoken is not relevant with alin’s response. data #9 cathy : “atuh berarti itu kamu ngeluarin uang banyak ya nanti tuh?” (it means that you will spend more money for it?) alin : “ih, nanti mah simple aja ngasihnya kalau mau mah, anaknya baik itu mah kaya cewek.” (it’s so simple to give him, he is kind as a girl.) cathy : “he’em.” (he’em.) (context) the utterance above demonstrates that alin will give anything if the participant also wants to support her observation. the utterance “ih, it’s so simple to give him, he is kind as a girl” is particularized conversational implicature because alin’s response towards cathy’s question does not relate to what cathy has said. cathy asks alin about “it means that you will spend more money for it?” and alin answers by giving statement that work out of cathy’s assumption like adding a gender. for example alin makes the participant similar with a girl. it should not be put on her response because cathy does not need the information. subsequently, this flouts maxim of relevant as it does not relate with cathy’s utterance. data #10 alin : “ah, males ah.” (ah, upsetting.) cathy : “pas aku kesini baru masuk?” (when i come in, has she just come into the room?) indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 97 (context) cathy asked alin about her guidence with the supervisor and she saw alin who was being lazy because she had been waiting for a long time. the particularized conversational implicature signed by the utterance “when i come in, has she just come into the room?” because it works out of the context when alin says that she get upset to wait for several minutes, suddenly cathy asks a question to her. the question does not relate with alin’s statement. this utterance then flouts the maxim of relevant because cathy’s utterance is not relevant with alin’s utterance. functions of conversational implicature violation of grice’s cooperative principle the first function of conversational implicature in students’ daily conversation is violation of grice’s cooperative principle. in conversational implicature, the violation is used to imply the cooperative principle of grice’s theory (tsuda, 1993). data #11 alin : “uh dia mah kita dimana dia mah udah selesai. kita mah masih dijudul dia mah udah dipembahasan. si ismi juga udah beres ya, apa lagi penelitian?” (uh, he had finished. when we are still discussing the title, he has been in the discussion. has ismi finished, or is she still doing her research?) cathy : “lagi.” (on going.) alin : “eh cathy cathy, kamu nengok cik iya biar ibunya tahu ada kita. jadi, ada kamu nanti ada aku juga nanti ibunya teh...” (eh cathy, you see the lecturer so that she knows we are here. so, here is you and me..) cathy : “tapi tadi pas aku kesini teh ya ngelihatin aja aku. dianya tuh lagi fokus sama eli dianya curhat bukan bimbingan.” (but, when i come in, she looks at me. but she focuses on eli who is telling not guding.) the underline utterance, alin orders cathy to get up from her chair and walks into the lecturer’s room then she only sees outside and probably alin is being lazy that she does not want to get the room because she has been waiting for a long time. power and solidarity according to tsuda (1993), power and solidarity is “indirectness sometimes damages communication when it is used only for selfish aims to manipulate others. in a society where people are sensitive to the rank order of the people in a group as in japan, indirectness is often employed by people of higher status to control people of lower status.” data #12 alin : “aku pernah nyobain apapun.” (i have ever tried anything.) dinda : “jaba lipstickna.” (especially the lipstick.) alin : “liptatto teh zaman dulu.” (liptatto in the past.) alin’s utterance informs that she had tried liptatto as one kind of familiar lipstick ever in the past, she used to buy every new lipstick especially for liptatto. alin uses the language to show up that she is a girl who loves the cosmetics. joking indirect expression they are consoled by the language that is being delivered so the people can smile easier. it is usually used in natural context such in informal situation when the people are talking with their close friend (tsuda, 1993). data #1 ismi :“yang di kelas tuh siapa aja, yang marry, alex?” (who are in the class, marry, alex?) mimi : “gak ada alex. oh maksudnya alex kelas ini?” (there is no alex. oh, you mean alex in this class?) ismi : “he’eh kelas ini.” (he’eh this class.) mimi : “ada, iya. teteh suka sama alex?” (yes. do you like alex?) the function of the underlined statement is to make a tease to ismi or mimi annisa martini conversational implicature of indonesian students in daily communication 98 wanted to know ismi’s feeling towards alex. the utterance can make them laugh because there is a little bit tease that refers to ismi. conclusion this research investigates conversational implicature of indonesian students in university of kuningan. after analyzing the data transcription, the researcher found 80 utterance belong to the two types of conversational implicature such generalized conversational implicature and particularized conversational implicature. of 80 utterances, 32 utterances (40%) belong to generalized conversational implicature and 48 utterances (60%) belong to particularized conversational implicature. from the precentage, it can be seen that the dominant of conversational implicature in natural context of indonesian students is particularized conversational implicature with the number of occurrences is 48 (60%). meanwhile, in terms of the function of conversational implicature, the research revealed three function of conversation, there are violation of grice’s cooperative principle, power and solidarity, and joking indirect expression. the function itself can be influenced by the situation in communication. however, the researcher concludes that the function depends on interpretation of the researcher and the speakers or the listeners who are participants in a conversation. so, the conversational implicature can be occured in a conversation especially in natural context. therefore, there has no principle to use the language widely, because as many as people use the language appropriate with their needs. references grice, h. p. (1975). logic & conversation. barkeley: university of california. harmer, j. (2008). the practice of english language teaching. cambridge: longman. inayati, a., citraresmana, e., & mahdi, s. (2014). flouting maxims in particularized conversational implicature. journal of language learning and applied linguistics world, 6(3), 53-61. kreidler, c. w. (1998). introducing englsih semantics. new york: routledge. leech, g. n. (1983). principle of pragmatics. london: longman. levinson, s. n. (1983). pragmatics. new york: cambridge university press. lodico, m. g., spaulding, d. t., & voegitle, k. h. (2006). methods in educational research. san fransisco: jossey-bass. schiffrin, d., tannen, d., & hamilton, h. e. (2001). the handbook of discourse analysis. oxford: blackwell publisher. subana. (2000). statistik pendidikan. bandung: pustaka setia. tsuda, s. (1993). indirectness in discourse: what does it do in conversation? journal of intercultural communication studies, 3(1), 63-74. yule, g. (1996). pragmatics. new york: oxford university press. indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 225 dissociating realities and trans-forming self in david ebershoff’s the danish girl kamelia talebian sedehi payam noor university, isfahan branch, isfahan, iran e-mail: cml.talebian@gmail.com tay lai kit department of english, faculty of modern languages & communication universiti putra malaysia e-mail: taylor5794@hotmail.com apa citation: sedehi, k. t., & kit, t. l. (2017). dissociating realities and trans-forming self in david ebershoff’s the danish girl. indonesian efl journal, 3(2), 225-230. received: 21-05-2017 accepted: 26-06-2017 published: 01-07-2017 abstract: since its film debut in 2015, the danish girl has garnered major attention on the novel which was originally published in 2000 by david ebershoff. as portrayed evidently in both mediums, einar wegener is depicted as a transgendered individual who suffers from gender identity disorder. however, this paper intends to argue that einar could potentially suffer from dissociative identity disorder (did), or more commonly referred to as multiple personality disorder. to specify, the current paper contends that einar dissociates himself from the reality he is grounded in and becomes another character upon any overwhelming situation. dissociation happens when the subject is subjected to extreme reality and breaks under pressure, thus, creating another persona as an act of self-protection to defend himself from the situation. as such, this article will shed light on the issue by providing textual evidences which helps in reading einar as a patient of did instead of being a transgender. keywords: dissociation, dissociative identity disorder, multiple personality disorder, the danish girl, alter introduction early childhood is a critical age. if parents do not take care of their children during that period, the children might suffer the consequences in the future. physical, sexual or emotional abuse will lead to trauma in later years. one of the effects of being traumatized can show itself in the form of dissociative identity disorder (did) which was known as multiple personality disorder. this disorder was not known before and now adays more diagnostic tools helped the psychologists to have information about this disorder. moreover, people have more access to the services which help them with child abuse which was hold in secrecy in the past. janet (1889), a french psychiatrist was the first to emphasize the role of trauma in the genesis of dissociative symptoms, which at the time were called hysteria (mcallister, 2000, p. 26). almost four decades of research passed to reach authoritative information about dissociative identity disorder and its symptoms. after years of research, researchers come upon this psychological problem as an independent disorder called dissociative identity disorder. dissociative identity disorder patient has problems with his memories as part of his memories cannot be recalled by the patient. he is also confused about his own identity. in fact, dissociation is a coping mechanism in which the traumatized patient dissociates himself from the situations kamelia talebian sedehi & tay lai kit dissociating realities and trans-forming self in david ebershoff’s the danish girl 226 that reminds him of those violent memories he suffered during his childhood. in other words, “dissociation allows the person, or host who may be unable to deal with an overwhelming stress, to be controlled by an alternative personality, the alter” (mcallister, 2000, p. 25). the stressful situations can be threatening to the patients who were traumatized before and at those crucial moments the alters evolve to cope with those stressors or triggers. one should notice that “james l. spira warns us that although a history of ongoing sexual or physical violence by a family member is frequently present, the therapist must not assume apriori that family members were involved in the abuse or that direct sexual or physical violence is always the case” (harrison, 2006. p. 1). the triggers should be recognized scientifically and analyzed carefully rather than dealing with the did patient with preassumptions. as the patient dissociates himself, there are alters who evolve. “watkins and others differentiate the concept of alters from that of ego states because the alters in did have ‘their own identities, involving a center of initiative and experience, they have a characteristic self representation’” (gillig, 2009, p. 26). the alters switch and control the patient’s behavior and thoughts. the switching of the alters can take seconds, minutes, hours or days. as a result of the switching, there is a sense of confusion about who a person is. when the patient cannot define what he likes or cannot remember what he has done, a sense of confusion of identity is involved. each identity state remembers different aspects of the patient’s life; however, the host personality is not conscious of the other personalities. putnam emphasizes that “each personality holds different memories and feelings and performs different functions” (1989, p. 37). the current paper intends to focus on david ebershoff’s the danish girl in the light of dissociative identity disorder in order to prove that einar wegener underwent surgery not because he was a transgender but because he suffered from dissociative identity disorder. method there are multiple controversies about multiple personality disorder which makes it difficult to understand, diagnose, treat or discuss. multiple personality is a state in which various alters dominate the main personality. however, one should notice that multiple personality disorder was considered to be schezifrennia at first. “freud abandoned dissociation for repression. janet was marginalized by psychoanalysis and the discrediting of his mentor, charcot. behaviorism disregarded multiple personality” (fink, 2010, p. 61). later on, the psychologists note that multiple personality disorder as a chronic posttraumatic condition. the patient has various alters and each alter has his own activities, mentality and history. the alters have different ages, races, genders and names. alters emerge as it is a way to cope with the difficult moments that the patient underwent. the alters emerge to defend the dominant personality. in case, the alters achieve their autonomy, their emergence will be problematic as they disrupt different situations. as the alters have sense of ownership of their own thoughts, feelings and activities, their dominance can disturb the patient’s identity. therefore, the switching of the alters can be disruptive since each alter has its own background. the aim of this paper is to indicate how einar, in the danish girl, suffered from this disorder and what its consequences were. results and discussion the danish girl is inspired by einar wegener and his wife’s life. as the indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 227 novel opens greta asks her husband einar to wear stockings and shoes and be her model as greta’s model cancelled the appointment. both greta and einar are painters and greta needs a live model to paint; however, this incident evolves a new side of einar. after wearing women’s stockings and shoes, einar shows interest in wearing them again to the extent that he wears women’s dresses, wears makeup, and goes out with that female appearance. to conceal the fact that einar is interested in cross dressing, greta tells friends that einar’s cousin, lili, visits them recently. however, when greta mentions cousin, “‘my cousin?’ einar said, sounding confused” (ebershoff, 2000, p. 16). the sense of confusion and the fact that he does not remember he has another female alter indicates that he suffers from did. surprisingly, this happened more than once. greta would mention lili to a friend, even to anna, and einar’s face would pinch up, as if he had no idea who lili was. he and greta never spoke about afterwards, about his childlike miscomprehension: lili who? oh, yes, lili. my cousin? yes, my cousin, lili. the next day the same thing would occur again. it was as if their little secret were really just greta’s little secret, as if she were plotting behind einar’s back (ebershoff, 2000, p. 16). though einar has appeared as lili many times, mere mention of life does not remind him of any thing. it is like einar and lili are two strangers in one body. as brand et al. note that “individuals with did experience recurrent gaps in autobiographical memory” (2016, p. 257). therefore, einar and lili cannot remember what the other alter did or experienced. did patients mostly suffer from this disorder since they have suffered physically, emotionally or sexually during their childhood. einar’s childhood passed with difficulties. he had a sick father who could not support himself. “einar would rest there and feel the weak heat from his father’s bones, his ribs showing through his nightshirt. the green veins in his throat would pulse with exhaustion. einar would take his father’s hand and hold it until his grandmother, her body small and rectangular, would come to the door and shoo einar away. ‘you’ll only make him worse,’ and she’d say, too busy with the fields and the neighbors calling with sympathy to tend to einar”( ebershoff, 2000, p. 17). einar did not have a strong father to copy him as a role model; moreover, his grandmother was too busy to be able to give him the affection he needed as a child. “yet despite his admiration, einar also resented his father, sometimes cursing him as einar dug in the bog, his spade cutting through the peat” (ebershoff, 2000, p. 17). he was deprived not only of his father but also his mother during his childhood that is the main reason why the emergence of lili can be seen as an alter which seeks protection. as mcallister (2000, p. 26) states that the abused child learns to dissociate, or temporarily leave consciousness, thereby placing the memory of the trauma into the subconscious, which later reveals itself as a separate personality. as the child grows and experiences repeated abuse, different identities or personalities evolve at different times. as a man, einar is the one who should provide his wife; whereas, as a woman, lili can find a man who would express his love for her; the emotions and affections that he did not experience during his childhood. children play various roles while playing together. once einar’s father “found einar, small at age seven, in drawers, the amber beads twisted around his throat, a yellow deckscarf on his head like long beautiful hair. his father’s kamelia talebian sedehi & tay lai kit dissociating realities and trans-forming self in david ebershoff’s the danish girl 228 face turned red, and his eyes seemed to sink into his skull. einar could hear the angry rattle of his father’s breath in his throat. ‘you can’t do that!’ his father said. ‘little boys can’t do that!’ and little einar replied, ‘but why not?’” (ebershoff, 2000, p. 18). the father was very harsh and he did not give any reason for his cruelty. the time he was forbidden to play as a girl in childhood provides a situation for him in the future to create a female alter unconsciously and indicate that even men can be women and dress like women too. once, while einar was playing with his friend, hans quietly said, ‘light a fire. boil some water. drop few stone potatoes and mutton joint.’ then, more vaguely, his gravelly voice suddenly smooth, ‘einar. let’s pretend.’ hand found einar’s grandmother’s apron with the cottongrass strings hanging limply next to the stovepipe. he brought it to einar and cautiously tied it around his waist. hans touched the nape of einar’s neck, as if there were a panel of hair he needed to lift aside. ‘you never played this game’ hans whispered, his voice hot and creamy on einar’s ear, his fingers with their gnawed-down nail on einar’s neck. hans pulled the apron tighter until einar had to lift his ribs with an astonished grateful breath, his lungs filling just as einar’s father padded into the kitchen, his eyes wide and his mouth puckered into a large o (ebershoff, 2000, p. 20). it was the first time, einar was touched sensually and he felt great sensations because love was a farfetched word for him as a child. but even this beautiful moment was interrupted with his father’s presence. as they were playing, the father saw them. “’leave the boy alone!’ his father’s walking stick was raised at hans… einar could hear the wheeze of his father’s breath and the flat punch of his fist landing on einar’s cheek” (ebershoff, 2000, p. 20). it was not einar’s fault that hans intended to act sensually, but he was punished for acting like a girl. all the repression of the feelings showed themselves in the later years as lili who evolves and needs male’s attention. “lili would study her profile in the mirror, first from the left, then from the right. she was sorry about leaving greta to her newspaper and the cone of light from her reading lamp_ but not sorry enough to fail to meet henrik at the proposed iron streetlamp” (ebershoff, 2000, p. 38). einar’s identity is changed and he prefers to be female more and more from the time he could find a lover like henrik who could give him love and attention that he was deprived of when he was a child. “lili got home, and she washed her face and removed her clothes and climbed into bed as einar” (ebershoff, 2000, p. 39). the identities switch and he will be caring husband again. “the next day greta told lili she should stop seeing henrik. ‘do you think it’s fair to him?’ she asked. ‘to deceive him like this? what do you think he would think?’ but lili didn’t understand what greta meant. what would henrik think about what? unless greta plainly told her, often lili forgot who she was” (ebershoff, 2000, p. 39). the switching of the alters are so sudden that even greta does not recognize that it is not lili whom she is talking to, but einar. therefore, he cannot remember who henrik is and why she should stop seeing him. the two alters cannot remember or know what the other one has done. each of the alters has their own experience of life and see life in different ways; therefore, they cannot know what the other alter does or thinks. einar’s personality is “split into distinct identities” and he cannot remember whatever happens to him by those identities (harrison, 2006, p. 1). einar promissed to talk to henrik later. once, out with henrik, lili was wondering what henrik knows about indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 229 her. “a terrible shudder rose through lili, and it suddenly was as if einar were a third person there_ as if he were one step removed from lili and henrik’s intimate circle of confession, witnessing it all. there he was, einar in the young girl’s dress, flirting with a younger man. it was an awful sight” (ebershoff, 2000, p. 39 40). this is the moment when alters meet. for the first time, einar saw himself as lili and he was ashamed of himself and the situation he was entangled. greta never complained about lili but she greets her every time “as if she was an amusing foreign friend. she’s hum and gossip as she helped lili into her shoes” (ebershoff, 2000, p. 42). lili as an alter has an independent identity and greta respected her since she loved her husband. however, wherever there is the switching of the alters the other alter does not remember friends and people. greta would say “we’re having dinner with hans… lili asked “hans who?” (ebershoff, 2000, p. 43). hans is einar’s close friend, yet lili does not know him since she is another alter. “how old was lili? she was younger than einar, who then was nearly thirtyfive” (ebershoff, 2000, p. 50). the two identities are totally separate from each other. lili said that she is twenty four. einar and lili have different ages as they are two different alters in one body. the identities evolve so sudden that einar might sleep as einar and wake up as lili. “the smell of blood woke einar. he got out of bed, careful not to disturb greta. she looked uneasy as if her face caught in a bad dream. the blood was trickling down his inner thigh, one slow hot line. a bubble of blood was caught in his nostril. he had woken as lili” (ebershoff, 2000, p. 80). each identity has its own features and here lili as a woman bleeds. despite being a man, the other female alter has her own experience of life. when einar visited many doctors to solve his problem and know what happened to him, he confirms that “there is another person living inside me… a girl named lili” (ebershoff, 2000, p. 97). two different identities live in one body and einar intends to come to terms with this disorder. he is so scared of his current situation that he tells the doctor that “like i don’t know who i really am” (ebershoff, 2000, p. 99). he is confused about his identity and he is not sure whether he is a man or a woman and it bothers him. as a result of confusion, einar undergoeds operation to change his gender to female. but it is not certain whether he undergoes operation as a result of the fact that lili as an alter dominates einar or not. the novel ends open endedly “when she opened her eyes, lili saw that carlisle and anna hadn’t yet returned. she wasn’t worried; they’d come back for her. they would find her in her chair” (ebershoff, 2000, p. 178). after the operation, lili is waiting for her friends to come and pick her. it is not mentioned whether she is pleased with her choice or not or whether einar will emerge in the future or she would live as lili for the rest of her life. conclusion to reiterate, this paper has provided substantial merits which argue that the protagonist indeed suffers from dissociative identity disorder. while einar is mainly read as a transgender who struggles from gender identity confusion, we propose that einar’s counter identity, also known as lili (referred to as the alter) is a product of his early childhood trauma. the fact that einar was denied the opportunity to express himself as a girl when he was young affects the stability of his gender identity as he grows older. as seen over and over again, his transformation, or switching to becoming lili happens kamelia talebian sedehi & tay lai kit dissociating realities and trans-forming self in david ebershoff’s the danish girl 230 whenever there is dire situation of which einar has no control of. ultimately, the paper concludes that it is lili who dominates the body (instead of einar) and made the decision to have the surgical transformation to match her identity. references brand, b. l., sar. v., stavropoulos, p., krüger, c., korzekwa, m., martínez-taboas, a., & middleton, w. (2016). separating fact from fiction: an empirical examination of six myths about dissociative identity disorder. harvard review of psychiatry 24(4). ebershoff, d. (2000). the danish girl. new york: viking. fink, g. (2010). stress consequences: mental, neuropsychological and socioeconomic. oxford: elsevier inc. gillig, p. m. (2009). dissociative identity disorder: a controversial diagnosis. psychiatry, 6(3), 24–29. mcallister, m. m. (2000). dissociative identity disorder: a literature review. journal of psychatric and mental health nursing, 7, 25 33. putnam f. (1989). diagnosis and treatment of multiple personality disorder. new york: the guilford press. indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 193 the effect of teaching oral communication strategies on indonesian efl learners’ speaking skill yuniarti department of english education, university of kuningan, kuningan, indonesia e-mail: yuniarti.nugraha@gmail.com apa citation: yuniarti. (2017). the effect of teaching oral communication strategies on indonesian efl learners’ speaking skill. indonesian efl journal, 3(2), 193-202. received: 25-05-2017 accepted: 26-06-2017 published: 01-07-2017 abstract: this study reports on applying the teaching of oral communication strategies (ocss) in the speaking class to improve students’ speaking skill. it was designed in a quasiexperimental research. 53 undergraduate efl students in the english department of a private university in kuningan were purposively chosen as the participant of the course. they were grouped into control and experimental class. the course material of ocss was adapted from a study conducted by nakatani (2005). the effects of teaching ocss were assessed by two types of data collection: the participants’ pre-test and posttest speaking scores, and the transcription from the tests. the first result showed that the most frequently used ocss in the speaking class were filled pauses, interlanguage-based, false starts, providing active response, first-language-based, and approximation strategy. then, second, the t result indicated that tobs was greater than tcrit. therefore, it can be concluded that the teaching of ocss in the efl speaking class had a significant effect in developing students’ speaking skill. it indicates that such training activities are relatively applicable to use in the language classroom. keywords: efl teaching, oral communication strategies, speaking skill introduction the main goal of learning a foreign language (fl) is to be able to communicate using the target language. communication itself means sending and receiving message effectively, and negotiating meaning in the communication with the interlocutor (rubin & thompson, 1994) as cited in (ya-ni, 2007). seeing this fact, speaking skill seems much more important than reading and writing. however, in the efl classrooms, it is common to find learners who are struggling to communicate their meaning using english. the phenomenon is not surprising where there are limited practice opportunities for foreign language learners to communicate in the target language. there are also some other factors that influence learners’ speaking skill. first, learners are afraid of making mistakes when speaking in the target language. second, indonesian and english language have different rules of grammar. so, it is not easy for learners to sustain a conversation in english especially for low-proficiency level learners. furthermore, based on the presurvey, in high schools, learners used to practice speaking using scripted dialogue. so, they lack the skill of negotiation in the real-life communication using the target language. third, the majority of learners have no idea about how to cope with the situation when they are confronted with some words they do not know. as the result, they tend to stop the conversation or leave the message unfinished. then, macintyre, dӧrnyei, clement, and noels (1998) said that the factor that influences students’ speaking yuniarti the effect of teaching oral communication strategies on indonesian efl learners’ speaking skill 194 performance in the classroom is also because of their unwillingness to use l2 for communication. khan (2010) mentioned that communicating in a foreign language is a complex multi-faceted skill. therefore, learners should create some efforts to make communication using english becomes easier. then, it is acceptable for learners making mistakes or errors in the process of learning. as what selinker (1972) believed that learner’s errors were not seen as negative but positive efforts made by learners in an attempt to organize their interlanguage. he took the view that learners make efforts to control their learning, through the use of what he coined as communication strategies. communication strategies itself was firstly introduced by selinker in his seminal paper in 1972 (dӧrnyei & scott, 1997). but then, the former researcher who firstly proposed the taxonomy of communication strategies was tarone in 1978. according to dӧrnyei and scott (1997), the notion of second language (l2) communication strategies was raised with the recognition that the mismatch between l2 speakers’ linguistic resources and communicative intentions often leads to difficulties or breakdowns in the communication. therefore, communication strategies are potentially conscious plans for solving what to an individual presents itself as a problem in reaching a particular communicative goal (fӕrch & kasper, 1983a) as cited in (dӧrnyei & scott, 1997). the other experts define communication strategies as a systematic technique employed by a speaker to express his/her meaning when faced with some difficulties in communicating in imperfectly known second language to enhance the effectiveness of communication (canale, 1983; coder, 1981; stern, 1975). it is believed that communication strategies play an important role in the development of strategic competence. thus, communication strategies and strategic competence are interrelated. canale and swain (1980) stated that strategic competence is the major component of communicative competence, defining it as “verbal and nonverbal strategies that may be called into action to compensate for breakdowns in communication due to performance variables or to insufficient competence” (p.30). scattergood (2003) as cited in maleki (2010) thinks that strategic competence is cultivated if teachers create a language classroom in which communication strategies are taught and practiced. nevertheless, teaching communication strategies to language learners has been the source of some controversy in the past decades. many researchers have argued about teaching and teachability of communication strategies. most of experts who cons would agree that strategic competence develop in the speakers’ l1 is freely transferable to target language use (see bagaerts & paulisse, 1989; bagaerts, kellerman, & bentlage, 1987; kellerman, ammerlaan, bagaerts, & paulisse, 1990; paribakht, 1985, as cited in dӧrnyei, 1995). this means that most adult language learners already have sufficient competence to communicate regardless of their l2/foreign language proficiency levels. kellerman (1991) concludes that “there is no justification for providing training in compensatory strategies in the classroom…teach the learner more language and let the strategies look after themselves” (p. 158). in spite of many contradictory views about teaching communication strategies in the classroom, there are a number of researchers who strongly supported and conducted some research about it. dӧrnyei (1995) argues that indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 195 “most arguments concerning the teachability issue are based on indirect or inconclusive evidence, but it must be noted that some of these data actually appear to confirm the validity of strategy training” (p. 61). so, communication strategies training is actually not aimed to introduce the strategies to the learners because as what is previously mentioned that they have already have it in their first language system, but rather to make learners aware of the strategies. a number of researches have been done in the area of specific training of some communication strategies, to seek its potential usefulness. fӕrch and kasper (1986) and tarone and yule (1989) reported on four different classroom projects that successfully incorporated strategy training into foreign language instruction. tarone (1981) reported on a study by piranian investigating learners of russian, in which learners who had had some extracurricular exposure to russian were found to use strategies more often and more effectively than their peers whose russian experience was limited to the classroom. dӧrnyei (1995), a renowned expert on communication strategies, piloted a study to obtain empirical data on the educational potential of strategy training. he found out the possibility of developing the quality and quantity of learners’ use of at least some communication strategies through focused instruction. nonetheless, most of the above previous studies only focused on strategies for solving learners’ own performance problems, which did not require interaction with others. these studies excluded the aspect of negotiation behaviors used when learners facing some problems of exchanging messages in the conversation. it is showed in their pretest and posttest test items which did not include pair work conversation. some studies showed that interaction skill in the negotiation of meaning between interlocutors is a crucial component for learning the target language. one of them is a study conducted by nakatani (2005) in japan who investigated the effect of awarenessraising training on oral communication strategy (ocss) use in japanese english class. in his study, ocss was used instead of communication strategies because it specifically focused on the oral interaction and interlocutors’ negotiation behavior for solving communication breakdowns. so, the strategies are used for an oral interaction not just a one-way communication. the result confirmed that the participants in the strategy training group significantly improved their oral proficiency test scores. based on the related research mentioned previously, ocss could help learners to communicate effectively using foreign language and increase their negotiation skill in the conversation. it is said that the use of communication strategies could improve learners’ skills for interpersonal communication (bejarano, levine, olshtain, & steiner, 1997; clennel, 1995). for language trainers (teacher/lecturer), they may teach these strategies to improve students’ speaking skills. therefore, this study attempted to seek out the effect of teaching ocss in the efl speaking class. ocss were explicitly taught in this class. as an experimental study, pre-test and posttest were held to assess the effect of teaching ocss, and then the result from the experimental and control group were compared. the researcher concerns on how teaching ocss affected some qualitative and quantitative aspects of strategy use as well as the improvement on students’ speaking skill. method this study involved 53 first year students from the department of english yuniarti the effect of teaching oral communication strategies on indonesian efl learners’ speaking skill 196 education in a private university in kuningan. since a quasi-experimental design was used in this study, the students were grouped into experimental group (eg) and control group (cg). before the treatment, both groups were given pre-test and after the treatment, they were given posttest. ocss proposed by nakatani (2005) were taught to the experimental group during the treatment. the ocss were also used as the framework to analyze the transcription of pre-test and posttest recording. there were two kinds of data in this study; students’ speaking tests recording and pre-test and posttest results. students’ speaking test recording was used to find out the kinds of oral communication strategies used by efl students in the speaking class. the recordings were transcribed, categorized, calculated and analyzed based on the list of ocss proposed by nakatani (2005). the pre-test and posttest results were analyzed to see whether the teaching of ocss was effective to improve students’ speaking ability. pre-test was conducted for both groups and the results were collected and analyzed as the preliminary data about the students’ initial speaking skill. then, posttest also was conducted for both groups to get the final output of the treatment. students speaking performances were assessed using criteria proposed by hughes (2003). she rates the speaking criteria by six-point scale for each of the following: accent, grammar, vocabulary, fluency, comprehension. the quantitative data obtained from pre-test and posttest then were computed using spss 18 program. results and discussion oral communication strategies used by the students in the speaking class the analyzed data show some initial conclusions could be made: 1) not all of the ocss available were used by the students in the tasks; 2) there were at least four dominant strategies used by the students in both pre-test and posttest (filled pauses, interlanguage-based, false starts, and providing active response); and 3) not all of the strategies were increasingly used after the ocss training. then, for further explanation, the next paragraphs elaborate the detail description of ocss used in every tests and its comparison. table 1. the recapitulation of ocs used by the students in the pre-test and posttest no. achievement or compensatory strategies pre-test posttest f % f % f % f % 1. help-seeking  appeal for help 0 0 247 60.1 0 0 212 54.6  asking for repetition 0 0 1 0.26 2. modified interaction  confirmation checks 9 2.19 9 2.32  comprehension checks 0 0 3 0.77  clarification request 5 1.22 7 1.80 3. modified output 1 0.24 2 0.52 4. time-gaining  filled pauses 153 37.23 84 21.7  use of fillers/hesitation devices 11 2.68 19 4.9 5. maintenance  providing active response 36 8.76 62 15.9  shadowing 10 2.43 1 0.26 6. self-solving  paraphrase or circumlocution 0 0 0 0  approximation 15 3.65 21 5.41  restructuring 7 1.70 3 0.77 indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 197 reduction strategies 7. message abandonment 12 2.92 164 39.9 8 2.06 176 45.4 8. first-language-based 39 9.49 0 0 9. inter-language based 67 16.3 96 24.7 10. false starts 46 11.19 72 18.6 total 411 100 411 100 388 100 388 100 f = frequency % = percentage the table displayed that there were 4 strategies that were not used by the students in the pre-test like appeal for help, asking for repetition, comprehension checks, and paraphrase/circumlocution. while in the posttest, there were only 3 strategies that were not used by the students, such as appeal for help, paraphrase/circumlocution, and firstlanguage-based. nevertheless, when looking at the total amount of the strategies used in both tests, the total was slightly decreased from 411 occurrences in the pre-test to 388 occurrences in the posttest. the followings are the description of each strategy used by the students starting from the most frequently used strategy. 1. filled pauses strategy this strategy is part of time gaining strategy which purpose is to give the speaker time to think and to keep communication channel open when he/she has difficulties in expressing an idea (nakatani, 2005). the example of filled pauses such as “oh…’”, “um…”, “er…”, etc. in the pre-test, this strategy was found 153 times used by the students and it drastically decreased into 84 times in the posttest. these filled pauses realizations in this study mostly consisted of utterances like “er…”, “em…”, “emh”, “eh”, “oh”, “ya”, and “oh ya”. 2. interlanguage-based strategy according to nakatani (2005), interlanguage-based strategy is used when a speaker faced with communication problems due to a lack of linguistic resources, he/she sometimes copes it by using his/her interlanguage system to reduce intended utterances and avoids using certain language structures or specific topics. this strategy was found 67 times in the pretest and 96 times in the posttest. so, there was an improvement of using this strategy. this finding might be an indication that the speaker were trying to speak english more in the posttest although they still did not have sufficient grammatical knowledge to form the utterances. the examples are as follows. [2.a] s19 : where [pause] where she is stay? s14 : she is near from my home… (pre-test transcription – student 19 & 14) [2.b] s9 : yes, what is it? s26 : so, i’m happy work in here, i’m enjoy work in here… (posttest transcription – student 9 & 26) 3. false starts strategy false starts were found 46 times or 11.19% of the whole pre-test findings. in the posttest, there were 72 occurrences of this strategy or 18.56% of the whole posttest findings. there was an increasing number of this strategy used in the posttest. this probably indicated that the students still often thought about how to structure sentences in the communication or they were still struggling with the grammatical rule. false start itself referred to the occasions in the conversation when the speaker runs into difficulties in executing his/her utterance and repeat one or more of the preceding words (nakatani, 2005). the example of false starts realizations in this study are as follows. yuniarti the effect of teaching oral communication strategies on indonesian efl learners’ speaking skill 198 [3.a] s28 : …what is your opinion about er… our you know po politic in our co in our country? s11 : er… i think politic er… in our country is…middle. (pre-test transcription – student 28 & 11) [3.b] s2 : sure i’ll help you but… what can i do for you? s5 : …i need…i need some money to go to brebes. (posttest transcription – student 2 & 5) 4. providing active response strategy providing active response means making positive comments or using others conversation gambits like “i know what you mean” and “sounds good” (nakatani, 2005). in this study, this strategy was used 36 times in the pretest and improved into 62 times in the posttest. mostly, the utterances of this strategy were “no.”, “hi.”, “bye.” and various kind of “yes.” like “yes, i have”, “oh, ok. yes.”, “yes, i know”, “ok”, “yup”, “eheh”, and “yeah”. however, the increasing number in the posttest indicated that the students made some efforts to keep the conversation going. in the conversation, the examples are: [4.a] s21 : yes.. yes.. we can save the trees. s3 : yes. (pre-test transcription – student 21 & 3) [4.b] s4 : ok ok doctor. ok thank you your advice er i hope my life be better s24 : yes, i hope too. (posttest transcription – student 4 & 24) 5. first-language-based strategy first-language based strategy consists of interjections in the speaker’s l1 for a lexical item when he/she experiences communication difficulties (nakatani, 2005). in this case, the speaker intentionally or unintentionally used bahasa indonesia to convey the message. it occurred 39 times in the pretest, as the example: [5.a] s2 : [wishpering] berapa lama kenalnya? s6 : em…[long pause] wait wait er… one one month one month. (pre-test transcription – student 2 & 6) the above example showed how the students used this strategy in the conversation. mostly because they did not know certain words in english and did not know how to ask for help in english. so, the realizations were the students directly mentioned the words in bahasa (like ruu pilkada, pilkada langsung, hak, baik, masih banyak lagi, deket, etc.), the students asked for help to their partner in bahasa (e.g. “mengganti apa yah.. mengganti..”, “misalnya bahasa inggrisnya?”, etc.), or the students had no idea what to talk next (e.g. “terus apalagi yah?”, “terus?”, “apa?”, “udah.”, etc.). one of the pairs, in the pre-test, even used their local language (sundanese) like the followings. [5.b] s17 : …education in indonesia same with er… universitas kuningan. [pause] you… [wishpering] atuh maneh atuh nu ngomong. s13 : [wishpering] sok bae terus nanya lagi. (pre-test transcription – student 17 & 13) on the contrary, first-languagebased strategy was not found in any of posttest recording. this was a good indication that the students tried hard to speak english despite of their limitation in vocabularies and grammar. 6. approximation strategy this strategy were found 15 times in the pretest then increased into 21 times in the posttest. approximation means the speakers use an alternative expression that has sematic features similar to those of the intended term (nakatani, 2005). in the pre-test, this strategy was frequently used when the students discussed about friendship. most of the students used the term indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 199 “friendship” as an exchange of “close friend” or “best friend” terms. this happened because probably they did not know the word “sahabat” in english, so they used the word friendship instead of close friend or best friend. [6.a] s4 : do you have friendship? s5 : yes, i have a friendship… (pre-test transcription – students 4 & 5) then, in the posttest, the students used various kinds of words to represent the messages they were intended to say. the following example shows how the student used the word ‘police office’ which meant ‘police station’. [6.b] s2 : …can you prove that you are not lying to me? s5 : …and you could prove it from… police office. (pre-test transcription – students 2 & 5) apart from the previous six strategies used by the students the strategy like use of fillers, message abandonment, shadowing, confirmation checks, clarification request, and restructuring strategy were not dominantly used by the students in the conversation. even, appeal for help and paraphrase/circumlocution strategies were not used at all in both pre-test and posttest. the effect of teaching oral communication strategies on the students’ speaking skill the statistical calculation of the students speaking scores from both eg and cg was conducted in three steps: first, computing pre-test scores from both groups; second, computing posttest scores from both groups; and the last, computing pre-test and posttest scores from experimental group. the first step was conducted to make sure that the initial ability of the two groups was not significantly different or rejecting the null hypothesis (h0). the mean of experimental group pre-test scores was 41.125 and the control group mean was 40.76. the df from the two groups was 51. the tcrit from df 51 was 2.021. then, the independent t-test result was -0.101 (negative value was considered as positive value). comparing the tobs with the tcrit, it can be concluded the tobs was lower than the tcrit. thus, the h0 was accepted. in sum, there was no significant difference of mean between eg and cg. in other words, both groups had the relatively same initial ability of speaking. the second test was conducted to make sure two things: 1) the progress of the students’ speaking ability and students’ equality between the two groups; 2) the ability of the two groups was significant difference. it resulted that the mean of experimental group posttest scores was 59.0893, and the control group mean was 40.52. furthermore, the independent t-test result was -6.221 and the df from the two groups was 51. the tcrit from df 51 was 2.021. comparing the tobs with the tcrit, it can be concluded that the tobs was higher than the tcrit. besides, there was a significant difference of mean between the experimental and control group posttest scores. hence, the teaching of ocss in the efl speaking class could bring improvement to the students’ speaking ability. the last step was done to determine whether there was evidence that the teaching of ocss was effective in improving efl students speaking skill. the mean score of the experimental group before the ocs treatment was 41.125 and after the treatment, the mean score became 59.0893. the result also showed that the tobs value was -12.219. when df was 27, the tcrit value at the 0.05 level was 2.052. so, the t result also indicated that the difference was yuniarti the effect of teaching oral communication strategies on indonesian efl learners’ speaking skill 200 significant because tobs was greater than tcrit. therefore, those facts become the evidence to support the claim that teaching ocss could improve the efl students speaking skill because the participants speaking scores were significantly improved after the treatment. in sum, the teaching of ocss was effective to improve the students’ speaking skill. conclusion this study showed the necessary of teaching ocss in the efl speaking class especially when the students were low proficiency learners. being aware of how to use ocss in the conversation has helped the students to deal with their communication problems in english. hence, the teacher/lecturer who has students with the same condition might apply this ocss training to increase the students’ speaking ability. the findings and discussion in the previous sections proved that, most significantly, the students’ speaking skill improved since the students learned to deal with communication problems using ocss. the ocss training has mostly improved their vocabulary mastery where none of them used l1 anymore in the speaking practices and they started to construct long sentences. it means that they felt encouraged to speak in english. then, this training also has made learners gained their confidence in speaking english in front of their friends. they were not shy and reluctant to speak anymore. so, it practically solved several speaking problems mentioned earlier in the introduction. however, from the speaking performances transcriptions and the ocss used by the students in the speaking tasks, the ocss training still could not increase students’ grammatical competence. most of the students’ utterances were poorly structured. these phenomena emerged probably because the lack of exposure to the english expressions and the researcher could not choose the appropriate tasks for the students in the treatment. despite of the fact about students’ grammatical competence, the students’ scores in speaking improved. its calculation supported the initial claim about the effect of ocss to the students speaking ability. the paired samples ttest calculation of the students’ speaking scores displayed significant difference where the tobs was greater than the tcrit. it can be concluded that the teaching of ocss in the efl speaking class positively affected to the increase of the students’ speaking ability. references bejarano, y., levine, t., olshtain, e., & steiner, j. (1997). the skill use of interaction strategies: creating a framework for improved small-group communication interaction in the language classroom. system, 25, 203–213. canale, m. (1983). from communicative competence to communicative language pedagogy. in j. c. richards & r. w. schmidt (eds.), language and communication, 2-27. harlow, uk: longman. canale, m., & swain, m. (1980). theoretical bases of communicative approaches to second language teaching and testing. applied linguistics, 1, 1-47. clennel, c. (1995). communication strategies of adult esl learners: a discourse perspective. prospect, 10, 4–20. coder, s. p. (1981). error analysis and interlanguage. oxford: oxford university press. dӧrnyei, z. (1995). on the teachability of communication strategies. tesol quarterly, 29(1), 55-85. dӧrnyei, z., & scott, m. l. (1997). communication strategies in a second language: definitions and taxonomies. language learning, 47(1), 173-210. fӕrch, c., & kasper, g. (1986). strategic competence in foreign language teaching. in g. kasper (ed.), learning, teaching and communication in the foreign language classroom, 179-193. aarhus: aarhus university press. hughes, a. (2003). testing for language teachers (2nd ed.). uk: cambridge university press. kellerman, e. (1991). compensatory strategies in second language research: a critique, a indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 201 revision, and some (non-) implications for the classroom. in r. phillipson, e. kellerman, l. selinker, m. sharwood smith, & m. swain (eds.), foreign/second language pedagogy research: a commemorative volume for claus fӕrch, 142-161. clevedon, england: multilingual matters. khan, s. (2010). strategies and spoken production on three oral communication tasks: a study of high and low proficiency efl learners. unpublished doctoral thesis. departament de filologlia anglesa i germanistica of universitai autònoma de barcelona. macintyre, p. d., dӧrnyei, z., clement, k. a., & noels, k. a. (1998). conceptualizing willingness to communicate in a l2: a situational model of l2 confidence and affiliation. the modern language journal, 82(4), 545-562. maleki, a. (2010). techniques to teach communication strategies. journal of language teaching and research, 1(5), 640646. finland: academy publisher. nakatani, y. (2005). the effect of awarenessraising training on oral communication strategy use. the modern language journal, 89(i), 76-88. selinker, l. (1972). interlanguage. iral, 10, 209230. stern, h. h. (1975). what can we learn from the good language learner? canadian modern language review, 31, 304-318. tarone, e., & yule, g. (1989). focus on the language learner. oxford: oxford university press. ya-ni, z. (2007). communication strategies and foreign language learning. us-china foreign language, 5(4), 43-48. school of foreign languages, qingdao university of science and technology. yuniarti the effect of teaching oral communication strategies on indonesian efl learners’ speaking skill 202 teacher a teacher asks her class, "if there are 5 birds sitting on a fence and you shoot one of them, how many will be left?" she calls on little johnny. he replies, "none, they all fly away with the first gun shot" the teacher replies, "the correct answer is 4, but i like your thinking." then, little johnny says "i have a question for you. there are three women sitting on a bench having ice cream: one is delicately licking the sides of the triple scoop of ice cream. the second is gobbling down the top and sucking the cone. the third is biting off the top of the ice cream. which one is married?" the teacher, blushing a great deal, replied "well i suppose the one that's gobbled down the top and sucked the cone" to which little johnny replied, "the correct answer is the one with the wedding ring on, but i like your thinking." (source: http://www.study-express.ru/humour/funny-stories.shtml, picture: www.google.co.id) http://www.study-express.ru/humour/funny-stories.shtml indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 147 study of demotivated vs. motivated efl learners’ preferences towards teachers’ oral error correction rezvan jafari, habibollah mashhadi, farideh okati, & roya movahed university of zabol, iran e-mail: farideh.okati@gmail.com apa citation: jafari, r., mashhadi, h., okati, f., & movahed, r. (2017). study of demotivated vs. motivated efl learners’ preferences towards teachers’ oral error correction. indonesian efl journal, 3(2), 147-158. received: 27-05-2017 accepted: 26-06-2017 published: 01-07-2017 abstract: the purpose of this study is to compare the possible differences between demotivated vs. motivated efl learners’ preferences toward teachers’ oral error correction, including the necessity, frequency, timing, type, method, and delivering agent of error correction. to this end, 141 iranian efl learners at the departments of foreign language in zabol and sistan and baluchestan universities participated in this study. the learners’ preferences for error correction questionnaire, the demotivation questionnaire, semistructured interviews, and classroom observations were used to collect the data. the results of independent sample t-tests indicated that there were no significant differences between the two groups regardless of their demotivation level toward oral error correction. the findings revealed five suggestions: firstly, errors should be corrected and sometimes to be corrected. secondly, correcting errors “after the student finishes speaking” was the most appropriate time among the two groups. thirdly, “serious spoken errors that may cause problems in listeners’ understanding” and “frequent errors” should be corrected more than other errors. fourthly, “elicitation” and “explicit feedback” were the most popular methods of corrective feedback among the two groups. finally, teachers were the most preferred person to deliver corrective feedback. furthermore, the results of the observation data showed that what students received as error correction in oral classes were not in line with what students preferred to be corrected. pedagogical implications for providing oral error correction have also been discussed. keywords: oral corrective feedback, demotivated learners, motivated learners, preferences, efl learners introduction if the strategies used to correct errors don’t meet students’ preferences subsequent negative attitudes may emerge. this is why teachers should consider students’ preferences for being corrected (hyland, 2003). the role of oral corrective feedback in foreign language learning has been a highly problematic task which most language teachers and students are faced. there is a controversy among researchers on whether error correction would be beneficial or rather harmful in developing second language learning (krashen 1982; park 2010). according to researchers (allwright & bailey, 1991; park, 2010), the positive effects of error correction improve the quality of language learning and foster students’ motivation to continue learning. on the other hand, the negative effects of error correction may prevent language development, because error correction may result in some misunderstanding between teachers and students that could make the state of anxiety and demotivation. as song (2005) stated there are many reasons that cause some rezvan jafari, habibollah mashhadi, farideh okati, & roya movahed study of demotivated vs. motivated efl learners’ preferences towards teachers’ oral error correction 148 students become demotivated such as teachers’ behaviors and teaching methods, inadequate school facilities, learners’ reduced self-confidence, and the course books used in language classes. to song (2005), the most important factor is the way teacher correct students’ errors. any mismatches between teacher practices and students preferences could be the source of students’ demotivation (kern, 1995) as cited in (rastegar & homayoon, 2012). the findings of some studies that were conducted by different researchers (schulz, 2001; hamouda, 2001; firwana, 2010; abedi, 2015, farahani & salajegheh, 2015) indicate that there are some differences between the teachers’ teaching practices and the learners’ preferences toward error correction. according to nunan (1988, p.177), “one of the most serious blocks to learning is the mismatch between teacher and learner expectations about what should happen in the classroom.” many foreign language researchers believe that such a gap between teachers and students’ preferences is harmful and can affect learning consequences (green, 1993; schulz, 2001). the possibility of such disparity force teachers to take into account students’ preferences to be sure that what they use as a correction method is consistent with what learners prefer to receive (schulz, 1996; 2001; diab, 2005). if successful language learning is based on matching the preferences of teachers and students, it is more significant for teachers to recognize the perceptions of demotivated and motivated learners on oral error correction because this can help teachers to know how different learners prefer to be corrected in speaking classes and how they should correct students to increase language learning and to lower their demotivation level. although, teachers should be familiar with learners’ preferences for corrective feedback and in spite of a few studies that have conducted on learners’ preferences toward error correction, what seem to be neglected is the preferences of efl learners toward oral error correction with reference to their demotivation level. therefore, this research will investigate the preferences of demotivated vs. motivated students toward oral error correction that would be an important subject matter for researchers. therefore, this issue encouraged the researchers to carry out a study to fill the gap in the related literature and pave the way for the better understanding of oral error correction. to this aim the following research questions are presented: 1. are there any differences between preferences of demotivated vs. motivated efl learners toward teachers’ oral error correction regarding necessity, frequency, timing, type, method, and delivering agent of error correction? 2. what are the strategies of oral error correction used by efl teachers and whether the strategies have any effect on students’ demotivation or not? method the study used mixed-method research designs by applying two questionnaires, a semi-structured interview, and classroom observations to triangulate the data. combination of both quantitative and qualitative analysis would provide the most comprehensive picture of the data in the present study. data from questionnaires can be combined with data from interview and observation to strengthen interpretations and gather more practical and reliable data (griffe, 2012). the participants in this study are 141 intermediate efl students consisting of 62 males and 79 females who were studying at the departments of indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 149 foreign language in zabol and sistan and baluchestan universities and 15 efl teachers teaching in these universities. the participants selected randomly from fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh semester who are majoring in english teaching and translation. the participants’ age ranged from 20 to 26 years old, while the teachers’ years of teaching experience ranged from 4 to 18 years. the data collected were then analyzed by using spss software. based on the students’ responses to the demotivation questionnaire, students were classified as demotivated or motivated group. regarding the division of learners into demotivated and motivated group, the highest score of the demotivation scale was added to the lowest score of scale and then divided by two to gain the cut-off point. 70 students were divided into a demotivated group and 71 students divided in motivated group. after dividing the learners into two groups on the basis of the cut-off point criteria, independent sample t-tests was performed in order to determine whether there were statistically significant differences between two groups regarding their preferences toward teachers’ oral error correction. the next step was analyzing and categorizing semi-structured interview items. students’ responses were recorded and noted down and then transcribed and analyzed until the major themes are extracted. based on this analysis, the most important and recurrent themes were categorized and interpretations were made by emphasizing differences and similarities between the group samples. results and discussion necessity of error correction item 1 of the questionnaire was related to the necessity of oral error correction. table 1 shows the mean responses of demotivated group (m =3.986) and motivated group (m = 3.817) that indicate there was no significant difference between preferences of the demotivated and motivated students toward necessity of oral error correction. demotivated students were more willing to receive error correction than motivated students. interviews data indicated students from both the demotivated and motivated groups unanimously agreed with the necessity of error correction and expressed error correction helps them to identify their mistakes and prevent them from not making the same error again. most of students agreed in receiving error treatment. majority of students explained that they learned more when their errors were corrected. table 1. comparison of responses on the necessity of error correction groups n mean std deviation t-value p demotivated 70 3.98 0.732 .165 >0.05 motivated 71 3.81 0.703 note *< 0.05 frequency of receiving corrective feedback the second question asked students how often they want their teacher to give corrective feedback on their spoken errors. regarding the differences between the two groups on their opinions about the frequency of oral error correction, the results in table 2 indicate that there was not a significant difference between the demotivated (m= 3.343) and motivated students (m= 3.465). rezvan jafari, habibollah mashhadi, farideh okati, & roya movahed study of demotivated vs. motivated efl learners’ preferences towards teachers’ oral error correction 150 the results of interview didn’t reveal any differences among the demotivated and motivated students. majority of students in both groups expressed that they prefer their teachers to correct them sometimes and usually when they make an error, for example, student 3 told: “i would like my teachers not always but sometimes correct my errors because if errors aren’t corrected, those errors might fossilize and if errors are corrected always cause i lose my confidence to speak.” table 2. comparison of responses on the frequency of error correction groups n mean sd t-value p demotivated 70 3.34 1.075 .498 >0.05 motivated 71 3.46 1.053 note *< 0.05 timing of error correction regarding the timing of error correction, there were no significant differences among the demotivated versus motivated students toward the appropriate time to correct students’ oral errors. the comparison of responses on the timing of error correction is showed in the following table. table 3. comparison of responses on the timing of error correction timing groups n mean sd t-values p as soon as errors made de 70 2.32 1.201 .842 >0.05 mo 71 2.36 1.031 after finishing speaking de 70 3.87 0.947 .660 >0.05 mo 71 3.94 0.998 after the activities de 70 3.52 1.046 .121 >0.05 mo 71 3.26 0.940 at the end of class de 70 2.48 0.989 .967 >0.05 mo 71 2.47 0.969 note *< 0.05 as table 3 shows that there were no significant differences among the demotivated versus motivated students toward the appropriate time to correct students’ oral errors. of four categories of timing of error correction, “after the student finishes speaking” among both the demotivated group (m=3.871) and motivated group (m= 3.944) received highest mean as the most appropriate time to correct students’ oral errors. “after the activities” received the second most appropriate time of oral correction among both groups of the students. then, “as soon as errors are made” received the lowest mean from the demotivated (m=2.329) and motivated group (2.366). from interview among 20 efl students, most of them wanted their errors to be corrected “after the student finishes speaking”. for example, in this respect student 6 said: “when we are speaking in class, our teacher interrupts us immediately and not let keep on our speaking. i feel it would be better if teacher correct me at the end of my speaking”. then, student 18 told: “it is better correction to be at the end of speaking because this indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 151 technique is more effective and it helps you without any stress learn the reason of erroneous utterance. and this method leads us be motivated and keep on our communication without any interruption.” student 12 stated: “i don’t like immediately correction because if teacher correct me as i speaking i will be confused and distract my attention, so i can’t keep up my speaking.” student 17 told: “i think it’s good if the teacher corrects after the students finish their speaking and it is not good to correct when i am speaking because sometimes you speak so fast it causes you forget where the error is”. while the majority of the interviewed students from two groups preferred after the student finishes the speaking a few of learners, for example, three students in demotivated group liked “at the end of the class” teachers correct their errors. as student 7 said: “as soon as i start talking, the teacher cuts me and corrects me. i feel fear in the class and cause i lose my selfesteem. so i don’t like to talk in the class when immediately teacher corrects me, he should cuts me at the end of class, this method causes other students don’t recognize my mistakes since in front of other students cause i embarrassed and feel shy.” therefore, the interview responses indicate students, regardless of demotivation level, had high preferences for delayed correction than immediate correction. one justification for the findings may be students have not any motivation to immediate correction because it interrupts students’ speaking and it discourages students to continue their speaking. these findings are in line with kaivanpanah, alavi, and sepehrinia’s (2012) study that stated majority of students prefer delayed correction over immediate correction. delayed correction provide an opportunity for teachers and students to complete the negotiation of meaning before engaging in the negotiation of form (rolin–lanziti, 2006) as cited in (farahani & salajegheh, 2015). types of errors that should be corrected for the fourth question relating to the five types of errors, there were no significant differences between the preferences of the demotivated and motivated group regarding types of errors that should be treated. of the five types of errors, serious spoken errors that may cause problems in a listener’s understanding in both the demotivated group (m= 3.700) and motivated group (m = 3.803). frequency of errors among the demotivated (m=3.700) and motivated group (m =3.662) had the highest mean among the responses. infrequent errors in demotivated (m=2.771) and individual errors in motivated group (m=2.789) received the lowest mean. table 4. comparison of responses on the types of errors that need to be treated types of errors groups n mean sd t-value p serious errors de 70 3.70 1.095 .550 >0.05 mo 71 3.80 0.935 less serious de 70 2.91 0.944 .723 >0.05 mo 71 2.85 0.899 frequent de 70 3.70 1.095 .823 >0.05 mo 71 3.66 0.909 rezvan jafari, habibollah mashhadi, farideh okati, & roya movahed study of demotivated vs. motivated efl learners’ preferences towards teachers’ oral error correction 152 infrequent de 70 2.77 1.119 .557 >0.05 mo 71 2.87 0.925 individual de 69 2.97 1.163 .292 >0.05 mo 71 2.78 0.844 note *< 0.05 the interview result revealed, among the motivated learners, five students favored to serious spoken errors, five favored to frequent errors that received highest mean among motivated learners. among the demotivated learners, six students believed in serious spoken errors that had the highest mean responses and three students responded to frequent errors. as student 15 stated: “the purpose of speaking is understanding and fluency, if i don’t understand what others say it makes me confused and i don’t have any willingness to listening.” student 10 told: “i like my teacher correct serious spoken errors that interrupt understanding and comprehension, in speaking, accuracy isn’t important so there is no need to correct grammatical words but it is better to correct content words that hint to comprehension and meaning.” student 5 told: “it is better if my teacher corrects global errors since if they aren’t corrected will cause misunderstanding. but for local errors, it is not necessary to correct them. even with local errors we understand the main point of communication.” for “frequent spoken errors”, most of students believed these errors should be corrected because these errors become a habit and will be fossilized. as student 1 states: “ the errors most of times occur are more important than infrequent errors, so these errors should be corrected because it will cause a bad habit and will be fossilized and after that it takes many times to be corrected.” student 14 told: “it would be better if my teacher correct frequent errors, because if they aren’t corrected, they stick in the mind and recognizing these errors from the right forms are difficult.” these findings show that both groups did not like if their teachers correct all errors, most of them were eager teachers to correct serious errors that cause misunderstandings and also frequent errors that cause fossilization in class. as burt (1975 cited in park 2010) states correcting global errors clarify the intended message more than the correction of several local errors. methods of corrective feedback of the eight types of corrective feedback, elicitation was the most effective method of corrective feedback among both the demotivated and motivated groups. “explicit feedback” among both the demotivated and motivated group received as the second most effective method of correction. then, “metalinguistic feedback” among both groups ranked as the third effective methods of error correction. “repetition” in the demotivated (m= 3.457) and “recast” among the motivated learners (m= 3.507) ranked as the fifth effective methods of error correction. “no corrective feedback” was the least favorite method among the students in the demotivated and motivated groups. the qualitative results suggested that students of both groups had almost similar preferences for types of feedback. students more favored elicitation that ranked in the first place, followed by explicit feedback, then metalinguistic cues, and finally clarification request. indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 153 table 5. comparison of responses on the methods of corrective feedback methods groups n mean sd t-value p clarification de 70 3.357 0.979 .098 >0.05 mo 71 3.070 1.060 repetition de 70 3.457 0.988 .532 .0.05 mo 71 3.352 1.001 implicit de 70 2.943 1.166 .531 >0.05 mo 71 3.056 0.969 explicit de 70 3.729 0.883 .533 >0.05 mo 71 3.817 0.798 elicitation de 70 3.871 1.006 .110 >0.05 mo 71 4.127 0.877 no corrective feedback de 70 2.557 0.987 .314 >0.05 mo 71 2.746 1.227 metalinguistic de 70 3.686 0.956 .376 >0.05 mo 71 3.535 1.053 recast de 70 3.371 1.038 .443 >0.05 mo 71 3.507 1.054 note *< 0.05 in the case of the students who had a preference for explicit feedback they expressed that they liked explicit explanations such as student 8 stated: “explicit feedback helps us to remember the reason behind the error, this method cause errors stick in our mind and remember it whenever it occurs. therefore this method is more memorable.” in the case of the students who had a preference for elicitation method, student 15 suggested: “i want to have an opportunity to repair my errors by responding to the teacher’s request that cause i fix my ill-formed utterances.” student 4 told: “i think elicitation is an essential method for correction of oral errors, it facilitates self-correction.” majority of students ranked explicit feedback and elicitation over implicit feedback since directly correction points to place of errors, reasons of errors, and how to correct errors. regarding elicitation as most effective method of corrective feedback, lyster and ranta (1997) found that elicitation is most effective error correction technique regardless of learners’ level of proficiency. these findings were like the findings of ur’s (2012) study in which explicit correction was the most favored corrective feedback strategy. delivering agents of error correction the sixth category asked the demotivated and motivated students about their preferences for providers of error correction and there were no significant differences toward delivering agents of correction among the two groups. of the three types of providers of error correction, teachers were the most favored agent in both groups and students themselves were the second favored agent among both groups. classmates were the least favored agent among the students both in the demotivated and motivated groups. most of students believed that teacher has the correct answer and their classmates are unable to correct their errors. in this regard, student 14 told: “how can my classmate correct me when he is a student like me?!! he cannot correct me because he has limited knowledge. the teacher knows better and is full of academic knowledge.” student 16 told: “teachers rezvan jafari, habibollah mashhadi, farideh okati, & roya movahed study of demotivated vs. motivated efl learners’ preferences towards teachers’ oral error correction 154 have a majority of methods for correcting errors of students and know how to correct in an appropriate way and in specific situation and context.” further, a few of them preferred self-correction, for instance, student 11 stated: “when my classmate corrects me, she can tell me i correct your errors i have more knowledge than you. i feel uncomfortable when my classmate corrects me, it is better if i correct the errors by myself.” while most of students emphasized on teacher-correction since teacher has the correct answer, two of them in the demotivated and motivated group liked to be corrected by their classmates as student 5 stated: “i would like my classmates correct me because i feel relax, and my learning will be better.” the results are consistent with the findings of previous studies which indicated learners preferred teachers to other correctors (kaivanpanah et al., 2012; katayama, 2007). table 6. comparison of responses on the delivering agents agents groups n mean sd t -values p classmates de 70 2.657 1.306 .646 >0.05 mo 71 2.761 1.357 teachers de 70 4.229 887 .836 >0.05 mo 71 4.197 0.904 students themselves de 70 3.700 1.147 .186 >0.05 mo 71 3.437 1.204 note *< 0.05 classroom observation for gathering practical data to observe which technique is useful for students to increase their motivation and which technique is harmful, eight speaking classes of different teachers were observed. as it was observed, regarding timing of oral error correction most of the teachers immediately corrected oral errors followed by delay correction. when teachers corrected students’ errors immediately and as soon as errors were made, students didn’t have any willingness and have no motivation to communicate. for example, they feared to continue to speak because of possibility of making more mistakes, and when they keep up their conversation, most of them changed volume of their voice; either they speak slowly or very fast. some of students avoided their eye contact with the teacher. therefore, students’ quietness and apparent inactiveness may be a manifestation of language demotivation. but, when the teachers corrected after students finished their speaking or when the main point of their sentences was completed, students showed their agreement with teachers by shaking their head. so, this is an indication that this method can be more satisfying for students and can cause students’ motivation to increase. regarding types of errors, most of teachers corrected pronunciation errors frequently followed by grammatical errors and then pragmatic errors. when teachers corrected pragmatic errors, students continued their speaking with high motivation but when teachers corrected students’ pronunciation and grammatical errors, they become nervous and continued speaking showing no willingness. according to renko (2010), pragmatic errors are less embarrassing than grammatical and pronunciation errors. classroom observation demonstrated that teachers used recast indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 155 more frequently and students repaired recast less than explicit and metalinguistic feedback. as the researcher observed, recast was not useful for error correction because in most of classes when teachers recast students’ errors, they confused to attend teachers’ intention. this can indicate students’ preference of direct feedback rather than indirect and it seems direct feedback has less effect on increasing students’ anxiety and demotivation. clarification request were ambiguous and unclear since the students couldn’t recognize what errors they committed and in addition, clarification request caused students to become demotivated since they didn’t understand the purpose of request. for example, when one student committed a pronunciation error the teacher said: what!!!! or i am sorry…i don’t understand your answer please repeat it again. regarding metalinguistic correction, most of students liked this method because when teacher gave a clue that their utterances were erroneous, for example when one student erroneously used past tense in place of present tense, teacher gave a clue that you speak about present tense then student recognized his error and revised it. generally, explicit and metalinguistic feedback lead students to have more motivation to keep up their conversation than clarification request and recast. as the researcher observed regarding explicit feedback, students recognized why they committed an error and by shaking their head showing their agreement with teachers. this can be an indication that explicit feedback lead students have high motivation to speak. regarding providers of error correction, as the researcher observed most of students preferred teacher correction than self-correction and peercorrection. when teachers corrected students, they felt relaxed than when their classmates and students themselves corrected them. based on the observation, when the teachers corrected students, they continued speaking with more willingness but when the teacher asked their classmates to correct other students they looked unhappy and nervous, for example they frowned and grumbled that why others corrected them. on the other hand, when teachers asked students to self-correct their errors most of them were silent and remained fully quiet because they were afraid of making another error while answering and correcting themselves. therefore, they didn’t have any motivation to self-correction. conclusion data analysis showed that, regardless of demotivation level, both groups of demotivated and motivated had similar preferences and there were no significant differences among preferences of demotivated and motivated learners toward necessity, frequency, timing, types, methods of error correction and delivering agents of error correction. the learners in both groups preferred to receive corrective feedback when they make errors, regardless of their demotivation level. regarding the frequency of errors, over 50% of both the demotivated and motivated group wanted their errors to be corrected sometimes. regarding the time of oral errors, delayed correction was preferred as the appropriate time of oral error correction. this was also reported in the study of rolin-lanziti (2006) who believed delayed correction provides an opportunity for teachers and students to complete the negotiation of meaning before engaging in the negotiation of form. among the types of errors that needed to be corrected, serious spoken errors and frequent errors were preferred as the most important types of errors. rezvan jafari, habibollah mashhadi, farideh okati, & roya movahed study of demotivated vs. motivated efl learners’ preferences towards teachers’ oral error correction 156 of the methods of corrective feedback, direct methods such as “elicitation”, “explicit correction”, and “metalinguistic” were the three most effective methods for both demotivated and motivated learners. while, “no corrective feedback” and “implicit correction” were the least effective methods for both demotivated and motivated learners. these findings are inconsistent with long's (2007) claim who suggests recasts are the most effective type of corrective feedback than explicit feedback in facilitating second language learning. for “delivering agents of corrective feedback”, most of the learners in both demotivated and motivated groups considered teachers as the main source of error correction whereas, peer correction received the lowest mean among both groups as least effective source of corrective feedback. these results are consistent with the findings from some previous studies (e.g., kaivanpanah et al., 2012; katayama, 2007) which indicated that learners preferred teachers to other correctors. based on the observation data, it can be concluded that what students received as error correction in oral classes were not in line with what, when and how students preferred to be corrected. therefore, according to kern (1995) any mismatches between teacher practices and student preferences especially in the context of error correction can be the sources of students’ anxiety and demotivation. references abedi, d. (2015). are iranian efl learners’ opinions about oral corrective feedback strategies line with their teachers’ actual classroom practices? international researchers, 4(2). allwright, d., & bailey, k.m. (1991). focus on the language classroom research for language teachers. cambridge: cambridge university press. burt, h. d. (1975). error analyses in the adult efl classroom. tesol quarterly, 9(1), 53-63. diab, r. l. (2005). teachers’ and students’ beliefs about responding to esl writing: a case study. tesl canada journal, 2(3), 28. farahani, a. a., & salajegheh, s. (2015). iranian efl teachers’ and learners’ perspectives of oral error correction: does the timeline of correction matter? latin american journal of content and language integrated learning, 8(2), 184-211. firwana, s. s. (2010). a comparison between palestinian efl teachers’ and students’ attitudes toward oral error and their correction. the journal of the islamic university of the gaza (humanities research series), 19(2), 1527–1558. green, j. m. (1933). student attitudes toward communicative and non-communicative activities: do enjoyment and effectiveness go together? the modern language journal, 77(1), 1-10. hamouda, a. (2001). a study of students and teachers' preferences and attitudes towards correction of classroom written errors in saudi efl context. english language teaching, 4(3), 128-141. hyland, f. (2003). focusing on form: student engagement with teacher feedback. system, 31, 217-230. kaivanpanah, s., alavi, s. m., & sepehrinia, s. (2012). preferences for interactional feedback: differences between learners and teachers. the language learning journal, 1, 1-20. katayama, a. (2007). learners’ perceptions toward oral error correction. in k. bradford watts (eds), jalt 2006 conference proceedings. tokyo: jalt. kern, r. g. (1995). students’ and teachers’ beliefs about language learning. foreign language annals, 28(1), 71-92. krashen, s. (1982). principles and practice in second language acquisition. oxford: perganmon. long, m. (2007). recast in sla: the story so far. new jersey: lawrence erlbaum associates. lyster, r., & ranta, l. (1997). corrective feedback and learner uptake: negotiation of form in communicative classrooms. studies in second language acquisition, 19, 37-66. nunan, d. (1988). the learner-centered classroom. cambridge: cambridge university press. park, h. s. (2010). teachers and learners’ preferences for error correction. unpublished master’s thesis. california state university, sacramento. rastegar, m., & homayoon, h. (2012). efl learners’ preferences for error correction and its relationship with demotivation and language proficiency in the iranian context. indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 157 issues in language teaching (ilt), 1(2) 323341. renko, k. (2010). finnish efl learners’ perceptions on errors, corrective feedback and foreign language anxiety. master’s thesis. university of jyvaskyla. rolin-lanziti, j. (2006). the organization of delayed second language correction. language teaching research, 14(2), 183-206. song, y. (2005). motivation and demotivation in l2 learning. sino-us english teaching, 2(7), 79-81. ur, p. (2012). a course in english language teaching. cambridge: cambridge university press. rezvan jafari, habibollah mashhadi, farideh okati, & roya movahed study of demotivated vs. motivated efl learners’ preferences towards teachers’ oral error correction 158 monkey a guy walks into a bar with his pet monkey. he orders a drink and while he's drinking, the monkey jumps all around the place. the monkey grabs some olives off the bar and eats them. then grabs some sliced limes and eats them. then jumps onto the pool table, grabs one of the billiard balls, sticks it in his mouth, and to everyone's amazement, somehow swallows it whole. the bartender screams at the guy "did you see what your monkey just did?". the guy says "no, what?" "he just ate the cue ball off my pool table-whole!". "yeah, that doesn't surprise me," replied the guy. "he eats everything in sight, the little bastard. sorry. i'll pay for the cue ball and stuff." he finishes his drink, pays his bill, pays for the stuff the monkey ate, then leaves. two weeks later he's in the bar again, and has his monkey with him. he orders a drink and the monkey starts running around the bar again. while the man is finishing his drink, the monkey finds a maraschino cherry on the bar. he grabs it, sticks it up his butt, pulls it out, and eats it. the bartender is disgusted. "did you see what your monkey did now?" he asks. "no, what?" replies the guy. "well, he stuck a maraschino cherry up his butt, pulled it out, and ate it!" said the bartender. "yeah, that doesn't surprise me," replied the guy. " he still eats everything in sight, but ever since he swallowed that cue ball, he measures everything first..." (source: http://www.study-express.ru/humour/funny-stories.shtml, picture: www.google.co.id) http://www.study-express.ru/humour/funny-stories.shtml http://www.google.co.id/ indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 60 the analysis of students’ error in using relative clause stevyara rismawathi kusdianty department of english education, university of kuningan email: stevyararisma@gmail.com apa citation: kusdianty, s. r. (2016). the analysis of students’ error in using relative clause. indonesian efl journal, 2(1), 60-70 received: 24-11-2015 accepted: 26-12-2015 published: 01-01-2016 abstract: this study is aimed at investigating error types of relative clause and focuses on error of selection items of relative pronoun. limitation of the study was on the students’ error in using relative pronoun (who, whom, which, and whose) in report text and the causes of the students’ error. this study used descriptive qualitative method. there were two techniques of collecting the data; observation which aimed at giving relative pronoun test in report text and interview which aimed at gathering information about the causes of the students made error. 20 students from class xi ipa 1 and xi ipa 2 of sman 1 garawangi were chosen by the researcher as the sample of this study. the theory by corder (1982), azar (1999) and brown (2000) were used as a basic theory to analyze the collected data. finally, the results of the analysis showed that the students made errors in relative pronoun “who” with number 45 errors or 33.6%. the error in using relative pronoun “whom” were 32 errors or 23.9%. the error in using relative pronoun “which” were 29 errors or 21.6%. the error in using relative pronoun “whose” with number 28 errors or 20.9%. the errors caused by the influences of intralingual transfer or most of the students didn’t understand about the material, and interlingual transfer or the influences from their mother tongue in pronouncing and writing relative pronoun. keywords: error analysis, relative pronoun, students, report text introduction in learning english, students often make errors in using relative clause. according to azar (1999, p. 267), “relative clause or also called adjective clause is a dependent clause that modifies noun. it describes, identifies or gives further information about a noun.” leech and svartvick (2002, p. 383) add that “the main function of a relative clause is to modify a noun phrase.” further, azar (1999) divides relative clause into two types. the first is relative pronoun that is used to connect dependent clause to independent clause. it includes who, whom, which, that, and whose. the second type is relative adverb that includes where and when. where is used to modify a place and when is used to modify a noun of time. relative pronoun is a pronoun whose function is to connect sentences and to describe nouns (antecedent) that can be humans, things, animals or plants. according to radden and driven (2007, p. 178), “the function of relative pronouns is to mark the relative clause within the structure of a complex sentence.” it is also supported by bao (2015) who states that relative pronoun is used to represent the person or thing in the main clause and each relative pronoun has its specific function. it means that each relative pronoun has different function. for example, “who” and “whom” are used for people, “that” stevyara rismawathi kusdianty the analysis of students’ error in using relative clause 61 is used for people and things, “which” is used for things, and “whose” is used for possessive adjective. wh-relative pronoun consists of “who”, “whom”, “which” and “whose.” the use of those relative pronouns depends on what we are referring to. leech and svartvick (2002, p. 386) states that “wh-relative pronoun are ‘who’, ‘whom’, ‘whose’ and ‘which’. they reflect the personal/non-personal gender of the antecedent.” here are examples of using wh-relative pronoun: (1) who & whom for personal relative pronoun who and whom is use to explain person antecedent of relative clause. huddleston and pullum (2005, p. 13) give an example about who relative pronoun: the secretary wrote to [all the members who were absent from the meeting]. they explains that “the underline relative clause modifies members and combines with it to form the head nominal of the bracketed np: members who were absent from the meeting.” regarding relative pronoun whom, broukal (2004, p. 346) states that whom is very formal english. we use “whom” only in formal situation, such as when writing for a school and speaking in a speech. here the example of using whom by broukal (2004, p. 347): the pilot whom i know is young. main clause : the pilot is young adjective clause : whom i know he describes that an adjective clause derives after the noun it explained. (2) which for non-personal relative pronoun which is used for things (non-personal) antecedent (azar, 1999, p. 268). example: the film which i need is unobtainable. the relative clause modifies film, and film which i need forms the head nominal (huddleston and pullum, 2004, p. 183). (3) whose for personal and nonpersonal according to azar (1999, p. 274), “whose is used to show the possession. it carriers the same meaning as other possessive pronouns used as adjectives: his, her, its and theirs.” here is the example of using relative pronoun whose (azar, 1999, p. 274): i know the man. his bicycle was stolen. i know the man whose bicycle was stolen. whose is linked to a noun: his bicycle becomes whose bicycle. in learning english as foreign language, errors is common problem made by the students and it can’t be avoided. thus, it is important to analyze the error since it can be an evaluation for the teacher himself. according to brown (2000, p. 219), “error analysis can keep us to closely focused on specific languages rather than viewing universal aspect of language.” in addition, corder (1982, p. 36) states that “errors are still classified on a superficial basis as errors of omission, errors of addition, errors of selection and errors of ordering.” 1. errors of omission where some element is omitted which should be present. 2. errors of addition where some element is present which should not be there. 3. errors of selection where the wrong item has been chosen in place of the right one. 4. errors of ordering where the elements presented are correct but wrong sequenced. furthermore, brown (2000, p.224) declares four sources of error as follows: 1. interlingual transfer indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 62 interlingual transfer has meaningful source of error for all learners (brown, 2000, p. 224). it means that the students who learn english as a foreign language have difficulties in their learning. sometimes, it was influenced by their mother tongue. 2. intralingual transfer richard (1973, p. 174) suggests that “intralingual error are those which reflect general characteristics of rule learning, such as faulty generalization, incomplete application of rules, and failure to learn condition after which rules apply.” it means that students sometimes make errors because of their understanding in language learning. perhaps, it causes by the sources of language, especially in grammatical rules. 3. context of learning context of learning refers to performance of teacher in the classroom. according to brown (2000, p. 226), “context, for example, refers to the classroom with its teacher and its material in the case of untutored second language learning.” he adds that the students often make errors because the teacher doesn’t give clear explanation. 4. communication strategies communication strategies is the teacher’s way in conveying the material to the students. selinker (1972) in corder (1982, p. 56) also states that “these errors were regarded as a by-product of the attempt of the learner to express his meaning in spontaneous speech with an inadequate grasp of the target language system.” method the data are taken from students at class xi mia i and xi mia ii in sman 1 garawangi. the writer uses two techniques in collecting the data, namely observation and interview. in observation, the writer gives writing test especially fill in the blank form about the use of relative pronoun in report text. then, the writer collected the data and identified the use of relative pronoun from report text. interview is used to investigate the causes of students’ errors in applying relative pronoun. the interview consists of six questions. the interviewees are ten students with the lowest score of relative pronoun test in report text. the interview session was recorded, then the writer transcribes it by using meaning condensation method. acoording to kvale (1996, p. 224), “meaning condensation entails an abridgement of the meaning expressed by the interviewees into shorter formulation.” stevyara rismawathi kusdianty the analysis of students’ error in using relative clause 63 results and discussion students errors in using relative pronoun table 1. students’ answer of relative pronoun test in report text no. name answer of errors types in relative pronoun total 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 which which who whom who whose whom who whom whose 1 s1 who whom whom which who whose whom which whose whose 3 2 s2 whose who whom whom who which whom which whom whom 3 3 s3 whose who whom whose which whom whom whose whom whose 3 4 s4 whose who whom whom whom whom whom who whose whose 4 5 s5 which whom which whose who whom whom whose whom which 4 6 s6 whose whose whom whom whom whom whom who whom whom 4 7 s7 whose which which whom whom whose which which whose whom 3 8 s8 which whose whom whom whose who whom which whom whom 5 9 s9 which who whom whose whom whom which who whose whose 3 10 s10 whose who whom whose which whom whom whom whom whom 2 11 s11 which who who whom who who whom whose who who 4 12 s12 whose whom who whom who who whom whose which whom 4 13 s13 whose which who which whose who who whom who which 2 14 s14 which whom whose whom who which whom whose whose which 4 15 s15 which who when who when where when where when where 1 16 s16 which whom who whom whom who whose whom whose who 3 17 s17 which whose who whose whom whose who whom who whom 3 18 s18 whose whom who which whose whom who which whose which 1 19 s19 which whose where who where whom where where whom whose 3 20 s20 which who which whose which whose who whom which whose 3 total 10 18 14 11 14 16 9 17 13 13 6 6 indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 64 1. rock music, _________ consists of electric guitar, acoustic bass guitar and drums, is favorite music of teenagers. the right answer for this question is relative pronoun which because the antecedents of the sentence is rock music and it belongs to non-personal (things) antecedent. in answering this question, there were 9 students (s2, s3, s4, s6, s7, s10, s12, s13 & s18) who used relative pronoun whose. relative pronoun whose is used to explain possessive adjective in relative clause. then, there was 1 students (s1) who used relative pronoun who. s2 : rock music, whose consists of electric guitar, acoustic bass guitar and drums, is favorite music of teenagers. s1 : rock music, who consists of electric guitar, acoustic bass guitar and drums, is favorite music of teenagers. correction : rock music, which consists of electric guitar, acoustic bass guitar and drums, is favorite music of teenagers. in conclusion, there were 10 errors in using relative pronoun which made by students at xi mia i. 2. rock and roll was the name given to the music____________ developed in the early 1950’s. the right answer for this question is which because the antecedent of the sentence is rock music and it belongs to non-personal (things) antecedent. it is as subject of clause. in answering this question, there were 8 students (s2, s3, s4, s9, s10, s11, s15 & s20) who used relative pronoun who. relative pronoun who is used to explain subject person in relative clause. there were 6 students (s1, s5, s12, s14, s16 & s20) who used relative pronoun whom. relative pronoun whom is used to explain object person in relative clause. then, there were 4 students (s6, s8, s17 & s19) who used relative pronoun whose. relative pronoun whose is used to explain possessive adjective in relative clause. s2 : rock and roll was the name given to the music who developed in the early 1950’s. s1 : rock and roll was the name given to the music whom developed in the early 1950’s. s6 : rock and roll was the name given to the music whose developed in the early 1950’s. correction : rock and roll was the name given to the music which developed in the early 1950’s. in conclusion, there were 18 errors in using relative pronoun which made by students at xi mia i. 3. alan freed, ___________was born on december 1921, comes from ohio. the right answer for this question is relative pronoun who. because the antecedents of the sentence is alan freed and it belongs to personal antecedent. it is as subject of relative clause. in answering this question, there were 8 students (s1, s2, s3, s4, s6, s8, s9 & s10) who used relative pronoun whom. relative pronoun is used to explain object person in relative clause. there were 3 students (s5, s7 & s20) who used relative pronoun which. relative pronoun which is used to explain non-personal (things) antecedent in relative clause. then, there was 1 students (s14) who used relative pronoun whose. s2 : alan freed, whom was born on december 1921, comes from ohio. s5 : alan freed, which was born on december 1921, comes from ohio. s14 : alan freed, whose was born on december 1921, comes from ohio. correction : alan freed, who was born on december 1921, comes from ohio. besides, there was 1 student who used relative when and where, it is false because it is relative adverb. in conclusion, there were 14 errors in stevyara rismawathi kusdianty the analysis of students’ error in using relative clause 65 using relative pronoun who made by students at xi mia i. 4. he is one of rock music’s pioneer____________ the people knows about. the right answer for this question is relative pronoun whom because him belongs to personal antecedent. it is as object of relative clause. in answering this question, there were 6 students (s3, s5, s9, s10, s17 & s20) who used relative pronoun whose. relative pronoun whose is used to explain possessive adjective in relative clause. then, there were 3 students (s1, s13 & s18) who used relative pronoun which. relative pronoun which is used to explain non-personal (things) in relative clause. then, there were 2 students (s15 & s19) who used relative pronoun who. relative pronoun who is used to explain subject person in relative clause s3 : he is one of rock music’s pioneer whose the people knows about. s1 : he is one of rock music’s pioneer which the people knows about. s19 : he is one of rock music’s pioneer who the people knows about. correction : he is one of rock music’s pioneer whom the people knows about. in conclusion, there were 11 errors in using relative pronoun whom made by students at xi mia i. 5. the rock singer___________appears in 1950 is elvis presley. the right answer for this question is relative pronoun who because the antecedents of the sentence is elvis presley and it belongs to person antecedent. it is as subject of relative clause. in answering this question, there were 6 students (s4, s6, s7, s9, s16 & s17) who used relative pronoun whom. relative pronoun whom is used as object of relative clause. then, there were 3 students (s3, s10 & s20) who used relative pronoun which. relative pronoun which is used to explain nonpersonal (things) antecedent. and there were 3 student (s8, s13 & s18) who used relative pronoun whose. relative pronoun is used to explain possessive adjective of relative clause. besides, there was 1 student who used relative when and 1 student who used relative where, it was false because it belongs to relative adverb. s4 : the rock singer whom appears in 1950 is elvis presley. s3 : the rock singer which appears in 1950 is elvis presley. s8 : the rock singer whose appears in 1950 is elvis presley. correction : the rock singer who appears in 1950 is elvis presley. so, relative pronoun whom, which and whose cannot be used for number 5. in conclusion, there were 14 errors in using relative pronoun who made by students at xi mia i. 6. elvis presley, ___________rock songs is famous in the world, is called by the king of rock and roll. the right answer for this question is relative pronoun whose because it showed the possessive adjective in relative clause. in answering this question, there were 8 students (s3, s4, s5, s6, s9, s10, s18 & s19) who used relative pronoun whom. relative pronoun whom is used to explain object personal antecedent of relative clause. then, there were 2 student (s2 & s14) who used relative pronoun which. relative pronoun which is used to explain non-personal (things) antecedent of relative clause. and there were also 5 student (s8, s11, s12, s13 & s16) who used relative pronoun who. relative pronoun who is used to explain subject personal antecedent of relative clause. then, there was 1 student who used relative where. indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 66 s3 : elvis presley, whom rock songs is famous in the world, is called by the king of rock and roll. s2 : elvis presley, which rock songs is famous in the world, is called by the king of rock and roll. s8 : elvis presley, who rock songs is famous in the world, is called by the king of rock and roll. correction : elvis presley, whose rock songs is famous in the world, is called by the king of rock and roll. in conclusion, there were 16 errors in using relative pronoun whose made by students at xi mia i. 7. he is handsome rocker ___________ the girls love in the world. the right answer for this question is relative pronoun whom because him belongs to object personal antecedent of relative clause. in answering this question, there were 2 students (s7 & s9) who used relative pronoun which. relative pronoun which is used to explain non-personal (things) antecedent of relative clause. there were 4 student (s13, s17, s18 & s20) who used relative pronoun who. relative pronoun who is used to explain subject personal antecedent of relative clause. then, there was 1 student (s16) who used relative pronoun whose. relative pronoun whose is used to explain possessive adjective in relative clause. then, there was 1 student who used relative when and 1 student who used relative where. s7 : he is handsome rocker which the girls love in the world. s13 : he is handsome rocker who the girls love in the world. s16 : he is handsome rocker whose the girls love in the world. correction : he is handsome rocker whom the girls love in the world. in conclusion, there were 9 errors in using relative pronoun whom made by students at xi mia i. 8. then comes bill haley and the comets, ____________come from united states are famous rock band. the right answer for this question is relative pronoun who because the antecedents of the sentence is bill haley and the comets and it belongs to personal antecedent. it is as subject of relative clause. in answering this question, there were 5 students (s1, s2, s7 s8 & s18) who used relative pronoun which. relative pronoun which is used to explain non-personal (things) antecedent of relative clause. then, there were 5 students (s3, s5, s11, s12 & s14) who used relative pronoun whose. relative pronoun whose is used to explain possessive adjective of relative clause. and there were 5 student (s10, s13, s16, s17 & s20) who used relative pronoun whom. relative pronoun whom is used to explain object personal antecedent of relative clause. then, there were 2 students who used relative where. s1 : then come bill haley and the comets, which come from united states are famous rock band. s3 : then comes bill haley and the comets, whose come from united states are famous rock band. s10 : then comes bill haley and the comets, whom come from united states are famous rock band. correction : then comes bill haley and the comets, who come from united states are famous rock band. in conclusion, there were 17 errors in using relative pronoun who made by students at xi mia i. 9. nicky astria, ____________we know is indonesia rock musician successful sells album more than 250 tapes. the right answer for this question is relative pronoun whom because her belongs to object personal antecedent of relative clause. in answering this question, there were 7 students (s1, s4, stevyara rismawathi kusdianty the analysis of students’ error in using relative clause 67 s7, s9, s14, s16 & s18) who used relative pronoun whose. relative pronoun whose is used to explain possessive adjective of relative clause. there were 3 students (s11, s13 & s17) who used relative pronoun who. relative pronoun who is used to explain subject personal antecedent of relative clause. then, there were 2 students (s12 & s20) who used relative pronoun which. relative pronoun which is used to explain non-personal (things) antecedent of relative clause. then, there was 1 student who used relative when. s1 : nicky astria, whose we know is indonesia rock musician successful sells album more than 250 tapes. s11 : nicky astria, who we know is indonesia rock musician successful sells album more than 250 tapes. s12 : nicky astria, which we know is indonesia rock musician successful sells album more than 250 tapes. correction : nicky astria, whom we know is indonesia rock musician successful sells album more than 250 tapes. so, relative pronoun whose cannot be used for number 9. in conclusion, there were 13 errors in using relative pronoun whom made by students at xi mia i. 10. the lady rocker’s album____________ famous is jarum neraka. the right answer for this question is relative pronoun whose because it shows the possessive adjective in relative clause. in answering this question, there were 7 students (s2, s6, s7, s8, s10, s12 & s17) who used relative pronoun whom. relative pronoun whom is used to explain object personal antecedent of relative clause. there were 4 students (s5, s13, s14 & s18) who used relative pronoun which. relative pronoun which is used to explain non-personal (things) antecedent of relative clause. there were 2 students (s11 & s16) who used relative pronoun who. relative pronoun who is used to explain subject personal antecedent of relative clause. besides, there was 1 student who used relative when. s2 : the lady rocker’s album whom famous is jarum neraka. s5 : the lady rocker’s album which famous is jarum neraka. correction : the lady rocker’s album whose famous is jarum neraka. in conclusion, there were 14 errors in using relative pronoun whose made by students at xi mia i. table 2. total of frequency & percentage error types in using relative pronoun at report text made by xi mia 1 & xi mia 2 no relative pronoun number of item frequency of error (mia 1) frequency of error (mia 2) total frequency of error total percentages 1 who 3 10 4 14 31.1% 5 7 7 14 31.1% 8 7 10 17 37.8% total 3 24 21 45 100% 2 whom 4 5 6 11 34.4% 7 2 6 8 25% 9 4 9 13 40.6% total 3 11 21 32 100% indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 68 3 which 1 7 3 10 35.7% 2 9 9 18 64.3% total 2 16 12 28 100% 4 whose 6 8 8 16 55.2% 10 5 8 13 44.8% total 2 13 16 29 100% table 3. total recapitulation of frequency & percentage error types in using relative pronoun at report text made by xi mia 1 & xi mia 2 no types of relative pronoun frequency of error (mia 1) frequency of error (mia 2) total frequency of error (mia 1&2) total percentages 1 who 24 21 45 33.6% 2 whom 11 21 32 23.9% 3 which 13 16 29 21.6% 4 whose 16 12 28 20.9% total 64 70 134 100% causes of students’ error the first caused of students’ error is intralingual transfer. interlingual transfer is the influences of students’ mother tongue into the target language. it is one of error sources which often occurs in learning english as a foreign language. in this research, the students stated that indonesian has influence on their errors in using relative pronoun. the result of interview question (item number 6) showed that there were 16 students (s3, s5, s6, s7, s8, s9, s10, s11, s12, s13, s14, s15, s17, s18, s19 & s20) or 80% who stated that interlingual transfer has influence on students’ error. researcher : is there indonesian influence of error in using relative pronoun? mention the reason! (adakah pengaruh bahasa indonesia dalam kesalahan menggunakan relative pronoun? sebutkan alasannya!) students : yes, actually i have difficulty in using whom and whose. and also, i feel confused to write whom and whose. (iya, sebenarnya saya memiliki kesulitan dalam mengucapkan whom dan whose. dan juga, saya suka bingung untuk menulis whom dan whose). from the explanation above, the writer concludes that there is an influence of interlingual transfer on students’ error in using relative pronoun. the second causes of students’ error is intralingual transfer. intralingual transfer is students understanding in learning english. intralingual transfer is one of error sourcess which cannot be avoided in learning english as a foreign language. the result of interview question (item number 1) showed that they were 20 students (s1, s2, s3, s4, s5, s6, s7, s8, s9, s10, s11, s12, s13, s14, s15, s16, s17, s18, s19 & s20) or 100% who stated that relative pronoun material is difficult. researcher : what’s your opinion about material of relative pronoun? apa pendapatmu mengenai materi relative pronoun?) students : [it was] difficult. (sulit) from the result of interview’s question above, the students think that stevyara rismawathi kusdianty the analysis of students’ error in using relative clause 69 relative pronoun material is difficult. it can be concluded that the students did not understand about relative pronoun material. then, from the result of interview question item number 2, there were 20 students (s1, s2, s3, s4, s5, s6, s7, s8, s9, s10, s11, s12, s13, s14, s15, s16, s17, s18, s19 & s20) or 100% who stated that the students did not understand about the use of relative pronoun, especially in the use of relative pronoun who, whom, and whose. what are relative pronoun types that you think it is the most difficult all of them? mention the reason! researcher : what type of relative pronoun that you this as the most difficult to be used? give me the reason. (jenis relative pronoun manakah yang menurutmu paling sulit? apa alasannya!) students : relative pronoun who and whom. i am confused to differentiate the use of relative pronoun who and whom. because it have function to explain person, but the position is different. then, relative pronoun whose. i can’t distinguish possessive adjective. (relative pronoun who dan whom. saya bingung untuk membedakan penggunaan relative pronoun who dan whom. karena itu kan memiliki fungsi untuk menjelaskan orang tapi posisinya berbeda. dan relative pronoun whose. saya tidak bisa menentukan kepemilikan itu seperti apa). all of the students or 20 students (100%) stated that they didn’t understand about the use of some relative pronouns, especially in the use of relative pronoun who, whom, and whose. relative pronoun who and whom is used to explain person antecedent of relative clause. but, relative pronoun who is used to explain subject person antecedent of relative clause. while, relative pronoun whom is used to explain object person antecedent of relative clause. besides, the students also cannot differentiate the use of relative pronoun whose. relative pronoun whose is used to explain possessive adjective antecedent of relative clause, but they cannot actually distinguish possessive adjective itself. from the explanation above, the writer concludes that there is an influence of intralingual transfer on students’ error in using relative pronoun. conclusion the students made error in all the types of relative pronoun. first, relative pronoun whom with 45 errors or 33.6%. then, relative pronoun whom with 32 errors or 23.9%. next, relative pronoun which with 29 errors or 21.6%. the last, relative pronoun whose with 28 errors or 20.9%. it happened because most of students did not understand about relative pronoun material and also the difficulties to pronounce and write relative pronoun itself. besides, this research also found some causes of students’ errors in using relative pronoun. those causes are interlanguage transfer and intralanguage transfer. references bao, x. (2015). senior high school students’ error on the use of relative words. canandian centre of science and education, 8(3). retrived from http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index. php/elt/article/download/45423/246 26.//. 137-154. broukal, m. (2004). grammar form and function. new york: the mcgraw-hill companies, inc. brown, h. d. (2000). principle of language teaching and learning (4th ed.). new york: pearson education. coles. (2003). english grammar simplified. toronto: coles publishing company. corder, s. p. (1982). error analysis and interlanguage two. new york: oxford university press. http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/elt/article/download/45423/24626./ http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/elt/article/download/45423/24626./ http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/elt/article/download/45423/24626./ indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 70 kvale, s. (1996). interviews an introduction to qualitative research interviewing, method of analysis. thousand oaks, calf: sage publication, inc. leech, g & svartvik, j. (2002). a communicative grammar of english. london: pearson education. radden, g & dirven, r. (2007). cognitive english grammar. amsterdam: john benjamins publishing company. richard, j. c. (1973). a non-contrastive approach to error analysis. error analysis perspective on second language acquisition, 25(3), 172-188. mansye sekewael & wanti josinta maria leni improving students’ vocabulary mastery by usingword walls strategy and alphaboxes strategy to understand descriptive text 242 improving students’ vocabulary mastery by using word walls strategy and alphaboxes strategy to understand descriptive text mansye sekewael post-graduate students, english study program pattimura university ambon e-mail: sekewaelmansye@yahoo.com wanti josinta maria leni english teacher of smp maria mediatrix, ambon, indonesia e-mail: wantijsl@gmail.com apa citation: sekewael, m. & leni, w. j. m. (2015). improving students’ vocabulary mastery by using word walls strategy and alphaboxes strategy to understand descriptive text. indonesian efl journal, 1(2), 242-249 received: 14-11-2014 accepted: 16-03-2015 published: 01-07-2015 abstract: the purpose of this research was to measure how far the words walls strategy and alphaboxes strategy can improve students’ vocabulary mastery in understanding descriptive text. this was the kind of action research where the writer tried to collaborate his idea with the english teacher of the seventh grade of smp naskat maria mediatrix ambon to gain the data of his research. the writer conducted his research at the first grade of smp naskat maria mediatrix in 2014/2015 academic year. there are 22 students at that grade as the subjects of this research. in applying those strategies, there were two cycles: the first cycle consisted of six meetings where three meetings for use of word walls strategy and alphaboxes strategy was sucessful in improving students’ vocabulary mastery in implementing words walls strategy and another three meetings for the alphaboxes strategy. for the second cycle, the writer used four meetings for applying both strategies. the writer used the students’ test result to measure the improvement of their vocabulary achievement. the writer found out that there were a significant differences scores after implementing both strategies. it proved that the students’ understanding of descriptive text well toward those strategies. keywords: vocabulary mastery, word walls strategy, alphaboxes strategy, descriptive text . introduction english has been considered as an essential language to be learnt in order to meet the communication needs in this globalization era. taking into account the benefits of english, indonesia has organized english to be taught in formal school as a compulsory subject. as stated in standard of content by kemendikbud 2013, the teaching of foreign language, specifically english, is aimed to develop students’ ability to communicate with world society. therefore, it is taught in different kind of grade levels. the teaching includes the teaching of the four skills, listening, speaking, reading, and writing and each of the micro skills. vocabulary is one of crucial aspects to support those skills. as stated by richards and renandya (2002), vocabulary is a core component of language proficiency and provides much of the basis of how well learners speak, listen, and write. the vocabulary mastery will affect someone’s ability in using the language either in spoken or written form. in listening skill, to be able to understand someone utterance, people should know what the meaning of words and sentences being said. therefore, they know the intention of the utterance and are able to react either through action or answer it using spoken utterance, which here, they have to use words to do that. additionally, to be able to understand what people is reading, they should be able to understand the meaning that is being conveyed through the written words. and as what needed in speaking, indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 243 people should be able to arrange words to convey meaning in writing. moreover, they should be able to spell the words and write them down. although arranging words is not the only way in conveying meaning because there are also paralanguage and context which assist, but in languages, vocabulary will be the most crucial aspect. as stated by wilkins in thornbury (2002), “without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed.” it tells us that if someone wants to be able to convey meaning they need vocabulary. although someone has known sentence structure but if he/she does not mastery vocabulary, he/she will remain unable to say or write anything and the grammar knowledge will be useless. thus, by improving the vocabulary, it will be a basic for someone to communicate what is in their mind using the targeted language. as a matter of fact, the researchers assumed that the students’ learning vocabulary development, especially junior high school students, is somewhat causing apprehension. based on the preliminary study that was conducted by researcher on grade vii of smp naskat maria mediatrix ambon through observation and interview in the class during two weeks, the researcher wanted to know about the students understanding of vocabularies. first, in the pre-activity, the teacher just asked to write what the teacher wrote on the whiteboard, and then she explained about the lesson and gave several questions. yet, only some students could answer the questions. while in the post activity, the teacher asked some students again regarding to the topic taught, they did not answer her questions. so, the writer interviewed the students and they did not understand about the text because it contained unfamiliar words that should be clearly explained to them. consequently, they preferred to keep silent during the lesson. concerning to the problems above, it shows that the condition or the atmosphere during learning process always could not improve students’ knowledge of vocabulary. in learning process, students need different and enjoyable atmosphere. according to kline in windura (2008), learning is more effective if it is done in a pleasant atmosphere. gunning (2000) suggested that creating an interesting atmosphere of word learning can have a significant impact upon development of students. so the writer tried to overcome the problems above by applying two strategies namely “word wall and alphaboxes strategies” to increase the students vocabulary in understanding the descriptive text. both of those strategies were separated explanations as follow: the first strategy that the writer applied was “word walls strategy”. erin (2011) states that interactive words walls showcase well-selected words; they help teachers build a foundation for student content vocabulary comprehension. they also support word-learning strategies by highlighting root words, suffixes, prefixes, and their meanings. this helps students decode meaning in text. additionally, when students use the word walls they become more conscious of words and definitions. this support content comprehension. it also help students become aware of vocabulary in the world around them. the second one was called “alphaboxes strategy”. hoyth (1999) states that alphaboxes is a strategy which encourages student to interact with text. in addition, alphaboxes helps student activate prior knowledge, build vocabulary, and increase comprehension. kimberly (2014) adds that alphaboxes is an ideal strategy for students to work collaboratively with a partner or small group to engage with informational text. the common core state standards encourage a shift toward using more informational text with students. even first grade students can use alphaboxes in a small group as a follow-up activity with informational storybooks. morrison & wlodarczyk (2009) conclude that the alphaboxes strategy requires students to move from simple recall of factual information to going beyond the information presented in the text. generating questions, making connections, providing explanations, identifying and discussing unfamiliar vocabulary words, and presenting alternative perspectives are all higher-level cognitive processes that increase learning (block & johnson, 2002; duke & pearson, 2002; pressley, 2006). additionally, when students mansye sekewael & wanti josinta maria leni improving students’ vocabulary mastery by usingword walls strategy and alphaboxes strategy to understand descriptive text 244 work with one another, their thinking is distributed among group members, and participants share cognitive responsibility while externalizing their thoughts as they work through tasks (palincsar & herrenkohl, 1999). the description above related with those strategies which were applied by the teacher can guarantee that they would master vocabularies in understanding the descriptive texts for several reasons: (1) to brainstorm strategy to elicit students’ prior knowledge and active their learning; (2) to find out the interesting words which are well known by the students; (3) to make the students more active in discussing their important words to the whole class so all students will get the same perception of the those words themselves; (4) to make reading comprehension looks still alive; (5) to motivate students in comprehending their vocabularies (morrison & wlodarczyk, 2009). based on the background of the study, the research problem was formulated as the following: “is the students’ vocabulary achievement significantly improved through word wall strategy and alphaboxes strategy in understanding descriptive text? method the research design was “classroom action research (car)”. in conducting car, the writer used kemmis and mc taggart’s model (1982). theoretically, this model includes a number of cycles as many as the writer needs. each cycle has several phases. there were two cycles in doing this research. in conducting the research, the writer applied word wall strategy and alphaboxes strategy in in improving students’ vocabulary through descriptive texts. the subjects of the research were the students of the viith grade of smp naskat maria mediatrix ambon in academic year 2014/2015. this class consisted of 22 students were eligible for data collection. before doing the real action, the teacher designed the lesson plan. the lesson plan was made in order to help the teacher to identify the students’ need, preference, and also to motivate them to learn. the lesson plan was arranged and develop on the basis of the first semester program. it covered topic to be taught, the objectives, the steps of the teaching and learning process, and the media used. the action was implemented in two cycles consisted of ten meetings. in the first cycle, three meetings are provided for applying word walls strategy and three meeting for alphaboxes strategy. for the second cycle each of those strategies had applied twice. the purpose of applying those strategies for understanding descriptive texts. for applying descriptive text, the teacher used word wall strategy with the following procedures: 1) preparation the teacher trys to select a place in the room for his word wall. large sheets of poster paper or a dedicated whiteboard work well. 2) building your word wall before the teacher begins reading a text (a descriptive text) or studying new material, assign students, possibly working in pairs, a term to define for the class word wall. the teacher can also requires students to present an image or graphic that represents the meaning of this word. associating an image with a word is one way to help students remember definitions. 3) adding to your word wall new terms can be added to the word wall as needed. students can also update the definitions on their word wall as they develop a deeper understanding of key terms. while in applying alphaboxes strategy, the procedures were as follow: a) the teacher divided the class into small group of two. in pairs they discussed about one of topic related with descriptive text. it is “a giraffe” b) he distributed a blank of alphabox sheet to each student. c) he asked the students to think of words and phrases associated with a particular topic and record their ideas on their own alphabox sheet. they should do this independently for a specified period of time.  e.g., consider the topic of giraffe. think about words and phrases indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 245 you know associated with box. giraffe. think independently and record your ideas in the appropriate box. for example, one thing i think of regarding giraffe is "neck things". i would record this phrase in the "n" 4) prompt students work with their partners or in small groups to compare their ideas. individuals should add to, correct, or clarify their own written record. 5) the teacher facilitated a class discussion of the words and phrases associated with the topic.  consider using structures such as interaction sequence to facilitate the group discussion.  consider creating an alphabox sheet. have students add their ideas to one document. 6) all those words that they had could help them understand the content of the descriptive text before they did answering several questions related to the text. to obtained complete and valid data, the writer used a number of instruments for recording, measuring or controlling data. the instruments which were used included an observation sheet, tests, questionnaire, documentation, and an interview guide. observation was conducted to examine the process that happened during the action and the note the classroom events. it was intended to know whether the action was in line with the planning used in the teaching and learning process. the writer implemented non-participant observation. he observed the subject of the study without taking an active part in the situation. the observation sheet used was a checklist. the checklist was used to check if the implementation of word wall strategy and alphaboxes strategy were effective in class. test were used to measure both strategies in improving students’ vocabulary in understanding descriptive texts. there were three tests which were done during the research. they were orientation test, post test in cycle i, and post test in cycle ii. the result of the tests were compared with the criteria of success to know whether the students’ skill in vocabulary improved. to gain the data, the writer used the questionnaire items addressed to the students and the teacher as the subject of the research. questionnaire was used to know the english teacher’s opinion and students’ responses related to the use of word wall strategy and alphaboxes strategy”. the writer also used documentation such as syllabus and descriptive texts. finally, the goal of interviews to explore the students’ opinion deeply in improving their vocabulary in understanding descriptive texts by using word wall strategy and alphaboxes strategy. results and discussion before doing his research, the writer gave a general test which is called pre-test. the test consist of some homonyms and antonyms. the writer wanted to measure how far the students in the seventh grade of smp maria mediatrix ambon understanding the words through a text. he provided local content materials in descriptive text. there are 3 (three) short texts which were consisted of 20 questions. those questions were in multiple choices. the result of the pre-test was provided in the figure 1 below: mansye sekewael & wanti josinta maria leni improving students’ vocabulary mastery by usingword walls strategy and alphaboxes strategy to understand descriptive text 246 figure 1. the result of pre-test. the result showed that the students were under the average level. three students were passed the test based on the standard of the research. thus, the total numbers of students succeeded were 14%. the highest score could reach 80 and the lowest one was 40 while the mean of the pre-test was 55. it could state that this class needed to get a strategy in comprehending their vocabulary. gaining the result as shown in figure 4.1, made the writer did a short interview with the english teacher and five of the seventh grade students of smp naskat maria mediatrix. the interview was done to know what the best strategy to be applied to make them more understand about the text through vocabulary. in the interview, the students were asked whether the descriptive text was difficult for them if they have lack of vocabulary. some of the students answered “yes” because they thought that it was hard to capture all information of the content in the descriptive texts because most of them have difficult words and they were new to them remembering that they were still in the seventh grade and some of them didn’t get english since they were in elementary school. they also explained that they were not familiar with difficult words, idioms, and phrases. they gave their opinion about their reading habit, they said that they were not interest in reading because more information for them were still new and they felt bored doing reading tasks. seeing that fact, the writer provided some strategies for the english teacher to be discussed. she then agreed to choose two of them namely “word wall strategy and alphaboxes strategy”. after getting the two strategies to be applied, the writer together with the english teacher tried to design lesson plans, english materials and evaluation tools in our planning. we planned to do two cycles in our research. but we didn’t limit our research to the next cycle if we’ve failed in the last cycle (2nd cycle). we would teach the students using both word wall strategy and alphaboxes strategy. each cycle in our research consisted of three meetings and the last meeting will be the test to measure the students comprehending about vocabulary through descriptive text. we started our research in cycle one on february 2nd, 2015. two meetings had done successfully (9th and 16th of february 2015) for word wall strategy, and then we did posttest of the 1st cycle for the students on february 23rd, 2015. we still used the same materials but different in the content of the text to be applied using alphaboxes strategy. we started our research on february 23rd and continue the next two meeting on 2nd and 9th march, 2015. after doing the evaluation of the 1st cycle of alphaboxes strategy, we then compare them through the result as shown in the following figure 2: 0 50 100 mean the highest score the lowest score success 55 80 40 14 mean the highest score the lowest score success indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 247 figure 2. the result of 1st cycle from the data above, we can stated that we need to do the next cycle because both word wall strategy and alphaboxes strategy couldn’t reach the minimum standard of our research where we need the mean of the class was 75 and the total percentage of students’ success was 80%. as the realty shown in the data above was the mean in word wall strategy was 65, the highest score was 95 and the lowest one was 55. the percentage of students’ success was 50%. we need to do the next cycle to make our research would be success. the same problem we’ve got from alphaboxes strategy. although the mean score was 77 and it stated that the students has been succeed but the total percentage in their success was 77% also and it could not answer the need of our research. we needed 80% for getting success in our research. that’s why, both of us decided to continue our research in the next cycle (2nd cycle). before starting our next research, we discussed about the strengthen and the weakness of alphaboxes strategy and word wall strategy. during the first cycle we found (1) both strategies were new to the students so, they were confused for the first time during the implementation. for the next meeting, they were serious in doing those strategies; (2) the vocabularies in the texts could be understood fast because they have background knowledge with them. so when they did the tasks, some of them did not need to look for the meaning in the dictionaries. as those strategies helped them much; (3) the students were happy doing their tasks. as they did competition one another to prove that they could handle their problems. sometimes they got difficult and need the teacher to explain a little to lead them understanding the concept of the materials. the 2nd cycle has done on march 16th, 23rd and 30th, 2015 for word wall strategy and april 6th, 13th, and 20th 2015 for alphaboxes strategy. the result can be shown in the figure 3 below: 0 20 40 60 80 100 mean the highest score the lowest score success 65 95 55 50 77 90 60 77 ww strategy ab strategy mansye sekewael & wanti josinta maria leni improving students’ vocabulary mastery by usingword walls strategy and alphaboxes strategy to understand descriptive text 248 figure 3. the result of 2nd cycle the figure 3 showed that there was a significant different in the result of the test in 2nd cycle. the mean score of word wall strategy was 84 and alphaboxes strategy was 88. the highest score of both strategies were the same (100). for the lowest score, the alphaboxes strategy was 70 while the word wall strategy was 65 but both word wall strategy and alphaboxes strategy had the same percentage of success. only two of the students were fail. so, the total number of the students’ success was 91%. from the result of the test above, the writer concluded that the research that has done will be stopped because the criteria of success had already reached. thus, we couldn’t continue our research to the 3rd cycle. it suggested that the use of word wall strategy and alphaboxes strategy” can improve students’ vocabulary mastery in understanding the descriptive text of the second semester students in viith grade of smp naskat maria mediatrix ambon. it was obviously seen that the score of the students in vocabulary kept increasing from the orientation test until the post-test of cycle 2. it was proved by the data which show that the mean of the students in the post-test ii for “word wall strategy” was 84 and for “alphaboxes strategy” was 88 if we compared in the pre-test where the result of the students in “word wall strategy” was 65 and “alphaboxes strategy” was 77. the qualitative data taken from observation sheet and questionnaire sheet also showed that the students’ questionnaire toward the implementation of word wall strategy and alphaboxes strategy” can be described as follow: 77,27% were interested in learning english text by knowing the meaning of vocabulary first and 22,28% were still not interest at all. 81,82% showed their interesting after applying “word wall strategy and alphaboxes strategy”, 13,64% were still confused and 4,54 was not give his answer. in understanding a descriptive texts, 95,45% stated that they were easy to understand them and enjoy reading them after the implementation of both strategies mention previously. while 4,54% did not give his respond. from the rest of the data above, both word wall strategy and alphaboxes strategy” were very helpful in improving students’ vocabulary mastery in understanding the descriptive texts. it was noted during teaching and learning process, they enjoyed their class very much. conclusion based on the research finding, the conclusion can be drawn as follow: (1), the use of word wall strategy and alphaboxes strategy” had positive impact on the improvement students’ vocabulary mastery and also produced their interest in reading descriptive text; (2) from the observation and documentation, the writer knew that the 0 20 40 60 80 100 mean the highest score the lowest score success 84 100 65 91 88 100 70 91 ww strategy ab strategy indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 249 english teacher and the students did all of the stages in the teaching and learning process starting from preparing lesson plans to do pre-activities, whilst-activities and post activities well; (3) from the interview with the english teacher and the students, the writer got positive responds from them concerning to the applying those strategies. according to them, those strategies were attractive and helpful to practice their vocabularies; (4) the result of the questionnaire showed that in understanding a descriptive texts, 95,45% stated that they were easy to understand them and enjoy reading them after the implementation of both strategies mention previously. while 4,54% did not give his respond. based on the above conclusions, it is recommended that teachers who teach vocabularies in reading texts should apply word wall strategy and alphaboxes strategy. those strategies can help students easily to understand the content of the texts. for the students, they can use and have more exercises with those strategies in daily activities in order to improve their capability in understanding all genre of texts. references erinn l. henrichs, b. s. (2011). interactive word walls and student perceptions of vocabulary.thesis. san marcos: texas state university duke, n. k., & pearson, p. d. (2002). effective reading practices for developing comprehension. in a.e. farstrup & s.j. samuels (eds.), what research has to say about reading instruction, 3rd edition., newark, de: international reading association gunning, t. g. (2000). creating literacy instruction for all children. boston: allyn and bacon hoyt, l. (1999). revisit, reflect, retell. portsmouth, nh: heinemann kemmis, s. and mctaggart, r., eds. (1982) the action research planner, third edition. victoria: deakin university. kimberly, t. (2014). alphaboxes: 14 strategies to use before, during, & after reading {12 days of literacy}. retrivted from: http://www.learningunlimitedllc.com/2014/01/12days-literacy-alphaboxes-10-simplestrategies/ morrison, v., & wlodarczyk, l. (2009, october). revisiting read-aloud: instructional strategies that encourage students' engagement with texts. the reading teacher, 63(2), 110-118. palincsar, a. s., & herrenkohl, l. (1999). designing collaborative contexts: lessons from three research programs. in a. m. o’donnell & a. king (eds.), cognitive perspectives on peer learning (pp. 151–177). mahwah, nj: erlbaum. pressley, m. (2006). what the future of reading research could be. paper presented at the international reading association’s reading research 2006 conference, chicago, illinois, april 2006. windura, s. (2008). mind map langkah demi langkah. jakarta: pt elex media kompotindo. http://www.learningunlimitedllc.com/2014/01/12-days-literacy-alphaboxes-10-simple-strategies/ http://www.learningunlimitedllc.com/2014/01/12-days-literacy-alphaboxes-10-simple-strategies/ http://www.learningunlimitedllc.com/2014/01/12-days-literacy-alphaboxes-10-simple-strategies/ indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 13 fostering students’ engagement in synchronous learning using interactive web-based media nia kurniawati english education study program, suryakancana university, cianjur email: nia@unsur.ac.id fuzi fauziyah bhakti medika vocational high school, cianjur email: fuzifau@gmail.com apa citation: kurniawati, n., & fauziyah, f. (2022). fostering students’ engagement in synchronous learning using interactive web-based media. indonesian efl journal, 8(1), pp. 13-22. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v8i1.5583 received: 19-09-2020 accepted: 18-11-2021 published:30-01-2022 introduction due to the pandemic covid-19 era, the ministry of education in indonesia replaces the teaching and learning process with the online system. the term online learning refers to the learning process by a computer or mobile devices such as smartphone, laptop, and or personal computer. it can be implemented using an asynchronous, synchronous, or blended form. in synchronous learning, teachers and students are interacting and collaborating in real-time. it is supported by video conferencing or audio conferencing platforms, and it is similar to a conventional classroom, except that it is accessible online by all participants through the internet (perveen, 2016). therefore, the participants must present simultaneously from their different locations. many new problems elevated by educators during online distance learning. for instance, in explaining the materials, teachers just speech to the students and rarely use interesting media. it is affirmed that this learning strategy is fairly monotonous (yuwanda, 2017) which cannot attract students' attention effectively so that students tend to be passive in following learning activities. in contrast, the students who participate actively in class seem to achieve higher academic rather than those who are inactive (thomas, 2020). it can be said that when students learn actively in the class, it means they have a great motivation to learn, and when the students are motivated to learn, the students' engagements occur. students' engagement is how students were active, attending class, asking and answering the question, and attempts to conceptualize of abstract: this research was conducted to investigate the implementation of bookwidgets to facilitate the students’ engagement in synchronous learning through web-conferencing. the subject were students of almadina vocational high school from 11 otkp, which involved 29 students. the objective of this implementation was to foster the students’ engagement during synchronous class, to find out the way bookwidgets facilitated the students’ engagement, and to reveal the most dominant students’ engagement types when bookwidgets was integrated. this study was a nested mix-method, employing observation, interview, and survey to gather the qualitative and quantitative data. it was applied for four meetings. the result of this research showed that this implementation could engaged students behaviorally, emotionally, and cognitively. they presented positive behaviors, involvement, effort, positive emotion, achievement, and good self-regulation during their learning. the interesting features had created meaningful learning for students in terms of verbal participation, students’ feeling and students’ academic investment. the easy use features of bookwidgets made students enthusiastic and reduced the boredom which made them motivate and engage in following the synchronous learning. based on the statistical data, bookwidgets facilitated behavioral engagement with 78%, emotional engagement with 76%, and cognitive engagement with 75%. from this result, it could be seen that bookwigets mostly facilitated the behavioral engagement. two or more engagement types were possible to occur simultaneously, but the level of each engagement could be different. keywords: students’ engagement; synchronous learning; bookwidgets. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i2.4564 nia kurniawati & fuzi fauziyah fostering students’ engagement in synchronous learning using interactive web-based media 14 engagement (fredricks, blumenfeld, & paris, 2004). they explain that students' engagement has numerous dimensions such as behavior (involvement and participation in academic and social activities), emotional (attitudes, interests, values, and affective reactions toward the class, teachers, classmates or school), and cognitive (motivation to learn and to use cognitive and metacognitive strategies in thinking and learning). this term covers the classroom activities such as being active in discussion class, doing their task, listening to the lesson, concentrating, obeying the role, and using strategy to solve their problems in learning. therefore, students' engagement becomes crucial in the learning process; the linkage between students' engagement and student academic achievement is undeniable. hence, it is necessary to apply effective instruction, interactive, empowering, challenging, entertaining, and motivating students to be involved actively. moreover, according to indiana university's high school survey of student engagement (hssse), more than 81,000 students in 110 secondary schools in 26 states dropped out of school in 2007 because they were bored with the teaching-learning routine class (astuti, wihardi, & rochintaniawati, 2020). in line with seifert (2004, cited in astuti et al., 2020), boredom happens due to the way instructional content is delivered, and students are not actively engaged in a lesson, so they lose the desire to learn. this state means that specific conventional tasks are tedious and inefficient. based on the demand for effective instruction above, it is necessary to organize the education by choosing suitable methods and media. various forms of technologies can be used to fully enable students to engage in the classroom learning process. one of them is interactive web-based media. web-based learning is an online learning medium or website with educational purposes, and many universities create science instructional content as a medium or repository of integrated science learning material (wang, cheng, chen, mercer, & kirschner, 2017). the benefits of webbased learning over other learning methodologies are that it uses online technologies and the internet. it can be accessed at any time and from any operating system, like android, ios, and windows. bookwidgets is one of them. bookwidgets is a web 2.0 application platform for creating interactive learning materials, and it can be accessed by the web browser. deploying a descriptive qualitative and quantitative approach, this study described the implementation of bookwidgets as interactive webbased media in fostering the students’ engagement during synchronous learning, explored the way bookwidgets facilitates the students' engagement, and investigated the types of students' engagement that are primarily presented in synchronous learning using bookwidgets. this research used the theory of students’ engagement by fredricks, blumenfeld, & paris (2004). many research investigated the students' engagement during teaching and learning processes, such as rajabalee, santally, & rennie (2020) examined the association between students' participation in an online module and their overall performance by evaluating students' learning experiences in an online module. in terms of synchronous learning, rahayu (2020) investigates students' experiences and perceptions of the implementation of synchronous e-learning through the zoom conference method. besides that, francescucci & rohani (2019) explore whether immersive, collaborative, real-time, instructor-led (viri) online learning provides the same student success and interaction outcomes as a face-to-face (f2f) course. in terms of application used, menon (2019), in his research, demonstrated bookwidgets to encourage teachers to develop a highly immersive learning environment for blended learning or any online learning that serves as a compliment. the implementation of interactive web-based media in fostering students’ engagement during synchronous class through web-conferencing is still new. thus, this research is significant to investigate. method this study employed a mixed-methods research design. it is an approach which combines and integrates qualitative and quantitative research and data in a research study (creswell, 2014). the mixed-method types used is nested method procedures which one method is used as the primary method (leavy, 2017). nesting quantitative data in qualitative designs involves using a qualitative method as the primary method, and nesting a quantitative component in the design (leavy, 2017). the first phase was a qualitative indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 15 exploration of bookwidgets implementation collected by observation, and the way bookwidgets facilitated the students’ engagement collected by interview. then, the second phase was developed by using an online questionnaire to build the first phase data in revealing the three dimensions of students’ engagement which most frequently appeared. the study was conducted at al madina vocational high school of cianjur. the school is located in caringin street, limbangansari, and district of cianjur west java. in addition, this site was chosen because this school is able to conduct synchronous learning using web conferencing tools namely zoom in their teaching and learning activities during this pandemic, so that it was suitable with the researcher’s topic. the class that researcher chose was 11th otkp (otomatisasi tata kelola perkantoran) consisted of 29 students. the research was carried out in four meetings. furthermore, the researcher collaborated with the english teacher. in carried out the study, the english teacher had a role to teach and implement english material that is cause and effect to students. while, the researcher’s role is an observer, who observes teaching learning activities during the synchronous learning process. the main data was collected qualitatively through an observation and interview and quantitatively through a questionnaire. the classroom observation was done virtually through zoom meeting which were held four times. the used instrument were observation checklist where the several indicators of students’ engagement has been provided on the sheet (leavy, 2017), field notes were prepared to note down some aspects of the students’ engagement which are not covered in the observation checklist, and video recorders to observe the whole process of teaching and learning. moreover, the researcher interviewed five students at the end of the course. the students were chosen by the teacher based on the students’ activeness both online and offline, cooperativeness in the classroom and also their overall english ability. the students were interviewed about their engagement and their feelings and thoughts in the learning process. interviews were conducted after all observation sessions end through whatsapp call. there were 21 pre-determined questions to be addressed for students which all are in the form of open-ended questions. there were 23 positively worded statements provided in the questionnaire which were distributed to 29 respondents. all statements were developed based on fredrick’s notions on student engagement and were adjusted from national survey students engagement (nsse). the statements in the questionnaire were written in bahasa indonesia in order to avoid misunderstanding and to ease the respondents in filling the questionnaire. the scale value of the questionnaire was based on likert-scale which underwent adjustment so that it consisted only four scales with different values; strongly agree, agree, disagree, strongly disagree. the questionnaire were designed to be completed online, via the internet. the researcher distributed the questionnaire to the participants in the end of learning process through google form: bit.ly/angket_bookwidgets. the researcher analyze and describe the data separately, it is according to leavy (2017), in mixed method research, the researcher may describe each set of findings in individual subsections of the results. in analyzing the qualitative data, the obtained data from observation checklist were organized. meanwhile, the video recording and voice recording of interview were transcribed. then, the researcher gave clearly label and mark up the transcript by using bold fonts consistently to address the research purpose and answer the research questions. because the interview activity was using bahasa indonesia, the researcher translated the obtained responses into english. then, the researcher classified the data into similar responses. after coded the data, the researcher looked for patterns and the relationships between codes. after that, the data was summarized, reflected, and connected to the theory which will gradually develop and feed into ongoing interpretation to find the meaning (leavy, 2017). the data was elaborated by using the theory of students’ engagement and the effect of utilizing technology in efl classroom. the questionnaire was analyzed based on a 4value of likert scale, which was primarily used to find the percentage of each statement that represented the construct of student engagement. several procedures need to be completed in measuring the likert scale according to the existing rules and procedures. the steps for measuring the likert scale are as follows (darmadi, 2011): nia kurniawati & fuzi fauziyah fostering students’ engagement in synchronous learning using interactive web-based media 16 the collected data from the respondents was summed by multiplying the weight of each response by a predetermined point. in this research, the strongly agree response has 4 value, agree has 3 value, disagree has 2 value, and strongly disagree has 1 value. after the total score of each statement was obtained, it was then changed into a percentage. the total score is divided by the maximum score, then multiplied by 100 percent. in this research, the maximum score was 116, obtained from the maximum value (4) multiplied by respondents’ total (29). after each statement’s percentage score was obtained, it was interpreted based on range criteria to bring a more explicit explanation on which type of student engagement the students were engaged in. the range criteria were defined by finding the percent score interval (i). in this research, the interval score was 25% because its total score on the likert scale was 4. results and discussion the implementation of bookwidgets in fostering students’ engagement quiz after the students comprehend the material, they were given the exercise to build their knowledge about cause and effect. the exercise was in the form of quiz with 5 questions. teacher sent the quiz link to google classroom. providing an online quiz as a regular exercise could help students maintain their performance by providing a fun and challenging environment. it lines with luthfiyyah et al. (2021) stresses that, compared to traditional exercise, interactive game-based exercise will reduce students' anxiety. most students are stressed and frustrated when they have to take an exam. still, digital game-based tests include a more immersive and engaging task experience that allows students to enjoy the process, which can encourage their learning. in this activity, the students were engaged due to their willingness in answering the questions. it could be meant that cognitive engagement was appeared, since it lines with fredricks et al. (2004) that cognitive engagement is often referred to as academic investment during the learning process. they were thinking and willing to comprehend complex ideas of questions. moreover, their activeness indicated the behavioral engagement since this engagement is closely linked to participation included the involvement of academic. those indicators could be meant that the students respond positively to the quiz, so that they were said to be emotionally engaged. split whiteboard the teacher asked the students to read the text about “water pollution” then asked the students to find which sentence that indicate the cause and the effect. it was presented using “split whiteboard”. the widget’s board were split into two, the left board was presented the text, and the right board was empty, so that the teacher and the students could type the causes and the effects regarding the text. after reading the text, the teacher and the students were discussing about the causes and the effect of water pollution. based on the observation, the engagement appeared were behavioral engagement and emotional engagement. when the students read the text, it indicated the behavioral engagement since it lines with lee, pate, & cozart (2015) stated that behavior engagement in online learning was performed by the students who read the course resources. moreover, the students also involved in the discussion session in order to find the cause sentences about water pollution. moreover, they also showed their enthusiasm in becoming volunteer to read aloud the text, although their pronunciation was not really good, but they were very confident to read and to answer the questions. it is following the statement that this type of engagement involves students' affective responses to the classroom, covering the excitement (fredricks et al., 2004). split worksheet students were asked to read a conversation about smoking then discussed about its effect in order to answer the provided questions on bookwidgets. after that, the students had to be back to zoom meeting, and teacher started to discuss about students’ answer together. the widgets used was split worksheet, the left sheet presented the conversation while the right split presented the questions in the form of short answer. based on the observation checklist 17, this activity was success to build the students’ participation in discussion which included to behavioral engagement. it lines with lee et al. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 17 (2015) that behavior engagement in online learning is also performed by participation in interactive activities. moreover, the discussion session was expected to increase the students and teacher communication, since emotional engagement in online learning is performed sense of self-worth while interacting with peers (lee et al., 2015). and also to build the cognitive engagement which can be seen from the way students’ mental effort and initiative to apply the new knowledge to different situations when selecting and evaluating relevant information and resources (lee et al., 2015). crossword the game cross word game was used to find the correct signal words in connecting sentences of cause and effect through bookwidgets. it was a fun game which was created from a list of words and descriptions. students answered the 10 questions regarding the signal words of cause and effect then arrange it on the crossword box. based on the observation, the students were excited to try to answer the question in turn, because the teacher offered the point to the one who could answer it correctly. this game was success to increase the students’ interest which included to emotional engagement. it lines with fredricks et al. (2004) that emotional engagement can be observed based on the students’ positive feeling, such as being happy and interested. the crossword is a game that optimizes learners’ thinking skills, and also be helpful for students as they try to retain new words especially about signal words of cause and effect. moreover, it is proved that this game could enhance their interest and enthusiasm. from their enthusiasm, it could lead to the behavioral and cognitive engagement. the way students competed each other to find the right answer also could be meant as they participate actively. this implied that the participation of students in learning can be seen by their actions in answering the question (fredricks et al., 2004). moreover, they invested their academic during answering question at a deeper level and comprehending the complex ideas. therefore, it lines with kennedy (2020) that in terms of online learning, cognitive engagement is reflected by students reflecting on and working through the learning material at a deeper level. find word in order to check students’ understanding about the material, teacher asked the students to do the quiz in the form of game. the game was a word search that the students should find the words indicated the signal words of cause and effect. to do this game, the students should use their scanning skills to find the hidden horizontal, vertical and diagonal words. in this activity, the students were engaged as it can be seen by their excitement. it caused by this activity integrated the game with learning materials. it is associated with taspinar, schmidt, & schuhbauer (2016) that gamification affects increasing learning enthusiasm and enjoyment in the form of theory-loaded material. based on the observation checklist 8 above, all students compete each other to find the right answer. it could be meant that they showed their enthusiasm, curiosity, interest, and a desire to complete the crossword puzzle it was included to emotional engagement. when students respond positively to their school class experience and their learning, they are said to be emotionally engaged. from their enthusiasm, it could lead to the behavioral and cognitive engagement. the way students competed each other to find the right answer, it could also be meant that they participate actively and will to solve this activity. this implies that the participation of students in learning can be seen by their actions in answering the question, and their willingness to engage the needed effort to solve this activity by being focused (fredricks et al. (2004). the way bookwidgets facilitate the students’ engagement using bookwidgets behavioral engagement the implementation of bookwidgets can encourage the positive behavior of students. it can encourage them to keep attending the class, motivate them to submit the assignment on time, facilitate them to take a note on material, and promote them to keep listening and reading material. based on the interview, the way bookwidgets encourage the positive behavior is by presenting the meaningful activities supported by the game and the online quiz. these widgets increased motivation and offered opportunities for students to learn in a meaningful context. the meaningful activities allow the students to involve in real-life which led to positive learning environment that encourages the students to learn. it lines with okert (2018) that nia kurniawati & fuzi fauziyah fostering students’ engagement in synchronous learning using interactive web-based media 18 technology allows students to involve in real-life and meaningful contexts, introduces different kinds of materials, and it has shown a positive impact on the motivation of learners of english as a foreign language. moreover, the implementation of bookwidgets can enhance the students’ participation. it can engage them in the form of asking and answering question to teacher or students, and involving in discussion. based on the interview, the students agree that the interesting feature of quiz and game of bookwidgets can encourage them to participate actively in the learning process. the interesting features offer an authentic and meaningful learning experience presented by audio-visual media (including video conferencing and presentation software) which make them be more participative on the course. it is supported by amin & sundari (2020) technology enhanced language learning has presented plentiful authentic material as well as an opportunity to practice language skills and be more participative on the course. this participation indicator supported by bookwidgets can change teacher-centered approaches towards learnercentered ones. bookwidgets provides more content and resources which help them to become more autonomous. it also provides an extensive variety of language context-learning opportunities and interactive activities most in a real context, such as online quiz and game. it is supported by alsied & pathan (2016) that technology has assisted in the switch from teacher-centered to learner-centered approaches. emotional engagement the implementation of bookwidgets can maintain the students’ emotion. the students feel happy and excited when using bookwidgets. it can be caused by the interesting and interactive feature such as game of bookwidgets which make them feel happy, not bored and easy to understand the learning materials. gamification affects increasing learning enthusiasm and enjoyment in the form of theory-loaded material (taspinar et al., 2016). moreover, bookwidgets has more opportunities for language learning than conventional methods. as a result, teachers has various resources and materials at their hands that can be implemented in their classrooms which can stimulate positive attitudes, for example, an increased level of interest, motivation, interaction, and language production, and students can feel happy. based on the interview, the students feel happy, enjoy, like, and interested when using bookwidgets. this can be facilitated by the interactive and easy feature of game and quiz which make them more understand the material. each widget is linked to a url that is sent to the students. students will begin working on the activity as soon as they receive the link. it makes no difference what device they choose since the link is browser-based and can be accessed from any device connected to the internet. the implementation of bookwidgets can maintain the students and teacher relation. bookwidgets can facilitate the communication between students and teacher. bookwidgets allows teacher to conduct student presentations, question and answer sessions, group assignments, and in-class problem-solving which can also facilitate collaboration. by this activity, the students are encouraged to become more than passive learners. it is caused by technology can also facilitate collaboration; one of the most significant benefits that educational technology offers is the simplicity with which students can collaborate and create (perdue, 2016). cognitive engagement the implementation of bookwidgets can help the students in solving their problem in learning english. bookwidgets improves the educational setting, and students can handle their learning so that the focus in the school shifts to the learner. it caused by bookwidgets can provide an authentic and meaningful learning experience. it is supported by amin & sundari (2020) that technologyenhanced language learning has presented plentiful authentic material as well as an opportunity to practice language skills and be more participative on the course. the audio-visual media in bookwidgets provides an accurate and meaningful environment and fosters a sense of community. it assists in various inclusionary approaches such as developing a sense of belonging, learners taking control of their learning, collaborative/ cooperative learning, and problem solving (francis, 2017). it is helped by the feature of test-review and game itself. for example, split worksheet, on the same tab, teachers generate text and accompanying questions. the text is on the right side of the screen, while the comprehension questions are on the left. by this feature the students could read the text and answer questions in other proficiency exams. moreover, the indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 19 game of cross word, it is a game that optimizes learners’ thinking skills. the teacher can develop crossword puzzles for individual learners or for learners to solve in groups. kapp, blaire, and mesch (2013, cited in menon, 2019) stated that gamification uses game-based mechanics, graphics, and game thinking to attract users, motivate action, encourage learning, and solve problems. bookwidgets facilitate the engagement of students in terms of self-regulation. students use their own learning strategy in following the learning activities. bookwidgets can be used to support reading, speaking, writing, and listening skills. amin & sundari (2020) agree that multimedia can assist students to be more independent in their learning. the interactive learning resources in bookwidgets provide learners with many opportunities to become autonomous learners. the widgets shared by teacher to google classroom can be accessed anytime so that the students can learn the material by themselves. it also in line with faoziah, jubaedah, kodir, & syarifah (2020) that technology offers more content and resources while still allowing students to become more independent. moreover, using technology can boost student selfregulation and self-efficacy (alioon & delialioglu, 2019). the most dominant types of students’ engagement in synchronous learning using bookwidgets the 29 respondents had answered the 23 questions regarding the students’ engagement aspects. the responses to the questionnaire were calculated through a statistical computation. each response of the statements in the questionnaire had a scale value based on the likert scale that was strongly agreewith 4, agree with 3, disagree with 2, and strongly disagree with 1. the highest score reflected the most dominant type of students’ engagement in synchronous class using bookwidgets. based on the survey result, the score for students’ behavior engagement was 78%. meanwhile, the score for emotional engagement was 76%, and the score for cognitive engagement was 75%. it means that behavior engagement was the most dominant type of students’ engagement, which covered positive conduct, active involvement, and participation in the learning process. the results below were arranged based on the most dominant to less dominant types of students’ engagement that appeared during synchronous learning using bookwidgets as interactive web-based media. table 1. the questionnaire result on types of student engagement in bookwidgets facilitated english class no types of engagement aspects items item no. interpret ation 1. behavior engagement (78%) positive conduct class attendance 1 77% 79% very high task submission punctuality 2 72% take a note 3 82% listen and read material 4 84% work involvement students’ effort 5 89% 78% very high better concentration 6 74% task accomplishment 7 72% participant asking for information to other peers and teacher 8 84% 75% very high discussion involvement 9 66% 2. emotional engagement (76%) positive emotional & general feeling enjoyment in using bookwidgets 10 72% 73% high english learning becomes easier 11 73% students teacher relation better communication with peers and teacher 12 74% 74% high values positive perception on the utility of bookwidgets for future 13 85% 85% very high orientation achievement satisfactory 14 71% 71% high nia kurniawati & fuzi fauziyah fostering students’ engagement in synchronous learning using interactive web-based media 20 toward class 3. cognitive engagement (75%) flexing problem solving various learning strategy 15 72% 72% high resilience towards problems in learning english 16 71% goal better able in understanding english material 17 72% 77% very high trying complete the task 18 84% gaining good score 19 73% quality of instruction the learning instruction is clear 20 75% 75% very high self regulation and learning strategy more planning in learning 21 69% 78% very high connecting knowledge with the materials 22 78% asking peers and teacher to overcome problems encountered while learning english 23 87% behavior engagement had a total score of 78%. it was formed from several aspects that are positive conduct (79%), work involvement (78%), and participation (75%), of which all aspects were categorized as very high engagement. it means that based on the survey, most of the students never skipped the class, their motivation in submitting the assignment on time was high, they also listen, read, and make a note on the material during the learning process. in terms of work involvement, the results indicated that the students had the willingness to do the task, tried harder to complete it effectively, and had a better concentration while doing it. moreover, the students had high participation during the learning process in zoom meeting in the form of asking and answering the teacher or students questions. based on the result, overall, the students were very highly engaged (76%) in terms of emotional engagement. the emotional engagement was constructed by positive emotion and general feeling (73%), student-teacher relation (74%), orientation toward class (71%) which were categorized as high engagement, and values (85%) which were categorized as very high engagement. this result showed that most of the students felt happy, excited, and understood the material while utilizing bookwidgets. they were able to maintain their communication when they had to conduct distance learning. it was supported by the activities of student presentations, question and answer sessions, and group assignments. moreover, most of the students agreed that bookwidgets had a big impact on their process and success in learning english. it could be seen by the result that represented the students were highly satisfied with the results they get in english class while bookwidgets was used. the cognitive engagement had a total score of 75%. it was composed of four aspects that are flexible problem solving (72%), which was categorized as high, goal (77%), quality of instruction goal (75%), and self-regulation and learning strategy (78%), which were categorized as very high engagement. the result reflected that the students’ ability to solve problems in learning is high when they utilized bookwidgets in their learning. this ability was supported by their excellent learning strategies applied during the learning process and their effort in completing the tasks given by the teacher. the strategies consisted of preparing planning in learning, connecting existing knowledge with materials, and asking peers and teacher to overcome problems encountered while learning english. in short, overall, the students were very highly engaged in terms of cognitive engagement. conclusion regarding the implementation of bookwidgets as interactive web-based media in fostering students’ engagement during synchronous learning, this study found the students were engaged behaviorally, emotionally, and cognitively. they presented positive behaviors, involvement, effort, positive emotion, achievement, and good self-regulation during their learning in the synchronous classroom using bookwidgets as the interactive web-based media. the use of bookwidgets has facilitated the students’ engagement in synchronous learning in several ways. the interesting features has created indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 21 meaningful learning for students in terms of positive behavior, verbal participation, students’ feeling and students’ academic investment. the different interesting widgets and the easy use features provided by bookwidgets made students enthusiastic and reduced the boredom which made them motivate and engage in following the instruction during synchronous learning. based on the statistical data, bookwidgets facilitated behavioral engagement with 78%, emotional engagement with 76%, and cognitive engagement with 75%. from this result it could be seen that two or more types of engagement were possible to occur 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(2017). the use of choral drilll technique to improve students speaking skills (thesis, state institute for islamic studies salatiga). retrieved from http://erepository.perpus.iainsalatiga.ac.id/2102/1/gradua tingpaper.pdf indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(2) july 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 80 the acculturation model of second language acquisition: inspecting weaknesses and strengths alireza zaker islamic azad university, science and research branch, tehran, iran email: alireza.zaker@gmail.com apa citation: zakir, a. (2016). the acculturation model of second language acquisition: inspecting weaknesses and strengths. indonesian efl journal, 2(2), 80-87 received: 26-05-2016 accepted: 24-06-2016 published: 01-07-2016 abstract: previous research has highlighted the significant impact of culture on learning a second language (l2). accordingly, culture is now believed to be a major learning-affecting factor which, along with linguistic competence, facilitates the process of l2 learning. some have proposed that being surrounded in the l2 environment gives one a better chance of learning an l2. based on this premise, schumann in 1978 proposed the acculturation/pidginization model as an environmental-oriented model that emphasizes identification with a community as the primary requirement of second language acquisition. this study attempts to take a closer look at different aspects of this theory. the taxonomy of factors which control social distance is presented along with the different types of acculturation and the stages/steps of acculturation in an l2 environment. the article concludes with a discussion on the advantages and shortcomings of the model. keywords: acculturation, culture, pidginization, target language environment introduction learning a second language (l2) is now believed to be a multi-faceted phenomenon which is affected by numerous factors, ranging from internal to social and cultural factors (hadley, 2003; nosratinia & zaker, 2014, 2015; zaker, 2015), and, consequently, many studies have highlighted the significant impact of culture on learning a second language (fromkin, 2003; zaker, 2016). accordingly, culture is now believed to be a major learning-affecting factor which, along with linguistic competence, facilitates the process of l2 learning (brown, 2007; culhane, 2004; fahim & zaker, 2014). galloway (as cited in hadley, 2003, p. 88) defines cultures as “powerful human creations, affording their members a shared identity, a cohesive framework for selecting, constructing, and interpreting perceptions, and for assigning value and meaning in consistent fashion.” differences in intercultural communication lie partially in the culturally conditioned restraining forces on communication. such intergroup differences can become prominent features of social interaction when members from different cultures communicate with each other (macintyre, 2007). when it comes to english language, two major perspectives have been adopted; english as a lingua franca and a postmodern approach to english, which views it in hybrid and fluid terms. according to de costa (2010), the former favors the interaction between different cultures through language whereas the latter acknowledges the existence of world english. alireza zaker the acculturation model of second language acquisition: inspecting weaknesses and strengths 81 the acculturation model many have argued that the degree to which a learner is successful in second language acquisition (sla) is dependent, to some degree, on how much contact the learner has with the l2 speakers (schumann, 1986); therefore, it has been suggested that being surrounded in the l2 environment gives one a better chance of learning an l2 (culhane, 2004). however, the way the first culture would be affected by this cultural change has been the subject of numerous studies. one famous longitudinal investigation was conducted by schumann on some syntactic aspects with six learners (2 children, 2 adolescents, 2 adults) in which he used questionnaires, observed spontaneous conversation during ten months, and applied a quantitative treatment to the data (menezes, 2013). based on the findings of the above mentioned study, schumann (1978) proposed the acculturation/pidginization model, as an environmental-oriented model, which emphasizes identification with a community as a primary requirement of sla. more specifically, schumann (as cited in long, 1990) argues that sla is just one aspect of acculturation along with many others. acculturation, according to schumann (1986), is the social and psychological integration of the learner with the target language group. schumann further states that any learner can be placed along a continuum ranging from social-psychological distance to social-psychological proximity with the speakers of the target language (farhady, 1981). schumann’s acculturation hypothesis, therefore, focuses on two main variables that account for differences in the way language learners approach and acquire language, social factors and psychological factors. they differ in that social variables account for the degree of social distance an l2 learner has to the target language whereas the psychological variables are concerned with an individual’s response to the conditions they find themselves in their language learning (ushioda, 1993). schumann and other theorists describe social distance as an individual’s position or perceived position, in relation to the target language group, and the extent to which they become part of that target language group (schumann, 1986; damen, 1987; ushioda, 1993; ellis, 2008; brown, 2007). also, schumann (as cited in peirce, 1995) talks about social distance as being a key aspect to gauge the amount of acculturation, and hence how effective a learner is at picking up an l2. this distance is not static, but can be thought of as lying along a continuum from maximum distance to close proximity to the target language group. schumann places both social and affective/psychological factors on similar scales, and makes the assertion that a learner’s success in second language learning is dependent on the amount of acculturation; the degree to which they have reduced the social and psychological distance. both brown (2007) and ushioda (1993) reinforce schumann’s idea that there is a significant and positive relationship between the depth of the social distance between two cultures and the difficulty in learning the l2 for the learner. as stated above, the degree of language acquisition, based on this model, would correlate with the degree of the learner’s proximity to the target group (farhady, 1981; jiang, green, henley, & masten, 2009). this point seems to have in common with gardner and lambert’s (1959, p. 272) socioeducational model where they hypothesized that “a strong motivation to learn a second language follows from a desire to be accepted as a member of the new linguistic community.” this notion indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(2) july 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 82 has also been captured by concepts such as international posture (yashima, 2002), xenophilic and sociocultural orientations (clément, dörnyei, & noels, 1994), and interest in the target language and people (ushioda, 2001). according to schumann (as cited in ushioda, 1993), there is a taxonomy of factors which control social distance that determine how close an individual will come to becoming like the target language group. they are as follows: 1. dominance/subordination: relating to the perceived status of a group in relation to another; 2. integration pattern: assimilation (giving up your own lifestyle in favor of another) /acculturation/preservation (how much of your own culture you hold on to); 3. degree of enclosure of both groups: amount that the two groups share the same social facilities (low enclosure), or have different social facilities (high enclosure); 4. degree of cohesiveness of second language learning group: intra group contacts (cohesive), or inter group contacts (non-cohesive); 5. size of second language learning group; 6. degree of congruence of the two cultures: the culture of the l2 group may be similar or different to the tl group; & 7. inter-group attitudinal evaluations: positive or negative attitudes to each other. the second factor mentioned by schumann and put forward by ellis (2008), psychological distance, relates to how comfortable a learner is in relation to the surrounding social affecting factors. psychological distance disorientates a learner in a way that may cause them to resist opportunities to take full advantage of the social situation. schumann in his 1975 article (as cited in ushioda, 1993) lists five affective factors that may increase the psychological distance. they are: 1. language shock: disorientation caused by learning a new linguistic system; 2. culture shock: stress, anxiety and fear caused when entering a new culture, the routine activities suddenly become major obstacles; 3. culture stress: prolonged culture shock, such as, homesickness, and questioning self-identity. 4. motivation: instrumental and integrative; and 5. ego permeability: the degree to which an individual gives up their differences in favor of the target language group. acculturation types schumann’s model distinguished between two types of acculturation. in type 1, the learner becomes socially integrated, developing social contacts with l2 speakers who provide him with input while continuing to retain the lifestyle and values of his native culture; this is similar to berry’s (as cited in culhane, 2004) integration strategy. in type 2 of acculturation, the learner develops social contacts in the target culture and also moves towards adopting the lifestyle and values of the target language group; this corresponds to berry’s (as cited in culhane, 2004) assimilation strategy. by encompassing both definitions of acculturation, the model implies that a learner could succeed in acquiring the target language regardless of whether he chose to adopt the norms of the target culture or not (bluestone, 2009). based on the above mentioned premise, it can be assumed that insufficient interaction with and input from target language speakers caused by alireza zaker the acculturation model of second language acquisition: inspecting weaknesses and strengths 83 low acculturation would result in a knowledge base that might contain representations of linguistic structure that are not correct by target language standards (bialystok & sharwood smith, as cited in long, 1990). this phenomenon is known as pidginization part of this model. this hypothesis states if the social and/or psychological distance is great, then, acculturation is impeded and the learner does not progress beyond the early stages of language acquisition. as result, his/her target language will stay pidginized (gitsaki, 1998). brown (1980) postulates the process of acculturation in the target language natural environment consists of four stages: 1. euphoria: the learners get excited over the newness of the surroundings 2. culture-shock: emerges as individuals feel the intrusion of more and more culture differences into their own images of self and security 3. cultural stress and gradual recovery: some problems of acculturation are solved, while others continue for some time. the learner starts to understand the differences in thinking. the learner`s problems center around the question of identity; she/he does not perceive herself/himself as belonging to any culture. 4. full-recovery: adaptation, assimilation, or acceptance of the new culture. a new identity is developed. the acculturation model and input hypothesis krashen’s input hypothesis attests to the advantages of receiving a lot of input, especially in the initial stages in language acquisition. both the acculturation model and krashen's monitor model try to lower a learner’s affective filter, and hence make it possible for acquisition to take place. where schumann and other social linguists differ to krashen is in the role of interaction as a key to success. krashen’s model appears to put the learner into quite a passive role whereas in the acculturation model the need to interact and be more active is quite evident (mondy, 2007). acculturation and motivation it is gardener's work on integrative and instrumental motivation that has been crucial in laying the foundations for the acculturation model. it is necessary to not only consider the general attitude of the learner, but how important they see the need to interact in the target language and with members of the target language culture so that opportunities can open up for interaction to take place, thereby reducing the social distance. it was berry (as cited in culhane, 2004) who furthered the idea of motivation within a social context with a model of acculturation attitudes, including the following factors:  integration (wanting to maintain their first culture and extend relations with new culture)  assimilation (wanting to integrate into new culture)  separation (wanting to maintain their own culture)  marginalization (little concern) the difference between schumann and berry is that both of schumann‘s categories assume that there is social contact between the learner and members of the target culture, whereas berry‘s taxonomy allows for the possibility of limited or zero contact between groups (bluestone, 2009). culhane (2004) discusses different kinds of motivation, and adds a third category to gardener’s traditional indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(2) july 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 84 psychological variables, that of psychosocial motivation. the intercultural interaction model joins together gardener’s instrumental and integrative motivation under the new label of orientation. culhane (2004) argues that gardener’s two themes on motivation should be extended to include assessment of the learner perceptions of the importance of using l2 in cultural communities. learners with a stronger instrumental motivation are likely to feel the educational setting alone is sufficient to accomplish their linguistic goals in acquiring the l2. they are expected, therefore, to make less effort to interact with members of the cultural group who use the l2. in contrast, learners with a higher degree of integrative motivation are likely to make more extensive efforts to form bonds with culturally different others when given the opportunity, as a means of learning the linguistic and cultural knowledge needed for sociocultural competence (culhane, 2004). contextual support for the acculturation model lybeck (2002) tested schumann’s acculturation theory via the operable social exchange networks model, which has a postmodern view on using english (de costa, 2010), with english native speakers who acquired norwegian as their l2 and found that those who developed positive network connections with native norwegian speakers evidenced more native-like norwegian pronunciation than those who had greater difficulty establishing such. hansen (1995) measured germanborn american immigrants’ acculturation on the variables identified in schumann’s acculturation model and found that acculturation correlated with native-like phonation of successful olderarrival age speakers that was assessed in both careful reading and spontaneous speech tasks. however, it should be stated that past research has indicated that the optimal acculturation strategy varies greatly by context with regard to the l2 acquisition practices and learning circumstances (vedder & virta, 2005). limitations of the acculturation model although some studies favored the validity of the acculturation model, like those stated above, schumann’s theory received limited empirical support and faced strong criticism. as a fundamental criticism against the significance of cultural factors in sla, dash (as cited in mondy, 2007) argues that cultural aspects are quite often, not so readily identifiable, and that individuals may succeed in sla despite the social conditions. moreover, according to mondy (2007), there are some learners that will be determined to succeed, irrespective of any of the conditions that present themselves, and those learners that will not be successful, regardless of favorable social circumstances. this implies that individual learner differences, such as learning style and affective state are more distinguishable as attributing factors to sla, than the social conditions (mondy, 2007). therefore, we should avoid making generalization about the importance of cultural factors. another problem with applying the acculturation model or in talking about macro-level group-to-group relationships in general, may be that these analyses take into account only one dimension of the many levels of relationships experienced by learners. a more complete picture may be achieved by including the micro-level effects of an individual’s personal social network (bluestone, 2009). this model has also been criticized for deliberately excluding other potentially important variables (such as alireza zaker the acculturation model of second language acquisition: inspecting weaknesses and strengths 85 cognitive and instructional factors) in sla (farhady, 1981). according to this model, variables other than acculturation are of minor or moderate importance for sla (farhady, 1981). for instance, this model does not provide any explanation or insight into the internal processes responsible for the acquisition of an l2. that is, it does not attempt to explain why there are developmental sequences or acquisition orders, for example, and what causes them (tavakoli, 2013). as another instance, this model argues that instruction has no important role in sla (except for a few exceptional cases). in this regard, schumann (as cited in long, 1990, p. 31) states: educational institutions are really only free to manipulate teacher, method, and text variables. i believe that these variables are so weak in terms of the total language learning situation that no matter how much we attempt to change them, we will never achieve much more success than we are achieving now. among other criticisms that the acculturation theory received was that social factors are assumed to have a direct impact on sla while they are more likely to have an indirect one (ellis, 2008). also, pidginization is a group phenomenon, while language acquisition is an individual phenomenon. moreover, the acculturation model fails to explain how the social factors influence the quality of contact the learners experience (ellis, 2008). therefore, some people caution against placing social factors so clearly in the forefront as a separate entity. moreover, there remain some unanswered questions regarding the model. schumann himself states that the model only accounts for language learning under conditions of immigration. he also cautions the reader about variables other than acculturation which may influence sla. schumann believes that the development of a typology of variables is important and must be continued. it is not clear, however, how long or to what extent the continuation of such typologies is necessary (farhady, 1981). research-wise, it has been argued that if acculturation can be considered as a unique aspect of sla, it has to be clearly classified and there needs to be some ways of measuring the amount of acculturation that is necessary for successful sla. the model is problematic, however, in that the concept of acculturation and what it entails is too complex to be operationally defined and experimentally tested (farhady, 1981). put another way, although this model acknowledges that the degree of social distance between cultural groups can affect language learning, it does not provide a means of actually measuring social distance. in addition, because the model deals with cultural groups rather than individual learners, it is not useful for accounting for individual differences in learning outcomes (bluestone, 2009). conclusion as stated above, there have been many factors assumed to limit and question the applicability and validity of the acculturation model; yet, aspects of this model may have significant educational implications for sla. that is why stern (1983, p. 518) believes this model has given a “better insight into language learning, designing research studies, and diagnoses individual patterns of language learning.” according to spolsky (1988), successful l2 teaching requires not only the ability to impart grammatical knowledge, but also sensitivity to the social realities faced by students. therefore, integrating cultural instruction in order to increase learners’ cultural tolerance, cultural literacy, and native culture appreciation not only indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(2) july 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 86 becomes a priority for l2 instructors but also for syllabus designers and policy makers. adopting such a context-sensitive perspective might generate higher levels of willingness and motivation among l2 learners (bluestone, 2009). it is also suggested not to consider teachers and language 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(2015). efl learners’ language learning strategies and autonomous learning: which one is a better predictor of l2 skills? journal of applied linguistics-dubai, 1(1), 27-39. zaker, a. (2016). social constructivism and metacognition in an efl context: inspecting the contribution of critical thinking to efl learners’ social intelligence. humanising language teaching, 18(6). retrieved from www.hltmag.co.uk/dec16/index.htm 6. elis.1.1 indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 181 relating teacher’s oral corrective feedback to young learners’ uptake: a case study in a young learner efl classroom elis homsini maolida faculty of teacher training and education, suryakancana university, indonesia e-mail: elishomsini@unsur.ac.id apa citation: maolida, e. h. (2017). relating teacher’s oral corrective feedback to young learners’ uptake: a case study in a young learner efl classroom. indonesian efl journal, 3(2), 181-192. received: 14-05-2017 accepted: 20-06-2017 published: 01-07-2017 abstract: this study explores various types of oral corrective feedback in relation to learners’ uptake in a young learner efl classroom in indonesia. it employed a qualitative research design embracing the characteristics of a case study. the data were mainly collected from 540 minutes video recording and observation to capture types of teacher’s oral corrective feedback and learners’ uptake in the classroom interaction. teacher’s lesson plans were also analyzed to look at possible contribution on teacher’s choice of corrective feedback and learners’ uptake. the first finding reveals that the teacher employed seven types of oral corrective feedback; recast, elicitation, clarification request, explicit correction, repetition, metalinguistic feedback, and paralinguistic signal. as result, the students responded by various types of uptake such as repair and need repair. the distribution of learners’ uptake following different types of oral corrective feedback shows that output prompting feedback strategies tend to be more successful in encouraging learners’ uptake than input provided by feedback strategies. it is also noteworthy that elicitation and repetition led to be the highest number of repair. the fact that input providing feedback strategies result in fewer uptakes, however, tends to be resulted from the teacher’s choice to continue the topic in a certain context which shows the influence of learning contexts and teacher’s objectives on the choice of teacher’s corrective feedback and the occurrence of uptake. keywords: oral corrective feedback, learners’ uptake, young learner introduction the importance of corrective feedback (cf) in classroom has been discussed in many studies. in this case, cf is claimed to serve as a valuable input in interaction (long, 1996), it gives opportunity for learners to stretch their interlanguage to meet targeted output (swain, 2007), it also functions as noticing tool (schmidt, 2010), and attention getting device (gass, 1991). furthermore, corrective feedback is considered as having a facilitative role to assist learners through self-correction to achieve self-regulation (sheen & ellis, 2011). in the context of young learners’ english learning, corrective feedback is considered useful in expanding conversation and negotiating meaning (maolida, 2013a). in relating the function of corrective feedback to learning, ellis (2010, p. 346) states that “learning is viewed not as an outcome (i.e., something that results from correction) but rather as a process that occurs within the enactment of a corrective episode.” the effectiveness of different types of feedback is often determined by whether or not a technique results in uptake, especially when it results in successful repair (tatawy, 2002). in this case, uptake is regarded as proof for elis homsini maolida relating teacher’s oral corrective feedback to young learners’ uptake: a case study in a young learner efl classroom 182 learners noticing (egi, 2010) in (choi & li, 2012) and representation of swain’s ‘pushed output’ concept (choi & li, 2012). uptake can also be viewed as a kind of contextualized practice (sheen & ellis, 2011). in addition, mackey et al. (2002) in (sheen, 2004) affirm that learners’ uptake serves as evidence that learners have understood the corrective nature of the interlocutor’s move and that uptake may help learners notice the gap between an interlanguage form and the target form. therefore, several researchers use uptake, especially repair, to be one of major measures of the effectiveness of corrective feedback such as lyster and ranta (1997), panova and lyster (2002), and sheen (2004). talking about feedback, sheen and ellis (2011, p. 593) define corrective feedback as “the feedback that learners receive on the linguistic errors they make in their oral or written production in a second language (l2).” it should be acknowledged, however, that this study only focuses on oral feedback in the classroom interaction where english is used as a foreign language, not a second language. regarding types of corrective feedback, this study applies categorization of corrective feedback from lyster and ranta (1997) added by one category from ellis (2009). there are six types of oral corrective feedback taken from lyster and ranta (1997), including recast (reformulating a student’s utterance with the correct one), repetition (repeating a student’s erroneous utterance), clarification request (indicating that a student’s utterance is misunderstood or incorrect), explicit correction (indicating the error and providing the correct form explicitly), elicitation (eliciting the correct form from the learners by completing the utterance such as ‘fill in the blank’ activity, using questions to elicit correct form and asking learners to reformulate their utterance), and metalinguistic feedback (giving comments, information, or questions regarding the correctness of the student’s utterance, without giving the correct form explicitly). a category is added from ellis (2009) that is known as paralinguistic signal (indicating an error by using a gesture or facial expression or giving the clue of the correct answer). regarding input providing and output prompting categorization, oral cf is considered as input providing where learner is provided by the correct form. in contrast, it is considered as output prompting when the teacher tries to elicit the correct form from the learner. these different types of oral cf will be simplified and displayed in the table below which is adapted from ellis (2009), and sheen and ellis (2011). table 1. taxonomy of oral cf strategies inputproviding a. recast, including explicit and implicit recast b. explicit correction, including explicit correction which is accompanied by metalinguistic comment outputprompting a. repetition b. clarification request c. metalinguistic clue d. elicitation e. paralingustic signal indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 183 the table shows that recast and explicit correction are categorized as input providing feedback while clarification request, metalinguistic correction, elicitation and paralinguistic signal are grouped into output prompting feedback. in the study of corrective feedback and uptake, lyster and ranta (1997, p. 48) define uptake as “a student’s utterance that immediately follows the teacher’s feedback and that constitutes a reaction in some way to the teacher’s intention to draw attention to some aspect of the student’s initial utterance.” the uptake is categorized as repair if the uptake successfully repairs the initial error. repair includes four types of responses: repetition (it occurs when the learner correctly repeats the teacher’s reformulated error), incorporation (it occurs when the learner repeats teacher’s modification of error, then he/she incorporates it to a longer sentence), self-repair (it occurs when the learner responds the teacher’s feedback by doing self-correction), and peer-repair (it happens when the correction generates somebody else, other than the student who makes error, to repair the error). meanwhile, the uptake is categorized as need repair if the uptake has not successfully repaired the initial error which means the erroneous part still needs repair. need repair includes acknowledgement (it occurs when the learner responds to the teacher’s feedback only with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’), same error (it occurs when learner repeats the error s/he makes in response to the teacher’s feedback), different error (it occurs when learner responds to teacher’s feedback by producing different error from the initial error), partial error (it occurs when learner corrects some parts of the errors following teacher’s feedback), and hesitation (it occurs when learner hesitates in responding to the teacher’s feedback). when student did not react to the teacher’s oral corrective feedback either because the student initiated to continue the topic or the teacher initiated to continue the topic, it was categorized as no uptake. when there is no uptake, then there is topic continuation. in this case, topic continuation can be initiated either by teacher or learner. the result of the studies on the effects of corrective feedback on uptake is dominated by the fact that several types of oral corrective feedback tend to lead to learners’ uptake while the other do not. elicitation, clarification request, metalinguistic feedback, and repetition are shown to be good precursors to uptake, and recast is the least type of feedback that results in uptake (lyster & ranta, 1997; panova & lyster, 2002; surakka, 2007; taipale, 2012). furthermore, the occurrence of uptake and repair also can be influenced by learning context. conducting a study on corrective feedback and learners’ uptake by involving four communicative classrooms, sheen (2004) reveals that in contexts where language is oriented as an object uptake and repair tend to appear more often than in contexts where the teachers concerned more with content. those previous studies, however, were mostly conducted in clil, speaking contexts in esl and immersion formal education settings. therefore, this study is expected to fill the gap of previous studies by revealing types of oral corrective feedback in relation to learners’ uptake in a young learner efl classroom in indonesia. method this study applied a qualitative approach by taking transcripts of lessons to find the teacher’s strategies of oral corrective feedback and learners’ uptake in elis homsini maolida relating teacher’s oral corrective feedback to young learners’ uptake: a case study in a young learner efl classroom 184 classroom interaction. this study was conducted in a young learner efl classroom in indonesia. the students involved in this research are ranging from 9 to 10 years old and their first language is sundanese while their second language is indonesian. the teacher was an english teacher with more than five years teaching experience. the data were mainly collected from observing and recording teacherstudents interaction in several lesson meetings which cover approximately 540 minutes. in addition, teacher’s lesson plans were also analyzed to look at possible contribution on teacher’s choice of corrective feedback and learners’ uptake. for the purpose of this study, the interaction transcript only covered speaking sessions, especially those that focused on oral-oriented skill. results and discussion the first part describes the types of teacher’s oral corrective feedback and learners’ uptake found in the classroom interaction. the aim of relating the use of corrective feedback to learners’ uptake is realized in the second part which discusses the distribution of uptake following different types of corrective feedback. types of oral corrective feedback the result of analysis reveals that the teacher used various types of corrective feedback in classroom interaction. the following are the description of each type of oral corrective feedback employed by the teacher in the young learner classroom interaction. recast in line with the definition of recast as “teacher’s reformulation of all or part of a student’s utterance, minus error,” (lyster & ranta, 1997, p. 46), the teacher employed various recast strategies to correct learners’ erroneous utterances. first, the teacher reformulated the illformed and implicitly infused the reformulation in the conversation. this type of recast is categorized as conversational recast and classified into input providing feedback (sheen & ellis, 2011). one of the examples is shown in the following excerpt. excerpt #1 no participants talks 53 t look, it’s four…what time is it? 54 ss four past sixteen 55 t yes, sixteen past four. what day is it today? 56 ss friday as shown in the excerpt 1, the teacher tries to give a corrected answer without disturbing the flow of communication. different from the implicit type of recast that was shown in the previous excerpt, the teacher sometimes made recast more explicit. this second type of recast, which is called didactic recast, was employed by reformulating and emphasizing a specific erroneous item, even though there was no communication problem (sheen & ellis, 2011). in this case, the definition that refers recast as an implicit type of feedback (panova & lyster, 2002) cannot be applied. excerpt #2 no participants talks 60 m where are you going /guing/? 61 t going /gouing/ 62 m going /gouing/ the excerpt shows that a student (m) mispronounced a word that was responded by the teacher’s corrective feedback. in correcting the erroneous utterance, the teacher isolated the word to be corrected and it was successfully recognized by the student who repeated the teacher’s corrected word. in this indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 185 case, the illocutionary force of the teacher to give correction was strengthened by word isolation. the tone and emphasis may also result in a more salient correction for young learners. explicit correction the second type of oral corrective feedback used by the teacher was explicit correction. in this case, the teacher provided the correct form with a clear indication of what was being corrected (lyster & ranta, 1997), as shown in the following excerpt. excerpt #3 no participants talks 104 b /groʊ ·sɔri stoʊr/ 105 t no, bukan /groʊ ·sɔri stoʊr/, it’s /groʊ·sə·ri stɔ:r/ 106 b /groʊ·sə·ri stɔ:r/ the excerpt shows that a student (b) mispronounced a word. then the teacher clearly indicated that the student’s pronunciation was incorrect and directly provided the correct pronunciation. responding to the teacher’s correction, the student successfully repeated the correct pronunciation of ‘grocery store.’ even though it is categorized under similar category with recast as input providing feedback, ellis and sheen (2006) state that the explicit technique can be more effective than implicit techniques such as recast. it is possibly because teachers are explicit about what is expected of students (emilia, 2010) and the instruction elements used are clear, unambiguous wording, and terminology to reduce possible confusion (archer & hughes, 2011). elicitation the third type of employed oral corrective feedback is elicitation by directly eliciting the correct form from students without providing the correct answer (lyster & ranta, 1997). one of the elicitation strategies employed by the teacher is eliciting the completion from students as shown in the following excerpt. excerpt #4 no participants talks 203 f t-shirt? 204 t no, it’s a ss… 205 b skirt 206 t yes, skirt. what color is the skirt? in the excerpt, the learners and the teacher were playing with a dice. when a student (f) stepped on a picture, the teacher asked what the picture was. the student gave a wrong answer and the teacher tried to elicit the correct word from the student by allowing the student to complete the utterance which resulted in a peer repair. this type of corrective feedback was identified as elicit completion (lyster & ranta, 1997). metalinguistic feedback the fourth type of oral corrective feedback utilized by the teacher was giving the information about the nature of error (lyster & ranta, 1997) or commonly known as metalinguistic feedback. the use of metalinguistic feedback can be seen in the following excerpt. excerpt #5 no participants talks 232 t what’s that? 233 b tooth 234 t tapi itu banyak 235 a teeth in the excerpt, the students were playing the board game with pictures. when the student stepped on the picture of teeth, the teacher asked the student what picture that was. instead of answering ‘teeth’, the student answered ‘tooth’. responding to the erroneous reply, the teacher corrected it by giving metalinguistic clue on the plural nature of word without directly giving the correct answer. in this case, the teacher used the sentence ‘tapi itu banyak’ elis homsini maolida relating teacher’s oral corrective feedback to young learners’ uptake: a case study in a young learner efl classroom 186 instead of utilizing technical terms such as ‘singular’ and ‘plural’ to make it easier for young learners to understand what should be corrected. as a result, another learner recognized and corrected the erroneous form. the effectiveness of metalinguistic clue in focusing learners to grammatical aspect is also acknowledged by rezaei and derakhshan (2011) and rassaei and moinzadeh (2011) in their experimental study. clarification request the fifth type of oral corrective feedback employed by the teacher is clarification request. in this case, the teacher indicated that certain utterances were either not understood or were ill-formed so a repetition or reformulation was needed (lyster & ranta, 1997). the use of clarification request is shown in the following excerpt. excerpt #6 no participants talks 136 m movie theatre /ˈmuː.fi ˈtiː.ə.t̬ɚ/ 137 t yes? 138 m movie theatre /ˈmuː.vi ˈtiː.ə.t̬ɚ/ the excerpt shows that a student (m) made a phonological mistake. responding to the mistake, the teacher indicated that the student’s pronunciation was erroneous by saying ‘yes?’ as we can see, the student understood the teacher’s attempt of correction and tried to correct her pronunciation even though the corrected answer still contained a partial error. repetition the sixth strategy that the teacher employed was repetition. in this case, the teacher repeated the erroneous utterance in isolation and usually adjusted her intonation to emphasize the error (lyster & ranta, 1997). the use of repetition is indicated in the following excerpt. excerpt #7 no participants talks 25 t ah what time is it? 26 h it’s three fifty 27 t what? three fifty? 28 h three fifteen 29 t three fifteen! go to sleep, gogo! the excerpt shows that a student (h) made a lexical mistake. responding to this, the teacher repeated the erroneous part with a higher intonation as to highlight the mistake. the student noticed the gap between what she said before with the correct target. as a result, she did a self-repair. paralinguistic signal the seventh strategy that the teacher utilized was paralinguistic signal. in this case, the teacher used non-verbal signal to indicate an error or to elicit the correct answer (ellis, 2009). it is shown by the following excerpt. excerpt #8 no participants talks 415 ss there’s a star above the apartment building 416 t what is above? 417 b melihat 418 t no, 419 m err, tinggi 420 t the book is above me (the teacher gives paralinguistic clue by putting the book above her) 421 a atas, atas 422 t that’s right. above the apartment building. apartment? the excerpt shows that a student (b) made a lexical error. responding to this, the teacher employed metalinguistic feedback that was responded by another student with a different lexical error. indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 187 then, the teacher used a paralinguistic signal to elicit the correct answer. as a result, another student (a) made a peer repair. types of learners’ uptake the result of observation and video recording show that the students responded the teacher’s feedback with uptake, including repair and need repair. in some occasions, the teacher decided to directly continue the topic which results in the absence of uptake. the following illustrates each type of uptake performed by the students. repair the uptake is categorized as repair when the student correctly reformulates an error or mistake as uttered in a student turn (lyster & ranta, 1997, p.49). in this case, the student repeated the teacher’s correct reformulation (repetition), as shown in excerpt #3 in which the student successfully repaired her pronunciation error by repeating the teacher’s correct pronunciation of ‘grocery store’. the second type of uptake given by the students was incorporation. in this case, the student repeated the teacher’s modification of error then she incorporated it to a longer utterance. this uptake is shown in the following excerpt. excerpt #9 no participants talks 454 t are they going to the park? 455 ay no, they is not 456 t no, they’re not. 457 ay no, they’re not, they are going to the restaurant the third type of repair that was identified from the interaction was selfrepair. in this case, the learner responded the teacher’s oral corrective feedback by doing self-correction as shown excerpt #7. in that case, the teacher only repeated the learner’s lexical error with a higher intonation and the learner recognized it as a corrective feedback. as result, the learner directly repaired her answer. the fourth type of repair that was found in the interaction was peer-repair. different from self-repair, it happened when the corrected utterance was given by a learner, other than the one who made the initial error (lyster & ranta, 1997), as shown in excerpt #4, #5, and #8. from those excerpts, it can be seen that there was another learner (s) who repaired the error(s) as a result of the teacher’s corrective feedback to a learner’s error. need repair the uptake given by the students was not always immediately successful. the observation reveals that to get to the correct answer, the students sometimes made previous responses that led the teacher to give another correction. the following excerpt shows the example of two types of need repair. the first is the example of partial error and the second is the example of same error. excerpt #10 no participants talks 136 m /ˈmuː.fi ˈtiː.ə.t̬ɚ/ 137 t yes? 138 m /ˈmuː.vi ˈtiː.ə.t̬ɚ/ 139 t one more time 140 m /ˈmuː.vi ˈtiː.ə.t̬ɚ/ the excerpt shows that the student had a phonological inaccuracy in pronouncing ‘movie theatre’. as a response, the teacher utilized clarification request to make the student notice the gap and repair her pronunciation. the student successfully noticed the gap but only did partial repair which resulted in partial error. then, the teacher tried another type of elis homsini maolida relating teacher’s oral corrective feedback to young learners’ uptake: a case study in a young learner efl classroom 188 cf by utilizing elicitation strategy. unfortunately, the student repeated the same error. the next type of needs repair identified from the interaction was different error. in this case, the student responded the teacher’s feedback with a different error. excerpt #11 no participants talks 236 t what’s that? 237 f it’s a flower 238 t flower is bunga but this is daun. what is daun in english? 239 b grass the excerpt shows that a student (f) made a lexical error and the teacher utilized explicit oral corrective feedback. another student (b) tried to give another answer but her answer did not correct nor repeat the initial error. instead, a different error was made. the fourth type of needs-repair was hesitation. in this case, the student hesitated when responding to the teacher’s feedback. excerpt #12 no participants talks 64 m what are you.. 65 t+f where are you… 66 m where..err.. (hesitate) 67 t come on, one more time 68 m where are you… (hesitate) where are you going? the excerpt shows that a student (m) made a lexical error. responding to the error, the teacher and another student corrected the error by using recast. however, m hesitated to repeat the corrected word. therefore, the teacher tried another strategy by using elicitation feedback. relating teacher’s oral corrective feedback to young learners uptake to look at the potential relation of teacher’s oral corrective feedback to learners’ uptake, the following table displays the distribution of uptake following different types of corrective feedback. table 2. the distribution of learners’ uptake following teacher’s oral corrective feedback the data in the table reveal that recast results in 64.3% of learners’ uptake, explicit correction results in 70.6% while elicitation, repetition, metalingusitic feedback, clarification request, and paralinguistic signal result in 100% of learners’ uptake. it is important to note that among those that result in 100% uptake, elicitation and repetition led to the highest percentage of repair (88.9%). referring to the categorization of output prompting indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 189 (elicitation, repetition, metalingusitic feedback, clarification request, and paralinguistic signal) and input providing feedbacks (recast and explicit correction) from ellis (2009) and sheen & ellis (2011), it can be seen that output prompting corrective feedbacks are more successful comparing to input providing feedbacks in leading students to perform an uptake. the result that output prompting feedbacks are successful in leading to learners’ uptake shows that output prompting cf can push learners in their output (ellis, 2009; sheen & ellis, 2011; lyster & ranta, 1997). in employing those output prompting feedbacks, the teacher often changed the tone of her voice and added gesture which seems as efforts to make the focus of correction more salient, even for young learners. the success of those output prompting strategies in leading to a hundred percent of learners’ uptake may also relate to their potential force to make the learners pay attention to specific error which they were exposed to. in this case, schmidt (2010) states that people learn about the things that they pay attention to and do not learn much about the things they do not attend to and output prompting feedback strategies were used by the teacher to make the learners pay attention to and learn from their error. by providing oral corrective feedback that led to learners’ uptake, the teacher also seems to try to trigger learners’ attention of the gap between their interlanguage and the target language (tatawy, 2002). in this case, the teacher utilized output prompting feedback to make the students notice the gap between their interlanguage and the target output, especially the accuracy. from those output prompting strategies that were successful in triggering learners’ uptake, the emphasis is given to elicitation and repetition which led to the highest number of repair. different from uptake that was considered as having speculative contribution to language learning, repair is believed to contribute to language learning since they provide opportunities to retrieve learners’ target language that already existed in learners’ cognitive system and lead to revision of learners’ output (lyster & ranta, 1997). as discussed in previous paragraphs, output prompting strategies tend to lead to more learners’ uptake comparing to input providing strategies thus they also led to more repair. in this case, elicitation and repetition leading to a high number of learners’ repair show that they are able to push the young learners to produce the correct output. it means that they fulfill their function as an attention getting device (gass, 1991) since the learners can notice the gaps that were indicated by uptake and repair. in addition, it can be said that they accomplish role as noticing tool and triggering to make the learners aware of linguistic problem by modifying their output to reach the targeted output (swain, 2007). the success of elicitation in getting learner repairs was also probably because it was explicit enough for young learners to identify the corrective function of elicitation such as ‘filling in the gap’ strategy (look at excerpt #4) as a way to elicit the correct response. another possibility of the high rate of repair in response to elicitation and repetition might be due to the learners’ familiarity of the corrected topic since the teacher tended to apply elicitation and repetition in correcting learners’ erroneous utterances that were the main language targets in the lesson. in this case, the learning context, especially where the focus of learning becomes the main target, influences the teacher’s choice to apply more output prompting, thus, lead to more uptake and repair as a way of drilling and language practicing elis homsini maolida relating teacher’s oral corrective feedback to young learners’ uptake: a case study in a young learner efl classroom 190 for students which is in line with sheen’s (2004) statement about the influence of context on the feedback episode, including the occurrence of uptake. it also supports that the teacher’s objectives in teaching tends to influence the way the teacher builds oral interaction pattern (maolida, 2013 b), including teacher’s choice of corrective feedback that leads to certain type of uptake. regarding the effectiveness of corrective feedback in leading to uptake, recast as the most frequent employed feedback strategies was the least one that led to uptakes (64.3%). the fact that recast is the least successful strategy to encourage uptake confirms the findings from previous studies (choi & li, 2012; lyster & ranta, 1997; panova & lyster, 2002; sheen, 2004; surakka, 2007; taipale, 2012). it explains why some researchers such as lyster and ranta (1997) and panova and lyster (2002) assert that recast has weakness in terms of its less success in generating learners’ uptake since recast is considered as less perceptible and ambiguous for the learners. however, as revealed from observation, the low rate of uptake was more related to the teacher’s choice to directly continue the topic without disrupting the flow of communication. instead of explicitly stated that the learner’s utterance was incorrect, the teacher directly reformulated the erroneous utterance with the corrected version and continued the conversation. in this case, the teacher often initiated to continue the topic after giving feedback in interaction events that focused more on the routine (not main activity) as shown in excerpt #1 and at the events that focused more on content (not form) and fluency. the teacher’s choice to continue the topic without giving more time for students to uptake influences the occurrence of uptake and repair. again, it supports sheen’s (2004) theory about the contribution of learning contexts and maolida (2013b) about the influence of teacher’s teaching objectives on oral interaction in classroom. in addition, the result of analysis shows that not all recast strategies failed in encouraging uptake since more than fifty percent of them led to uptake. a close observation on the pattern of recast reveals that explicit recast tends to lead to uptake and implicit recast tends to lead to topic continuation. in this case, explicit recast seems to function as a corrective tool while implicit recast more as a supportive tool in young learners’ classroom interaction. by applying both types of recast, the teacher likely maintains two focuses between accuracy and fluency and this is in line with the language learning targets in teacher’s lesson plan to improve not only the learners’ accuracy, but also concerns on their fluency. furthermore, the use of recast which has the strength of not distracting the flow of communication (long, 1996) is in some ways, suitable to maintain the young learners’ motivation to involve in the classroom oral interaction. in the context of young learner classroom, corrective feedback strategies that have less potential to dampen learners’ motivation to speak are likely suitable to give (cameron, 2001; linse, 2005). in that case, the use of recast fits with teacher’s objective in her lesson plan to encourage students to actively involve in a meaningful interaction by using the main target vocabularies and expressions. the fewer uptakes are also shown to be attributed to the use of explicit correction. this result is in line with previous studies (choi & li, 2012; lyster & ranta, 1997; panova & lyster, 2002). similar with the low uptake rate of recast, the fewer uptakes of explicit correction were mostly due to the indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 191 teacher’s decision to continue the topic without giving opportunity for the learners to give uptake. in this case, the teacher often gave explicit correction after she utilized more implicit types of oral corrective feedback. the similar result is also shown by choi and li (2012) that in the context of young learner classroom, the teacher tends to provide explicit correction in extended sequences involving multiple feedback moves. conclusion based on the findings above, it can be said that the types of oral corrective feedback utilized by the teacher likely influence learners’ uptake. in this case, output prompting feedback strategies such as elicitation, repetition, metalinguistic feedback, clarification request, and paralinguistic signal are shown to lead to more uptake than input providing feedback strategies such as recast and explicit correction. the result also shows that elicitation and repetition led to higher number of learners’ repair. however, the fact that input providing feedback generates fewer uptakes is often due to teacher’s choice to directly continue the topic, especially in learning sessions which focus more on routine, content, and fluency. it implies that there is also an influence of learning context and teacher’s objectives on the teacher’s choice of cf and the occurrence of uptake and repair. references archer, a. l., & hughes, c. a. (2011). explicit instruction: effective and efficient teaching. new york: the guilford press. cameron, l. (2001). teaching language to young learners. cambridge: cambridge university press. choi, s. y., & li, s. (2012). corrective feedback and learners’ uptake in a child esol classroom. relc journal, 43(3), 331 –351. doi: 10.1177/0033688212463274. ellis, r., & sheen, y. (2006). reexamining the role of recasts in second language acquisition. studies in second language acquisition, 28, 575-600. doi: 10.10170s027226310606027. ellis, r. (2009). corrective feedback and teacher development. l2 journal, 1(1), 1-18. retrieved from: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/2504d6w 3. ellis, r. (2010). epilogue: a framework for investigating oral and written corrective feedback. studies of second language acquisition, 32, 335-449. doi: 10.1017/s0272263109990544. emilia, e. (2010). teaching writing: developing critical learner. bandung: rizki press. gass, s. m. (1991). grammar instruction, selective attention, and learning. in r. phillipson, e. kellerman, l. selinker, m. s. smith, & m. swain (eds.), foreign/second language pedagogy research (pp. 124-141). clevedon, uk: multilingual matters. linse, c. t. (2005). practical english language teaching: young learners. new york: mcgraw-hill companies. long, m. h. (1996). the role of the linguistic environment in second language acquisition. in w.c. ritchie & t. k. bhatia (eds.), handbook of second language acquisition (pp. 413–468). san diego: academic press. lyster, r., & ranta, l. (1997). corrective feedback and learners’ uptake: negotiation of form in communicative classrooms. studies in second language acquisition, 20, 37-66. retrieved from http://digitool.library.mcgill.ca/r/?func=db in-jump full&object_id=19364&local_base=gen01. maolida, e. h. (2013a). a descriptive study of oral corrective feedback in an esl young learner classroom in indonesia. k@ta, 15(2), 117123. doi: 10.9744/kata.15.2.117-124. maolida, e. h. (2013b). the influence of teacher’s instructional objectives on variations of exchange patterns in an efl classroom. indonesian journal of applied linguistics, 3(1), 68-80. doi: 10.17509/ijal.v3i1.661. panova, i., & lyster, r. (2002). patterns of corrective feedback and uptake in an adult esl classroom. tesol quarterly 36(4), 575-595. retrieved from http://digitool.library.mcgill.ca/webclient/ streamgate?folder_id=0&dvs=1496286119 632~880. rassaei, e., & moinzadeh, a. (2011). investigating the effects of three types of corrective feedback on the acquisition of english whquestion forms by iranian efl learners. http://digitool.library.mcgill.ca/r/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=19364&local_base=gen01 http://digitool.library.mcgill.ca/r/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=19364&local_base=gen01 elis homsini maolida relating teacher’s oral corrective feedback to young learners’ uptake: a case study in a young learner efl classroom 192 english language teaching, 4(2). doi:10.5539/elt.v4n2p97. rezaei, s., & derakhshan, a. (2011). investigating recast and metalinguistic feedback in taskbased grammar instruction. journal of language teaching and research, 2(3), 655663. doi:10.4304/jltr.2.3.655-663. schmidt, r. (2010). attention, awareness, and individual differences in language learning. in w. m. chan, s. chi, k. n. cin, j. istanto, m. nagami, l. w. sew, t. suthiwan, & i. walker, proceedings of classic 2010, singapore, december 2-4 (pp. 721-737). singapore: national university of singapore, centre for language studies. sheen, y. (2004). corrective feedback and learners’ uptake in communicative classrooms across instructional settings. language teaching research, 8(3), 263-300. sheen, y., & ellis, r. (2011). corrective feedback in language teaching. in hinkel, e. (ed). (2011). handbook of research in second language teaching and learning (pp.593607). new york: routledge. surakka, k. (2007). corrective feedback and learners’ uptake in an efl classroom (master thesis, university of jyvaskyla). retrieved from: https://jyx.jyu.fi/dspace/bitstream /handle/123456789/37544/urn_nbn_fi_j yu-201203121409.pdf;sequence=4. swain, m. (2007). the output hypothesis: its history and its future [powerpoint slide]. retrieved from: http://www.celea.org.cn/2007/keynote/pp t/merrill%20swain.pdf. tatawy, m. e. (2002). corrective feedback in second language acquisition. tesolalwebjournal, 2(2), 1-19. retrieved from: www.tc.columbia.edu. taipale, p. (2012). oral errors, corrective feedback, and learners’ uptake in an efl setting (master thesis, university of jyväskylä). retrieved from: https://jyx.jyu.fi/ dspace/bitstream/handle/123456789/375 44/urn_nbn_fi_jyu-201203121409.pdf; sequence=4. http://www.tc.columbia.edu/ https://jyx.jyu.fi/ indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 89 an interpersonal meaning analysis of ahok’s blasphemy case in online news portals teti kartika department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education, university of kuningan, indonesia email: karthikatetty@gmail.com marwito wihadi department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education, university of kuningan, indonesia e-mail: m_wihadi@yahoo.com apa citation: kartika, t., & wihadi, m. (2018). an interpersonal meaning analysis of ahok’s blasphemy case in online news portals. indonesian efl journal, 4(1), 89-92. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v4i1.888. received: 15-11-2017 accepted: 29-12-2017 published: 01-01-2018 abstract: this research presents an interpersonal meaning analysis of two online news concerning ahok’s blasphemy case in the two online news portals. the two selected news coming from the jakarta post and republika.co.id were analyzed to find out the mood types and to describe the underlying reason of the news from the differences of modality system. this descriptive qualitative research involved the analysis of mood and modality types of clauses identified. as results, it shows that the interpersonal meaning was applied. yet, not all mood or modality types appeared in the two online news. there is only one mood and one modality type appeared, namely indicative which is declarative type and modalization which is probability type. therefore, it can be concluded that both writers used the same mood and modality types in the online news of ahok’s blasphemy case as well as their interpersonal meaning are determined by contextual factors such as the aims or needed in giving information about the news event of ahok’s blasphemy case in indonesia. keywords: interpersonal meaning, ahok, blasphemy case, online news introduction interpersonal meaning here concerns with the relationship between writers and readers as a part of an interactants in a news event in the online news portals. based on halliday and matthiessen (2014, p. 134) “...another aspect of the meaning of the clause, its interpersonal meaning as an exchange. here the principal grammatical system is that of mood.” it means that interpersonal meaning as an exchanging meaning in the language used could be analyzed by using mood system through analyzing clauses that are realized in the structure of mood. further, mood system analysis of the clause provides interactants involved in the dialogue with the resources for giving or demanding a commodity, either information or goods-&-services (halliday & matthiessen, 2014). it means that the clause analysis of the online news texts involved an interactans between the addressor to the addressee with regards whether that clause is involved a commodity exchange either an information or goods-&-services. thus, the clause takes a vital place in the semantic level either a proposition or a proposal. if language is used to exchange a commodity of information, the clause takes place as a proposition, while if language is used to exchange a commodity of goods-&-services, the clause takes place as a proposal. furthermore, according to halliday and matthiessen (2014), modality is the speaker judgement, or request of the judgement of the mailto:karthikatetty@gmail.com teti kartika & marwito wihadi an interpersonal meaning analysis of ahok’s blasphemy case in online news portals 90 listener, on the status of what is being said. it means that modality is the most important system in social communication. it can objectively express the addressor’s judgement toward the topic and it shows the social relationship, scale of formality and formal relationship. thus, through modality system analysis, it shows that, in written language, it is important to use language in right way. then, it can provide meaning in relationship with other people and here is relationship between the writer as the addressor in the online news and the reader as the addressee. in addition, related to the data source, the researcher chooses an interpersonal meaning analysis of ahok’s blasphemy case in online news portals because these topic was interesting to be analysed. then, another reason was because the case was happening in indonesia and became a polemic either in certain groups of people or among people in indonesia widely. through analyzing clauses from aspect of interpersonal meaning in the online news portals, either mood or modality system, the researcher could analyze the mood types applied and the differences of modality system used in the data source. meanwhile, related to the data source, the researcher made the scope of the study which makes this research become more specific in the analysis. the limitation was in the online news portals taken from two online news portals; the first was the jakarta post and the second was republika.co.id. further, from both online news portals, the researcher only chooses one online news which has the same topic and publishing time. in the jakarta post, the news entitled “religious expert says ahok's remarks blasphemous” and in republika.co.id. the news entitled “expert witness says there is misguidance in ahok's speech”. both of the news published on tuesday, february 21st, 2017. method this descriptive qualitative research used documents as the main data source in which it consists of two online news with the same topic and publishing time. the news was about ahok’s blasphemy case which was taken from two different online news portals on the internet: the jakarta post and republika.co.id. the first news was taken from the jakarta post entitled “religious expert says ahok's remarks blasphemous”, published on tuesday, february 21st, 2017 at 04.30 pm. then, the second news was taken from republika.co.id entitled “expert witness says there is misguidance in ahok's speech”, published on tuesday, february 21st, 2017 at 07.19 pm. analyzing the collected data involves several steps, including segmenting, analyzing, and recapitulating. first step was segmenting both online news texts into the clauses in which the researcher classified the data into some clauses. the second step was analyzing the data by using functional grammar approach which focused on mood and modality types. the last step was recapitulating the data and deciding the dominant of mood and modality types appeared in the texts. after that, the researcher described the underlying reason of the news texts from the differences of modality system used. results and discussion halliday and matthiessen (2014) propose there are two main types of mood system, those are indicative and imperative. in this research, the researcher found one of mood and modality types from both online news selected that was taken from two online news portals; the jakarta post and republika.co.id. the percentage of mood type in the two online news portals is shown in the table below. table1. the percentage of mood type no. mood type occurrence percentage (%) 1. indicative declarative 46 100 interrogative 0 0 2. imperative 0 0 indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 91 46 5 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 mood clauses modality clauses t o t a l o f t h e c l a u s e f o u n d i n t h e d a t a s o u r c e indicative type modalization type total 46 100 from the table, it can be seen that there is only one mood type found which was an indicative type realized by declarative. the researcher found 46 clauses (100%) out of 46 caluses belonging to declarative. while, other types of indicative, an interrogative type either yes/no interrogative or whinterrogative, were not found in any clause. thus, the percentage was 0% with 0 occurrence. further, in another primary type of mood system, it was imperative type, the result shows that the percentage of the imperative type was 0% with 0 occurrence of the clause from total 46 clauses. further, the result of the data refers to the information commodity, it means that the statement occurred in the data analysis mostly appeared in the clauses. thus, these results described that the role of the writer refers to the giving information as commodity being exchanged which is realized by creating statements. the percentage of modality type in the two online news portals is shown in the table below. table 2. the percentage of modality type no modality type occurrence percentage (%) 1. modalization probability 5 100 usuality 0 0 2. modulation obligation 0 0 inclination 0 0 total 5 100 based on the percentage of modality type in the two online news portals above, the researcher found that the expression of probability reflected trough modal finite became the only one modality type used, with 5 times occurrences (100%) from total of 5 clauses. it can be concluded that there was only one modalization type used which belong to probability type. further, since there was no difference in the modality type used, the difference only lies in the way the writers forms the clauses in which it refers to the writer’s or speaker’s judgment or opinion to the preposition in the clauses. as halliday and matthiessen (2014) say modality is the speaker’s judgment, or request of the judgment of the listener, on the status what is the speaker being said. thus, in writing the news, the writers gave their judgments, or assessments on the topic or event in the news. finally, the overall results of data analysis were described clearly in the following chart. figure.1 the result of the data analysis teti kartika & marwito wihadi an interpersonal meaning analysis of ahok’s blasphemy case in online news portals 92 the data shows that there were 46 mood clauses identified out of 46 clauses. all the clauses identified belong to indicative mood type realized by declarative with percentage 100%. further, there were 5 clauses (100%) of modalization type that is categorized as the probability type. related to the objectives of the research, the reason behind the result in the data analysis in which it was only found one mood type and one modality type because the data was the news text. as farooq (2015) says the news should be designed to impart some sort of information to the readers and news is a truly, concise and accurate report of the event. furthermore, halliday and matthiessen (2014) add modality is the speaker’s judgment, or request of the judgment of the listener, on the status what the speaker is being said. there are a lot of research related to the analysis of interpersonal meaning that were conducted with different subject and object of the research. therefore, the researcher used some previous studies as references in this research in order to compare the results of this research with another research relating to interpersonal meaning analysis. those researches were conducted by ayoola and olusanya (2013), sujatna (2013), setyowati (2016), syah (2015), and huang. (2014). from those previous studies, the researcher found that some of those researches revealed only one mood and modality type in the data. it could be happened probably because the data source in this analysis is news that refers to the fact of an event. conclussion there is one mood type found from the two primary types; indicative and imperative mood types. the mood type found was the indicative mood type. the result of the data analysis shows that from the indicative mood type, the researcher only found declarative mood type in the data. in other words, the writer of the news intends to provide information to the readers by creating the declarative mood type. further, the researcher also found only one modality type used in the data. from two modality types; the modalization and modulation types, both of the writers applied the same modality type, it was the modalization type which had characteristic as the probability type. in other words, the writer from both online news portals; the jakarta post and republika.co.id used the same modalization type which belongs to probability type. the modality type used in both data source was similar, it is because the modality is speaker’s judgment or assessment hence the writers of the news providing the information based on the fact in the news event, not to give their opinion or desire to the topic in the news. briefly, language is used in the interaction between the speakers either the addressor or the addressee. then, the system of mood and modality are the keys to understand the interpersonal relationship between them. thus, by looking at the choice of mood and modality type used, the language could not learn only in a text material but actually it could serve as meaningful materials that could be explored contextually and semantically. references ayoola, & olusaya, m. (2013). an interpersonal metafunction analysis of some selected political advertisements in some nigerian newspapers. international journal of humanities and social science, 3(8), 165-178. farooq, u. (2015). what is news meaning definition and sources of news. retrieved from http://www.studylecturenotes.com/journalismmass-communication/what-is-news-meaningdefinition-and-sources-of-news. halliday, m.a.k., & matthiessen, c.m.i.m. (2004). an introduction to functional grammar. london: hodder arnold. halliday, m.a.k., & matthiessen, c.m.i.m. (2014). halliday’s introduction to functional grammar. london, new york: routledge publishers. halliday, m.a.k., & webster, j. (2009). continuum companion to systemic functional linguistics. london, new york: continuum. huang, k.z. (2014). snip-snap: an analysis of interpersonal meaning in a political tv interview. international journal of english linguistics, 4(5). setyowati, l.a. (2016). interpersonal meaning analysis in short story of hans christian andersen the real princes (master’s thesis). retrieved from http://eprints.ums.ac.id/43254/17/naskah%20p ublikasi.pdf sujatna, e.t.s. (2013). mood system and transitivity of the airlines slogan a comparison of national and regional airlines. international journal of english linguistics, 3(3), 42-52. http://www.studylecturenotes.com/journalism-mass-communication/what-is-news-meaning-definition-and-sources-of-news http://www.studylecturenotes.com/journalism-mass-communication/what-is-news-meaning-definition-and-sources-of-news http://www.studylecturenotes.com/journalism-mass-communication/what-is-news-meaning-definition-and-sources-of-news http://eprints.ums.ac.id/43254/17/naskah%20publikasi.pdf http://eprints.ums.ac.id/43254/17/naskah%20publikasi.pdf indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 43 the implementation of task-based instruction in teaching speaking mutiara stepani indonesia university of education, bandung, indonesia e-mail: mutiarastepani@gmail.com apa citation: stepani, m. (2016). the implementation of task-based instruction in teaching speaking. indonesian efl journal, 2(1), 43-52 received: 10-11-2015 accepted: 21-12-2015 published: 01-01-2016 abstract: this study aims at investigating the benefits and challenges encountered by the teacher and the students in implementing task-based instruction. this study mainly utilizes a qualitative research design covering the trait of a case study. this study was carried out in one vocational high school in bandung involving one class from the eleventh grade students. the data were collected through interview and questionnaires. the data from classroom interview and questionnaires were analyzed qualitatively. the result of interview and questionnaires revealed that task-based instruction resulted in some benefits and challenges. it was revealed that task-based instruction contributes to students’ speaking skill and enhances students’ participation. apart from those benefits, some challenges were also found in terms of teacher’s competence, availability of time, and mixed ability students. accordingly, it is recommended that this method is implemented in a long period of time. keywords: task-based instruction, teaching speaking, benefits of task-based instruction, challenges of task-based instruction introduction speaking english is considered as the most fundamental skill to be mastered in language learning (aleksandrzak, 2011; bashir, azeem, & dogar, 2011; hasan, 2014; malihah, 2010; oradee, 2012). it is supported by the fact that speaking proficiency is often used as the measurement of the success of learners in learning english (richards, 2008). in indonesian context, speaking skill is considered as an important skill to be mastered by senior high-school students, either public high school or vocational high school. however, speaking is considered as a difficult skill to develop. it is because of the students’ lack of exposures, lack of confidence, and lack of motivation (febriyanti, 2011). speaking skill is also considered challenging because the students need more time and courage to speak (bashir et al., 2011; oradee, 2012). in addition, some of the students are reluctant to speak because they feel nervous in expressing themselves in front of other people (harmer, 2007). based on preliminary observation, some problems of speaking are also found in a vocational school in cimahi. the observation showed that many students were reluctant to speak and looked nervous to speak in english. some of the students did not want to raise hands to answer teacher’s questions. the preliminary observation also showed that the students need more hours to practice speaking because they are trained to be ready to work in companies and demanded to speak communicatively. hence, it is noteworthy for organizing instruction, which can accommodate the demands of curriculum and the students’ needs. in other words, it is prominent in mutiara stepani the implementation of task-based instruction in teaching speaking 44 having a teaching-learning process which encourages the students to speak english. in accord with a decree of the minister of education and culture no 70/2013, the teaching-learning process requires the instruction which focuses on learner-centered and interaction, involves students as active participants, provides students to work collaboratively in groups, and uses multimedia as the teaching media. in relation to speaking skill issue, the english teacher in this study is required to give instruction which encourages the students to be actively engaged in doing tasks either individual or collaborative tasks by using a target language. task-based instruction, hence it will be mentioned as tbi, is the alternative method which can fulfill the aforementioned expectation. task-based instruction is defined as an instruction which promotes learner centeredness (ellis, 2003; nunan, 2004; richards & rodgers, 2001), and uses tasks as the center of instruction and language to complete the tasks (kumaravadivelu, 2012; littlewood, 2007; schmidt, platt, & schmidt, 2003 as cited in shehadeh & coombe, 2010). tbi lesson in the classroom goes through different sequencing frameworks proposed by some researchers (ellis, 2003; prabhu, 1987; skehan, 1996; willis, 1996). they have three principal phases which reflect the chronology of a taskbased lesson. ellis (2003) describes tbi sequences into pre-task, during-task, and post-task. willis (1996) proposed three sequencing stages involving a pre-task, the task, and language focus. the first stage of tbi is the pre-task stage. this stage takes place at the beginning of the lesson to prepare various activities before starting the task (aliakbari & jamalvandi, 2012). willis (1996) proposes three steps of pre-task stage. first, the teacher has to introduce the topic by defining the topic area. second, the teacher identifies the topic language i.e. assisting the students to introduce, recall, or activate the vocabularies, words, or phrases that will be used during the task. third, the teacher ensures that students understand what to do and what to achieve in the task. the second stage of tbi is a task cycle. the task phase allows students to show their effort to achieve the goal (beretta & davies, 1985). this phase allows them to work together to communicate and carry out the meaningful activity which concentrates on fluency and producing forms of language (hyde, 2013). willis (1996) proposes three components of a task cycle; the task, planning, and report. the third stage presents the language analysis and practice stage which focusing on language form and use (ellis, 2003; willis, 1996). this stage consists of two activities; the language analysis and language practice activities. the language analysis activities called as consciousness-raising activities or language awareness activities. these activities provide the students by identifying the language features from the task stage by giving the explicit instruction of teaching form or grammar (branden, 2006; ellis, 2003; nunan, 2004). on the other hand, the language practice activities are conducted to increase learners’ confidence and help them to improve their fluency in using language features (ellis, 2003; nunan, 2004). at this stage, the teacher presents activities to practice the language that the students have analyzed in the previous activity that can be spoken, or mainly written. further, a number of studies have examined the implementation of tbi on students’ speaking skill in the efl context. the research in the turkish context showed that tbi develops students’ speaking and engages indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 45 meaningful interaction among the students (kırkgöz, 2011). additionally, tbi also had beneficial effects on students’ learning process, enhances the interaction among students, gives the students opportunity to practice target language, and gives a relaxed atmosphere with enjoyable activities (ismaili, 2013). in thai context, uraiwan (2010) found that tbi helps the students improving their english-speaking and gives positive opinions such as learning with tbi was fun, interesting, and relevant to realworld language. in china, xiongyong and samuel (2011) explored the implementation of task-based language teaching among 132 secondary schools efl teachers in china, it showed that most of the teachers had positive attitudes toward tbi execution, but many teachers did not employ tbi. further, in korea, yim (2009, cited in wichitwarit, 2014) revealed that tbi could increase class participation, students had greater confidence in speaking english, and they have positive attitudes towards learning english. the problem of the study was further supported by the results of previous related studies in the indonesian context. gunawan (2013) conducted a study in university level in order to seek how a task-based instruction affects the students’ speaking skill. the results showed that there is significant improvement in students’ speaking skill after learning by using task-based instruction. further, rohani (2012) conducted a research on the implementation of tbi to tertiary english language class. the results showed positive responses towards tbi, which is indicated by the increase of students’ self-esteem, risk-taking behavior, and motivation to learn english. besides, the students also showed improvement in using strategic competence in oral communication skills. the aforementioned research has explored task-based instruction and responses towards tbi. few were known regarding how the teacher implements task-based instruction in classroom practice, particularly in vocational high school level. therefore, this study is concerned with seeking the benefits and challenges of task-based instruction to teach speaking at a vocational high school level. method this study focuses on revealing the benefits and challenges of task-based instruction in teaching speaking encountered by the teacher and the students. the study employs a case study to gain an in-depth understanding concerning particular events, a program, a process, and activity which was focused on teaching-learning process (see creswell, 2008; merriam, 1991). the study was undertaken at a vocational high school in cimahi, west java. there were two reasons in selecting this research site. first, the english teacher had the same interest in promoting the use of tbi in his classroom, and he had been conducting research on various aspects related to tbi. he also implemented tbi in his teaching-learning process. thereby, it is assumed that the english teacher might have knowledge of tbi and its theoretical foundations. hence, it is expected that this research is contributed to develop the teacher’s way in teaching speaking using task-based instruction (tbi). second, the researcher has access to the site. the data collection techniques employed in this study were observation, teacher’s interviews, and questionnaires. interview was conducted to gather the data regarding the benefits and challenges of the implementation of tbi. a semi-structured interview with openended questions was employed in interviewing the respondent. there were some steps of analyzing the interview data, such as transcribing, coding, categorizing, and interpreting the data mutiara stepani the implementation of task-based instruction in teaching speaking 46 from interview to address research questions. relevant theories were also used to justify the data. then, the questionnaire was administered to the students in order to answer the research question. in this study, a set of openended questionnaires were used. the questionnaires proposed by gunawan (2013) were applied to support data from interview. results and discussions this section discusses the findings obtained from interview and observation. from the analysis, it was revealed that the implementation of task-based instruction in teaching speaking gives some benefits and challenges. the benefits of the implementation of task-based instruction in teaching speaking the result of the analysis showed that there are two benefits of the implementation of task-based instruction. firstly, tbi contributes to students’ speaking skill. secondly, tbi contributes to students’ participation in the classroom. a. task-based instruction contributes to the students’ speaking skill on the basis questionnaires and interview, it was found that tbi contributes to students’ speaking skill. it was reflected on the questionnaires data which showed that most of the students feel that task-based instruction activities contribute to their speaking skill. 33 out of 35 students stated that their speaking skill was developed through tbi. the students’ responses on the questionnaire are described in the following excerpt. excerpt #1 “bertambah sedikit demi sedikit karena setiap pertemuan guru memberikan pengetahuan baru kepada siswa tentang grammar dan vocabulary” (s3) ([my speaking skill] was getting better because the teacher always gave us new materials about grammatical form and vocabulary in every meeting) excerpt #2 “meningkat seiring dengan kosakata saya yang bertambah” (s2) ([my speaking skill] improves along with the improvement of my vocabulary mastery) excerpt #1 illustrates that the student’s speaking skill developed because of grammatical form and vocabularies taught by the teacher. while, excerpt #3 illustrates that taskbased instruction also enhanced his vocabulary mastery. in this context, the students not only practice how to speak by using target language but also how to communicate with it. based on the teacher’s interview, the students are paying attention to their accuracy while performing dialog and stating the expressions orally without any hesitant after implementing tbi. consequently, after several meetings, tbi encourages them to speak and communicate actively. this finding also was depicted in the data of the teacher’s interview which highlighted the students’ speaking improvement as follows. first, in terms of… err… students’ skill, it’s so great. significantly developed! it means that students’ speaking skills after implementing tbi are developed as expected by target task. the students can deliver the message and feel unafraid in stating the expressions. that’s the point, when they felt unafraid in communicating. unafraid here means they don’t show any hesitant in speaking. therefore, they might think that communication in english is important. in addition, as we know that in communicating, we have to know other factor such as they are scared of making mistakes or afraid of mispronouncing the words. however, those factors are not quite indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 47 important for me. as long as they can deliver the message, that’s great! (teacher interview) the examples of the teacher’s remark above indicated that the activities in task-based instruction implementation influenced students’ speaking skills. it was because the activities in tbi encourage the students to speak actively, give the students opportunity to learn pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar, encourage the students to work independently, and encourage them to interact in english. thus, the activities seemed motivating the students in learning. those findings are in line with the statement that tbi can support the development of students’ target language, give positive attitudes of learning to speak, help the students to increase their motivation to speak, and increase students’ ability to speak fluently and correctly (lochana & deb, 2006; ruso, 2007; willis, 1996). b. task-based instruction enhances students’ participation in teaching learning the interview results revealed that activities done in every meeting make the students negotiate meaning by themselves and become independent learners. those impacts can be found mostly in the task-cycle when they interact and work in groups or in pairs. regarding this, the following excerpt shows this assumption. r : how about students’ involvement? is there any difference after implementing tbi? t : honestly, 50% of students involved actively after implementing tbi. many things have changed. at least, it is a good progress for the vocational students. before implementing tbi, the students kept silent or sometimes they seemed afraid and shy when i asked them to practice or answer questions. however, this 50% of the students are able to ask questions or practice speaking in front of the class. besides, this percentage is the maximum result of my effort. now i know that there is connection between a method used and the goal of the task stages. clear stages help them realize how to do the task. like in the second stage, the students just explore the language. the important thing is the students do know that i never blame their mistakes unless giving motivation. (int#1, 30/09/15) moreover, regarding students’ participation, it can be seen from the students’ questionnaires result. it was found that 71% of the students stated that they were very active in task-based instruction lesson while 29% stated that they were quite active in answering the questions. it was also confirmed by the statements wrote by the students below. sangat aktif seperti dalam memberikan pendapat, menjawab pertanyaan, dan berdialog di depan kelas (s12) ([i am] very active in giving opinion, answering questions, and performing dialog in front of the class) saya terlibat secara aktif dalam menjawab pertanyaan, berpendapat serta berani menampilkan bahasa inggris saya melalui dialog (s6) (i am involved actively in answering questions, stating opinion, and performing my english skill through dialog) aktif dalam menjawab dan bekerja kelompok (s7) (actively answer and do the task in pair or group) those excerpts support the studies which suggest that task-based instruction increases students’ motivation and encourages them to be the risk takers (torky, 2006). the challenges of the implementation of task-based instruction in teaching speaking in implementing the task-based instruction, there were three main challenges that could hinder the effectiveness in gaining its benefits. the challenges had something to do with teacher’s competence, availability of time, mutiara stepani the implementation of task-based instruction in teaching speaking 48 and mixed ability students’ proficiency as depicted in the following sections. a. teacher’s competence based on the interview, the challenges during the implementation of task-based instruction were related to teacher’s preparation and teacher’s roles in encouraging students to communicate in target language. regarding the teacher’s preparation, the teacher argued that he should be well-prepared in implementing task-based instruction, including the materials, contexts, strategy of teaching, and media based on the students’ characters in the classroom. it is shown in the interview below. r : is there any challenge you faced when implementing tbi in your classroom? t : i have to be well-prepared; especially selecting appropriate strategy and media for selected basic content. i have to prepare to implement tbi because the reality is somehow different from the theory itself. to implement this method, it is important to know the contexts, materials, students, and class environments. how tbi is carried out in the classroom is such a challenging task. like what i did today, i combined procedure and strategy to overcome my difficulties. then, it is also challenging for the teacher to introduce the topic which makes them communicate in target language. teacher plays as an important role. that’s why i said before that well-prepared teacher is important. well prepared here belongs to various aspects such giving various materials, using media such as video, power point, and questions and answers strategy. (int#1, 30/09/15) additionally, the teacher’s competence in designing an effective lesson plan, delivering the lesson, and managing the classroom was essential. during observation, the teacher used different kinds of media such as video and power point. at the other time, the teacher asked the students to engage in the discussion. those strategies and media bring new things to students and might encourage students’ enthusiasm in learning. concerning the challenge above, gebhard (2009) stated that the teacher needed lots of time and effort to prepare authentic materials and media. however, it also has benefits as a way to reinforce the students in connecting language in the classroom to the real world outside the classroom. besides, it is supported by richards (2001) who states that authentic materials such as video, text, and photographs provide supports to learn a language in a natural way. therefore, the teacher should be able to organize teaching activities which could accommodate all students in achieving target tasks. b. availability of time the second challenge found in the implementation of task-based instruction was the time of learning. 28.5 % or 10 out of 35 students stated that they have lack of time in accomplishing the tasks in task-based instruction. some students wrote the following statements on their questionnaires. tbi membutuhkan waktu lebih banyak (s1) (tbi needs lots of time) butuh waktu lama dalam memahami materi (s31) (need more time to understand the materials) kurangnya waktu membahas grammar dan vocabulary (s13) (lack of time in explaining grammar and vocabulary) in indonesian vocational school, the time of learning english for eleventh grade of students is 1 x 45 minutes in a week. this time allocation was considered less to have students master the speaking skill. this limited time of learning also influenced students’ language learning, such as grammar and vocabulary. based on the questionnaire above, it was found that the student indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 49 seemed need more time in understanding grammar and memorizing vocabularies. the reason might because they were used to learn english which focused on word formation, spelling, and vocabulary (alwasilah, 2001). therefore, due to limited of time, this teaching program focused on encouraging students to communicate. as stated by the teacher in the interview script below. grammar is important to teach implicitly, not explicitly. therefore, there was no grammar focus at the beginning of the lesson. not form focus. it means that the students can explore the expression or understand the meaning in communication. that’s good. in the last stage, i explain grammatical form. we discussed about what they had said in the dialog. for example, in the dialog the students made grammatical error, so i could explain the right sentence at this stage. grammar is important, but if we talk about tbi, communication first, grammar later. the portion is 25% grammar and 75% communication. grammar is only for correcting the language produced by the students. (teacher interview) as a consequence, the students with better language form were able to follow the instruction. it was because they could comprehend the instruction better. thus, this challenge should be taken into account for the teacher in managing tasks with better proportion of time. c. mixed proficiency level the last challenge in this study dealt with students’ proficient level. 22.8% or 8 students admitted that they have lack of language proficiency such as limited vocabularies, grammar, and pronunciation. those challenges were their obstacles in understanding the instructions and in expressing their opinion. guru selalu menggunakan bahasa inggris saat menjelaskan sehingga membuat saya kurang paham (s30) (the teacher always uses english in explaining the materials so that i don’t really understand about it) membosankan karena tidak bisa menjawab pertanyaan yang diberikan (s8) (it bored me because i couldn’t answer the question given by the teacher) in consequence, there were some students who used bahasa indonesia while answering teacher’s questions or discussing in groups. this is considered as the consequence of students’ lack of language proficiency. it is in line with the statement that task-based instruction gives chances to students in using their mother tongue (carless, 2004; littlewood, 2007). thus, this challenge should be taken into account for the teacher in selecting materials and designing a lesson plan that can accommodate all students’ english proficiency. conclusion based on the data analysis, this study revealed that the implementation of task-based instruction contributes to students’ speaking skill. the contribution was indicated by how the students actively respond to the questions, how they interact in groups, and how they perform speaking confidently. besides, the contribution was also shown by how the students pronounce words, use appropriate vocabulary, and pay attention to grammatical form. further, task-based instruction was found enhancing students’ participation in a teaching-learning process particularly when the teacher asked questions. however, apart from those benefits, some challenges were also found in this teaching learning process through taskbased instruction. the challenges had something to do with teacher’s competence, availability of time, and mixed ability students. finally, it can be concluded that the result of the study confirmed the possibility of teaching english which uses task-based instruction in assisting vocational high school students to speak mutiara stepani the implementation of task-based instruction in teaching speaking 50 english. it indicated that task-based instruction can be applied in efl vocational high school in indonesia. references aleksandrzak, m. 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(2011). perceptions and implementation of task-based language teaching among secondary school efl teachers in china. international journal of business and social science, 2(24), 292. venny eka meidasari the assessment and evaluation in teaching english as a foreign language 224 the assessment and evaluation in teaching english as a foreign language venny eka meidasari department of english education, faculty of language & art university of indraprasta pgri, indonesia e-mail: venny_xiaofen@yahoo.com apa citation: meidasari, v. e. (2015). the assessment and evaluation in teaching english as a foreign language. indonesian efl journal, 1(2), 224-231 received: 14-11-2014 accepted: 16-03-2015 published: 01-07-2015 abstract: this article is focusing on assessment and evaluation of english as a foreign language learning (efl). these are essential components teaching and learning in english language arts. both assessment and evaluation are the critical parts of effective literacy development; therefore, it is important for classroom teachers to know how to evaluate english language learners’ progress. without an effective evaluation program it is impossible to know whether students have learned, whether teaching has been effective, or how best to address student learning needs. the overall goal of assessment is to improve student learning. assessment should always be viewed as information to improve student achievement. one could look at assessment and evaluation as the journey (assessment) versus the snapshot (evaluation). the assessment and evaluation literacy needs from the learner’s perspective is also an important part of an instructional program. the needs of assessment and evaluation process can be used as the basis for developing curricula and classroom practice that are responsive to learners’ needs. it encompasses both what learners know and can do and what they want to learn and be able to do. learners need opportunities to evaluate their progress toward meeting goals they have set for themselves in learning english. key words: assessment, evaluation, foreign language learning, teaching, curriculum introduction assessment and evaluation are essential components of teaching and learning in english language arts. without an effective evaluation program it is impossible to know whether students have learned, whether teaching has been effective, or how best to address student learning needs. the quality of the assessment and evaluation in the educational process has a profound and well-established link to student performance. research consistently shows that regular monitoring and feedback are essential to improving student learning. what is assessed and evaluated, how it is assessed and evaluated, and how results are communicated results send clear messages to students and others about what is really valued—what is worth learning, how it should be learned, what elements of quality are most important, and how well students are expected to perform. although the terms assessment and evaluation are often used interchangeably, in actuality they are two parts of the same process. assessment is the process of gathering evidence of what the child can do. evaluation is the process that follows this collection of data, including analysis and reflection, as well as decisions based on the data. the assessment and evaluation of literacy needs from the learner’s perspective is an important part of an instructional program. although they may say they just want to “learn english,” they frequently have very specific learning goals and needs; for example, to be able to read to their children, speak with their children’s teachers, or to get a job. if their needs are not met, they are more likely to drop out than to voice their dissatisfaction. therefore, using informal, self-assessment tools to gauge learner needs and goals is important. also important, of course, is using formal assessment tools to gauge learner progress. mailto:venny_xiaofen@yahoo.com indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 225 the needs assessment and evaluation process can be used as the basis for developing curricula and classroom practice that are responsive to learners’ needs. it encompasses both what learners know and can do and what they want to learn and be able to do. learners also need opportunities to evaluate what they have learned—to track their progress toward meeting goals they have set for themselves in learning english. method this is a qualitative research and the research is all about exploring issues, understanding phenomena, and answering questions aims to gather an in-depth understanding of human behavior and the reasons that govern such behavior. the object of the research is undergraduate students of indraprasta university, semester three. however, the procedure used below is also adjustable for any level of language students. procedure: 1. planning the assessment in planning assessments to be taken by the general student population, including ells (english language learner), the general principles of good assessment practices apply. test purpose the purpose of a test must be clear in order for valid interpretations to be made on the basis of the test scores. tests have different purposes. for example, one test may be used to evaluate students’ readiness to advance to the next grade, while another evaluates students’ need for remediation. it is also important to outline the specific interpretations that will be made based on the scores. for example, tests used as a criterion for high school graduation will affect students differently than tests designed to inform instructional decisions. 2. developing test items and scoring criteria matching the task to the purpose the first step in developing a test item should be to link, directly to the test specifications and content standards, the content and skill that the item is supposed to measure. if the items require a high level of english proficiency, unrelated to the construct as defined, this will likely affect the scores for ells as well as students in the general population. for content area assessments, only include items that require high degrees of english proficiency if they are consistent with the assessment specifications. examples of items that require a high degree of english proficiency are those that ask examinees to identify or provide specific definitions or terminology in english that are unrelated to the construct, or items that are evaluated based on the quality of the language in a constructed response. item writers and reviewers should work to ensure that all test items maintain specificity in their match to content guidelines. as part of the process of creating and reviewing test material to ensure that it is appropriate and accessible to examinees, it is important that item developers, state content review staff, and state review committees analyze each item critically to ensure that it only measures the intended construct. defining expectations because ells—just like students in the general population—come from a wide variety of cultural and educational backgrounds, item writers should not assume that students have had any previous experience with given tasks. for example, students should be told explicitly what type of response is acceptable for a constructed-response question, whether it is a paragraph, complete sentence, list, diagram, mathematical equation, and so on. likewise, the criteria for the evaluation of the response should be made clear to the student. as this may add a significant reading load to the directions, information about how responses will be scored may be especially helpful if students receive it prior to the test. venny eka meidasari the assessment and evaluation in teaching english as a foreign language 226 using accessible language using clear and accessible language is a key component of minimizing constructirrelevant variance. however, do not simplify language that is part of the construct being assessed (e.g., the passages on a reading comprehension test or challenging vocabulary that is part of the construct of a subject area test). in other cases, though, the language of presentation should be as simple and clear as possible. some general guidelines for using accessible language are provided below:  use vocabulary that will be widely accessible to students. avoid colloquial and idiomatic expressions, words with multiple meanings, and unduly challenging words that are not part of the construct.  keep sentence structures as simple as possible to express the intended meaning. for ells, a number of simple sentences are often more accessible than a single more complex sentence.  avoid use of negatives and constructions utilizing not in the questions’ stems and options as they can cause confusion, especially for ells.  when a fictional context is necessary (e.g., for a mathematics word problem), use a simple context that will be familiar to as wide a range of students as possible.  a school based context will often be more accessible to ells than a homebased context. technique divide the course into three phases:  the first phase consists of sessions on effective teaching and introduction to communicative language teaching (clt); skills and sub skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing; grammar; vocabulary; classroom management, educational technology and assessment. the sessions are conducted daily from 10 am to 5 pm. after the sessions, participants work in groups (each group consisting of four or five participants) and plan and prepare lessons for peer/team teaching with the help of a supervisor.  the second phase is peer teaching, where trainees teach sections of their prepared lessons to their fellow students who act as students. the lessons are observed by a trainer or guest observer; and are followed by a feedback session.  the third phase is ‘real teaching’ where participants teach a lesson with a group of proficiency course learners, and the lessons are observed by a trainer and followed by a feedback session. strategies for collecting data the assessment/evaluation process involves the use of multiple sources of information collected in a variety of contexts. at the primary level, this research uses observation, work samples, and selfevaluation as tools in the process of assessment and evaluation. a) observation observation is the careful consideration and analysis of students’ behavior and performance based on a broad range of contexts. in order to use observation effectively, teachers need to know a lot about students, language, and how students learn language, and they need to be able to interpret what they are observing. students demonstrate what they think, know, and can do as they engage in various classroom activities that require the application of language processes and learning strategies. teachers can learn a great deal about students by observing them engaged in such processes as reading, writing, and interacting with others. teachers who have not been accustomed to using observation as an assessment tool are sometimes uncertain about what they should be looking for. the key-stage and specific curriculum outcomes provide a framework for teachers to use in their observations. indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 227 b) gathering observational data to make classroom observation manageable and effective, teachers need to focus their observations. many teachers develop a systematic, rotational schedule. as well, they might choose a particular focus for their observations in each of these contexts as they work through their class. important and relevant information can also be gathered more incidentally. teachers can also gather important data about students’ attitudes, understandings, and knowledge through questioning students and talking with them. although students may know or be able to do more than they put into words, conferences and other forms of dialogue can provide a wealth of information about students and their learning. waldemar martyniuk, waldemar, et. al. (2007). languages of education portfolio aims:  to provide a record of achievement in all languages of education  to provide evidence of developing language competences needed for democratic citizenship  to motivate learners to extend their range of language competences  to ensure that the language needs of all pupils are being addressed introductory profile of developing competence in a range of languages – linked to other assessment outcomes. language across curriculum (lac) evidence of language competence from other subjects: e.g. video clip of presentation in geography; discursive writing in history; technical report from science. language as school subject (ls) examples: reading log incorporating literature and non-fiction; evidence of reading for different purposes; writing samples; video clip of discussion of literary texts; selfassessment. other languages (fl etc.) a variety of specific test results both local and national. evidence of achieving threshold competences through recognized reporting mechanisms. details of certificates, diplomas etc. language biography personal language autobiography incorporating meta-cognition of language processes – dialect and accent, language and identity, etc. additional evidence venny eka meidasari the assessment and evaluation in teaching english as a foreign language 228 results and discussion teachers of language as school subject are sometimes hostile to the idea of large-scale or formal testing on the grounds that it diminishes the subject and ignores the significance of context. this view needs to be considered. a) basic principles of assessment/evaluation  the primary purpose of assessment and evaluation is to inform teaching and to promote and encourage learning—to promote optimal individual growth. in order to provide information vital to the teachers, assessment and evaluation must be an ongoing and integral part of the teaching/learning process. it is one continuous cycle consisting of collecting data, interpreting data, reporting information, and making application to teaching.  assessment and evaluation must be consistent with beliefs about curriculum and classroom practices, and clearly reflect the various outcomes of the kindergarten–3 english language arts curriculum, including those areas that cannot easily be assessed with pencil and paper (e.g., processes, attitudes, and values).  the assessment/evaluation process involves the use of multiple sources of information collected in a variety of contexts. in order to make decisions about any aspect of a child’s learning, the teacher observes evidence of that learning at different times, in different contexts, and in different ways. no one single behavior, strategy, activity, or test can provide a comprehensive picture of a child’s learning.  the assessment/evaluation process recognizes learners as active partners in their own learning and in the evaluation of that learning. students are encouraged to reflect on their own growth, considering progress, strengths and weaknesses, and goals. b) what is needs evaluation and assessment? needs assessments and evaluation with adult english language learners examine the following aspects from the perspective of the learner:  english language proficiency  native language literacy  literacy contexts in which the learner lives and works  learner need for native language translation or aid of an interpreter  learner wants and needs for functioning in specified contexts  learner expectations from the instructional program the needs assessment and evaluation process focuses and builds on learners’ accomplishments and abilities rather than deficits, allowing learners to articulate and display what they already know (holt and van duzer, 2000). it is a continual process and takes place throughout the instructional program. the process can influence student placement, materials selection, curriculum design, and instructional practice (tesol, 2003). at the beginning of the program, needs assessment and evaluation might be used to determine course content, while during the program, it assures that learner goals and program goals are being met and allows for necessary program changes. at the end of the program, needs assessment and evaluation can be used for planning future directions for the learners and the program (marshall, 2002). these same tools also may be used as a way to measure progress at the end of the year. however, for reporting outcomes to funders and external stakeholders, standardized assessments must be used. c) the findings utilizing first language (l1: indonesia) as a facilitating device for efl reading class is presented in the findings in this study. questionnaires were distributed to 117 students that are shown in table 1 below. indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 229 table 1: students’ responses to assessment in efl reading class by utilizing l1 no question concerns yes (%) no (%) 1 students’ fondness for english in senior high school. 68 32 2 students’ difficulties in learning english. 99 1 3 students’ experience in learning reading by retelling activity in indonesian language in senior high school. 79 21 4 students’ experience in learning reading by retelling activity in indonesian language in senior high school. 83 17 5 students’ easiness to understand a text in retelling activity from english text to indonesian language. 97 3 6 students’ motivation in retelling activity in indonesian language. 90 10 7 students’ difficulty in retelling activity using indonesian language from english text to understand text. 17 83 8 students’ easiness in retelling activity from english text by using english to understand text. 20 80 9 students’ difficulty in retelling activity by using english 80 20 10 students’ comprehension on english text by retelling activity by utilizing english. 14 86 tree questions in behavior aspects from question 2, 3, and 4 and seven questions in attitudinal aspects from question 1, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 were equipped with reasons of each except question 2 and 4 due to the questions purpose for confirmation for students’ learning english difficulty and retelling activity (rta). most students (68%) stated they had liked english since senior high school due to their willingness to be able to speak english well. meanwhile some students (32%) stated they disliked english due to their difficulties of vocabulary and sentences. almost all students (99%) stated english is difficult subject due to their ignorance of vocabulary, pronunciation and their difficulties in grammar. many students (79%) stated they had been familiar with rta since senior high school school. most students (83%) stated it was not their first time to perform rta by efl use. these findings showed that rta in efl reading learning was not a strange teaching technique for them. all students (97%) stated rta by indonesian language provided them with easiness in understanding english reading text due to their l1 familiar meaning as an easier way to understand english reading text than efl use. almost all students (90%) stated rta by indonesian language provided them with high motivation due to their easiness in recalling reading content. the findings indicated that students’ motivation for rta by indonesian language from their easiness in efl text understanding. almost all students (83%) stated they did not find difficulties in performing rta from efl reading text by indonesian language due to their l1 meaning familiarities. almost all students (80%) stated it was not easy to perform rta by english language due to (1) their ignorance of vocabulary, pronunciation, and text meaning, (2) their difficulties in text understanding. the findings indicated the students’ learning efl difficulties in performing rta in linguistic and comprehension. almost all students (80%) stated it was difficult to perform rta by english due to (1) their difficulties in translating and understanding text and memorizing text (2) their ignorance of vocabulary and pronunciation. almost all students (86%) stated rta by english did not show their text understandings due to their ignorance of vocabulary, words, text meaning and content. semi-structure interviews were conducted to focused group interview which consisted of six students. two aspects of interview questions, in which question 2 in behavior aspect and questions 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6 venny eka meidasari the assessment and evaluation in teaching english as a foreign language 230 in attitudinal aspects, were analyzed by coding technique that are shown in table 2. table 2. students’ responses to assessment in efl reading from interview no questions concern response coding 1 students’ difficulties in text understanding yes. the students’ difficulty in meaning, vocabulary, and text understanding. x difficult -easy other 2 students’ experience about retelling activity in efl reading i ever joined retelling activities when i was in senior high school x ever -never -other 3 students’ easiness in retelling activities in indonesian language i felt easy to retell activity in indonesian language because it would be easy to understand text. x easy -difficult -confused 4 students’ difficulties in retelling activity in english language i feel difficult to retell activities in english because i found that vocabulary and pronunciation were difficult so that i could not speak english fluently -easy x difficult -strange 5 students’ comprehension in retelling activity in english language. i could not understand it because i did not know the meaning and the story content, -comprehend x not comprehend -confused -other 6 students’ preference retelling activity in indonesian or english language. i prefer indonesian language because i could comprehend the text easily -english x indonesian -other. students’ text understanding difficulties revealed that they still found it hard to comprehend efl reading text due their difficulty in vocabulary, meaning, and text understanding. these findings were confirmed by questionnaire responses which indicated that almost all students (99%) found english as a difficult subject due the difficulty of vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar. students’ experiences about rta in efl reading class revealed that they had been familiar with rta which were confirmed by questionnaire responses indicated almost all students (83%) found it not strange to perform rta in efl reading class. students’ easiness in rta by indonesian language revealed that rta by l1 use provided them with easiness. these findings were confirmed by questionnaire responses indicated that almost all students (97%) found it easy to perform rta by indonesian language due to their l1 meaning familiarities and text understanding. students’ difficulties in rta by english language revealed that they found it more difficult to perform rta by english than by indonesian language due to their vocabulary, pronunciation, and meaning difficulty. these findings were confirmed by questionnaire responses which indicated that almost all students (80%) found it not easy to perform rta by efl use. students’ comprehension in rta by english language revealed that rta by english did not show their text understandings due to their ignorance of meaning and story content. these findings were confirmed by questionnaire responses which indicated that almost all students (86%) found rta by english which did not show their text understandings due to text meaning and text understanding difficulties. students’ preference for rta by indonesian than by english language revealed indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 231 that they preferred indonesian language due to their easiness in text understanding. these findings were confirmed by questionnaire responses which indicated that almost all students (97%) found it easier to perform rta by indonesian than by english language due to l1 word meaning familiarities. conclusion assessment is important but it is not without controversy and it can easily lead to polarised views and unhelpful tensions. this is particularly the case in the context of language as school subject (ls) because of the diversity and complexity of its aims. constructive debate around differences of opinion is always helpful, but too often disagreements about assessment become entrenched and unproductive. this happens for a number of reasons, including:a failure to recognise that assessment needs to fulfil a wide range of legitimate purposes; an assumption that a single assessment tool will be able to serve all needs; a lack of awareness that it is the use made of assessment, not necessarily the assessment process itself, that will largely determine its impact; and a tendency to search for universal solutions to assessment issues and neglect the significance of context. with regard to efl learning classroom interaction, it is suggested that english teachers should not force their students to fully utilize english in the learning classroom interaction for checking device in efl classroom to avoid misunderstanding, confusion, and embarrassment. english teacher should employ l1 use to teach poor reader to guide their comprehension. references ellis, r. (1998). the evaluation of communicative tasks. in b. tomlinson (ed.): materials development in language teaching (pp. 217-238). cambridge: cambridge university press. holt, d. & van duzer, c. (2000). assessing success in family literacy and adult esl. washington, dc: center for applied linguistics. marshall, b. (2002). preparing for success: a guide for teaching adult esl learners. retrieved from http://calstore.cal.org/store martyniuk, waldemar, fleming, mike, noijons, and josé. (2007). evaluation and assessment within the domain of language(s) of education. strasbourg: language policy division, council of europe. teachers of english to speakers of other languages, inc. (2003). standards for adult education esl programs. retrieved from http://www.tesol.org wajnryb, ruth (1992). classroom observation tasks: a resource book for language teachers and trainers. cambridge: cambridge university press. http://calstore.cal.org/store http://www.tesol.org/ indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 241 linguistic performance of former us president over developing terrorism in the middle east mostafa shahiditabar, mohammad amin mozaheb, mohsen mohseni, abolfazl babaei, amir hossein rashidi, ali dehchali, & mojtaba hosseini department of foreign languages, imam sadiq university, tehran, iran e-mail: m_shahidi2005@yahoo.com, mozaheb.ma@gmail.com, mohseni@isu.ac.ir, babaei@isu.ac.ir, rashidi@isu.ac.ir, dehchali@isu.ac.ir, hosseini@isu.ac.ir hossein pourghasemian qom university of technology, qom, iran e-mail: hosein_710@yahoo.com apa citation: shahiditabar, m., mozaheb, m. a., pourghasemian, h., mohseni, m., babaei, a., rashidi, a. h., dehchali, a., & hosseini, m. (2017). linguistic performance of former us president over developing terrorism in the middle east. indonesian efl journal, 3(2), 241-248. received: 14-05-2017 accepted: 23-06-2017 published: 01-07-2017 abstract: this study aims to reveal how a single reality, i.e., terrorism, is presented and viewed by us officials. the corpus of the current study is us president barack obama’s speeches from 2011 to 2015. the approach used in this study to detect discursive structures within the transcripts of the american officials’ speeches and discover the ideologies underlying them is van dijk’s (2004) as well as a content-based analysis method. as far as the analysis the data is concerned, the macro strategies of ‘positive self-representation’ and ‘negative otherrepresentation’ are useful to evaluate attitudes and opinions on the one hand, that is, obama has applied polarization, victimization, actor description, national self-glorification, presupposition, lexicalization, and actor description among other strategies in his speeches. on the other hand, the findings prove that obama’s impressions of terrorism versus terrorists and states versus people are changing from 2011 to 2015. the findings of the present study is hoped to be useful for both critical discourse analysts and political activists. keywords: critical discourse analysis (cda), political discourse, obama, terrorism introduction terrorism can be defined as the unofficial or unauthorized use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims. terrorism has many types like international and domestic terrorisms in many ways like violent acts, mass destruction, assassination, and kidnapping. it is easy to detect that today the use of terrorism is widespread from religious groups and revolutionaries to even state institutions such as armies, intelligence services, and police. in 21th century, terrorism has become increasingly one of the most important concerns and crisis the whole world. different politicians have different points of view regarding terrorism. one of the most important officiates involved with terrorism is said to be america’s barack hussein obama. barack hussein obama was born in honolulu, hawaii (august 4, 1961). he is serving as the 44th president of the united states (since 2009) and he is a democratic politician. additionally, he is the first african american president of the united states. regarding obama’s mostafa shahiditabar, mohammad amin mozaheb, mohsen mohseni, abolfazl babaei, amir hossein rashidi, ali dehchali, mojtaba hosseini, & hossein pourghasemian linguistic performance of former us president over developing terrorism in the middle east 242 presidency, one can say that iraq played an important role in his decisions. literature on cda is enormous. a brief review of literature shows that many scholars belonging to critical discourse community have used cda to analyze relevant political texts. for instance, dastpak and taghinezhad (2015) shows that the key ideological parts of obama’s discourse can be condensed into the accompanying ideas as pragmatism, liberalism, inclusiveness, acceptance of religious, and ethnic diversity and unity. it also shows that most noticeable words utilized by obama are country, new and america, and a general strength of the individual pronoun we. according to dastpak and taghinezhad (2015), the mentioned finding is believed to prove obama’s comprehensive impression of the american culture and a requirement for solidarity. aschale (2013), similarly, shows that the political discourse of barack obama regarding the middles stresses on condemning the tyrants, extremists, nuclear armed countries and change resistant’s. this study shows that the political discourse of barack obama regarding the middles concentrates on the moldable and accommodable for change with the vaccines and instruments of ‘freedom, democracy, equality, tolerance, technology and globalization’ in order for america to easily slip and swipe into a given country (abundant in resource or politically important) without war and confrontations. this study confirms that narrating ideology, change, morality, religion, hegemony, identity and the allay dilemma discourse analysis are ‘the clear evidences from obama’s (america’s) own words’. aschale (2013) believes that these words ‘are backed by masked’ terms of support, allay, cooperation, renewal, engagement, partnership, interference and other beneficiary means of doorways for america to easily access the required resources or political advantages. in addition, martínez, and gonzález (2012) discuss victory and non-victory speeches of obama and the former us president george w. bush. this study shows that the different conditions surrounding the election of both bush and obama were encoded in their speeches. it is believed that obama’s words were ‘the words of victory’ and his speech focused on the audience and ‘he turned his victory into the victory of the people’. meanwhile, bush’s words were ‘the words of failure’ and ‘resentment turned into discourse punishment for voters’. further, rashidi and souzandehfar (2010) show that the candidates of each party, i.e., democrats and republicans, utilized different subtle ideological discourse structures to achieve its goal in election. both parties have utilized the two major strategies of positive selfpresentation and negative otherpresentation in their speeches. accordingly, viewpoints of all politicians are important regarding this issue including obama who is serving as the 44th president of the united states. therefore, this current study is aimed to analyze obama’s speeches from 2011 to 2015 by using van dijk’s (2004) framework in an attempt to uncover his viewpoints regarding terrorism. method the materials used in this qualitative study are the transcripts of obama’s speeches from 2011 to 2015. the framework employed in the current study is van dijk’s (2004) framework. van dijk elaborates 27 ideological strategies among which the fundamental dichotomy of ‘self indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 243 positive-representation’ and ‘other negative representation’ stand out. positive self-representation or in-group favoritism is a semantic macro-strategy used for the purpose of ‘face keeping’ or 'impression management' (van dijk, 2004). negative other-representation is another semantic macro-strategy regarding in-groups and out groups, that is, their division between ‘good’ and ‘bad’, superior and inferior, us and them. van dijk (2004) introduces these two major strategies in the form of an ‘ideological square’: emphasize our good things emphasize their bad things de-emphasize our bad things de-emphasize their good things (p. 18). another part of the framework of the current study is content-based analysis. it is a wide and heterogeneous set of techniques for ‘contextualized interpretations of documents produced by communication processes in the strict sense of that phrase (any kind of text, written, iconic, multimedia, etc.) or signification processes (traces and artifacts), having as ultimate goal which is the production of valid and trustworthy inferences’ (wikipedia, 2016). results and discussion using content based analysis and critical discourse analysis, obama's speeches have been meticulously analyzed. in order to fully understand different ideologies behind his dictions, the main themes and words mentioned in his speeches have been detected and counted. the strategies used by obama in his speeches based on van dijk (2004) are presented in the following. the strategies used in obama’s speeches in 2011 polarization: “for there should be no doubt that so long as i am president, the united states will never tolerate a safe haven for those who aim to kill us. they cannot elude us, nor escape the justice they deserve.” victimization: “terrorists have taken the lives of our citizens in new york and in london.” the strategies used in obama’s speeches in 2012 authority:” every one of you who served there can take pride in knowing you gave the iraqis this opportunity that you succeeded in your mission.” actor description: ”iranian people have a remarkable and ancient history, and many iranians wish to enjoy peace and prosperity alongside their neighbors. iranian government continues to prop up a dictator in damascus and supports terrorist groups abroad. what we’ve done is organize the international community, saying assad has to go. we’ve mobilized sanctions against that government. we have made sure that they are isolated. we have provided humanitarian assistance, and we are helping the opposition organize. and we’re particularly interested in making sure that we’re mobilizing the moderate forces inside of syria.” mostafa shahiditabar, mohammad amin mozaheb, mohsen mohseni, abolfazl babaei, amir hossein rashidi, ali dehchali, mojtaba hosseini, & hossein pourghasemian linguistic performance of former us president over developing terrorism in the middle east 244 the strategies used in obama’s speeches in 2013 authority: “we'll need to help countries like yemen, and libya, and somalia provide for their own security, and help allies who take the fight to terrorists, as we have in mali.” actor description: “when i think about five israelis who boarded a bus in bulgaria…. that’s why every country that values justice should call hezbollah what it truly is – a terrorist organization.” national self glorification: “we are the largest humanitarian donor.” the strategies used in obama’s speeches in 2014 authority: “at the request of the iraqi government -we’ve begun operations to help save iraqi civilians stranded on the mountain.” presupposition: “still, we continue to face a terrorist threat. we can't erase every trace of evil from the world, and small groups of killers have the capacity to do great harm.” lexicalization: “now, it will take time to eradicate a cancer like isil.” the strategies used in obama’s speeches in 2015 authority: “we will destroy isil and any other organization that tries to harm us.” actor description: “isil does not speak for islam.” as mentioned earlier, another part of data collection of the current study is done by means of a content-based analysis approach. regarding content-based analysis, the most frequent vocabularies of obama are shown in the following tables. table 1. the most frequent vocabularies used by obama in 2011 word frequency percentage middle east 20 20/6% terrorist 14 14/4% iraq 14 14/4% iran 10 10/3% syrian 10 10/3% syria 8 8/2% islam 4 4/1% muslim 4 4/1% iranian 4 4/1% terrorism 3 3/0% counterterrorism 3 3/0% terror 3 3/0% as it is seen in table 1, the most frequent words are middle east, terrorist, iraq, iran and syrian. an interesting point is that terrorist is used more than terrorism. indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 245 table 2. the most frequent vocabularies used by obama in 2012 word frequency percentage syria 19 23% iran 18 22% iraq 15 18% syrian 11 13% muslim 9 11% iranian 4 5% terrorist 3 4% middle east 2 2% islam 1 1% terrorism 0 0% counterterrorism 0 0% one of the most important points about table 2 is that syria is ranked first in 2012 despite the fact that it was ranked sixth in 2011. table 3. the most frequent vocabularies used by obama in 2013 word frequency percentage syria 60 23/8 terrorist 41 16/26 terrorism 31 12/3 iran 24 9/52 iraq 23 9/12 counterterrorism 13 5/15 muslim 15 5/95 syrian 13 5/15 middle east 13 5/15 islam 8 3/17 iranian 11 4/36 this table shows that obama used the words terrorist and terrorism 72 times, but he used counterterrorism 13 times. so, counterterrorism is less important than terrorist and terrorism. also, obama used syria more than iraq that shows syria is more important than iraq for america in this year since, in 2013, syria is ranked first. table 4. the most frequent vocabularies used by obama in 2014 word frequency percentage iraq 110 34/7 isil 73 23/0 terror 58 18/2 syria 54 17/0 isis 22 6/9 iranian 11 4/36 mostafa shahiditabar, mohammad amin mozaheb, mohsen mohseni, abolfazl babaei, amir hossein rashidi, ali dehchali, mojtaba hosseini, & hossein pourghasemian linguistic performance of former us president over developing terrorism in the middle east 246 in obama’s speeches during 2014, he used isil more than isis. isil stands for "islamic state of iraq and levant", while isis stands for "islamic state of iraq and sham". it is clear that isil is more extended than isis. table 5. the most frequent vocabularies used by obama in 2015 word frequency percentage isil 12 63% terrorism 5 26% iraq and syria 2 11% this table is extracted from address to the nation on foreign and domestic counter-terrorism strategies. in this part, some examples of obama’s speeches will be provided. at the beginning, obama sees terrorism as a newborn cancer that his administration ought to root it out and stop it from spreading in the world. so, he says: “we'll work with the pakistani government to root out the cancer of violent extremism (afghanistan troop reduction address to the nation, 2011).” on the death of bin laden, he says that justice is done: “on nights like this one, we can say to those families who have lost loved ones to al qaeda’s terror: justice has been done (on the death of osama bin laden).” it is clear that obama does not categorize the threat of terrorism as large as the u.s. should send its troops to fight directly and says: “but to meet this threat, we don’t need to send tens of thousands of our sons and daughters abroad or occupy other nations (state of the union, 2013).” but some thoughts crossed his mind in a bid to persuade american congress on his plan to target terrorists as he says: “i will continue to engage congress to ensure not only that our targeting, detention and prosecution of terrorists remains consistent with our laws and system (state of the union, 2013).” in 2014, we see that he used his troops to target terrorists: “to stop the advance on erbil, i’ve directed our military to take targeted strikes against isil terrorist convoys should they move toward the city (on authorizing air strikes and humanitarian effort in iraq, 2014).” briefly, a close examination of the transcripts of obama’s speeches from 2011 to 2015 through van dijk’s (2004) comprehensive framework and a content-based analysis revealed that obama’s points of view are malleable. that is, at first he talks about terrorists rather than terrorism. it can be argued that he does not see terrorism as an important and effective event or a trend rather he conceives it as a terrorist action done by some people. obama categorizes iran as the most crucial supporter of terrorism. he also proclaims that he wants to fight against terrorism but he has no war with islam. in 2012, obama names iraq, syria, and iran because, in his viewpoint, these counties have faced with a modern and furious phenomenon called terrorism. an interesting point is that obama uses the names of the countries more than the nationalities. in other words, he applies iraq, syria, and iran more than iraqi, syrian, and iranian. this shows that countries are considered and have crucial roles in obama's speeches. it can be argued that since the most powerful and influential part of countries are their states, american foreign policy concentrates on regulating power and balancing the regional policy by choosing this linguistic choice. in 2013, the loci of indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 247 obama speeches are on syria rather than iraq and iran. he also stresses on conserving syria rather that syrians. in 2014, the frequency of isil is higher that isis in obama’s speeches. he declares that terrorism in tripling and believes that a state is going to be formed to do terrorist actions that are composed of extremist muslims. in 2015, obama has a different viewpoint about terror and terrorism. his behavior is softer in comparison with last years. maybe he is going to monitor terrorism. conclusion reviewing the transcripts of obama’s speeches from 2011 to 2015 through van dijk’s (2004) framework shows that to justify his claims, obama utilized different subtle ideological discourse structures that can be categorized under the two major strategies of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation. polarization, victimization, actor description, national self-glorification, presupposition, lexicalization, and actor description were frequently used as effective devices in persuasion and justification by obama. further, a detailed reviewing of the transcripts of obama’s speeches from 2011 to 2015 through van dijk’s (2004) comprehensive framework proves that obama has applied numerous linguistic tricks to achieve his ideology. the results of this study proves that cda provides a great opportunity to discover the realities particularly in political discourses which, according to fairclough (1995), has been distorted and naturalized as “non-ideological common sense.” it is also fruitful for the scholars of critical discourse to make a more specific contribution to shed more light on the crucial role of discourse in the reproduction of dominance and hegemony. references aschale, a. (2013). a critical discourse analysis of barack obama’s speeches vis-a-vis middle east and north africa. unpublished ph. d. thesis. addis ababa university. dastpak, m., & taghinezhad, a. (2015). persuasive strategies used in obama’s political speech: a cda approach based on fairclough’s framework. journal of applied linguistics and language research, 2(6), 13-27. fairclough, n. (1992). discourse and social change. cambridge: polity press. martínez, d., & gonzález, v. c. (2012). obama and bush: their victory and non-victory speeches. on omázein, 25(1), 205-217. rashidi, n., & souzandehfar, m. (2010). a critical discourse analysis of the debates between republicans and democrats over the contribution of war in iraq. jolie, 3, 54-81. van dijk, t. a. (2004). politics, ideology and discourse. retrieved online february 20, 2008 from http://www.discourse-insociety.org/teun.html. mostafa shahiditabar, mohammad amin mozaheb, mohsen mohseni, abolfazl babaei, amir hossein rashidi, ali dehchali, mojtaba hosseini, & hossein pourghasemian linguistic performance of former us president over developing terrorism in the middle east 248 ice cream there was an elderly couple who in their old age noticed that they were getting a lot more forgetful, so they decided to go to the doctor. the doctor told them that they should start writing things down so they don't forget. they went home and the old lady told her husband to get her a bowl of ice cream. "you might want to write it down," she said. the husband said, "no, i can remember that you want a bowl of ice cream." she then told her husband she wanted a bowl of ice cream with whipped cream. "write it down," she told him, and again he said, "no, no, i can remember: you want a bowl of ice cream with whipped cream." then the old lady said she wants a bowl of ice cream with whipped cream and a cherry on top. "write it down," she told her husband and again he said, "no, i got it. you want a bowl of ice cream with whipped cream and a cherry on top." so he goes to get the ice cream and spends an unusually long time in the kitchen, over 30 minutes. he comes out to his wife and hands her a plate of eggs and bacon. the old wife stares at the plate for a moment, then looks at her husband and asks, "where's the toast?" (source: http://www.study-express.ru/humour/funny-stories.shtml, picture: www.google.co.id) http://www.study-express.ru/humour/funny-stories.shtml indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 49 lesson study to improve student english grammar mastery using jigsaw technique to the third semester students of ikip siliwangi acep haryudin english education department of ikip siliwangi e-mail: haryacep@gmail.com ningtyas orilina argawati english education department of ikip siliwangi e-mail: tyas.orilina@yahoo.com apa citation: haryudin, a., & argawati, n .o. (2018). lesson study to improve student english grammar mastery using jigsaw technique to the third semester students of ikip siliwangi. indonesian efl journal, 4(1), 49-56. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v4i1.798. received: 10-11-2017 accepted: 27-12-2017 published: 01-01-2018 abstract: the implementation of lesson study is aimed to improve students’ ability in mastering the teaching materials on english grammar, fostering creativity, improving critical thinking, and increasing ability to work both personally and in group. in implementing this lesson study, the researchers used jigsaw as a learning technique. this study was conducted in 3 cycles, in which each cycle consists of planning (plan), implementation (do), and reflection (see). the results showed that there are good developments on students’ learning where the constraints that appear can be minimized. besides, students understand the function and word forms, they have high critical thinking or curiosity, and they have no difficulties in comprehending grammar formula. moreover, the result also showed that students have high motivation in learning english and there was no gap between high-motivated and low-motivated students. finally, after knowing what, why, and how lesson study was implemented, lecturers could consider the importance of applying lesson study in the learning process. keyword: cooperative learning, grammmar mastery, jigsaw, learning technique, lesson study introduction many approaches and methods have been tried by english teachers and instructors on teaching english as a foreign language. they do such efforts in order to improve their students mastering english. as we know, english has four basic skills; they are listening, reading, speaking, and writing. to master all of the four basic skills, students must learn the other skills such as vocabulary and grammar as the basic skills. both vocabulary and grammar are the two important things that should be mastered by students in learning english. this assumption arises because vocabularies are very significant on one’s mastery of such a language. besides, grammar is something which cannot be ignored on learning english as stated by argawati (2017) that learning english is not dealing only on vocabulary but also on grammar. strumpf and douglas (2004, p. 14) also say “we study grammar so that we may speak and write in a clearer and more effective manner.” grammar covers many themes that may confuse students on memorizing and understanding them. however, since grammar is important to their development of english mastery, they have to study it well. many difficulties are faced by english teachers during the process of teaching grammar since grammar need to be not only memorized but also understood by the students. it relies more on the concepts. once the students comprehend the concept, they will easily develop their ability on solving problem concerning grammar. to acep haryudin & ningtyas orilina argawati lesson study to improve student english grammar mastery using jigsaw technique to the third semester students of ikip siliwangi 50 deliver the concept, teachers must put their effort to seek for a suitable learning technique for the students. to cope with the problems mentioned above, teachers may refer to the cooperative language learning (or simply cooperative learning) approach. this is an approach to teaching that makes maximum use of cooperative activities involving pairs and small groups of learners in the classroom. as stated by slavin (1995) that cooperative language learning in which students work in small groups help students learn academic content more easily. in cooperative learning situations, there is a positive interdependence among students’ goal attainments: students perceive that they can reach their learning goals if and only if the other students in the learning group also reach their goals. therefore, the success of cooperative learning highly depends on the nature and organization of group work. according to slavin (1995, p. 5), there are several specific models teachers can use to set up cooperative learning groups: 1) stad (student teams achievement divisions), 2) team accelerated instruction (tai), 3) jigsaw technique, 4) reading and composition (circ), 5) teams games tournaments (tgt), and 6) cooperative integrated. from those six models, jigsaw is selected to be proposed as a solution in this research. jigsaw is a technique belonging to cooperative approaches which enable students to work in group discussion.the jigsaw technique is a method of organizing classroom activity that makes students dependent on each other to succeed. it breaks classes into groups and breaks assignments into pieces that the group assembles to complete the (jigsaw) puzzle. it was designed by social psychologist elliot aronson to help weaken racial cliques in forcibly integrated schools. there are nine steps considered to be important in the implementation of the jigsaw classroom. aronson (2008) describes them as follows. 1. students are divided into a 5 or 6 person jigsaw group. the group should be diverse in terms of ethnicity, gender, ability, and race. 2. the day’s lesson is divided into 5-6 segments (one for each member) 3. each student is assigned one segment to learn. students should only have direct access to only their own segment. 4. students should be given time to read over their segment at least twice to become familiar with it. students do not need to memorize it. 5. temporary experts groups should be formed in which one student from each jigsaw group joins other students assigned to the same segment. students in this expert group should be given time to discuss the main points of their segment and rehearse the presentation they are going to make to their jigsaw group. 6. students come back to their jigsaw group. 7. students present his or her segment to the group. other members are encouraged to ask question for clarification. 8. the teacher needs to float from group to group in order to observe the process. intervene if any group is having trouble such as a member being dominating or disruptive. 9. a quiz on the material should be given at the end so students realize that the sessions are not just for fun and games, but that they really count. the application of this method, jigsaw, itself will not be effective if it is only used without any appropriate arrangement. therefore, the researchers put this method into several cycles which belong to lesson study. lesson study is a major form of quality improvement of learning and teacher professional development. it was first developed by elementary teachers in japan (susilo et al., 2011, p. 2). it provides a process for collaborating and designing lessons and evaluating the success of teaching indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 51 strategies that have been implemented in an effort to improve students’ learning and learning process itself (santyasa, 2009). lesson study has three main sections in every cycle; they are (1) plan: planning an instruction or action in the classroom, (2) do: doing an action which had been planned, and (3) see: evaluating and revising the action done. teachers feel free to determine how many cycle they want to conduct on this study. the more the cycle conducted, the better the effect would be. lesson study (ls) is a highly specified form of classroom action research focusing on the development of teacher practice. it has been used in japan since the 1870s. ls therefore pre-dates action research as we know it in the west, by some 70 years. ls involves groups of teachers collaboratively planning, teaching, observing and analyzing learning and teaching in ‘research lessons’. they record their findings. over a cycle of research lessons, they may innovate or refine a pedagogical approach that will improve pupil’s learning and which will be shared with others both through public research lessons, and through the publication of a paper outlining their work. taking part in collaborative enquiries into improving teaching and learning is the most impactful action a school leader can take to improve educational outcomes for pupils (robinson, hohepa & lloyd, 2009). ls only started to become popular in the west this century, following the success attributed to it by us researchers in developing deep teacher knowledge of both pedagogy and of subject amongst japanese teachers. this leads to high standards of educational attainment by japanese pupils when compared with those of comparable groups of pupils in the us (stigler & hiebert, 1999; timss, 1999). another definition for lesson study comes from rusman (2011, p. 385) who argues that lesson study is one of the coaching efforts to improve the learning process conducted by a group of teachers in a collaborative and continuous in planning, implementing, observing and reporting the results of reflection of learning activities. moreover, hendayana (2006, p. 10) argue that lesson study is a model of educational profession development through collaborative learning and continuous learning based on the principle of colleague and mutual learning to build learning communities. the procedure of research and how the program work in implementing lesson study is showed at figure bellow. acep haryudin & ningtyas orilina argawati lesson study to improve student english grammar mastery using jigsaw technique to the third semester students of ikip siliwangi 52 figure 1. problem, solution and output after ls method this study was conducted at ikip siliwangi bandung. specifically, the study was carried out at class a3 which consists of 40 students majoring english education. in this research, lesson study was used to improve the quality of the students covering creativity, critical thinking, ability to collaborate and communicate when they study grammar using jigsaw. fernandez (2005) as cited in hartanti (2007) expresses that the goal of lesson study is to improve the effectiveness of the experiences that the teachers provide to their students. in addition, santyasa (2009) argues that lesson study provides a process for collaborating and designing lessons and evaluating the success of teaching strategies that have been implemented in an effort to improve students’ learning and learning processes. this study relies more on the process of colaboration between student to student, and between students to teacher. in conducting this study, the researchers use procedure as proposed by putra et al. (2010, p. 8). he states that lesson study is supported by three pillars of activities, namely, plan, do and see. figure 2 below shows the procedure of lesson study used by the researchers. jigsaw technique 1. students have low motivation in learning english 2. students do not understand between function and form of words (verb, noun, adjective etc.) 3. students have no critical thinking/curiosity 4. students have difficulties in comprehending grammar formula 5. there was a gap between high-motivated and low-motivated students 6. students rarely interacted with the teacher and/or among them 7. do not want to be involved in learning process problems found on students’ learning grammar outputs after ls implementation 1. students have high motivation in learning english, 2. students understand between function and form of using words (verb, noun, adjective etc.) 3. students have high critical thinking/ curiosity, 4. students have no difficulties in comprehending grammar formula, 5. there was no a gap between high-motivated and low-motivated students, 6. students have good interacted with the teacher and/or among them, 7. students want to be involved in learning process. lesson study indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 53 figure 2. procedure of lesson study firstly, in plan step, the researchers design learning activities which relate to student-centered instruction where students are able to participate actively in the learning process. secondly, in do step, the researchers conduct an action planned by using jigsaw. here, the students actively follow the learning process given by the researchers. lastly, in see step, the researchers evaluate the action done and make a necessary revision for the next cycle. results and discussion lesson study involves groups of teachers meeting regularly over a period of time (ranging from several months to a year) to work on the design, implementation, testing, and improvement of one or several “research lessons” (stigler & hiebert, 1999). research lessons are actual classroom lessons taught to one’s own students, that are (a) focused on a specific teacher-generated problem, goal, or vision of pedagogical practice, (b) carefully planned, usually in collaboration with one or more colleagues, (c) observed by other teachers, (d) recorded for analysis and reflection, and (e) discussed by lesson study group members, other colleagues, administrators, and/or an invited commentator (lewis &tsuchida, 1998). lesson study which was conducted by the researchers took place at ikip siliwangi, especially to thethird semester students which consisted of 40 students. the class was choosen due to the existence of some problems. as mentioned above, many students found difficulties in understanding the concept of grammar. grammar has a wide discussion and number of point to discuss. besides, there is also a psychologycal factor that affects the students’ difficulties, namely anxiety. since they do not understand the concept, they mostly could not answer the question correctly. this situasion rises their anxiety of being wrong. to solve the problem, technique of jigsaw was proposed. jigsaw belongs to cooperative learning which seeks to develop classrooms that foster cooperation rather that competition in learning. brown (2001, p. 185) defines jigsaw technique as a special form of information gap in which each member of a group is given some specific information and the goal is to pool all information to achieve some objectives. jigsaw involves two distinct groups in which students will be a part of. initially, there is a heterogeneous group that the students will temporarily leave to meet with homogeneous group to learn to be an expert on a topic. after students have become “experts” they reconvene with their original heterogeneous group to take turns sharing their “expert” knowledge. the teaching method used in this reseach was lesson study. lesson study has three main section in every cycle; they are (1) plan: planning an instruction or action in the classroom, (2) do: doing an action which had been planned, and (3) see: evaluating and revising the action done. on this research, the researchers decided to use two cycles of the lesson study. each cycle consisted of those three steps. action in cycle i began with the application of jigsaw technique. the implementation of this lesson aims to improve discipline and teamwork. cycle i is held during the first meeting or 2 hours of acep haryudin & ningtyas orilina argawati lesson study to improve student english grammar mastery using jigsaw technique to the third semester students of ikip siliwangi 54 lesson.the implementation of this learning technique was done by one lecturer model who was assigned to teach and become a learning facilitator, and three observers who were tasked to observe the learning process. in the first cycle, the application of learning is done by collaborative learning method which contains two activities, namely group discussion and group presentation. 1. plan stage the first phase of the first cycle is the plan or planning phase implemented on april 6th, 2017. the researchers did discussion session to determine the material and the technique apllied in the classroom. it would be delivered by one of the researchers as a lecturer of the subjects of the foundation of english grammar who will also serve as the lecturer model in the implementation of this lesson study. the design of learning was made by focusing on the importance of teamwork and student discipline. based on the draft, the lesson study for do in the first cycle requires instructional tools, such as papers containing materials for jigsaw implementation and lessons learned in group discussions. the researchers should prepare an observation sheet to observe the activities and performance of each group. figure 3. discussion session and material preparation figure 3 shows the situation when the researchers discussed about the material which would be delivered in the classroom. the material chosen was about tense covering progressive and simple present tense. the first researcher proposed jigsaw as a technique and some media in the form of cards which contained some problems and their answer sheet. students would set on group and would get their own task to be gathered on the expert group. after coming back to their first group, they had to share their knowledge gaining from the expert group. 2. do stage do stage or stage of learning implementation in cycle i is executed on april 7th, 2017 where the learning activity starts with the lecturer model. after the lesson was started, the lecturer model then conducted preliminary learning activities such as checked the readiness of the students in following the lesson, asked students condition, checked the attendance, then leading the prayer. then the model lecturers did the core activities of learning, delivered learning objectives, materials and indicators to be achieved. after that, the lecturer model divided the students into several groups to further implement jigsaw as a technique in learning. after the lecturer divided the students into several groups and provided the foundation of english grammar material, other lecturers as observers observed the course of the learning process and observed the involvement of each student in the learning process. based on the conditions and target achievement of the course, the group formed is a group based on the divisions that exist in indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 55 grammar learning activities. it aims to have good communication and coordination on every student. at the end of the learning activities, the lecturer conducted an evaluation by requesting a brief report on the results of the discussions that have been carried out by each group. then, the lecturer concluded and motivated students to work well together. figure 4. the learning condition in the classroom the figure shows the process of learning and teaching conducted by the researchers. the first researcher was as the lecturer, and the second researcher acted as the observer. the students were doing discussion and one of them was explaining about the definition and function of present progressive and present simple tense. on the other hand, the other students were paying attention and they had to be ready to give any suggestion or additional information if needed. after the discussion, they came back to their first group and accomplished the exercise given by the lecturer. 3. see stage phase see or evaluation of learning was done immediately after the do stage completed on april 7th, 2017. based on observations, stage do that has been conducted has a great impact on students in the learning process, namely: a. students have high motivation in learning english, b. students understand the function and word forms (verb, noun, adjective, etc.) c. students have high critical thinking/curiosity d. students have no difficulties in comprehending grammar formula e. there was no a gap between highmotivated and low-motivated students f. students have a good interaction with the teacher and among them g. students want to be involved in learning process. actually there are three cycles for this research based on lesson study and jigsaw as technique, but the researchers only provided one cycle as the representative of ls. to make it clear, the description of final result of lesson study from cycle 1 to 3 is shown in the table below. table 1. description of final lesson study observation sheet no aspect of learning activities score note 1 a. students with materials 86 excellent 2 b. students with learning media 85 excellent 3 c. student with teacher 87 excellent acep haryudin & ningtyas orilina argawati lesson study to improve student english grammar mastery using jigsaw technique to the third semester students of ikip siliwangi 56 4 d. students with students 84 good 5 e. achievement of learning objectives 88 excellent total score 430= 86 excellent general comment based on the result, lesson study using jigsaw as the technique could give excellent feedback for students in learning grammar.they had great improvement in joining learning process. scoring scale: excellent : 85– 100 good : 75 – 84 fair : 65 – 74 poor : < 64 from the table, it can be seen that the four aspects of learning activities, including students’ interaction with learning materials, learning media, teachers, and the achievement of learning objectives, categorize as excellent. it means that lesson study with jigsaw technique gives positive impact on students in learning grammar. in terms of students’ relationship with other students, it categorizes since the students work well in group activities such as students actively involved in group activities, collaborative learning, etc. conclusion from the analysis, it can be concluded that the implementation of lesson study lesson study in improving students’ ability in mastering grammar materials using jigsaw as a learning technique gives positive impacts on students in which there are good developments on students’ learning where the constraints that appear can be minimized. besides, students understand the function and word forms, they have high critical thinking or curiosity, and they have no difficulties in comprehending grammar formula. moreover, the result also showed that students have high motivation in learning english and there was no gap between high-motivated and low-motivated students. finally, after knowing what, why, and how lesson study was implemented, lecturers could consider the importance of applying lesson study in the learning process. references fernandez, m. l. (2005). exploring “lesson study” in teacher preparation. in chick, h. l. & vincent, j. l. (eds.), proceedings of the 29th conference of the international group for the psychology of mathematics education, 2, 305312. melbourne: pme. retrieved from http://www.emis.de/proceedings/pme29/p. hartanti, p. (2007). penerapan lesson study dalam pembelajaran statistika sebagai upaya meningkatkan hasil belajar siswa kelas 3 akuntansi 1 smk negeri 1 jember. a paper presented in kgi 2007. jakarta, 27-28 nopember 2007. hendayana, s. (2006). lesson study: suatu strategi untuk meningkatkan keprofesionalan pendidikan (pengalaman imstep-jica). bandung: upi press. putra, y., et al., 2010. belajar dari pembelajaran: best practice implementasi lesson study. jakarta: direktorat tenaga kependidikan, dirjen pmptk kementerian pendidikan nasional. robinson, v., hohepa, m., & lloyd, c. (2009). school leadership and student outcomes: identifying what works and why best evidence synthesis. auckland: new zealand ministry of education. rusman. (2011). model-model pembelajaran: mengembangkan profesional guru. jakarta: rajagrafindo persada. susilo, h., et al. (2011). lesson study berbasis sekolah: guru konservatif menuju guru inovatif. jatim: bayu media. santyasa, w. i. (2009). implementasi lesson study dalam pembelajaran. a paper presented in a seminar at universitas pendidikan ganesha. strumpf, m., & douglas, a. (2004). golden’s concise english grammar. kuala lumpur: golden books centre sdn. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 137 fostering students’ critical thinking skills through high-level questioning in analytical exposition text muhammad handi gunawan english education study program, universitas pendidikan indonesia, bandung, indonesia email: handi_gunawan@upi.edu erma rahmawati english education study program, universitas pendidikan indonesia, bandung, indonesia email: erma08059394@gmail.com didi suherdi english education study program, universitas pendidikan indonesia, bandung, indonesia e-mail: suherdi_d@upi.edu anni kristanti yunandami sma negeri 2 cimahi, indonesia email: kristanti.anni37@gmail.com apa citation: gunawan, m. h., rahmawati, e., suherdi, d., & yunandami, a. k. (2022). fostering students’ critical thinking skill through high-level questioning in analytical exposition text. indonesian efl journal, 8(2), 137-146. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v8i2.6437 received: 07-03-2022 accepted: 12-05-2022 published: 31-07-2022 introduction critical thinking has been considered one of the important skills needed in the 21st-century era. it has been marked as an important general skill contributing to academic and career success (shaw, 2019). furthermore, due to the massive development of technology and media, it is important for students to be able to filter information critically. it is in line with kress’s (2003) statement that nowadays the change from book to screen and the change from the traditional print-based media to the new information and communication technologies intensify the needs for potential and communicational action by their users. students are expected to be able to analyze, and evaluate information, and give their arguments relating to the information they have read. therefore, as fisher (2001) argued, to process the information, high-order thinking skills – analyzing, and evaluating – are needed. critical thinking is urgent to handle the complexity of problems caused by the rapid development of technology and social movements in this era (ulger, 2018). hence, more optimal and effective actions should be accomplished by all education institutions to prepare graduates skilled in critical thinking (ali & awan, 2021) because the students need to have their critical reasoning, critical self-reflection, and abstract: this study employed classroom action research and was conducted in two cycles. the main data were students’ written texts taken from the first cycle and the second cycle, and the teacher’s field notes. the texts were analyzed by examining the schematic structure and the linguistic features of an analytical exposition text. to measure students’ critical thinking, the texts were examined using the critical thinking value rubric developed by the association of american colleges and universities (aacu). the findings showed that there are positive implications for the application of high-level questioning in students’ critical thinking skills. furthermore, in comparison between the data gained in the first cycle and the second cycle, it shows that after the implementation of high-level questioning there are some improvements in all aspects of the critical thinking criteria such as issue, evidence, the influence of context, and conclusion based on the value rubric. although there are some improvements, in terms of delivering the issue, and showing evidence, the students still have difficulties in explaining and elaborating their ideas clearly. keywords: analytical exposition text; critical thinking; high-level questioning. mailto:erma08059394@gmail.com muhammad handi gunawan, erma rahmawati, & didi suherdi fostering students’ critical thinking skill through high-level questioning in analytical exposition text 138 critical action (barnett, 2017). in indonesia, curriculum 2013 includes higher order thinking skills as one of the goals which inculcate the component of critical thinking skills. the 2013 indonesian education curriculum highlights the greater importance of thinking and creativity in place of rote learning. along with the inclusion of thinking and creativity, students are expected to develop questioning skills such as formulating and articulating questions to strengthen their inquiry-related thinking (gustine, 2014). thus, in accordance with the potential needs and characteristics of the students, critical thinking is promoted as a part of the demand of the curriculum 2013. critical thinking is the skill to think critically in analyzing, categorizing, selecting, judging, and evaluating information to make effective decisions. one of the important aspects that prevent students from improving critical thinking skills is questions; how to ask and what to ask. in education, questions have become an important part of teaching and learning. it sparks conversation and discussion between teacherstudents or students-students. questions also encourage learning in the classroom and it ranges in the level of difficulty, from easy to hard. teachers usually open the class with questions to lead the students to the material. they also use questions in assessing the students. statistics show that most teachers ask an average of 300 to 400 questions on a daily basis; however, 60-80% of these questions are low-level questions that only require students to recall something they already learned (tienken in remark & ewing, 2015). the questioning comes naturally to teachers, however, to be done effectively, questioning must be planned, structured, and systematic (remark & ewing, 2015). to nurture students’ critical thinking, teachers should provide questions that range from low-level – remembering, understanding, and applying – to high-level– analyzing, evaluating, and creating. in relation to this study, before students move to a higher level of education, they face the responsibility to develop their critical thinking skills, specifically in the area of conveying their argument or opinion toward an issue (king in park, 2003). one of the typical texts that students learn in expressing their argument towards an issue is analytical exposition. hence, analytical exposition is chosen to see whether high-level questioning can improve students’ critical thinking skills. in this context, critical thinking is required for deciding on receiving information, formulating opinions based on acceptable, logical, and non-subjective reasons, and assuring the correct conclusion (moralesobod, valdez remirez, satria, & indriani, 2020) a study about critical thinking skills and highlevel questioning has been conducted by remark and ewing (2015). in their study, they examined the impact of high-level questioning to increase student achievement in reading. the result shows that high-level questioning has a great impact on the improvement of students’ comprehension skills. moreover, it also helps improve students’ metacognition which nurtures critical thinking skills. thus, it can be concluded that high-level questioning has a positive impact on students’ comprehension, metacognition, and critical thinking skills. the study is related to the relation between higher-level questions and critical thinking which is still uncommon in indonesia. as a result, to fill the gaps and to meet the demands of the 2013 indonesian education curriculum and the 21stcentury skills, this study applied higher-level questions to promote students’ critical thinking skills in writing an analytical exposition text in the indonesian context. method this study employed a classroom action research design. action research is a combination of the word action and research. the main purpose of this study is to foster high school students’ critical thinking using higher-level of questions. this study attempted to see whether the application of highlevel questioning helps improve students’ critical thinking. it is relevant to the idea of action research which is an effort to improve the quality of an organization and its performance (hamied, 2017) and also the enhancement of curriculum and programs, as well as the creation of conditions for improved student learning experiences (simmons et al, 2021). furthermore, in an educational setting, the main purpose of action research is to improve learning and teaching than theory building. this research was conducted in two cycles. each cycle consisted of two meetings. furthermore, there were four steps in conducting each cycle. every cycle consists of planning, acting, observing, and reflecting. it is in line with what ramlal and augustin (2020) suggested that some reflective indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 139 practices can foster individuals’ reflective thinking and linguistic skills. as stated previously, the teaching was carried out in two cycles. each cycle was conducted in two meetings and contained a four-learning-hour action (one learning hour equals 45 mins). the participants of the study were a class of 11thgrade students, consisting of approximately 37 students. large class sizes are common in public and private primary and secondary indonesian schools. all participants in this study ranged from 16-17 years old. in addition, bahasa indonesia as their mother tongue is mainly used in daily communication while english is used as a foreign language. they were chosen purposively because if we take a look at the 2013 indonesian education curriculum, analytical exposition text is taught in the first semester of 11th-grade class. moreover, 11th-grade students are expected to be able to think critically, for it is one of the goals of the 2013 indonesian education curriculum. in addition, in this study, the teacher was involved both as the researcher and educator. there is also an element of purposely and intentionally design in the implementation of higher-level questions in fostering students’ critical thinking skills. then, this research is expected to lead to a change in the teachers’ pedagogical practice which is the changes in designing questions (gustine, 2014). the findings of the study cannot be generalized to other groups or individuals. that means the result of every group will be different and if another researcher finds a way to teach a certain group, it does not mean that this method is more effective than the other (cohen, 2007). the data for this study were gathered from various sources: teacher’s field notes, and students’ written work samples that were collected throughout the study. firstly, the teacher’s field notes were the teacher’s diary about what happened in the classroom. the notes contain information about some interactions that occurred within a particular context that is mediated by values (i.e., all children can learn), and norms (i.e., students must raise their hands and be called on before answering a question). lastly, in a sample of students’ written work, students wrote two analytical exposition texts based on the theme presented in the first cycle and the second cycle. the first cycle talked about “the impact of cell phones” and the second cycle focused on “bullying”. both texts were analyzed to see whether there are improvements in students’ writing or not. a total of 20 texts from 10 students chosen as participants were analyzed to find out the impact of high-level questioning to improve students’ critical thinking in writing analytical exposition. the data in this study were analyzed using multiple analytical frameworks appropriate to research aims and obtained from teacher’s field notes and students’ written work. field notes can come in many shapes, forms, and varieties. some of these include: scripting dialogue and conversation, diagramming the classroom or a particular part of the classroom, or noting what a student or group of students are doing at particular time intervals. however, in this research, the field notes were in a form of notes which contain a particular part of classroom activities and notes of what a student or group of students are doing in the classroom. then, students’ writing samples were collected to identify the schematic structure and the linguistic features of the analytical exposition text. in addition, students’ written texts were analyzed using the critical thinking value rubric developed by the association of american colleges and universities (aacu). the rubrics articulate fundamental criteria for each learning outcome, with performance descriptors demonstrating progressively more sophisticated levels of attainment. the rubrics are intended for institutional-level use in evaluating and discussing student learning, not for grading (rhodes, 2009). results and discussions results the research was conducted in two cycles. in the first cycle, the teaching applied high-level questioning developed by bloom to foster students’ critical thinking. the theme for the first cycle was the importance of cellphones. in cycles ii, the teaching was similar to the first cycle however it was conducted with some revision and a different theme, bullying. cycle i planning in this stage, the researcher prepared the research instrument to be used for the first cycle such as the lesson plan, the model text, and the high-level muhammad handi gunawan, erma rahmawati, & didi suherdi fostering students’ critical thinking skill through high-level questioning in analytical exposition text 140 questions that were used for the classroom discussion. thus, the main activity in the first cycle was in a form of classroom discussion to raise students’ participation and motivation in the classroom activity. in preparing the lesson plan, the researcher looked up to the syllabus and formulated the lesson objective and indicators based on that. furthermore, the researcher picked up one theme for the lesson plan which was the impact of cellphones. then, plan the classroom activities from the opening, main activity, and closing. secondly, in choosing the text model for the lesson, the researcher looked up the internet and chose several analytical exposition texts about the impact of a cellphone. the text was analyzed in terms of the schematic structure, the linguistic features, and the content. to meet the desired model text, the researcher made some changes and revisions to the text. so, it will be suitable and applicable for the class discussion. the last is formulating the questions to ask in the classroom. due to the research purpose, the questions used are based on bloom’s taxonomy pyramid ranging from low-level questions to highlevel questions. the top three bottoms are classified as low-level: remember, understand, and apply. in low-level questions, students are required to remember or recall information and demonstrate an understanding of facts, concepts, and ideas. meanwhile, from bloom’s taxonomy pyramid, high-level questions stand in the top three ranks; analyze, evaluate, and create. high-level questions require students to think deeply before they answer the question. students need to analyze, synthesize, evaluate, categorize or apply what they have read or learned. acting the first cycle was implemented in two meetings. each meeting was a 2 x 45-minutetime allotment. the classroom activities were based on the lesson plan: first meeting opening before going to the main activities, the researcher opened the class by giving the students an icebreaking activity. the activity was related to the theme that was about the impact of cellphone. the researcher gave the students some questions about the cellphone and relate them to their life. here, the researcher introduced the students to high-level questions. then, students watched a video about cell phones and compared the video with their real life. main activity in the main activity, the researcher gave each student an analytical exposition text entitled teenager and cellphone to be read. at first, students read the text by themselves and after that, the students read the text together with the teacher’s guide. in addition, some words and sentences that the students did not understand were analyzed together. after that, the classroom discussion began. the researcher gave some questions – low-level questions to high-level questions – related to the text. in the low-level questions, some students participated actively. however, when the questions require some analysis, the students did not participate actively. the researcher should mention their names so they will answer but then many of them could not answer the questions. closing in the closing, the researcher and students reflect on what they have learned that day. the researcher told the students about the activity for the next meeting. second meeting opening just like in the first meeting, before going to the main activities the researcher opened the class by giving the students an ice-breaking activity. the activity was related to the theme that was about the impact of cellphone. the researcher gave the students some questions related to their responses about the impact of cellphone in their life. main activity in the main activity, the researcher gave students guided questions to help them write their analytical exposition text about cellphones. the questions are based on bloom’s taxonomy ranging from lowlevel to high-level questions. the students were free to explore their ideas by answering the questions and writing them in a form of text. they can brainstorm with their peers or by reading books in the library. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 141 closing by the end of the session, the students collected their writing. then, the researcher and students reflect on what they have learned that day. the researcher told the students about the activity for the next meeting. observing the observation was conducted during the classroom activity. as a teacher and researcher, the observation was done during the learning process between the students and the teacher. the observation result was written in a form of a teacher’s field notes. based on the observation, the learning process that happened in the classroom is quite good. however, implementation of high-level questioning in the classroom can be hard and tricky, especially in getting the students’ attention. when the researcher asked some questions to the students, it was hard to get them to answer and participate in solving the questions given. for lowlevel questions whose answers can be found in the passage, some students tried to answer them however, for high-level questions which require students to think out of the box no one wanted to try, possibly due to the students who are not familiar with highlevel questions. they are used to answering low-level questions, types of questions whose answers can be found in the passage. reflecting after the implementation of the first cycle was done, the researcher reflected on the planning, acting, and observing. this reflection was done to find out some weaknesses, and problems during the implementation of the first cycle. therefore, it can help the researcher in improving the learning process in the second cycle. the data gained from the first cycle was students’ written text about the impact of cellphone in a form of an analytical exposition text. the text was analyzed using the critical thinking value rubric developed by the association of american colleges and universities. the score of each criterion ranges from 1 – the lowest score – for benchmark, 2 and 3 for milestones, and 4 – the highest score – for capstone. cycle ii planning the planning of the second cycle was the improvement of the first cycle based on the analysis and reflection. the instrument was also similar. however, in planning the second cycle, the researcher as the teacher made some changes in the main activity to get a better result. the changes were: (1) the theme for the second cycle changed. in the second cycle, students discussed the topic of bullying. (2) before the classroom discussion began, the students worked in a group of four to answer the questions related to the text about bullying. after each group finished their discussion, classroom discussion began. (3) students were given “wait time”. it is said that one factor that can have powerful effects on student participation is the amount of time a teacher pauses between asking a question and doing something else. students need at least three seconds to comprehend a question, consider the available information, formulate an answer, and begin to respond. acting similar to the first cycle, the second cycle was implemented in two meetings. each meeting was a 2 x 45-minute-time allotment. the classroom activities were based on the lesson plan: first meeting opening before going to the main activities, the researcher opened the classroom by giving the students an icebreaking activity. the activity was related to the theme that was about bullying. the researcher gave the students some questions about bullying and relate it to their life. here, the researcher introduced the students to high-level questions. then, students watched a video entitled kids react to bullying. after watching the video, students discussed and answered some questions related to it. main activity in the main activity, the researcher gave each student an analytical exposition text entitled bullying – has this become a problem? to be read. at first, students read the text by themselves and after that, the students read the text together with the teacher’s guide. in addition, some words and sentences that the students did not understand were analyzed together. then, the class was divided into muhammad handi gunawan, erma rahmawati, & didi suherdi fostering students’ critical thinking skill through high-level questioning in analytical exposition text 142 9 groups. the researcher gave some questions – low-level questions to high-level questions – related to the text. each group was given time to discuss the answer to the questions. after each group had finished the discussion, the classroom discussion began. just like in the first cycle, in the low-level questions, the students participated actively. however, when the questions require some analysis and thinking, some students participated actively and joined the discussion. although some students were still reluctant at that point they tried and it is better than in the first cycle. closing in the closing, the researcher and students reflect on what they have learned that day. the researcher told the students about the activity for the next meeting. second meeting opening just like in the first meeting, before going to the main activities the researcher opened the classroom by giving the students an ice-breaking activity. the activity was related to the theme that was about bullying. the researcher gave the students some questions related to their responses about bullying in school. main activity in the main activity, the researcher gave students guided questions to help them write their analytical exposition text about bullying. the questions based on bloom’s taxonomy range from low-level to high-level questions. the researcher also used wait time so the students had time to think before answering. the students were free to explore their ideas by answering the questions and writing them in a form of text. they can brainstorm with their peers or by reading books in the library. closing by the end of the session, the students collected their writing. then, the researcher and students reflect on what they have learned that day. the researcher told the students about the activity for the next meeting. observing just like in the first cycle, observation was conducted during the classroom activity. as a teacher and researcher, the observation was done during the learning process between the students and the teacher. the observation result was written in a form of a teacher’s field notes. based on the observation, the learning process that happened in the classroom has improved significantly compared to the first cycle. as stated previously, the implementation of high-level questioning in the classroom can be hard and tricky especially, in getting the student’s attention. however, after making some revisions to the main activity, students started to participate actively during classroom discussions. thus, the learning process went well. reflecting after the implementation of the second cycle was done, the researcher reflected on the planning, acting, and observing. this reflection was done to seek whether there are some improvements in students’ critical thinking or not. the data gained from the second cycle was students’ written text about bullying in a form of an analytical exposition text. just like in the first cycle, the text was analyzed using the critical thinking value rubric developed by the association of american colleges and universities. the score of each criterion ranges from 1 – the lowest score – for benchmark, 2 and 3 for milestones, and 4 – the highest score – for capstone. discussion the impact of high-level questioning on student’s critical thinking skills based on the data collected from the student’s written texts show positive impact and negative impact. from the first cycle, the impact of the high-level questioning on students’ critical thinking skills can be seen in the figure below. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 143 figure 1. average score of student’s written text from the first cycle from the figure above, it can be seen that the average score of students’ critical thinking based on the analytical exposition they have written in the first cycle range from 2 to 3. the data were taken after students written texts were analyzed using the critical thinking value rubric. from the rubric, students’ critical thinking is at the milestones level. in addition, from the second cycle, the impact of the high-level questioning on students’ critical thinking skills can be seen in the figure below. figure 2. average score of student’s written text from the second cycle similar to the first cycle, it can be seen that the average score of students’ critical thinking based on the analytical exposition they have written in the second cycle range from 2 to 3. the data were taken after students’ written text was analyzed using the critical thinking value rubric. however, if we compare the average score between the first cycle and the second cycle there are some improvements in each criterion. it can be seen in the figure below. figure 3. comparison between the average score of student’s written text from the first cycle and the second cycle based on the figure of comparison between the first cycle and the second cycle average score, although the level of student’s critical thinking is still at the milestones level there are improvements in all aspects of the critical thinking criteria; issue, evidence, the influence of context and assumption, student’s position, and conclusion. first, there is a significant improvement in the issue aspect from students written text in the first cycle to the second cycle. in delivering the issue, students were able to state, describe and clarify the topic so that understanding is not seriously impeded by omissions (rhodes, 2009). the students are able to describe the topic and clarify some actions that can be considered bullying. by being able to state, describe, and clarify the issue, students already think critically because, in critical thinking, the issue is one of the essential components (emilia, 2005). furthermore, by stating, describing, and clarifying the issue, students are able to spark controversy or disagreement regarding some fundamental concern about the issue which is in line with the purpose of analytical exposition (mills & dooley, 2014). second, there is also an improvement in students’ written text in the evidence aspect. after analyzing the students’ written text using the value rubric, the information from the text is taken from source(s) with enough interpretation/evaluation to develop a comprehensive analysis or synthesis (rhodes, 2009). this shows how students already try to think critically by giving evidence and reason in their writing. moreover, evidence or reason is another essential aspect of critical thinking. it is the central point of an argument, as it provides support for claims and it is by means of reasoning that we extend and defend a claim or knowledge (emilia, 2005). it also shows that students can think in higher order thinking by evaluating; they relate their experience to the context (fisher, 2001). third, it can be seen that there is an improvement in the influence of context and assumption aspects. based on the analysis, students are able to question some assumptions by identifying several relevant contexts when presenting a position (rhodes, 2009). fourth, in comparison to the text in the first cycle and the second cycle students are getting better at showing their stance toward an issue. from the value rubric, a good specific position is one that takes into account the complexities of an issue and acknowledged others' points of view within the muhammad handi gunawan, erma rahmawati, & didi suherdi fostering students’ critical thinking skill through high-level questioning in analytical exposition text 144 position (rhodes, 2009). as an example, student d has written a text about the cellphone and he stated that “even though cell phones have a lot of negative effects but it is useful for us.” from this statement, he is not only pointing out his stance but also acknowledging others’ points of view about cellphone. it can be concluded that students are able to evaluate: judging the worth, credibility, or strength of accounts (tiruneh, 2014). last, in terms of the conclusion, it can be seen that the students also make an improvement in this aspect. based on the analysis, students’ conclusion is stated critically because it is logically tied to a range of information, including opposing viewpoints; related outcomes (consequences and implications) which are identified clearly. challenges faced by the teacher in developing student’s critical thinking skills through high-level questioning after conducting the action research in two cycles, there are some challenges faced by the researcher as a teacher. the challenges come from the students and the researcher. the challenges that come from the students are mainly in getting students to participate and be motivated to study. however, after doing some reflection by the end of the first cycle, the researcher found a way to solve those problems. for unresponsive students, the researcher applied “wait time” in the second cycle. in addition, before students have a classroom discussion, they work in a small group first. after giving students a chance to discuss the questions and answer them in a small group first before going into the classroom discussion, some students become more involved in the classroom discussion. they participate in answering the questions and start giving responses in the classroom discussion. thus, it is better than in the first cycle. however, some students are still unresponsive, some did not participate in the small group or classroom discussion, and some even discuss other things rather than discussing the topic and the answer to the questions. and for the students who are unfamiliar with high-level questions, the researcher made some revisions to the questions by making the questions simpler. implementing high-level questioning in the classroom can be hard and tricky. full preparation is needed not only in preparing the students but also in preparing the teacher. in the first cycle, as the researcher and the teacher, sometimes it is hard to realize what kind of questions come out from the teacher. it is easier to ask a question from the lowlevel such as remembering, understanding, and applying. however, in the second cycle after conducting a reflection, those problems can be handled by keeping track of the questions by writing the questions in a list and checking the bloom taxonomy pyramid. thus, in the second cycle, the researcher can track the questions and how to handle students’ responses. another challenge that the researcher face during the research is timing. sometimes it is hard to find the right timing in asking a question. so, to solve that the researcher used “wait time” to help teachers prepare and give students time to answer. it also allows enough time for the student to think through the problem and increases the analytical and problem-solving skills of students. conclusion to conclude, regarding the impact of high-level questioning in fostering students’ critical thinking, students show their capability to think critically by analyzing the issue and evaluating the evidence to be put in the argument section. furthermore, in comparison between the data gained in the first cycle and the second cycle, it shows that after the implementation of high-level questioning there are some improvements in all aspects of the critical thinking criteria; issue, evidence, the influence of context, assumption, student’s position, and conclusion. although there are some improvements in terms of delivering the issue, stating their stance, and concluding the text, the students still do not explain it clearly. in addition, based on the analysis of students’ written text using the critical thinking value rubric, the level of students’ critical thinking is still at the milestones level, quite good but needs improvement, especially in the influence of context assumption. references ali, g., & awan, r.-n. 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(2014). critical literacy in an indonesian efl setting: sustaining professional learning (doctoral thesis). deakin university, australia. retrieved from dro.deakin.edu.au/du:300673. hamied, f. a. (2017). research method: a guide for first-time researchers. upi press. kress, g. (2003). literacy in the new media age. psychology press. mills, k., & dooley, k. (2014). teaching persuasive texts: building a language of evaluation through hedging and moderated intensification. literacy learning: the middle years, 22(3), 33. morales-obod, m., valdez remirez, m. n., satria, e., & indriani, d. e. (2020). effectiveness on the use of mother tongue in teaching the concepts of fraction among second grade of elementary school pupils. journal for the education of gifted young scientists, 8(1), 291–304. https://doi.org/10.17478/jegys.637002 park, c. (2003). engaging students in the learning process: the learning journal. journal of geography in higher education, 27(2), 183– 199. ramlal, a., and augustin, d. s. (2020). engaging students in reflective writing: an action research project. educational action research, 28(3), 518–533. doi:10.1080/09650792.2019.1595079 remark, a. a., & ewing, e. m. (2015). use of high-level questioning to increase student achievement in reading. (master thesis, st. catherine university, sophia). retrieved from https://sophia.stkate.edu/maed/127 rhodes, t. (2009). assessing outcomes and improving achievement: tips and tools for using the rubrics. washington, dc: association of american colleges and universities. shaw, a. (2019). thinking critically about critical thinking: validating the russian heighten critical thinking assessment. studies in higher education, 45 (9), 1933-1948. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2019.1672640. simmons, m., et al (2021). reflection as pedagogy in action research. educational action research, 29(2), 245-258. https://doi.org/10.1080/09650792.2021.1886960 ulger, k. (2018). the effect of problem-based learning on the creative thinking and critical thinking disposition of students in visual arts education. interdisciplinary journal of problem-based learning, 12(1), 1-19. https://doi.org/10.7771/1541-5015.1649 tiruneh, d. t., verburgh, a., & elen, j. (2014). effectiveness of critical thinking instruction in higher education: a systematic review of intervention studies. higher education studies, 4(1), 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2019.1672640 muhammad handi gunawan, erma rahmawati, & didi suherdi fostering students’ critical thinking skill through high-level questioning in analytical exposition text 146 indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 33 language labs: the loop of the features, materials, and functions levita dwinaya department of visual communication design, faculty of architecture & design institut teknologi nasional, bandung e-mail: levitadwinaya26@gmail.com corry caromawati department of informatics system, faculty of industrial technology institut teknologi nasional, bandung e-mail: corrycaromawati@gmail.com apa citation: dwinaya, l., & caromawati, c. (2022). language labs: the loop of the features, materials, and functions. indonesian efl journal, 8(1), pp. 33-44. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v8i1.5585 received: 17-09-2021 accepted: 22-11-2021 published: 30-01-2022 introduction the world we live today has been witnessing the rapid development as well as incremental use of technology in all walks of life. in education, technology has become an essential part as noted by harris and al-bataineh (2015) that it is so as technology allows instant dispersion of knowledge, faster and more effective communication and new way of students’ learning as well as engagement. this is also true in the field of english language education for its affordance in enhancing the content and delivery of the traditional english language instruction (alqahtani, 2019). it is clearly seen, then, that the integration of technology into education is not a mere case of jumping-into-theband-wagon proverbial act. rather, it is built on a strong basis of reaping the full potentials along with the benefits it brings to education world in terms of both organization and pedagogy. in indonesia, the integration of technology into english language education is generally conducted in language laboratory. referring to its definition found in the american heritage dictionary, language labs are described as rooms equipped with tape recorders, video cassette recorders or computers connecting to monitoring tools. that is to say, as part of modern language teaching, language labs are installed with audio or audiovisual equipment (victoria, 2019). these tools allow the teachers to listen and speak to their students both individually and/or in groups (bera, 2017, p. 135). the presence of language laboratory in an efl setting is not uncommon for its popularly known function in creating the atmosphere of target language (lokmacıoğlu, küçükyılmaz, & balıdede, 2015). as al-ameedi, ibrahim, and nayef (2019) mention, language labs make materials produced by native speakers accessible, which in turn help abstract: the implementation of computer-assisted language learning (call) in educational institutions has been projected to be inseparable from the language laboratory, short as lab, for decades. this study investigated the current implementation of call in ten universities in bandung, indonesia, by mapping the features, call materials, and functions of the language labs. the data was collected through observation and interviews. there were four findings of this study. first, there were common call materials and distinguished ones among the participating universities. second, there were three types of language labs found according to their common features. one category is the integrated call lab, and the other two categories were considered as the transition from one type kind of lab to another. third, there were four purposes of language labs: test preparation, skill development, pedagogical knowledge practice, and varied. fourth, the three aforementioned aspects were found to influence one another. these findings provide information that language laboratories in bandung to some degree vary. it also suggests that one aspect will determine the others and results in the setup or management of a language laboratory. keywords: computer-assisted language learning (call); language laboratory; call materials; efl; higher education. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i2.4564 levita dwinaya & corry caromawati language labs: the loop of the features, materials, and functions 34 learners to improve their language skills into nativelike production. therefore, all levels of education, not to mention higher education both state-owned and private institutions feel the need of establishing their own english language laboratory in which complementary activities for english classes are conducted. the situation emerges as classrooms which are used for all other subjects are thought restricting language learning process such as listening and speaking activities which usually require the use of learning technology such as mp3 players and recordings. therefore, the existing of language labs helps learners improve their communication skills as bera (2017) says that the general function of the language lab is to train learners of language skills, namely listening, speaking, reading, and writing so as to help them. therefore, krishna (2021) believes that it is imperative for academic institutions to have language lab with good quality to give learners chances for practical aspects of language learning process. the beginning of the language lab was inseparable from the early discovery of the phonograph by thomas edison in 1877 (lokmacıoğlu et al., 2015; roby, 2013), which years later was used by frank c. chalfant, who installed a phonetics laboratory at washington state college at pullman, usa, in 1911. in this lab, the students used networked earphones to listen to the phonograph and speak to the phonographrecording machine to later compare their pronunciation with that of the native-speaker model. after the discovery, this idea was used by the us army and naval for language training during the second world war. this special training was carried out in a rigid study room known as a cubical that separated the learner one to another. in each cubical, there was a record player that trained the soldiers to be able to listen to and speak the language that they were trained. for that reason, this method is called "mim-mem" (roby, 2013). even though this method was based on the behaviorism perspective, it got a lot of criticism in the field of pronunciation so the term drilling and killing arose. lab with layout and learning methods like this is known as the structural lab. in this type of lab, the main feature of the language lab is audiocassette with tools that can rotate, repeat, and stop it. learning booths and isolated headsets are also the main features of this period. according to balamayuranathan (2019), this is the time when analogue technology was implemented. in this era, the implementation of call is also called behavioristic call (warschauer & healey, 1998). because of the many criticisms, the structural lab ended in the early 1970s. after the period of the world war ii, as the american government began to focus on education in mathematics, science, and foreign languages, the communicative lab with more features enabling greater opportunities for individual to work on the computer started. this lab corresponds with the cognitive theories stressing that students learn through the process of discovery, expression, and development. thus, the interaction occurs in the communicative lab not only between the learner and the computer itself, but also other people such as the instructor and other learners. during the communicative lab, the main feature of the lab was computers, the more open learning booths equipped with computers on it, and the existence of consoles and / or lan (the local area network). with or without a console, the lan connects the teaching computer with the learner. instead of a console, the learning environment software is used. these features allow instructors to manage class management and use call materials such as software, videos, learning packages (courseware), etc. along with the development of the computerbased technology, the role of the internet has begun to dominate so that the face of the lab changed from the communicative lab to the integrative lab. the integrative lab, according to warschauer and healey (1998), is the use of computer-based technology by integrating skills (speaking, listening, reading, and writing) and by integrating different types of computer-based technology. further, abdulla and kumar (2017) add that this integration of various media gives way to a natural integration of the four language skills in a single activity. as such, it is predictable that the implementation of computer-assisted language learning or call is clearly seen in the running of language laboratories. although it has been implemented since the 1950s (chapelle, 2001), the use of computer-assisted language learning (call), was recorded no later than the early 60's (davies, otto, & rüschoff, 2013). in a simple way, call can be defined as the use of computer-based technology for language learning purposes. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 35 for this learning purposes, computer is treated as a medium that connects the teacher, student, and language itself. this medium becomes a tool to facilitate language learning and teaching. usually, the computers store the entire course resources and students access the resources based on the features available in the system (williams, 2020). as a tool, the computer is in general constructed from two main parts: hardware and software (peace & mabel, 2016). the hardware refers to any units of a computer which physically can be touched or seen. nurchalis, ermawati, sardi, and nursabra (2021) simply put it as machine. hardware includes units for command input such as a mouse, keyboard, and microphone; for processing such as processor and ram; for output such as a printer, monitor, and speaker; and for connection such as hub, switch, bridge, router, and access point. while hub, switch, and bridge are used in local access network (lan), router and access point are used to connect the computer to the internet. the software, on the other hand, can be defined as any program giving specific tasks to the computer (long & long, 2002, p. 33). by nature, the hardware will enable the software to run, and the types of hardware will determine what types of software can be run on a specific computer. in general use, software has come in a vast variety such as text displayers, audio players, text creators, audio creators, video makers, etc. benjamin (2018) mentions that language labs typically make use of basic software as well as openor closed-ended content software, depending on the adaptability of the stored sources. in call specifically, it also has been offered in various types including vocabulary or grammar games, quiz makers, computer-mediated communication (cmc) tools, and courseware. in fact, levy and stockwell (2006) put software as one form of call materials in addition to learning packages, websites, online classes, or learning environments, as levy (1997) defines call materials as teaching materials made by utilizing computer technology. therefore, it was interesting to study the implementation of call in language laboratories in foreign language learning setting covering the interrelation of their features, selection of call materials and functions. few, if none, studies echo this curiosity. it is so as most studies related to the integration of technology into language learning activities in indonesia so far are exclusive to certain software, website, courseware, etc. some of them are the studies on the use of edmodo (abdulrahman, 2016; pardede, 2019), quizlet (wahjuningsih, 2018), smartphone apps (jati, 2017), quipper school (agustina & cahyono, 2017), webquest (amalia & jati, 2018), e-learning (kwary & fauzie, 2017; mu’in & amelia, 2018) and learning management system/lms (dwinaya, 2021). attempts to research the integration of technology into efl teaching and learning process in language laboratory using multi facet views from features it has, call materials it selects as well as the functions it serves in cooperating both its features and call material selection have also rarely been done. previous studies such as tanipu (2014), aulia (2016), asningtias (2018), makhtuna (2020), nurchalis et al. (2021), and syaifudin, rozi, and asri (2015) each portrayed technology-based efl instruction in language laboratory in either managerial or practical level. all those studies and the likes provide profound contribution in the field of call in indonesia efl context yet in them as a whole lies the inability of portraying the comprehensiveness of call application in language laboratory as a complex system constituting a variety of things from decision making process at the managerial level to the teaching and learning activities at the day-to-day practical level based on the laboratory’ features, call material selection as well as function. therefore, this study attempts to fill the gaping hole by mapping the features, call material selection and function of language laboratories in ten (10) higher education institutions in bandung. it is hoped that the revelation will lead to an understanding of how call is implemented at institutional level and provide comprehensive information for stake holders, language laboratory administrators, english teachers, or technologybased learning material developers to integrate call into teaching and learning practices better and more effective. method this study does not aim to test a hypothesis. its purpose was to map the real existing phenomena so that it was expected to contribute to the literature on language laboratories by providing information regarding the current state of language laboratories levita dwinaya & corry caromawati language labs: the loop of the features, materials, and functions 36 in indonesia. therefore, the research approach applied was mostly qualitative with a very small portion of the quantitative method. the quantitative method was used to calculate the number of the universities having similar, if not the same, features of their language labs, and matching with the criteria of the existing types of labs. ten universities voluntarily participated in this study, three state and seven private universities. the data of this study was collected from observation to the language labs, and interviews. the observation data was collected through a visit to the language labs at the participating universities. this data was recorded in the form of photos of the labs to provide information regarding the lab features as well as the materials. in addition to the photos, whatsapp chats were also utilized to provide additional information or confirmation to the observation data interpretation. during the visit, the persons-in-charge (pics) of the labs who possessed the best knowledge of the labs, either the heads of the lab themselves or the technicians, were interviewed to provide information regarding the purpose of the labs, instructional practice, call features and materials, and roles of the stakeholders particularly the instructors and students. results & discussion the collected data was analyzed deductively in accordance to the themes investigated: the purposes of the labs, technological features, and call materials. the analysis was aimed to provide information on the trends of language labs currently were on in indonesia, particularly in bandung. the purposes of the language laboratories the language laboratories involved in this study were built for two different targets: the language and language education study program students and students from various study programs. the former was found in only two participating universities, a private and public universities. the later was known as english as mata kuliah dasar dan umum (mkdu) which was a supporting course in a university. it was found in the rest of participating universities. the target users of the language labs determined the purposes of the labs. in the labs for language and language education study programs, the purposes were not only one. they included the practice of language (e.g. speaking) and pedagogical skills (e.g. how to teach english with technology). in the university with internet connection, the purpose of the lab comprised the access for the students to complete their assignments from their lecturers. each lab for english as mkdu, on the other hand, had only one purpose. it was either aimed at teaching skills or exam preparation such as toefl or toeic. technological features the technological features found in the language labs involved in this study included the instructor’s computer (l ecturer's pc), lan (the local area network), consoles/controller device, learner’s booths, learner’s pcs), loud speakers, projectors/camera projectors, projector screens, projector cameras, headsets, microphones, internet connectors, tvs and tape players. some of these features can be seen in the figure below. picture 1. features found in the language labs in the participating universities indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 37 the availability of the features unsurprisingly was quite diverse in the ten universities. however, based on their common and distinguished features, they could be grouped into these categories: group 1. labs with a teacher’s computer, learner’s booths and computers, and a local access network (lan). group 2. labs with a teacher’s computer, learner’s booths and computers, without a lan. group 3. labs with a teacher’s computer and learning booths, without learning computers nor a lan. the arrangement of the lab space for each group has similarities, namely the location of the teaching computer and the screen in front of the class. apart from that, the location of the learner's booth is arranged in a variety, there is a u-shaped shape, some facing the front of the class, some face to face. the location of the projector also varies, some are placed on the ceiling of the class, some are on the instructor's desk, and some are placed at the back of the class. for a projector that uses a camera, it is usually placed on the teacher's desk. illustration of lab layout (layout) lab can be seen in the picture below followed by a detailed finding for each group. picture 1. the lab with the students' booths facing the teacher's desk (left); the lab with a u shape (right) group 1 the common features found in this group were a teacher’s computer, individual or side-by-side learner’s booths, learner’s computers, loud speakers, projectors (either a camera projector or non-camera), projector screens, headsets and microphones, and a tv. the existence of the lan connected the teacher’s computer to those of the learners’. it enabled a local virtual learning environment between the teacher and the learners in the lab. within this environment, the teacher could present and/or share their materials with the learners and interacted with them. the online environment itself was created by a software purchased from a software company. it could come with a console as a controller. this software was considered high priced and the features to support it were costly as well, thus unsurprisingly the universities belonged to this group were big universities possessing financial budget for this purchase or having networks with other countries who granted them the budget. levita dwinaya & corry caromawati language labs: the loop of the features, materials, and functions 38 of the ten universities, six universities belonged to this group consisting of three state universities and three private universities. only one of them used the console as their lab management. in addition to this console usage, there are several other minor differences regarding the internet allocation, types of projectors, tv presence, and the preservation of a structural lab. while lan provides local connection, the internet connection can provide access to other websites. five universities restricted this connection only for the lecturers to find their teaching materials. it is because they wanted the learners’ learning to be fully under their control. one university, on the other hand, provided the internet connection because they wanted their learners to be more independent in their learning. the second difference is that five of the university used a camera projector (see number four in figure 3), while one university still used the noncamera type of projector. this is related to the university’s budgets, since the camera type is more expensive. the third difference is that five universities utilized tv to display any visual teaching materials such as movies or other videos that was assigned to the learners to watch. one university had a budgeting reason for not having a tv in their lab. the last difference is that one university, in addition to the more modern type of lab, still preserved a lab using tape players. this structural lab is maintained by the university to facilitate senior lecturers who were more comfortable using it than using other types of labs. the roles of the teachers in this lab group in addition to as instructors were as teaching material providers and virtual environment managers such as breaking the virtual rooms for group works of pair works. in this group, most of the universities gave the instructors authority to either use the virtual environment or only other technological features such as tv or projector. only one university obliged the use of the virtual environment. group 2 the second group is a group that has a pc for instructors, a booth for learners equipped with computers. this group did not have a local access network (lan) so they did not require a software for creating virtual learning environment. as a result, the teaching practice in this group was teacher fronted. the teacher used their computer to play audio files or display their teaching materials through the projector. this practice consequently made the learners very rarely used their computers. of the ten universities in this study, there was only one university that entered the second group. this university was a private university that used its lab to train their learners to listen to the practice of toefl pbt (paper-based) questions. they claimed that previously their lab was equipped with a lan as they delivered the language course through a courseware. the lan was diminished as the learning outcomes shifted from language skills development to exam preparation. the management believed that the current features were sufficient for an exam preparation course. the roles of the teachers in this group were as instructors and classroom managers. they usually taught testing strategies based on commercial toefl books. after explaining the strategies, the teachers assigned the students to practice answering toefl-like questions which were discussed and explained afterwards. as all the teaching materials had been provided by the toefl strategies book(s), the teachers did not have to provide their own teaching materials. group 3 the third group was the university group that had a teacher’s pc and learners’ booths or seats, but it was not equipped with a lan nor computers for the learners. there were three universities included into this group. these three universities were private universities, two had learners’ booths and one had learners’ chairs only. this minor difference did not have a major impact on the grouping because these universities had the same teaching pattern, which was apparently similar to that of the second group. these technological features were used to practice for the pbt (paper-based) toefl questions, language skills, and/or pedagogical skills practice for language education program students. unlike those of in group 2, the roles of the instructors in group 3 were more varied. they played roles as instructors, classroom managers, and if they were willing, they could provide teaching materials as well. however, this group as well as the second one was found to use less indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 39 varieties of call materials than the first group as discussed in the section of call materials. call materials as discussed earlier, the technological features in the first group made the call materials used more diverse. this may be caused by the demands of features themselves. the existence of the virtual learning environment made the instructors feel obliged to enrich the teaching materials so that the class would not be monotonous and the time was spent well for learning. based on the interview data, there were several call materials found in these language labs, they included the learning environment software, media players, media recorders, websites, and courseware. the virtual learning environment in this research was software that could come with or without a console. the console had a broadcasting system related to the control of the learning process including communication between instructors and learners under the instructors’ monitors. in addition to communication, the console also allowed instructors to send content teaching materials to certain learners or the entire class and/or limit what could be accessible to the learners. if the software was not supported by a console, these functions would be executed in the computer as the monitor would display these functions. considering the functions, this software could be considered as process material, albeit the term console is used to describe a technological feature. this software was relatively expensive. thus, it is not surprising that it was considered luxurious purchased by the universities themselves by issuing substantial funds to the managements and/or proposing grants to the ministry of higher education (dikti). additionally, two state universities were granted the technological features as well as the software from other developing countries such as japan or saudi arabia. the second call material was the media player which was usually featured by the os (operating system) on the computer. it was commonly used to play audio files such as mp3 or video for teaching listening skills. as spoken language (listening and speaking) had become the focus of lab learning targets since its appearance, starting from the use of phonograph, cassette, to media players as seen today, thus unsurprisingly all universities from the three groups formed in this study used this type of call material. in addition to listening skills, developing speaking skills (especially pronunciation) had also been a learning goal in the language lab. it could be seen from the drilling method that was applied during the structural lab both during the war to post-war. the use of audio cassettes during the structural lab could also be used to record the learner's voice in the golden end of the lab. today, the audio cassette had been replaced by a computer using an application that could do the same things such as recording, playing, and even modifying the learner’s spoken language production. there were many types of voice recorder applications, but the one found in this study was adobe audition (see picture 3). figure 2. the use of adobe audition for speaking practice levita dwinaya & corry caromawati language labs: the loop of the features, materials, and functions 40 of the ten universities or the three lab groups in this study, only six universities in the first group used this application. this finding indicated that the other two lab groups did not focus on teaching speaking skills in their labs. it is interesting because one of the universities in group three stated that they had learning outcome of developing their learners' communication skills. in this study, we assumed that this university used other techniques instead of using computer applications for speaking skills practice. the next material was text viewer applications or software such as microsoft word and adobe reader. these applications displayed text for the purpose of reading and giving instructions of the tasks which the learners must work one. this type of call material was found in all universities in this study. however, group 1 could share the texts to individual learners through their computers so that they could work according to their pace. whereas group 2 and 3 would display them in front of the class through the projector so that all learners could read them. figure 4 below displays an example of use of the text viewer application. figure 3. text software used for displaying a reading text to perform a class activity task another call material containing instructional content found in this study was web-based content materials. even though we did not get much information about different kinds of websites used by teachers in the language labs, we managed to gather information on some examples of links that were used to become material content in the labs of group 1. the websites used were commonly those that were purposefully designed for language learning such as bbc. when using the web-based call materials, group 1 labs would send the link to the students and open the internet access them. by using the control feature provided by the software, the instructors could restrict the student’s internet access so that they would only be able to access the assigned page. some universities in group 1 who did not want to give any internet access to the learners would download the downloadable materials or copy them and then share them through their virtual learning environment. the group 2 and 3 labs, on the other hand, were not found to incorporate these materials. in addition to the text viewer application and website, the call content materials found in one of the universities was courseware. this courseware could be in the form of a software or special websites that had been designed for language learning and thus had provided ready use english language learning materials. by the time of this study conducted, this courseware was starting to be offered by many it companies. and the most offered courseware was the web-based versions so the students could access them everywhere. but in indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 41 this study, the courseware found was softwarebased rosetta stone (which apparently also offered the web-based version). this software was used to increase vocabulary and develop the learners’ communication skills. of the ten universities, only one university used it. this university had a learning outcome that was to improve its learners’ english communication which was measured by the toeic test. types of the language laboratories by looking at the features mentioned above, group 1 labs to many degrees meet the characteristics of integrative lab (warschauer & healey, 1998; bera, 2017), certainly excluding the tape player-based lab which belonged to the structural lab. integrative lab is used to teach integrated skills (reading, writing, speaking, and listening) and incorporating integrating teaching materials. most universities in this this group were found to use their language labs to teach language skills. however, one university who also possessed a structural lab used their lab more diversely. as the labs in this university were specially purposed for language and language education study programs such as english, japanese, arabic, and french, it also used their labs for their program courses such as language pedagogy or translation. thus, the internet in this university is accessible to their students, unlike the other universities in this group. group 2, on the other hand, was an example of a shifted type lab from an integrative lab to whatever it may become. if in the future they would incorporate more technological features such as tablets or mobile devices and give internet access for language learning and teaching purposes, they might become a technological enhanced language learning (tell)-based lab (buscaglia, 2013). similarly, even though they had never been integrative labs, the labs in group 3 could possibly become tell-based labs if they would involve more technological features in the future. these findings suggest that the labs in bandung, indonesia were relatively varied in terms of purposes, features, and teaching materials. the language labs in the ten universities mainly could be categorized as the integrative labs, but almost half of them did not match any characteristics of the lab types discussed in the literature. this finding indicates that some universities might have lost their focus on developing their language labs so that they did not provide much support for them to utilize more technological features as well as provide internet connection for their students. another finding of this study was that the purpose(s) of the labs could determine the features of the labs, and these features determine the types of call materials used in the language instructions. however, it was not always the case. it could be the features of the labs determined the purposes of the labs, depending on the university management. conclusion based on the explanation in above and the summary we made in table 1, it can be concluded that the most common features of the language lab are teaching computers, projectors, screens, student booths and loud speakers. this shows that not all language labs in bandung have features as explained by bera (2017). however, 60% of the labs that are the object of our research can be categorized as integrative labs with minimal features as illustrated by bera (2017). the other four universities did not match any types of labs. in addition to features, call materials that are found are also diverse. the most commonly used materials are the media player and text viewer. while other materials such as learning environments, media recorders, websites, and courseware are only found in groups of universities that use lan. although we conclude this, the implementation of material selection will depend on the lecturer. one of the findings of this study is that the availability of features determines learning outcomes that impact on the diversity of call materials used. when using lan and console/learning environment as main material processes, learning outcome focuses on improving language skills or tests that measure language skills, and some even have a variety of goals. whereas when lans are not used, content materials are limited to audio and text files so that learning outcome is limited to toefl listening practice or reading teaching materials for pedagogy learning. there is one university that has a group of three features but has learning outcome language learning skills. it is undeniable, without learning environment the practice of language skills can still be done but is limited. levita dwinaya & corry caromawati language labs: the loop of the features, materials, and functions 42 table 1. the summary of the common features, call materials, and purposes in the participating language labs 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 total (%) features lecturer’s pc √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ 100 lan √ √ √ √ √ √ 60 console √ 10 student’s booths √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ 90 students’ pcs √ √ √ √ √ √ √ 60 loud speaker √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ 100 screen √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ 100 projector √ √ √ √ √ 50 camera projector √ √ √ √ √ 50 headsets √ √ √ √ √ √ 60 microphone √ √ √ √ √ √ 60 internet √ 30 tv √ √ √ √ √ 50 tape player √ 10 call material learning environment √ √ √ √ √ 50 media player √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ 100 media recorder √ √ √ √ √ √ 60 text file displayer √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ √ 100 website √ √ √ √ √ 50 courseware √ 10 purpose v s s s s e e e s p v s e p 1 1 5 5 3 3 1 1 based on the findings, it is critical for universities in indonesia to possess rounded understanding of types of language labs therefore they can properly set language lab management as well as equip their language lab with technological tools and call materials in accordance to the goals of learning english as foreign language. it is also important for the government to issue regulation regarding university language laboratory management to meet the fast pace technology advancement related to teaching and learning english in indonesia. therefore, graduates of indonesian universities can be equipped with english language skills that meet the needs of industries. for future research, we suggest to replicate the investigation to other contexts in indonesia, as this investigation is limited to only one city. more and more research on this topic is hoped to provide adequate data on the real picture of the running of language laboratories in universities in indonesia. therefore, universities have sufficient information on proper language laboratory management including appropriate equipment and call materials. acknowlegment we would like to express our 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(2020). impact of language laboratory on effective teaching and learning of oral english language in secondary schools. international journal of innovative research and advance studies, 7(8), 145-152. indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 12 the quest for happiness in wole soyinka’s the trials of brother jero christine osae adventist university of central africa e-mail: christine.osae@yahoo.com apa citation: oase, c. (2016). the quest for happiness in wole soyinka’s the trials of brother jero. indonesian efl journal, 2(1), 12-22 received: 14-11-2015 accepted: 24-12-2015 published: 01-01-2016 abstract: in pursuit of happiness, humans have indulged in atrocious acts and lost the moral membrane, perhaps with a conviction that they can find fulfillment. literature, being a mirror of the society, is the best medium to help in correction of these wrongs. this article is aimed at the analysis of the major fictional characters in soyinka’s the trials of brother jero to reveal their daily struggles in search of happiness. a textual analysis in relation to aristotle’s doctrine of happiness leads to a conclusion that soyinka has successfully created lifelike characters whose struggles in life are relatable yet unproductive as far as the quest for happiness is concerned. keywords: virtue, golden mean, happiness, fulfillment introduction humans are the most endowed of all the creatures, yet with equal measure, the most discontented. many seek to amass wealth only to become unhappy. others seek love while some seek honor in futility – it is an endless cycle of unhappiness. a child goes to school, for example, to get knowledge, but he only needs this knowledge to get employed. with employment, he can earn a living-wealth; can it be consequently supposed that he has found happiness? kenny (2002) argues that “money is only as good as what it can buy. it is how someone spends his money that shows us where he really thinks happiness lies: does he spend it on luxury, for instance, or to gain political power, or give it to those less well off?” (3) evidently, wealth, honor, pleasure, and love among other things do not guarantee happiness. a search in the archives of history will reveal that several men of wisdom (aristotle, socrates, plato, and augustine among others) have taken turns in trying to establish what happiness is or is not and how to be happy but all these attempts have only served to create more confusion. what is shocking though is that despite its nonrepresentational nature, it is a vital end sought after by everyone (tosin, 2015). as evidenced in aristotle’s (1985) submission, “every craft and every investigation, and likewise every action and decision, seems to aim at some good; hence the good has been well described as that at which everything aims” (nicomachean ethics, 1985:1094a1). in this case, aristotle suggests that this good is the ultimate purpose of human existence. for want of a better name, aristotle suggests that this great end should be called happiness. christine osae the quest for happiness in wole soyinka’s the trials of brother jero 13 what is inexplicable however is what people are willing to do to be happy. while some achieve this end virtuously, others will commit the most villainous acts for the same. often times, people wallow in the miasma of the idiom, the end justifies the means, that it becomes practically impossible for them to realize how wicked their actions are. literature then becomes our cursor to the right track. it is through textual analysis of literary texts, and an understanding of what characters (though fictional) struggle with, that we can truly understand our own dilemma, and rest assured that we are not alone in this hunt. the chief claim of this article is that soyinka’s characters, just like other human beings, are vainly in pursuit of happiness and will do anything to attain this elusive end. using aristotle’s doctrine of happiness the article analyses the trials of brother jero to investigate man’s search for happiness and the actions implemented to achieve it. the concept of happiness according to aristotle (1985), happiness is the ultimate end for which there is no other end (nicomachean ethics, 1985:1094a1). what this means is that happiness, more than anything else, seems unconditionally complete or self sufficient because we always choose it as an end and not because we want something else after getting it (nicomachean ethics, 1985:1097b18). in other words, when one is happy, they will not need anything. the implication here is that only happiness can bring complete fulfillment in life (bremner, 2011, p. 40). it can therefore be argued that happiness is that which one freely seeks to attain for its own sake. today, people seek pleasure, wealth, and a good reputation or honor but these are not ends in themselves. aristotle (1985) contends that while each of these has some value, none of them can occupy the place of the chief good for which humanity should aim. indeed, happiness is the end which meets all these requirements. it is apparent that we desire money, pleasure, and honor only because we believe that these goods will make us happy. this is an indication that all these things are a means to achieving happiness yet happiness is not a means to achieving them. to bring his point home, aristotle (1985) explains that man’s unique function is to reason. this guarantees that all philosophers are more inclined to be happy as they tend to reason a lot. when we reason out things, we are able to find solutions to our problems hence attain happiness. “we have a rational capacity and the exercising of this capacity is thus the perfecting of our natures as human beings” (nicomachean ethics, 1985:1097b24). for this reason, gratification alone cannot amount to human happiness, for gratification is what animals seek and human beings have higher capacities than animals. similarly, he argues that instantaneous pleasure that most men seek today is animalistic and does not bring the ultimate happiness; hence, he bewails, “the mass of mankind are evidently quite slavish in their tastes, preferring a life suitable to beasts” (nicomachean ethics, 1985:1095b 20). how then can we be happy? by practicing morality and doing our duties with excellence (nicomachean ethics, 1985:1098a13). simply put, do your jobs diligently and maintain the right moral cord and you will be happy. this introduces a central relationship between moral character and a realization of happiness. he seems to suggest that virtue should ultimately bring fulfillment as opposed to vice, yet in order to achieve virtue we must indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 14 make the right choices which is a tricky undertaking since we are often tempted to choose pleasurable things that may not always be good. usually, the lesser good promises immediate pleasure and is more tempting, while the greater good is painful and requires some sort of sacrifice (http://www.pursuit-ofhappiness.org/history-ofhappiness/aristotle). on the relationship between happiness and virtue, aristotle (1985) says, “happiness is an activity of the soul expressing complete virtue” (nicomachean ethics, 1985:1102a513). this, he says can be, “virtue of thought [e.g., wisdom, comprehension, intelligence] or virtue of character [e.g., generosity, temperance, courage, justice] (nicomachean ethics, 1985:1103a14). furthermore, aristotle (1985) argues that to be truly virtuous, one must attain the golden mean. this is the mark between excess and deficiency in our actions. as observed in the article golden mean, “today's modern man usually succumbs in the extreme of excess, which can be seen in the uncontrollable accumulation of material wealth, food, alcohol, drugs, but he can descend into deficiency as well. for this reason, aristotle recommends courage, temperance, liberality, magnificence, proper pride, good temper, modesty, and friendliness as marks of virtue. in the rule of the golden mean, aristotle argues that there are three divisions to every behaviorthe two extremes and the temperate. “for instance, a person who flees from every danger is cowardly; the one who does not flee from anything is rash. what is courageous, then, falls somewhere between these extremes; courage is "preserved by the observance of the mean" (nicomachean ethics, 1985:1104a26). this implies that if one finds a moderate position between those two extremes, they will be acting morally. going by aristotle’s designation of happiness, it is futile to pursue it. how many can declare they have lived a truly happy life? how many in the contemporary society can say they have found happiness? today, a cyber thief will hack someone’s personal details, for example, to impersonate him, but he is impersonating him so he can withdraw the victim’s savings and use the credit cards. with this money, he can leave a pleasurable life; can it be consequently supposed that he has found happiness? is pleasure therefore the good aristotle is talking about? kenny (2002) argues that “money is only as good as what it can buy. it is how someone spends his money that shows us where he really thinks happiness lies: does he spend it on luxury, for instance, or does he use it to gain political power, or give it to those less well off?” aristotle (1985) says wealth is merely a useful choice to help us meet another end but is not an end in itself (nicomachean ethics, 1985:1096a 6-8). this other end is happiness. man’s life is characterized by this overwhelming need to be happy. in conclusion, aristotle (1985) makes the following claims as to what happiness is: happiness is the ultimate end and purpose of human existence; happiness is not pleasure, nor is it virtue. it is the exercise of virtue; happiness cannot be achieved until the end of one’s life. hence it is a goal and not a temporary state; happiness is the perfection of human nature. since man is a rational animal, human happiness depends on the exercise of his reason; happiness depends on acquiring a moral character, where one displays the virtues of courage, generosity, justice, friendship, and citizenship in one’s life. these christine osae the quest for happiness in wole soyinka’s the trials of brother jero 15 virtues involve striking a balance or “mean” between an excess and a deficiency; happiness requires intellectual contemplation, for this is the ultimate realization of our rational capacities (http://www.pursuit-ofhappiness.org/history-ofhappiness/aristotle). simply put, humans passionately chase after happiness utterly ignorant that their own vices are an impediment. happiness cannot be achieved if one is not virtuous yet virtue is only practiced through right choices. plot synopsis of the trial of brother jero according to mireku (2013), soyinka’s the trials of brother jero is a “bitter criticism of religious and political roguery that have become rampant worldwide particularly in post-colonial africa and his own nigerian society” (p. 282). in its five scenes, a fraudulent amateur, jeroboam, masquerading as a true prophet of god uses slander and deceit to dupe and amass wealth from a small congregation that foolishly overdepends on him for divine providence. with prophesies and sermons of prosperity, he utterly leads the lowest (chume, the office messenger) to the highest in the society-the member of parliament, to a vain hope of a better future. his true flaws are finally revealed when chume discovers through amope that brother jero is a debtor and a slanderer. to chume’s dismay, the self proclaimed prophet is merely an “adulterer! womanthief” (soyinka, 1996, p. 28). the main cast include: brother jero, chume, amope, drummer boy, the trader, the old prophet, penitent, member of parliament, neighbors, villagers and worshippers. the pursuit of happiness brother jero brother jero is one of the most conflicted and unhappy characters in the play. on one hand, he is an unbelievably corrupt and disgustingly shameless, yet on the other, incredibly cowardly. because of his twisted conception of happiness and an overwhelming ambition, he yields to his emotional rather than rational part of his brain. to him, happiness is being wealthy, honorable and sexually satisfied. he therefore worships himself, steals from others and lustfully admires women he knows he can’t haveall in a worthless attempt to be happy. right at the beginning of the play, soyinka introduces him to the audience in the most ridiculous soliloquy in which he describes himself as a self madebetterthanothers prophet. he calls himself “the immaculate jero… articulate hero…” (soyinka, 1996, p. 23), names which are less befitting to the villain we know he is. one is surely bound to think that with this pride, his ultimate goal is honor and that with such honorable names, he is fulfilled but the opposite is true. his entire life is a miserably futile journey in search of honor, an end that aristotle does not regard as happiness since honor is not an end in itself but something sought so that one can be happy. he has grown taller than life such that other characters are mere shadows under his “mighty” spell. to him, “there are eggs and there are eggs!” (soyinka, 1996, p. 7), meaning that he is the real deal and others are just armatures. he refers to chume, his most loyal disciple as “… too crude” (soyinka, 1996, p. 16); his predecessor, the old prophet, as a foolish dodderer (soyinka, 1996, p. 8), the member of parliament as a “poor fish” (soyinka, 1996, p. 7), and amope as the evil daughter of discord (soyinka, indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 16 1996, p. 22). for such a vice, aristotle would regard jero a fool and prescribe high mindedness as the golden mean. without a doubt, it is very unlikely for jero to hit this mark of highmindedness because his pride is colossal, making it even harder for him to be happy. one might decide with conviction that jero’s pride is a major hindrance to his happiness. he feels he is too good for others. when describing his appearance, he emphasizes how handsome he is. “you must admit that i am rather good looking...no, don’t be misled, i am not at all vain.” (soyinka, 1996, p. 8). while a low self-esteem is deficient, a self conceited pride is an excess and jero conveniently misses the mark which is self-control. like jero, many people struggle with self pride the “i”. in his chase for honor, he minimizes others and considers them as lesser extensions of human beings. this only serves to show how truly unhappy he is. jero is also a manipulative shameless thief who has turned religion into business in an attempt to attain happiness. his main skill is in duping others and amassing wealth. he proclaims: “…i was born a natural prophet. and i grew to love the trade”, the word “trade” mireku (2013) suggests, becomes indistinct given it could connote the prophet hood, ordinarily, or a money-making business where the accent is on moneyconsciousness. the church is his market and the worshippersthe customers. he confesses, “i am glad i got here before any customersi mean worshippers well, customers if you like. i always get that feeling every morning that i am a shop-keeper waiting for customers” (soyinka, 1996, p. 14-15). he fully understands their flaws and gullibility yet he exploits them to exhaustion in a bid to be wealthya status he believes will make him happy. this pleasurable venture only gives a short lived satisfaction and makes him a very unhappy man. aristotle submits, “for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy” (nicomachean ethics, 1985:1098a18). if jero’s call is to be a prophet, he should do it with excellence in order to be happy. however, his actions are everything but those of a true prophet. through his fake prophecies, he has managed to capture a few ignorant people whom he feeds with one lie after another. he takes pleasure in keeping them dissatisfied (unhappy) because satisfaction (happiness) as he claims will keep them away. indeed, aristotle contends that, “that which is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else” (nicomachean ethics, 1985:1097a30-34), is happiness. he knows that if chume beats amope he will be happy and will not need him. he prides in his follower’s vulnerability and uses their ambitions for his own gain. he audaciously confesses, this one here who always comes earliest, i have prophesied that he will be made a chief in his hometown. that is a very safe prophecy. as safe as our most popular prophecy, that a man will live to be eighty. if it doesn’t come true … that man doesn’t find out until he is on the other side. so everybody is quite happy. one of my most faithful adherents, unfortunately, he can only be present at weekends – firmly believes that he is going to be the first prime minister of the new mid-north-east state when it is created. that was a risky prophecy of mine, but i badly needed more worshippers at that time. (he looks at his watch.) the next one to arrive is my most faithful penitent. she wants children, so she is quite a sad case. or you would think so… (soyinka, 1996, p. 18). christine osae the quest for happiness in wole soyinka’s the trials of brother jero 17 this passage underscores a few points as far as happiness is concerned. firstly, jero himself admits that happiness is achievable after death: “if it doesn’t come true … that man doesn’t find out until he is on the other side. so everybody is quite happy (soyinka, 1996, p. 18); one then wonders why he single-mindedly chases after what he can’t have. secondly, he admits that wealth will make him happy so as long as men keep attending his church, money won’t be an issue. how absurd isn’t he the same jero jumping off the window because he is running from a creditor whose debt he has failed to pay? thirdly, there is a varied understanding of the concept of happiness. while the naïve minister thinks political status is a true end to happiness, the barren woman believes that having a child will bring happiness. at the end of the day, the question is not what brings happiness but whether or not you are happy. finally, this passage also portrays jero as a villain who does not deserve to take advantage of good innocent people in the society. soyinka brusquely satirizes the likes of jero in the society who constantly prey on innocent victims. such are the traits of unhappy people whose lives are utterly empty. in addition to the above, jero shamelessly steals from his poor followers and is not even decent enough to pay his debts. he is portrayed as a man who will stop at nothing to get what he wants. after grabbing land from the old prophet and sending him away unceremoniously, he ambitiously sets his eyes on the beach. he says, “if only i had this beach to myself” (soyinka, 1996, p. 14). he is utterly devoid of any sympathy for chume whose predicament at the hands of a tyrannical nagging wife he fully understands. he sadistically prides in keeping his congregators “dissatisfied” (soyinka, 1996, p. 15). ambition is not bad, but the overwhelming need to have everything at all cost is an excess which aristotle argues must be moderated to a balancea golden mean. only then can one attain happiness. similarly, jero’s lack of remorse for his own wrongs makes him a sadist. he remains unrepentant even after chume confronts him with the truth. instead, he intends to inflict more grief. he makes his malevolent plans very lucid when he says, i have already sent for the police. it is a pity about chume …. with the influence of that nincompoop, i should succeed in certifying him with ease. a year in the lunatic asylum will do him good anyway… and so the day is saved. the police will call on me as soon as they catch chume. and it looks as if it is not quite time for the fulfillment of that spiteful man’s prophecy (soyinka, 1996, p. 30). this is not in line with aristotle’s doctrine of happiness. according to aristotle, “happiness [is] an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue” (nicomachean ethics, 1985:1098a13). there is nothing even remotely virtuous about hurting others, much less rejoicing in the same. when at the end of the play we still meet him planning how to dupe the member of parliament, we are sure soyinka intends to highlight man’s nature to err. even though the measure of happiness can be defined at the end of one’s life, jero is not a happy man and all his attempts to attain happiness seem futile as he is going about it the wrong way. it is ironical that a man too confident as to robe his congregators in daylight should be so frightened by a woman. jero, the self proclaimed hero stoops so low as to escape his own house through the window at the scare of amope, a tyrannical woman, who is determined to settle the scores. indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 18 according to aristotle, cowardice is a vice but so is foolhardiness. jero must strive to hit the mark which is courage courage to confess that he is not a true prophet; courage to face amope and pay his debts; courage to live in his own house without begging; courage to find a decent job. it is only through this that he can lead a truly happy life. it can therefore be said that jero is his own obstacle to happiness. according to aristotle, if one attains the golden mean, they are regarded as good people in the society. however, jero is considered as a “bearded rogue”, “a thief of a prophet” (soyinka, 1996, p. 13) and an “adulterer”, “woman-thief” by chume (soyinka, 1996, p. 30). it is quite clear here that jero is lost in the two polarities of excesses and deficiency as opposed to the balance point. he is a man of err just like any other. aristotle says “he who observes the mean, being a man who is “always himself”, is truthful in word and deed, confessing the simple facts about himself, and neither exaggerating nor diminishing them” (http://www.gradesaver.com/aristotle s-ethics/study-guide/summary). in jero’s pursuit for happiness, he greatly messes up and ends up an unhappy man hunted down by all. because of his infamous life style, he ends up without any true friend but a trail of enemies seeking his blood in vengeance. the jeros in this contemporary time should surely learn that evil never breeds any good. while his tact and manipulative intelligence are admirable, how dirty he is willing to play just to be honorable and wealthy is disgusting. soyinka’s point here is that intelligence is a virtue but when cunningly used for mischief, becomes a vice. all these vices make jero exceedingly unhappy; consequently, it can be ascertained that jero will never find happiness unless he behaves well. chume chume is jero’s most devoted adherent. yet even his religious commitment does not suffice to bring him happiness. to him, happiness can be attained by pleasing god, getting a good job and beating his wife. he is the one we most empathize with because he is gullible and nauseatingly naïve. for example, it is baffling how chume completely trusts jero with issues concerning his marriage and does not sense any foul play when suddenly jero decides that amope, chume’s wife, deserves a beating. he is defenseless to both his authoritarian strong willed nagging wife and the shrewd deceitful jero. jero assures him that, “…this woman whom you so desire to beat is your cross. bear it well. she is your heaven sent trial” (soyinka, 1996, p. 18). the cross connotes a burden something that enslaves. jero encourages chume to stay in slavery of unhappiness because he (jero) does not want to lose a follower. for this reason, he is constantly unhappy as he does not exercise his own will. his vulnerability is a vice because it is not a sign of humility but rather delicate stupidity. chume blindly follows jero. he clearly has no understanding of religion or god. mireku (2013) argues that, “despite the triviality and meanness of what is prophesied as prosperity for him, we find chume trusting in the abilities of jero” (p. 276). she adds that considering how engrossed in prayer where he repeats, vehemently, unrealistic demands for better life, which are unlikely to get to him, we cannot help but sympathize. chume is christine osae the quest for happiness in wole soyinka’s the trials of brother jero 19 evidently the saddest character in the play. although too trusting and annoyingly immature, it can be argued that he is the only character who demonstrates self control and gentleness in scores of encounters. a wife like amope can make even the politest of men go gaga! after agonizingly (his legs can barely reach the peddle, so it is a struggle) transporting his wife to the prophets house, he is rewarded with nothing but obscenities. he must put up with constant nagging and disapproval from his wife. she exclaims: “a chief messenger in the local government officedo you call that work? your old school friends are now ministers riding in long cars… he’s no worse than other men but, he won’t make the effort to become something in life” (soyinka, 1996, p. 11). however, instead of beating the arrogance out of her, chume goes for prayers. this is self-control, a virtue that should reward him with happiness amidst the maze of hostility he endures from his wife. he constantly rewards the nags with compassion. when amope complains of an aching foot, he offers to bandage it even when he knows she is exaggerating (soyinka, 1996, p. 10). he is late for work but patiently listens through his wife’s arrogance without bursting into fury a reaction we can barely understand because his fury is heightened when he explains his problems to jero later on, “this woman will kill me” (soyinka, 1996, p. 17). nevertheless, going by aristotle’s submission as quoted by koven (2015), “equilibrium is the right feelings, at the right time about the right things, toward the right people, for the right end, and in the right way” (nicomachean ethics, 1985:1106b, p. 15-29) in this case, chume can be considered virtuous despite his naivety. he hits the mark yet even then is still unhappy. even when he finally discovers that jero is a scum, he projects his anger towards him and not his wife. his initial intent is to beat the wife but when he discovers the foul play; his fury is immediately turned to the root cause of the problemthe prophet. fighting is a vice but aristotle clearly states that if this vice is directed towards the right person at the right time for the right reason, it is no longer a vice but a virtue (nicomachean ethics, 1985:1106b, p. 15-29). one would argue here that fighting is a vice but considering the mischief jero has been up to, he deserves to be put in his place. so once again, chume hits the golden mean of virtue. aristotle agrees that: he then who is angry on the right occasions and with the right persons, and also in the right manner, and at the right season, and for the right length of time, is praised; we will call him gentle, therefore, since gentleness is used as a term of praise. for the man who is called gentle wishes not to lose his balance, and not to be carried away by his emotions or passions, but to be angry only in such manner, and on such occasions, and for such period as reason shall prescribe. but he seems to err rather on the side of deficiency; he is loath to take vengeance and very ready to forgive (peters, 1893: iv. 5, 4). but the deficiency, call it wrathlessness or what you will—is censured. those who are not angered by what ought to anger them seem to be foolish, and so do those who are not angry as and when and with whom they ought to be; for such a man seems to feel nothing and to be pained by nothing, and, as he is never angered, to lack spirit to defend himself. but to suffer one’s self to be insulted, or to look quietly on while one’s friends are being insulted, shows a slavish nature (peters, 1893: iv. 5, 6). the portrait of chume in this play is an indication that happiness is indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 20 extremely elusive. despite chume’s virtuous acts, he is still unhappy. secondly, chume’s portrait also indicates that quest for happiness if done virtuously but with no maturity of reason can be futile. amope amope, unlike chume, is very hard lined, distressing and narcissistic. having deeply observed the society, she has come to a conclusion that this is how to deal with people if she is to get what she wants. she believes that justice brings happiness. her confrontation with the prophet is an attempt to get back her moneyjustice. when she bargains the price of fish, it is just an indictment against extortion justice. even her encounter with the drummer is just a proclamation that people should work hard to earn what is rightfully theirs instead of merely begging. soyinka’s plot to reveal the false prophet through further presents her as the tool for justice. the question however is, is this justice an end to itself or will it bring her happiness? in her pursuit of justice and ultimately happiness, she abuses every one with whom she comes into contact. mireku (2013) describes her as, “a truly wicked woman because in spite of the husband’s shortcomings, she tends to be too disrespectful to him (p. 279). when she is introduced to the audience, the portrait is of a woman complaining of everything and nothing worthwhile in particular. her complains soon turn into a trail of sarcastically derogative comments that inevitably send chume into rage. one would think that amope is absolutely devoid of even an iota of civility. what is certain however is that she is unhappy. through her, soyinka seems to suggest that justice is good but the means of achieving it, if immoral, taints the course. the trail of obscenities she hails at the self proclaimed man of god is beyond belief. when jero warns her of pride, she responds with an insult: “listen, you bearded debtor” (soyinka, 1996, p. 12). the opener, “listen” seems to suggest she is in control but what follows next indicates that she is not exactly in control of her on temperament or haughtiness. this overconfidence is what aristotle calls a vice and he suggests that until man moderates it to valorthe golden mean, virtue hasn’t been reached. consequently, without virtue, man cannot lead a truly happy life. the prophet is however not his only victim. she becomes even more ridiculous in her encounter with the trader who, by the way, is just as discourteous. one may agree with brother jero that women are daughters of discord. a keen consideration of her encounter with the trader (soyinka, 1996, p. 12-13), reveals that amope is the offender. aggressively, she turns the negotiations to insults. she is the first to maliciously complain that the fish smells. a critical reader might deduce that this is just an excuse so she can spend lessa vice which according to the doctrine of the golden mean is stinginess. assuming this was true and that amope in this case should strive for magnificence, her stinginess given her economic status would not be considered a vice. had she been a rich lady yet underpaying for goods, one should straight away regard her behavior as bad. peter (1893) quoting aristotle, states that: a poor man cannot be magnificent: he has not the means to spend large sums suitably: if he tries, he is a fool; for he christine osae the quest for happiness in wole soyinka’s the trials of brother jero 21 spends disproportionately and in a wrong way; but an act must be done in the right way to be virtuous. but such expenditure is becoming in those who have got the requisite means, either by their own efforts or through their ancestors or their connections, and who have birth and reputation, for all these things give a man certain greatness and importance (iv. 2, 13). however, others may regard this act as a pure push for justice in pricing goods. clearly, her pursuit for happiness is a pain to others with whom she comes into contact as she is arrogant and offensive. even a drummer who has committed no offence tastes of amope’s cup of wrath. without any prior exchange, amope turns her anger to the boy: “take yourself off you dirty beggar. do you think my money is for the likes of you? i don’t know what the world is coming to. a thief of a prophet, swindler of a fish seller and now that thing with lice on his head comes begging for money” (soyinka, 1996, p. 13). amope’s foolhardiness is also worth comment. she is portrayed as a fearless character who tackles the bull by the head. when we first meet her, she has her bags parched and is camping at jero’s door until she is paid her debt. as soon as jero appears, she fearlessly confronts him making her intentions very clear. no amount of dissuasion from her husband will make her recoil. in the public fight she finally has with chume, she dangerously dares him to beat her. knowing how furious chume is, the audience is scared that she will be killed but she doesn’t care. she dares him to: “kill me! kill me! i won’t get on to that thing unless you kill me first (soyinka, 1996, p. 25). clearly, chume is exercising a delicate yet unlikely kind of self control. very few people, if any would put up with this kind of temptation. by juxtaposing the two characters, soyinka clearly portrays amope’s pomposity and foolhardiness to make it clear that an end may be justified and good but only if the means to the end are equally good. had amope exercised self restraint, she would be a happy person. nevertheless, this is still debatable since chume is the most self restrained yet very unhappy. mireku (2013) admits that “even though we do not side with amope’s insulting habit, we admire her industry and desire to succeed. above all, we admire her refusal to be cowed before a man: an opportunistic christian leader at that” (274). conclusion an in-depth study of soyinka’s the trials of brother jero proves that true happiness is elusive and unachievable. all the major characters analyzed display futile attempts to pursue happiness and how this pursuit makes them villainous since it tends to be selfish. each of these characters has varied opinions concerning what brings happiness. to jero, wealth, honor and sexual satisfaction are ends to happiness. chume however feels that beating amope and getting a good job will make him happy. amope on the other hand seeks justice as a means to happiness. the barren woman seeks a child to make her happy but the member of parliament thinks political fame is the source of happiness. at the end of the day, they are all unhappy as they fail to attain these desires. in this play, soyinka also makes an important point that the end should not justify the means but vice versa. all these characters display wickedness in a bid to be happy. just like aristotle (1985) suggests, “happiness turns out to be an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue (nicomachean indonesian efl journal, vol. 2(1) january 2016 p-issn 2252-7427 e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 22 ethics, 1985: 1098a13). aristotle would be strongly critical of wickedness in the pursuit of happiness. references aristotle. (1985). nichomachean ethics. indianapolis: hackett publishers. aristotle. (1893). the nichomachean ethics of aristotle (5th ed.). london: kegan paul, trench, truebner & co. bremner, r. h (2011). theories of happiness: on the origins of happiness and our contemporary conception. retrieved from: http://hss.ulb.unibonn.de/2011/2597/2597.pdf retrieved on 20/08/2016. golden mean. retrieved from http://www.anus.com/zine/articles/d raugdur/golden_mean/. golden mean (philosophy). retrieved from: http://www.newworldencyclopedia.or g/entry/golden_mean_(philosophy) koven, s. (2015) responsible governance: a case study approach. retrieved from: https://books.google.com/books? kenny, c. (2002). the philosophy of happiness. retrieved from http://charleskenny.blogs.com/weblo g/files/kenny_chapter_1.pdf. tosin, t. (2015). the pursuit of happiness: what is happiness, and how can we make ourselves happier?. retrieved from http://www.unc.edu/~gsmunc/phil22 /nicosum.pdf. wole, s. (1996). the trials of brother jero. new york: dramatists play service, inc indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 155 analyzing students' passive voice difficulties muziatun department of english education, universitas negeri gorontalo, indonesia email: muziatun@ung.ac.id fahria malabar department of english education, universitas negeri gorontalo, indonesia email: fahria@ung.ac.id lisnawati mustapa department of english education, universitas negeri gorontalo, indonesia email: reallizna.mustapa@gmail.com apa citation: muziatun., malabar, f., & mustapa, l. (2022). analyzing students’ passive voice difficulties. indonesian efl journal, 8(2), 155-164. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v8i2.6439 received: 09-02-2022 accepted: 12-05-2022 published: 31-07-2022 introduction educators emphasize the importance of english learning. a wide range of fields rely heavily on the english language, including commerce and engineering as well as the fields of medical and education. the english language has become an international medium of communication among the people of the world, and it is essential to learn so that people may speak with each other without any difficulties (muziatun, saud, & halada, 2021). for indonesia as a developing country, the acquisition of english as an international language is of the utmost importance in order to maintain effective communication with other nations whose primary language is english (renandya, hamied, & nurkamto, 2018; zein, sukyadi, hamied, & lengkanawati, 2020). in order for students to be able to communicate effectively with persons who do not speak their native language, the education system in indonesia prioritizes the teaching of english as a foreign language (hamied, 2012; rinantanti, bin-tahir, & suriaman, 2019). in order for the students to achieve mastery of the english language, they need to be proficient in four language skills – listening, speaking, reading and writing (cintrón-valentín, garcía-amaya, & ellis, 2019; mayyas & bataineh, 2019; muziatun, virginia, & jusuf, 2020). aside from being fluent in these four skills, they should also be able to demonstrate proficiency in grammar (mayanondha & soontornwipast, 2020; mayyas & bataineh, 2019; muziatun & jusuf, 2020; philippines & tan, 2020; yaccob & yunus, 2019; zalbidea, issa, faretta-stutenberg, & sanz, 2021). this is due to the fact that grammatical roles must to be taken into consideration in all aspects of english competence. according to some (denham, 2020; fontich, 2018; fontich & garcía-folgado, 2018; kolln & hancock, 2005; larson, 2009) grammar may be seen as a systematic and scientific study. the study of it gives us the information and guidance that is abstract: the purpose of this study is to find out how difficult it is for students of using passive voice. there were twenty students in class b of the english department's 2017 academy class at university negeri gorontalo, but only sixteen of them were chosen for this study, which employed a descriptive quantitative technique. a survey and an interview were used to get the data. as part of the test, students had to change the forms of numerous active sentences into passive ones. the data was examined using sudijono’s (2006) formula and parrot's (2000) theory of passive voice difficulties. this study found that students in the english department's class of 2017 at universitas negeri gorontalo continue to struggle with the use of the passive voice. auxiliary verb "be" utilization was found to be the most problematic by students admitted, with a percentage of 67.18 percent, followed by difficulties in changing the main verb into the past participle (48.43 percent) and changing the object and subject (43.75 percent). the usage of the auxiliary verb "be" is the most difficult part of passive voice for students, compared to the other two. keywords: students’ difficulties; grammar; and passive voice. mailto:muziatun@ung.ac.id mailto:fahria@ung.ac.id mailto:reallizna.mustapa@gmail.com muziatun, fahria malabar, & lisnawati mustapa analyzing students’ passive voice difficulties 156 required to comprehend a language. grammatical structures provide a wealth of useful information for language learners. in addition to this, it contributes to the production of grammatically accurate language, whether spoken or written. in order to express themselves clearly, individuals must have a solid grasp of grammar. to put it another way, if people do not know the grammar, communication will not flow as smoothly as it should since the goal of communication will not be achieved. there are two categories of verbs that may be used in english sentences: transitive verbs and intransitive verbs (bacharach, kellas, & mcfarland, 1972; fiktorius, 2019; ito, 2021). an intransitive verb is a verb that does not have an object that it acts upon in order to complete the action (buriev, 2022; hirakawa, 2013; kline & demuth, 2014; liu, 2008; najmiddinov & bahodirov, 2020; nasution, sinaga, & lubis, 2021). in the case of an intransitive verb, the predicate or the verb may be followed by an adverb rather than an object or a noun. for instance, cry, work, laugh, walk, etc. a transitive verb, on the other hand, is one that requires an object in order for the action to be taken (buriev, 2022; duffley, 2000; najmiddinov & bahodirov, 2020; ninio, 2016). as a result of their actions (verbs), the verbs are linked to their respective objects. without the object that is supposed to follow the verb, the meaning of the sentence cannot be fully understood. such as borrow, bring, purchase, give, etc. there are two voices in transitive verbs: the active and the passive (hamizah, 2019; klammer, 2000; ursic & zoghbor, 2020). the use of the passive voice is often recognized as one of the most difficult aspects of english grammar to master (abualzain, 2019; hamizah, 2019; inzunza, 2020; klammer, 2000; scholastica, 2018). students have a difficult time understanding the passive voice, since the sentence’ structure is not in a typical position, and the emphasis of the sentence has shifted. in addition, choomthong (2011) asserted that the students have a number of challenges while attempting to acquire the english passive voice. to begin, there is a circumstance in which it is appropriate to use the passive voice. students do not understand when it is appropriate to utilize the active or passive voice. second, become a proficient on the structure of irregular verbs in english. in addition, the students have difficulty comprehending the meaning of words. the uses of a formula that is not in agreement with the tenses that are employed, as well as a lack of correct grammar, particularly the past participle, are two of the most common types of writing mistakes that are discovered in passive sentences. when speaking or writing, employing the passive voice is a common mistake made not only by those who are just starting out or who are in their last year of high school. this error is made by people of all ages, even students in higher education. the purpose of this study is to investigate the challenges that students face while attempting to employ the passive voice in four different tenses, namely the simple present tense, the simple past tense, the present continuous tense, and the past continuous tense. a statement or sentence is said to be written in the passive voice when the subject of the sentence or clause is recognized as the recipient of the action and is characterized by the predicate (aarts, 2001; abualzain, 2019; scholastica, 2018). there are three components to the action sentence (aik & hui, 1994). the first person is a doer. a person or thing that carries out an action is known as a doer. the second category consists of verb-recognized actions. the third and last role is that of the person who is affected by the action. the person or thing that is affected by the action carried out by the doer is referred to as the recipient. an additional point of view about passive voice may be found in radford (2020). he said that the passive voice is characterized primarily by the following four qualities: the first thing worth noting is that the passive voice requires the use of the auxiliary verb "be." the second important point to note is that the passive voice should use the past participle form of the primary verb. the third feature is that sentences written in the passive voice often conclude with the word "by," which performs the same role as the subject in active voice sentences. the fourth point is the complement, which appears in the active voice, may take on the role of the subject when used in the passive voice. according to swan (2017), not all verbs are able to have forms that are expressed in the passive voice. for instance, intransitive verbs such as "like," "die," and "arrive," among others, cannot be converted into passive voice since they do not take an object; hence, none of them up become the indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 157 subject of the passive sentence. it is possible to change an active sentence into a passive one if the active sentence contains a transitive verb, but it is not possible to change an active sentence into a passive one if the active statement does not include a transitive verb. this claim has been substantiated by hopper, gale, foote, and griffith (2000), who wrote that a transitive verb, which is also known as an active verb, might be transformed into its passive version. their finding provides credence to the aforementioned assumption. a verb that does not take an object; in other words, an intransitive verb cannot be altered to take the passive voice. the passive voice is an alternative to the active voice, and in order to produce a passive voice that is acceptable, the auxiliary verb be is required. according to alexander (2019), the elements that comprise the passive voice are the subject, the verb be and the past participle. the formula for a sentence written in the passive voice consists of the subject, the verb be and the past participle. it signifies that the passive voice contraction is improper when there is no subject, no verb be and the subject is inaccurate or the past participle is incorrect. example: vegetables is watered by my little sister. the above statement is inaccurate because the passive voice was employed with the incorrect form of the verb be. the formula for passive voice is: s + verb be + past participle the subject of the sentence is vegetables, and it has to have the verb be agree with that subject. therefore, the verb that ought to be used in the preceding passive voice is going to be are. passive voice may be problematic for students for a variety of reasons, as what have discussed earlier. these reasons include the difficulty of passive sentence structure, changes in the focus of passive sentences, a weak mastery of irregular verbs and past participles, a low proficiency of when to use active and passive sentences, and students' inability to comprehend the meaning of words (abualzain, 2019; choomthong, 2011; hamizah, 2019; inzunza, 2020; klammer, 2000; scholastica, 2018). in addition, cowan (2018) outlined the challenges associated with using the concept of passive voice as follows: (a) students have a difficult time understanding the change in place because the object of the active voice becomes the subject of the passive voice. (b) the verb form for passive voice is the past participle, and some of the students are caught off guard by the change in verb form. (c) the decision of whether or not to provide information on the object of the sentence might also be difficult at times. (d) even though the structure of passive voice is straightforward, it is not easy to understand and may be challenging to implement in a variety of tenses. (e) using the passive voice should not be done without careful consideration since it often leaves out information about the agent. in addition to those issues, parrot (2000) discussed from his point of view the challenges that students confront while employing the passive voice. according to parrot (2000), the following are the obstacles that students face while utilizing passive voice: (1) the subject and the object of the sentence have switched places. the students are under the impression that the subject of a sentence is the agent, despite the fact that this is not the case. consider the following scenario, here is the example: a man was attacked by three women. (2) the use of the "to be"/auxiliary verb. the auxiliary verb that comes before the past participle might be skipped by the students. for instance, england was eliminated by costa rica. in this sentence, students will sometimes use the verb in the right tense, and then just follow it up with the word by. consider, for instance, the film made by scorsese. in this sentence, students have a propensity to leave off the auxiliary verb be, which is the most prevalent issue that arises while using the word. (3) the verb change. students may not utilize the past participle form of the main verb. the construction of passive voice involves changing the tense of the verb "to be," which is then followed by a past participle. for instance, the song is sung by me. method the descriptive quantitative approach or the descriptive statistical method was used in this study. the term "descriptive statistic" refers to a straightforward quantitative overview of a data collection that has been compiled. according to sugiyono (2010, 2014), descriptive statistics is the method of doing data analysis with the purpose of describing or explaining the data. the researchers deliver the data in numerical and descriptive form in this descriptive quantitative research approach. muziatun, fahria malabar, & lisnawati mustapa analyzing students’ passive voice difficulties 158 this study used a method known as descriptive quantitative research, because after the researchers had discovered the outcome of the data, they explained the data into descriptive form and interpreted the data qualitatively. the researchers are able to determine the proportion and frequency of the students that have difficulty utilizing passive voice by using this methodology. this study's population was made up of 124 students from the english department's 2017 class. this was because the graduating class of 2017 completed an advanced english grammar course, which was one of the reasons for sample selection in this study. the students in this class were categorized as belonging to one of five different classes: a, b, c, d, and e. for the purposes of this study, the researchers had the choice of using either the class of 2015 or the class of 2016 as the population. on the other hand, the vast majority of students in the class of 2015 have already graduated. in the meanwhile, the members of the class of 2016 were nearing the end of their studies. as a direct consequence of this, doing study with students from the classes of 2015 and 2016 would present a substantial barrier to the researchers. according to sugiyono (2014), a sample is a representative portion of the population that is going to be researched. the researchers used purposive sampling in order to determine the sample. the term "purposive sampling" refers to a method of selecting samples by taking into account a variety of factors. even though the majority of students in class b earned poor scores in the advanced english grammar subject, class b is the most appropriate class to employ as a sample in this study out of all the classes because of this. the sample consisted of just 16 students who had grades ranging from 3.00 (b) to 2.00 (c), despite the fact that there are 21 students in total in the class. taking into account the fact, that one student did not follow the final exam and that four other students obtained scores ranging from a to b+ accordingly. as a result, they have eliminated from consideration to be a part of the sample. two types of instruments, including a test and an interview, were employed by the researchers to gather the data. due to the widespread transmission of the covid-19 virus, both the test and the interview were all carried out online through use of the use of a google form. in this study, the researchers gathered data through the use of a test as an instrument. the purpose of the test was to determine the extent to which students struggled with the use of passive voice, particularly in simple present tense, simple past tense, present continuous tense, and past continuous tense. due to the fact that, out of all tenses, only these four tenses fall into the difficult group according to parrot. then, therefore, the students will be given a test on changing sentences, in which they will be required to convert an active statement into a passive sentence by using the appropriate formula. the students have been provided with four numbers that correspond to four distinct tenses. although each tense only has one number, the number covers every area of challenging topics. those four questions are listed below: (a) ralph lauren designs many of actresses’ gowns. (2) they are presenting an award now. (3) the actress wore a beautiful gown. (4) the reporter was interviewing the winners. in order to back up the outcome of the test that was completed by the students, the researchers conducted an interview with them and asked them 11 questions concerning their understanding of learning passive voice. due to the fact that they had previously achieved a passing grade in advanced english grammar subject during a different semester, the researcher did not observe the class or engage them when they were sitting in on the class. the researchers only presented the students with 11 questions that were connected to the active and passive voice instruction that they had previously received when studying this topic. the inquiry that was addressed in response to parrot's assertion on the challenges that students face when attempting to use passive voice. these 11 questions are as follows: (1) “do you know about passive voice?”, (2) “do you know the meaning of passive vice?”, (3) “mention the rule of passive voice”, (4) “are you difficult in determining subject and object in passive voice?”, (5) “do you know the position of subject and object will be changed”, (6) “do you know the subject will be the agent in passive?”, (7) “are you difficult in changing main verb into past participle?”, (8) “do you find difficulty in using auxiliary verb in passive voice?”, (9) “do you know the auxiliary verb will follow the subject in passive?”, (10) “mention the auxiliary verb of passive voice in four tenses”, and (11) “do you know how to change active sentence into passive?”. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 159 following the completion of the data collection process, the researchers performed an analysis on the data. without the researchers' intervention, the findings of the questions and test were presented as they were in terms of their current state. the data collection techniques that the researchers employed in this study were known as descriptive analysis technique (using percentage). this technique can be implemented in further detail in the table percentage that is shown in sudijono (2006), which reads as follows: in which: p = the percentage of incorrect answers in each item f = the number of incorrect answers in each item n = the total number of students using percentage and frequency, the researchers calculated the average score using the formula below: in which: p = the percentage f = the frequency n = the total number of students n = the number of item test results and discussion the researchers concluded that the following are the challenges associated with the use of passive voice. it was based on the data that had been obtained about the identification of problems that are associated with utilizing passive voice from the test and the interview. the data had been gained regarding the identification of difficulties that are related with employing passive voice. test the findings of the investigation were derived from the students' ability to construct four passive sentences, which were rephrased versions of the four active sentences that the researchers had provided as inquiries to the students. the problem in using the passive voice was covered in more depth earlier on in the section that bears the same name, and the aforementioned remark by parrot serves as the foundation for the discussion that follows. the students’ difficulty in changing object and subject in passive sentence the ability of students to recognize adjustments in the focus of the sentence is the first consideration that must be made when analyzing the challenges that students face while attempting to use passive voice. this may be determined by examining the students' ability to alter the subject and object of the sentence. table 1 displays the percentage of difficulty in changing objects and subjects in four distinct tenses. table 1. object-subject change difficulty n o. object-to-subject change in four tenses item number diffic ulty freq uency percen tage 1. 2. 3. 4. simple present tense present continuous tense simple past tense past continuous tense sentence 1 sentence 2 sentence 3 sentence 4 10 5 4 9 62.50 % 31.25 % 25.00 % 56.25 % total 4 28 43.75 % the total average is calculated using the following formula: = = = 43.75 % the table demonstrated the students' difficulties in changing the object and subject of an active voice into a passive voice in four tenses. the test consists of four questions. sixty-two percent of the 16 students who took the exam had difficulty changing the object into the subject in the simple present tense. meanwhile, 31.25 percent of students, or five, had trouble switching from object to subject in the present continuous tense. in the simple past tense, 25.00 percent or four students had trouble converting the object into the subject in a passive phrase. in the past continuous tense, nine students, or 56.25 percent of the total students, had difficulty changing the object to the subject in the passive voice. as a result, 43.75 percent of students still struggle with changing the object of an active voice into the subject of a passive voice. there were 10 students, or 62.50 percent of the total number of students, who had trouble converting the object into the subject in a passive muziatun, fahria malabar, & lisnawati mustapa analyzing students’ passive voice difficulties 160 sentence while using the simple present tense with the active statement "ralph lauren designs many of actresses' gowns." when constructing a passive sentence, the object from the active sentence should be transformed into the subject. therefore, in an active statement such as "ralph lauren designs many of actresses' gowns," the phrase "many of actress' gowns" will function as the subject, while "ralph laurent" will play the role of the object or the agent. the students’ difficulty in changing form of “be” in passive voice table 2 provides the frequency of difficulties encountered while changing the form of "be" in each of the four tenses. table 2. "be" form changes difficulty n o “be” change in four tenses item number diffi culty freq uency percent age 1. 2. 3. 4. simple present tense present continuous tense simple past tense past continuous tense sentence 1 sentence 2 sentence 3 sentence 4 8 11 10 14 50.00 % 68.75 % 62.50 % 87.50 % total 4 43 67.18 % for the purpose of determining the overall average, the formula that follows is used: = = = 67.18 % the students had difficulty changing the form of the verb "to be" in active voice into passive voice in all four tenses, as seen in the table. in the simple present tense, there were eight students out of the total of sixteen who responded to the exam who struggled with changing the form of the verb "be." this is a percentage of difficulty equal to 50 percent. in the meanwhile, 68.75 percent of students, or 11 of them, had trouble changing the form of the verb "be" when engaging in the present continuous tense. there were ten students, which is 62.5 percent of the total, who have trouble changing the form of the word "be" in passive sentences while using the simple past tense. in addition, in the past continuous tense, there were 14 students, which represents for 87.5 percent of the total students, who have difficulty changing the form of the verb "be" when it is used in the passive voice. as a result, the overall average percentage of students who still struggle with modifying the form of "be" in passive sentences is 67.18 percent. according to the findings, the most challenging aspect of using the passive voice, in terms of the auxiliary verb 'be,' accounted for 67.18 percent of all instances of occurrences, on average (please see table.2). in the past continuous tense with the active voice "the reporter was interviewing the winners," there were 14 students, or 87.5 percent, who struggled with transforming the form of "be" in the active voice into a passive voice. the following is the incorrect response that some students gave: (1) student 1: the winners was interviewed by the reporter. (2) student 2: the winners were interviewed by the reporter. (3) student 3: the winners are being interviewed by the reporter. (4) student 4: the winners are interviewed by the reporter. the students’ difficulty in changing main verb into past participle in passive voice table 3 illustrates the frequency of difficulties encountered while transforming the main verb into the past participle in a variety of tenses. table 3. main verb to past participle difficulty n o main verb into past participle change in four tenses item number diffic ulty frequ ency percenta ge 1. 2. 3. 4. simple present tense present continuous tense simple past tense past continuous tense sentence 1 sentence 2 sentence 3 sentence 4 6 7 14 4 37.50 % 43.75 % 87.50 % 25.00 % total 4 31 48.43 % the following is the formula for calculating the overall average: = = = 48.43 % the table illustrated how difficult it was for the students to change the main verb into the past participle in all four tenses. there were six students, or 37.50 percent, out of the sixteen students that answered the test who struggled with changing the main verb into the past participle in simple present tense. in the meanwhile, the transformation of the main verb into the past participle in present continuous tense was indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 161 challenging for 43.75 percent of students, or seven of them. the transformation of the main verb into the past participle in a passive sentence was challenging for 14 students, which accounts for 87.50 percent of the class as a whole. the difficulty in changing the main verb into the past participle in passive voice was therefore found in the past continuous tense by four students, or 25.00 percent of the total student population. as a consequence of this, the overall average reveals there were still 48.43 percent of students who continued to struggle with changing the active main verb into the past participle of a passive voice. the difficulty of changing passive voice for the following group of students is the modification of the main verb, with an overall average of 48.43 percent. the sentence "the actress wore a beautiful gown" is written in simple past tense and with an active sentence. there were fourteen students, which corresponds to an 87.5 percent failure rate, who are unable to change the verb into the past participle. the active sentence has an irregular form of the main verb; however, the majority of the students employed past verb after the subject, which is an inappropriate construction. several students gave the following responses, all of which are instances of inappropriate responses: (1) student 1: a beautiful gown was wore by the actress. (2) student 2: a beautiful gown was wearing by the actress. the students’ difficulty in using passive in four tenses following the administration of the test, the researchers reviewed the students' responses and calculated the outcome. the study revealed that students had an average difficulty of 53.12 percent when it comes to adopting passive voice in four different tenses, including simple present tense, present continuous tense, simple past tense, and past continuous tense. after conducting an investigation into the difficulties that students encounter when attempting to use passive voice in all four tenses, it was revealed that students' difficulties in using passive voice in all four tenses indicated a total of 102 incorrect answers. applying sudijono’s formula yields this result: so, f = 102 n = 16 n = 12 percentage = = 53.12 % according to the figure shown up above, the percentage of students that have issues with applying passive voice averages out to 53.12 percent. table 4. passive voice difficulties in four tenses n o passive voice difficulty difficulty frequency percentage 1. changing object into the subject 28 43.75 % 2. changing form of “be” 43 67.18 % 3. changing main verb 31 48.43 % total 102 53.12 % passive voice, according to parrott (2000), is difficult for students to master because of the difficulty in changing the subject and object, as well as the usage of to be/auxiliary verbs and changing of the main verb. the employment of the auxiliary "be" was found to be the most common issue in applying passive voice, followed by the change of the main verb, and finally, the change of subject and object. interview based according to the results of the interview, each of the students responded that they are familiar with the concept of passive voice as well as the meaning of passive voice in general. since students are already acquainted with the subject matter, passive voice is not foreign to them. when the researchers investigated the students about the rules of passive voice, the majority of the students stated how to construct a passive voice, and some of the students typed down the formula for passive voice. there were a total of 11 questions that were asked of the students throughout the interview, and there were a number of questions to which all of the students a total of 16 students responded "yes." these values correspond to the questions "do you know about passive voice?" (question number 1) and "do you know the meaning of passive vice?" (question number 2), respectively. this demonstrates that students have a good grasp of passive voice. the remaining questions all received muziatun, fahria malabar, & lisnawati mustapa analyzing students’ passive voice difficulties 162 a variety of responses from the students. in particular, the question that inquires about how difficult it is to make use of passive voice will serve as the initial focus of the investigation. particularly the questions that corroborate the results of the data gathered from the test questions change the active to passive voice. when asked, "are you difficult in determining object and subject in passive voice?" only four of the sixteen students who were surveyed gave a positive response. the other twelve students said they had no trouble identifying the subject and object of a passive voice sentence. as a result, the subject and object placements in a sentence are not the important considerations for them while using the passive voice. this point is made obvious by the high percentage of students who are aware that in a passive sentence, the subject will take on the role of the active agent, while the object will trade places with the subject and take on the role of the recipient of the action. only six of the students who answered the question “are you difficult in changing main verb into past participle form?” had trouble changing the verb in a passive phrase, whilst the other students did not have any issue with this aspect of the assignment. furthermore, this indicates that the use of a past participle in a passive voice sentence is not a significant issue. in the meanwhile, in response to the question “do you find difficulty in using auxiliary verb in passive voice?” eight students gave the answer "yes." this is more than the problems in any other category, and it is verified by the test result, which indicated that the students had the strongest struggles employing auxiliary verbs in passive voice. only three of the students were able to properly mention the auxiliary verb "be" in passive voice when the researchers requested them to do so in simple present, present continuous, simple past, and past continuous. as a direct result of this, the use of the auxiliary verb "be" is the core reason for the complexity that is associated with the composition of passive voice for students. a final question was presented to the students, and the findings revealed a tendency that was quite astonishing. out of the 16 students, there were 15 students who responded "yes" to the question “do you know how to change the active sentence into the passive sentence?”. this indicates that the vast majority of students have the confidence to answer questions using the passive voice. the conclusion that can be drawn from this is that students have an optimistic outlook of their abilities in terms of the use of passive voice. when asked to change an active statement into a passive one, the vast majority of students do it incorrectly. this demonstrates that their knowledge does not line up with the reality of the circumstances in which their understanding is put into practice. conclusion it is possible to draw the conclusion that the students in the english department class of 2017 continue to struggle with the use of the passive voice; the changing of subject and object, the use of the auxiliary verb of be, and the application of verb. in this particular circumstance, the students were encountering the greatest amount of difficulty with the auxiliary verb of be. this is also reinforced by interviews that were provided to the students, which indicated that the usage of the auxiliary verb be is the most dominating hindrance for the students when it comes to employing passive voice. this inclination is brought on by the fact that students often choose to communicate using an active voice as opposed to a passive voice, which is what triggers this predisposition. the students are more used to utilizing active speech as opposed to the passive voice. in addition, according to the findings of the investigation that were carried out in each tense, it was revealed that the majority of students had difficulty deciding whether to use an auxiliary verb of passive voice in the past continuous tense. the students were given the recommendation to focus their attention more intently on the circumstances surrounding the use of the passive voice, as well as to comprehend and commit to store up the auxiliary verb and verb form, in addition to the regular verb and irregular verb. it is recommended that teachers of grammar provide students with detailed and understandable explanations of the materials they are teaching, particularly with regard to the use of passive voice. it is required of lecturers to provide additional motivation to the students in order to stimulate the students' interest. motivating students to learn passive voice in english is essential, since it is an important aspect of the language that has to be learned for both spoken and written communication. researchers might undertake indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 2, july 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 163 further studies to determine the exact reasons why students have difficulty utilizing passive voice. in conclusion, this study may serve as a reference for the subsequent researcher who is working on a subject that is comparable, and it is anticipated that this research will give some sort of empirical data for the research that will be conducted in the future in this field. next researchers will be able to come up with a strategy that addresses the research problem, particularly in finding a technique to alleviate or at the very least minimize the challenges of students. reference aarts, b. 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(2015). the arabic cognates or origins of plural markers in world languages: a radical linguistic theory approach. indonesian efl journal, 1(2), 144-163 received: 02-12-2014 accepted: 01-05-2015 published: 01-07-2015 abstract: this paper traces the arabic origins of "plural markers" in world languages from a radical linguistic (or lexical root) theory perspective. the data comprises the main plural markers like cats/oxen in 60 world languages from 14 major and minor familiesviz., indo-european, sino-tibetan, afro-asiatic, austronesian, dravidian, turkic, mayan, altaic (japonic), niger-congo, bantu, uto-aztec, tai-kadai, uralic, and basque, which constitute 60% of world languages and whose speakers make up 96% of world population. the results clearly show that plural markers, which are limited to a few markers in all languages comprised of –s/-as/-at, -en, -im, -a/-e/-i/-o/-u, and ø, have true arabic cognates with the same or similar forms and meanings, whose differences are due to natural and plausible causes and different routes of linguistic change. therefore, the results reject the traditional classification of the comparative method and/or family tree model of such languages into separate, unrelated families, supporting instead the adequacy of the radical linguistic theory according to which all world languages are related to one another, which eventually stemmed from a radical or root language which has been preserved almost intact in arabic as the most conservative and productive language. in fact, arabic can be safely said to be the radical language itself for, besides other linguistic features, sharing the plural cognates in this case with all the other languages alone. keywords: plurality, language families and relationships, radical world language, radical linguistic theory introduction the radical linguistic theory (jassem 2014h-l, 2015a-i) is a slightly revised version which developed from the lexical root theory (jassem 2012a-f, 2013a-q, and 2014ag). thus far, it has passed through three main stages. in the initial stage, the lexical root theory was originally proposed to trace back the origins of indo-european languages into arabic at all linguistic levels. in particular, jassem (2012a-f, 2013a-q, 2014a-k, and 2015a-h) has shown in forty three studies that arabic, english, german, french, and the so-called indo-european languages as a whole are genetically related very closely phonetically, morphologically, grammatically, and semantically or lexically to such an extent that they can all be regarded as dialects of the same language indeed. more precisely, the arabic origins or cognates of their words were successfully traced in twenty seven lexical studies in key semantic fields like numerals, religious, love, democratic, military, and legal terms (jassem 2012a-d, 2013a-q, 2014a-k, 2015a-g); in three morphological studies on inflectional and derivational markers (jassem 2012f, 2013ab); in nine grammatical papers like pronouns, verb 'to be', wh-questions, and case (jassem 2012c-e, 2013l, 2014c, 2015d); and in one phonetic study about the english, german, french, latin, and greek cognates of arabic back consonants (jassem 2013c). in the second stage, it was extended to trace the arabic origins of pronouns in mandarin chinese (jassem 2014h) and basque and finnish (jassem 2014i). in the final stage (jassem 2015h-i), it was generalized to trace the arabic origins of all language families in the areas of demonstrative pronouns (jassem 2015h) and negation (jassem 2015i) in eleven major (and minor) language families, making up 95% of the total world population; plural markers follow suit here. finally, two mailto:zajassems@gmail.com indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 145 papers applied the approach to translation studies (jassem 2014e, 2015b) and one to language learning and teaching (jassem 2016). the radical linguistic theory (jassem 2014 h-k, 2015a-i) is a slight revision of the lexical root theory (jassem 2012a-f, 2013aq, 2014a-g, 2015a-g), both deriving their name originally from the use of lexical (consonantal) roots or radicals in retracing genetic relationships between words in world languages. the theory first arose as a rejection of the family tree model or comparative method in historical linguistics for classifying arabic as a member of a different language family than english, german, french, latin, greek, sanskrit, and/or the so-called indo-european languages (see bergs and brinton 2012; algeo 2010; crystal 2010: 302; yule 2014; campbell 2004: 190-191; crowley 1997: 2225, 110-111; pyles and algeo 1993: 61-94). in all the above forty three studies, the very close genetic relationship between arabic and such languages was, on the contrary, categorically established phonetically, morphologically, grammatically, and semantically or lexically so much so that they can be really considered dialects of the same language, where arabic was found to be their source or parent language for several reasons (jassem (2012a-f, 2013a-q, 2014a-k, 2015ag). in other words, arabic, english, german, and french words of all types and sorts, for example, were shown to be true cognates with similar or identical forms and meanings, whose apparent differences are due to natural and plausible causes and diverse routes of linguistic change. this entails that all such languages developed, in fact must have developed, from an earlier single, perfect, suddenly-emerged radical or root language from which all human languages emanated in the first place, and which could never have died out and will never do so but rather has fully, though variably, survived into today's languages, to which they can all be traced, with arabic in particular being the closest or most conservative and productive descendant with a continued, unbroken history. in addition, the traditional classification of language families was found to be grossly inaccurate. evidence from pronouns in chinese (jassem 2014h) and basque and finnish (jassem 2014i) as well as indo-european pronouns (jassem 2012c) supports this claim, which shows that all such pronouns have true arabic cognates or origins. therefore, to aptly capture the close genetic linkage between european and arabian languages in general, a new larger language family grouping has been proposed, called eurabian or urban (jassem 2015c: 41; 2015d). on a more global level, a radical (root) world language has also been proposed. this paper is a follow-up to jassem's (2015h-i) investigation of the arabic origins and/or cognates of demonstratives and negation in world languages. in particular, it examines the arabic origins or source cognates of plural markers in 60 world languages, comprising 61% of world languages spoken by 96% of world population (see table 1 below). the remainder of the paper includes five sections: (ii) research methods, (iii) plural marker survey, (iv) results, (v) discussion, and (vi) conclusion. method the data the language sample the data consists of plural markers in 60 world languages in 14 major and minor language families. these languages are shown in the following table by family and language and speaker statistics. table 1. a statistical summary of world languages language family no. & % of languages no. & % of speakers afro-asiatic 366 (5.15%) 380, 821,999 (6.05%) indo-european 437 (6.15%) 1, 913,575, 380 (46.31%) sino-tibetan 453 (6.38%) 1, 268, 181, 584 (20.16%) austronesian 1223 (17.22%) 323, 456, 908 (5.14%) zaidan ali jassem the arabic cognates or origins of plural markers in world languages: a radical linguistic theory approach 146 altaic (japonic) 14 (0.20%) 206 227 820 (3.28%) mayan 31 (0.44%) 6, 522,182 (0.10%) dravidian 84 (1.18%) 229, 346,860 (3.65%) niger-congo 1524 (21.46%) 436, 814,956 (6.94%) uto-aztec 58 (0.82%) 1, 910,442 (0.03%) turkic 39 (0.55%) 170, 156, 603 (2.70%) tai-kadai 94 (1.32%) 80, 772,252 (1.28%) basque 1 545, 872 total 4331 (60.84%) 95.64% source: ethnologue.org 2015 it can be clearly seen in the table that these languages comprise about 61% of world languages which are spoken by around 96% of the world population. it also shows that the language families differ in their numbers and speaker populations. more precisely, the largest language families in terms of their native speaker numbers are the indo-european and sino-tibetan whereas the largest in terms of language numbers are the niger-congo and austronesian. afro-asiatic languages are about equally divided as to the ratio of speaker and language numbers. all the other language families are minor ones like altaic, dravidian, uto-aztec, turkic, and tai-kadai. basque is an isolate without relatives although it has been found to be genetically related to arabic, finnish, and indo-european languages (jassem 2014i). data sources plural marker data selection and/or collection has been obtained from published internet sources about world languages such as www.learn101.org, www.walsonline.org, www.mylanguages.org, www.en.wikipedia.org, and the author's knowledge of and works on arabic, english, german, french, and european languages (e,g., jassem 2012f, 2013a-b, 2015d). a brief survey is given separately in section (3) below. as for etymological data, all references to english and indo-european languages are for harper (2015). however, this etymology is not, like all other similar dictionaries, without its severe drawbacks owing to the many unknowns, uncertainties, and the seemingly illogical derivations or meanings of many words (jassem 2015h-i). therefore, it has to be used with discretion. concerning arabic data, the main sources are (jassem 2012f, 2013a-b, 2015d), ibn manzoor (2013), alghalayini (2010), alafaghani (2003), e-sources, and the author's knowledge and use of shami (syrian) arabic as a native speaker. all the genetic linkages between arabic and such languages are exclusively mine, unless otherwise stated. data transcription in transcribing the data, normal romanized spelling is used for all languages for practical purposes. nonetheless, certain symbols were used for unique arabic sounds: namely, /2 & 3/ for the voiceless and voiced pharyngeal fricatives respectively, /kh & gh/ for the voiceless and voiced velar fricatives each, /q/ for the voiceless uvular stop, capital letters for the emphatic counterparts of plain consonants /t (t), d (d), dh (dh), & s (s)/, and /'/ for the glottal stop (jassem 2013c). long vowels in arabic are usually doubled i.e., /aa, ee, & oo/. numerals indicate tone marks in tone languages like chinese without considering them in the analysis for having no semantic impact on the final output. data analysis theoretical framework: radical linguistic theory in data analysis, the radical linguistic theory (jassem 2014h-l, 2015a-i), which is a slightly revised and more generalized version of the original lexical root theory (jassem 2012a-f, 2013a-q, 2014a-g), will be used as the theoretical framework here. the lexical root theory (jassem 2012a-f, 2013a-q, 2014ag) was so called because of employing the lexical (consonantal) roots or radicals in examining genetic relationships between words such as the derivation of observation http://www.learn101.org/ http://www.walsonline.org/ http://www.mylanguages.org/ http://www.en.wikipedia.org/ indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 147 from serve (or simply srv) (see jassem 2013o) and description (subscription, prescription, inscription) from scribe (scrb) (see jassem 2013i, 2014e). the main reason for that is because the consonantal root carries and determines the basic meaning of the word irrespective of its affixation and vowels such as observation (srv). historically speaking, classical and modern arabic dictionaries (e.g., ibn manzoor 1974, 2013) used consonantal roots in listing lexical entries, a practice first founded by alkhaleel, an 8th century arabic linguist, lexicographer, musician, and mathematician (jassem 2012e). the lexical root theory has a simple structure, which consists of a theoretical principle or hypothesis and five practical procedures of analysis. the principle states that: arabic and english as well as the socalled indo-european languages are not only genetically related but also are directly descended from one language, which may be arabic in the end. in fact, it claims in its strongest version that they are all dialects of the same language, whose differences are due to natural and plausible causes and different courses of linguistic change. in the radical linguistic theory, the above principle has been slightly revised to read: all human languages are genetically related, which eventually emanated from a single, perfect, suddenlyemerged language which developed over time into countless human dialects and languages that continue to become simpler and simpler. that original first language, which may be called radical or root language, has not died out at all but has instead survived uninterruptedly into modern day languages to various degrees where some languages have preserved words and forms more than others. perhaps arabic, on spatial and temporal grounds, has preserved almost all of its features phonetically, morphologically, syntactically or grammatically, and semantically or lexically. as to the five applied procedures of the lexical root theory which have been used all along to empirically prove that principle in data collection and analysis, they remain the same in the current revised and generalized version: i.e., (a) methodological, (b) lexicological, (c) linguistic, (d) relational, and (e) comparative/historical. since all have been reasonably described in the above studies (jassem 2012a-f, 2013a-q, 2014a-g), a brief summary will suffice here. firstly, the methodological procedure concerns data collection, selection, and statistical analysis. apart from loan words, all language words, affixes, and phonemes are amenable to investigation, and not only the core vocabulary as is the common practice in the field (crystal 2010; pyles and algeo 1993: 76-77; crowley 1997: 88-90, 175-178). however, data selection is practically inevitable since no single study can accomplish that at one time, no matter how ambitious it might be. the most appropriate method for approaching that goal would be to use semantic fields such as the present and the above topics. cumulative evidence from such findings will aid in formulating rules and laws of language change at a later stage (cf. jassem 2012f, 2013a-f, 2013l). the statistical analysis employs the percentage formula (see 2.2.2 below). secondly, the lexicological procedure is the initial step in the analysis. words are analyzed by (i) deleting affixes (e.g., explained → plain), (ii) using primarily consonantal roots or radicals (e.g., plain → pln), and (iii) searching for correspondence in meaning on the basis of word etymologies and origins as a guide (e.g., harper 2014), which should be used with discretion, though. starting with meanings, soundless or sound laws, which are central as the former are more stable and change very much less than the latter which do so extensively. so the final outcome yields the derivation of plain form arabic baien, baan (v) 'clear, plain' via /l/-insertion or split from /n/ (jassem 2013i). thirdly, the linguistic procedure handles the analysis of phonetic, zaidan ali jassem the arabic cognates or origins of plural markers in world languages: a radical linguistic theory approach 148 morphological, grammatical and semantic structures and differences between words. the phonetic analysis examines sound changes within and across categories. more precisely, consonants may change their place and manner of articulation as well as voicing. at the level of place, bilabial consonants ↔ labio-dental ↔ dental ↔ alveolar ↔ palatal ↔ velar ↔ uvular ↔ pharyngeal ↔ glottal (where ↔ signals change in both directions); at the level of manner, stops ↔ fricatives ↔ affricates ↔ nasals ↔ laterals ↔ approximants; and at the level of voice, voiced consonants ↔ voiceless. for example, /t/ may turn into /d/ by voice or /th & s/ by manner. in similar fashion, vowels change as well. although the number of vowels differ greatly within and between, e.g., english (roach 2008; celce-mercia et al 2010) and arabic (jassem 2012g, 1987, 1993), all can be reduced to three basic long vowels/a: (aa), i: (ee), & u: (oo)/ (and their short versions besides the two diphthongs /ai (ay)/ and /au (aw)/ which are a kind of /i:/ and /u:/ respectively). they may change according to modifications in (i) tongue part (e.g., front ↔ centre ↔ back), (ii) tongue height (e.g., high ↔ mid ↔ low), (iii) length (e.g., long ↔ short), and (iv) lip shape (e.g., round ↔ unround). in fact, the vowels can be, more or less, treated like consonants where /i:/ is a kind of /j (y)/, /u:/ a kind of /w/, and /a:/ a kind of /h/ or vice versa. their functions are mainly (i) phonetic such as linking consonants to each other in speech and (ii) grammatical like indicating tense, word class, and number (e.g., sing, sang, sung, song; man/men). thus their semantic weight is marginal and so is of little lexical significance, if not at all. for these reasons, vowels may be totally ignored in the analysis because the limited nature of the changes do not affect the final semantic result at all. sound changes result in natural and plausible processes like assimilation, dissimilation, deletion, merger, insertion, split, reordering, substitution, syllable loss, re-syllabification, consonant cluster reduction or creation and so on. in addition, sound change may operate in a multidirectional, cyclic, and lexically-diffuse or irregular manner (for detail, see jassem 2012a-f, and 2013c). regarding the morphological and grammatical analyses, some overlap obtains. the former examines the inflectional and derivational aspects of words in general (jassem 2012f, 2013a-b); the latter handles grammatical classes, categories, and functions like pronouns, determiners, verbs, nouns, prepositions, question words, and case (jassem 2012c-e, 2013l, 2014b-c, 2015d). since their influence on the basic meaning of the lexical root is marginal, inflectional and derivational morphemes may also be ignored altogether. as both morphological and grammatical features have already been dealt with in full, there is no need to include them in every single case later. as for the semantic analysis, meaning relationships between words are examined, including lexical stability, multiplicity, convergence, divergence, shift, split, change, and variability. stability means that word meanings have remained constant over time. multiplicity denotes that words might have two or more meanings. convergence means two or more formally and semantically similar arabic words might have yielded the same cognate in english. divergence signals that words became opposites or antonyms of one another. shift indicates that words switched their sense within the same field. lexical split means a word led to two different cognates. change means a new meaning developed. variability signals the presence of two or more variants for the same word (for detail, see jassem 2012a-f). fourthly, the relational procedure accounts for the relationship between form and meaning in words from three angles: (i) formal and semantic similarity (e.g., three, third, tertiary and arabic thalath 'three' (damascus arabic talaat (jassem 2012a)), (ii) formal similarity and semantic difference (e.g., ship and sheep (jassem 2012b), and (iii) formal difference and semantic similarity (e.g., quarter, quadrant, carat, cadre and arabic qeeraat 'a fourth; carat' (jassem 2012a)). indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 149 as in the morphological and syntactic or grammatical procedures, there is no need to tackle it in every single case for it will lead to undesirably lengthy treatments. finally, the comparative historical analysis compares every word in english in particular and german, french, greek, latin, and sanskrit in general with its arabic counterpart or cognate phonetically, morphologically, and semantically on the basis of its history and development in english (e.g., harper 2014; pyles and algeo 1993) and arabic (e.g., ibn manzour 2013; altha3aalibi 2011; ibn seedah 1996) besides the author's knowledge of both arabic as a first language and english as an equal second language. discretion should be exercised here due to uncertainties and inaccuracies, especially in harper's work, though. in summary, the most appropriate procedure for genetically relating english and arabic words, e.g., to each other can be summed up as follows: (i) select a word, e.g., describe, write, tail, tall, cut, democracy, air, (ii) identify the source, daughter, and/or sister language meaning (e.g., english or latin) on the basis of especially word history or etymology. it is essential to start with meanings, not sounds or sound laws because they are more stable and change very much less than the latter which do so extensively; for example, all the sounds of a given word might change beyond recognition while meanings do so in a rather very limited way; so the meaning will lead you to the cognate easily whereas the sounds will get you lost definitely, (iii) search for the corresponding meaning and form in the target, parent, or reference language (e.g., arabic), looking for cognates: i.e., sister words with the same or similar forms and meanings, and (iv) finally explain the differences in form and meaning between the cognates lexicologically, phonetically, morphologically, and semantically as indicated. as a matter of fact, finding the right cognate on the basis of its meaning first often leads you to the ensuing changes automatically. that is the whole story briefly, simply, and truly. no fuss, no mess (see jassem 20122015). statistical analysis the percentage formula will be used for calculating the ratio of cognate words or shared vocabulary (cowley 1997: 173, 182), which has been fully described in earlier papers (jassem 2012a-f, 2013a-q, 2014a-k). plurality in world languages: a linguistic survey world languages of all families not only mark their plurals in similar or identical ways generally but also have a very limited number of such markers, not exceeding six broad types at the most. the following survey is for 60 languages in 14 major and minor language families which, as stated earlier, constitute 61% of world languages and 96% of world population. their plural forms are listed below by family and language. afro-asiatic languages afro-asiatic languages mark plurals similarly. arabic, the major language in the group, marks its plurals in various ways, which are linked to gender and case. in brief, there are two types of plural in arabic: regular and irregular, both of which are productively used. while the latter exhibits internal and external vocalic changes which may involve prefixes, infixes, and suffixes like walad 'boy' versus its four plural forms 'awlad, wildan, wild, and wilda(t) (pronounced wildah at pause, also realized as wildeh, wilde, wildee in spoken arabic, depending on accent), 'boys', the former is divided into masculine and feminine forms. masculine plural is usually made by adding the nominative suffix –oon or its accusative variant -een to singular nouns such as muslim 'a muslim' v. muslimoon 'muslimsnom.' or muslimeen 'muslimsacc.' whereas feminine plural by suffixing –at to singular feminine nouns like kaas 'cup' v. kaasat 'cups', bint 'girl' v. banat 'girls'. it has to be noted that the –n can be deleted in certain grammatical (usually genitive) constructions, which need not concern us here (for further details, see jassem 2012f). zaidan ali jassem the arabic cognates or origins of plural markers in world languages: a radical linguistic theory approach 150 the other languages in the family have two or three forms at most. for example, akkadian uses two forms only which are linked to gender and case: (i) –ū/-i in the masculine as in šarr-um 'kingnom.' v. šarrū 'kingsnom.' and šarr-i 'kings acc./gen.' and (ii) –um/-im in the feminine as in šarr-at-um 'queennom.' v. šarr-āt-um 'queensnom.' and šarr-āt-im 'queens acc./gen.' (en.wikipedia.org 2015). hebrew usually utilizes two plural, gender-based suffixes: (i) –im for masculine nouns as in davar 'thing' v. davarim 'things', jeled 'boy' v. jeledim 'boys' and (ii) -ot for feminine ones as in mita 'bed' v. mitot 'beds' (en.wikipedia.org 2015). syriac employs the plural suffix –in with all types of nouns as in tannoor 'oven' v. tannoorin 'ovens', šeqle 'tax' v. šeqlin 'the taxes' and šeqlay 'taxes of' (en.wikipedia.org 2015). as in arabic, the –n is deleted in genitive constructions. amharic makes use of two forms: (i) – če is the commonest for all noun types as in farase 'horse' v. farasoče 'horses', beta 'house' v. betoča 'houses', seta 'woman' v. setoča 'women'; (ii) –te is less common as in masehafe 'book' v. masehafeta 'books' (learn101.org 2015). coptic uses –wa for all nouns as in pero:me 'the-man' v. pe-ro:mwa 'the-men' (en.wikipedia.org 2015). hausa employs several suffixes, which are (i) –una/-ani as in kaf 'cup' v. kafuna 'cups', fulawa 'flower' v. furanni 'flowers', (ii) –ai as in littafe 'book' v. littafai 'books', (iii) – wa as in itace 'tree' v. itatuwa 'trees', (iv) –ci as in mota 'car' v. motoci 'cars', (v) –ta as in mace 'woman' v. mata 'women', (vi) –je as in gida 'house' v. gidaje 'houses', and (vii) internal (irregular) vocalic change as in doki 'horse' v. dawaki 'horses' (learn 101.org 2015). berber is similar to arabic in many respects in having regular and irregular plurals (mylanguages.org 2015). for example, regular plurals add –ne as in oushan 'wolf' v. oushanne 'wolves', yisse 'horse' v. yissane 'horses'; irregular plurals involve internal vocalic change just like arabic as in nmare 'a tiger' v. nmoura 'tigers', ikarde 'monkey' v. ikourda 'monkeys' (all such words have arabic cognates, e.g., nimr and numoor). 3.2 altaic languages in japanese and korean, plurality is usually not indicated in both. that is, korean usually affixes nothing as in keob 'cup, cups', namja 'man, men', jib 'house, houses', amso 'cow, cows' (learn101.org 2015). however, it sometimes uses the plural suffix deur (deul) as in mal 'horse' v. mal deur 'horses', gae 'dog' v. gae deur 'dogs' (mylanguages.org 2015). similarly, japanese uses nothing as in koppu 'cup, cups', ie 'house, houses', ushi 'cow, cows'; however, in human nouns, the plural suffix tachi or its variant -tati may be added as in josei 'woman' v. josei tachi 'women', dansei 'man' v. dansei tachi 'men', gakusei 'student' v. gakusei-tati 'students', watasi 'i' v. watasi-tati 'we' (learn101.org 2015). 3.3 austronesian languages different strategies are used in marking their plurals. malay and sundanese both repeat the noun twice as in buku 'book' v. bukubuku 'books' (learn101.org 2015). javanese usually attaches nothing to nouns as in buku 'book, books', montor 'car, cars', negara 'country, countries', basa 'language, languages', wong wadon 'woman, women', wong lanang 'man, men'; however, repeating the noun may be used in animal names as in sapi 'cow' v. sapi-sapi 'cows' (learn101.org 2015). tagalog uses the prefix mga as in puno 'tree' v. mga puno 'trees', libro 'book' v. mga libro 'books' (learn101.org 2015). maori plural is indicated in various ways by means of the definite article, demonstrative pronouns, possessives, and vowel lengthening, e.g., te rakau 'the tree' v. nga rakau 'the trees', wahine 'woman' v. waahine 'women' (en.wikipedia.org 2015). 3.4 indo-european languages the largest family in speaker numbers the world over, their plural, which is often linked to gender and case, is marked differently and variously as has already been described in detail in jassem (2012f, 2015d). below is a brief exposition, though. indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 151 (i) in germanic languages, english uses (i) -s often as in cat, cats, (ii) –en sometimes as in ox, oxen, and (iii) irregular plural rarely as in man, men; cow, kine; fox, vixen. german uses (i) –en mainly as in student v. studenten, frau 'woman' v. frauen 'women', mensch 'man in general' v. menschen 'men in general', tasse 'cup' v. tassen 'cups', (ii) final vowel addition as in kuh 'cow' v. kühe 'cows', pferd 'horse v. pferde 'horses', and (iii) irregular plurals as in buch 'book' v. bücher 'books', mann v. männer 'men', haus v. häuser 'houses'. (ii) in romance languages, vocalic changes in all are usually applied. latin, the main language, links plurality to gender and case. in nominative masculine singular us-terminated nouns, -i is used such as stimulus v. stimuli, filius 'boy' v. filii 'boys'; in nominative neuter singular umfinal nouns, -a applies such as pomum 'apple' v. poma 'apples'; and in nominative feminine singular a-final nouns, -e is used as in femma 'woman' v. femmae 'women', formula v. formulae. in the accusative, -as is used in the neuter as in pomas 'applesacc.' and in the feminine as in femmas 'womenacc.'. other endings are used in the other cases which are not important here (see jassem 2012f, 2015d). french, portuguese and spanish plural adds –s to all nouns (learn101.org 2015). for example, spanish hombre 'man' v. hombres 'men'; mujer 'woman' v. mujeres 'women'; casa 'house' v. casas 'houses'; taza 'cup' v. tazas 'cups'; caballo 'horse' v. caballos 'horses'; vaca 'cow' v. vacas 'cows'. italian plural involves final vowel change of the –e/-i-type in all nouns as in uomo 'man' v. uomini 'men'; donna 'woman' v. donne 'women' v. casa 'house' v. case 'houses'; tazza 'cup' v. tazze 'cups'; cavallo 'horse' v. cavalli 'horses'; mucca 'cow' v. mucche 'cows' (learn101.org 2015). romanian plural is similar in general (learn101.org 2015). (iii) in slavic languages, russian plural is made by suffixing –i/-a as in dom 'house' v. doma 'houses', korova 'cow' v. korovi 'cows', zhenshina 'woman' v. zhenshini 'women', moozchina 'man' v. moozchini 'men' (learn101.org 2015). ukrainian, polish, czech, and macedonia plurals use a similar strategy to russian in which the plural suffix is –i or –a (learn101.org 2015). for example, czeck dom 'house' v. domy 'houses', krava 'cow' v. kravy 'cows', zena 'woman' v. zeny 'women', muzh 'man' v. muzhi 'men' (learn101.org 2015). (iv) in indo-aryan languages, persian uses two suffixes: (i) ha in objects and nonhumans as in kitab 'book' v. kitabha 'books', kul 'flower' v. kulha 'flowers', kaw 'cow' v. kawha 'cows'; and (ii) –an in humans as in mard 'man' v. mardan 'men', zan 'woman' v. zanan 'women'. sanskrit uses –(a)s (see jassem 2012f, 2015d), whose modern direct descendants are hindi and urdu (see below). kurdish utilises two suffixes: (i) –an in humans as in pyaw 'man' v. pyawan 'men', zhin 'woman' v. zhinan 'women', and (ii) –kan in objects and non-humans as in kteb 'book' v. ktebkan 'books', gwl 'flower' v. gwlkan 'flowers', dar 'tree' v. darekan 'trees'. bengali employs two suffixes also: (i) –ra in human noun plurals as in mahila 'woman' v. mahilara women' and (ii) gulo with all others as in kappa 'cup' v. kappagulo 'cups', garu 'cow' v. garugulo 'cows'. urdu uses three forms, which are (i) – in/un in objects and humans as in kitab 'book' v. kitabin 'books', karu 'car' v. karin 'cars', biala 'cup' v. bialian 'cups', 3awrat 'woman' v. khawatin 'women', darkhat 'tree' v. darkhatun 'trees', (ii) –at as in makan 'house' v. makanat 'houses', and (iii) zero (no change) as in adami 'man, men' and ka'i 'cow, cows'. like urdu, hindi uses three forms: (i) –en/-on, e.g., mhilaa 'woman' v. mhilaaen 'women', ghr 'house' v. ghron 'houses', gaaay 'cow' v. gaaayen 'cows', (ii) vowel change as in ghodeaa 'horse' v. ghodee 'horses', and (iii) zero plural (no change) as in aadmi 'man' v. aadmi 'men', kp 'cup' v. kp 'cups' (learn101.org 2015). zaidan ali jassem the arabic cognates or origins of plural markers in world languages: a radical linguistic theory approach 152 pashtu makes use of two forms: (i) – nah as in kor 'house' v. koronah 'houses', aas 'horse' v. aasoneh 'horses' and (ii) final vowel change as in bialah 'cup' v. biala 'horses', ghawa 'cow' v. ghawawa 'cows', sara 'man' v. sari 'men' (learn101.org 2015). punjabi uses three suffixes: (i) –am as in aurata 'woman' v. auratam 'women', gam 'cow' v. gamiam 'cows', (ii) vowel change as in ghora 'horse' v. ghore 'horses', and (iii) zero plural as in marada 'man, men', ghara 'house, houses' (learn101.org 2015). (v) in hellenic languages, modern greek plural, like ancient greek in general, adds (i) –s as in yenaika 'woman' v. yenaikes 'women', ayelatha 'cow' v. ayelathas 'cows', (ii) involves vocalic change or addition as in anthropos 'man' v. anthropoi 'men', spiti 'house' v. spitia 'houses', flitzani 'cup' v. flitzania 'cups', aloyo 'horse' v. aloya 'horses' (learn101.org 2015). neuter nouns turn on into –a as in bacterion v. bacteria. dravidian languages they have similar plural suffixes. in tamil, the suffix –gal (sometimes -kkal) is added to nouns which is coupled by changing the last consonant of the noun as well such as malai 'hill, mountain' v. malaigal 'hills'; karam 'hand' v. karangal 'hands'; kan 'eye' v. kangal 'eyes', nilaa 'moon' v. nilaakkal 'moons' (anguagereef.com 2015; learn101.org 2015). likewise, kannada attaches –galu to all kinds of nouns as in karadi 'bear' v. karadigalu 'bears', hasu 'cow' v. hasugalu 'cows', bekku 'cat' v. bekkugalu 'cats' (learn101.org 2015; mylanguages.org 2015). malayalam attaches the suffix -kal to all types of nouns as in patti 'dog', pattikal 'dogs'. telugu suffixes –lu to all nouns as in aavu 'cow' v. aavulu 'cows', manisi 'man' v. manisilu 'men', kappu 'cup' v. kappulu 'cups' (learn101.org 2015) mayan languages this is a small family, which indicates their plurals differently. for instance, yucatec uses three forms: (i) unmarked or zero plural, (ii) the suffixes –oob or -ob where the former is used with nouns that end in a consonant while the latter in a vowel as in na 'house' v. naob 'houses', and (iii) the suffix –i as in ac 'turtle' v. aci 'turtles', cay 'a fish' v. cayi 'fish', nal 'a corn' v. nali 'corn' (bolles 2001/2015). tzotzil uses the suffixes -et–ik as in mut 'bird' v. mut-et-ik 'birds'; its variants -t-ik (-ik) and -t-ak are used in possessives (en.wikipedia.org 2015). 3.7 niger-congo languages it has the most languages, numerically speaking, in which plurality is marked differently. for example, yoruba adds awon before all noun types as in arabirin 'woman' v. awon arabirin 'women', ife 'cup' v. awon ife 'cups', esin 'horse' v. awon esin 'horses' (learn101.org 2015). igbo employs two frontal markers: (i) umu is placed before human nouns as in nwanyi 'woman' v. umu nwayni 'women' and (ii) otutu before all others as in iko 'cup' v. otutu ikodu 'cups', efi 'cow' v. otutu efi 'cows' (learn101.org 2015). bantu languages these are a sub-family of niger-congo. for example, xhosa and zulu, which are closely related and are the most widely wellknown in the group, use similar strategies in general. both prefix iin objects as in incwadi 'book', iincwadi 'books', inkomo 'cow', iinkomo 'cows'. humans and animals have the prefixes amaand abaas in umfazi 'woman' v. abafazi 'women', indoda 'man' v. amadoda 'men', ihashe 'horse' v. amahashe 'horses' (learn101.org 2015). besides, zulu uses the prefix izto mark the plural of objects and animals as in indlu 'house' v. izindlu 'houses', imoto 'car' v. izimoto 'cars', imbali 'flower' v. izimbali 'flowers', inkomo 'cow' v. iziinkomo 'cows' (learn101.org 2015). sino-tibetan languages the second largest family in terms of speaker numbers, sino-tibetan languages, marks plurals similarly. for example, mandarin, the largest and biggest of all, suffixes –men to nouns and pronouns as in wo indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 153 'i' v. wo-men 'we', xuesheng 'student' v. xuesheng-men 'students'. in most cases, nothing is added to nouns like mă 'horse, horses'. to make up for the loss, numbers (e.g., 1, 2, 3) are often added before nouns (learn101.org 2015; mylanguages.org 2015). in burmese, myar is added to all nouns as in nwar 'cow' v. nwar myar 'cows', ain 'house' v. ain myar 'houses' (learn101.org 2015). turkic languages this is a rather small family, all whose plurals are similarly marked. for example, turkish, the main language, adds the plural suffix –ler/-lar to all nouns as in ev 'house' v. evler 'houses', kahve 'coffee' v. kahveler 'coffees', kitap 'book' v. kitaplar 'books' (www.cromwell-intl.com. 2015; learn101.org 2015). similarly, uzbek uses the same suffix in all noun types as in ayyol 'woman' v. ayyollar 'women', moshina 'car' v. moshinlar 'cars' (mylanguages.org 2015) and so do azeri and kazakh as in kamera 'a camera' v. kameralar 'cameras', teleba 'a student' v. telebeler 'students' (mylanguages.org 2015; learn101.org 2015). tai-kadai languages this is another small family with thai being the major language. thai plural is made by adding zero or nothing to singular (especially animal) nouns as in ma 'horse, horses', wua 'cow, cows' (learn101.org 2015). sometimes, other suffixes may be used, which need not concern us here. uralic languages this is a small family in which different endings are employed. in finnish, for example, although the plural is linked to case (eleven in number), the two or three most common endings are: (i) –(o)t in the nominative case as in talo 'house' v. talot 'houses', kirja 'book' v. kirjat 'books', (ii) –a in the partitive as in taloja 'houses', (iii) –en in the genitive as in talojen 'house's', and (v)–i/(o)i in a-final nouns as in muna 'egg' v. muni 'eggs', kana 'hen' v. kanoi 'hens'. all the other cases take their name from and end with a preposition as in taloissa 'in the houses', taloilla 'on/by house' (learn101.org 2015; mylanguages.org 2015; venla 2015). estonian plural adds –d as in karu 'bear', karud 'bears', kass 'cat', kassid 'cats' (mylanguages.org 2015; learn101.org 2015). hungarian plural attaches –k (-ak, -ek) as in no 'woman' v. nok 'women', haz 'house' v. hazak 'houses', lo 'horse' v. lovak 'horses' (learn101.org 2015). uto-aztec languages this is a small family where various suffixes are used. in nahuatl, the plural is formed by adding (i) –meh as in kojo-tl 'coyote; a kind of american wolf; lowly person' v. kojo-meh 'coyotes', (ii) –tin, (iii) reduplication sometimes, (iv) –wan in possessive plurals as in kal-li 'house', no-kal 'my house' v. nokalwan 'my houses' (en.wikipedia.org 2015). hopi plural is normally formed by adding (i) –m as in tsiro 'bird' v. tsirom 'birds' or (ii) by reduplication (grune 1997/2015). (note hopi tsiro and basque txir 'bird' are from arabic tair 'bird' via /t/-split into /t(s/x)/.) yaqui uses –im as well, e.g., miisi 'cat' v. miisim 'cats' (langendoen and fabian 2015). basque although basque is considered an isolate without sisters in europe (campbell 2006/2013; crowley 1997), jassem (2014i) rejected that and established its relationship to both arabic and indo-european languages, regrouped and renamed eurabian or urban (jassem 2015f). anyway, its plural attaches – ak to all nouns as in lorea 'flower' v. loreak 'flowers', autoa 'car' v. autoak 'cars'. results & discussion the results will mainly focus on the arabic lexical (consonantal) radicals or roots of plural markers in world languages and the changes that affected them. as the exact quality of the vowel or tone marks has little or no semantic impact whatsoever on the final output, it will be ignored as usual (jassem 2012-2015). the results will be presented family by family and language by language, all whose plural markers can be zaidan ali jassem the arabic cognates or origins of plural markers in world languages: a radical linguistic theory approach 154 traced back to arabic as a radical or root language directly and easily, though with a little explanation sometimes. afro-asiatic languages the arabic origins and/or source cognates of all their different plural markers can be easily and directly traced back as follows. a) akkadian –in (dual), syriac -in, berber – ne, and hausa –una/-ani are all true and identical cognates to arabic –een/-oon; b) akkadian –im/-um and hebrew –im could have developed from either (i) arabic –um 'a plural pronominal marker' as in anta 'you (sing.)' v. antum 'you (pl.)' via morphological shift or (ii) arabic – een/-oon in which /n/ evolved into /m/. c) hebrew -ot, hausa –ta and -ci, and amharic -te and –če all come from arabic –ta in which /t/ further developed into /s & ch/ in hausa and amharic; that is, -ta and -ci and –te and – če can be really treated as 'conditioned' variants; d) akkadian –u, coptic –wa, and hausa -wa derive from arabic –oo(n) in which /n/ is deleted in genitive constructions and/or –oo '3rd person plural pronominal marker'; e) hausa –ai and -je, akkadian –i, and arabic –ee(n) are true and identical cognates in the first of which /-ee/ became /j/; f) hausa irregular plural descends directly from arabic internal irregular/broken plural as in baaki 'weeper' v. bawaki 'weepers'. indo-european languages all their plurals have already been traced back to arabic roots in jassem (2012f, 2013a, 2015f) as follows: a) case apart, english -s, greek -s, latin -s, portuguese -s, spanish -s, french -s, sanskrit –s, and urdu -at all come directly from arabic –at via its evolution into /s/ as /t (d) & s/-variation is very common in these languages like democrat, democracy; intimate, intimacy; poetess, jeanette, henritta; amat (latin), liebt (german), loves (english); b) english -en, german –en, persian -an, kurdish -an, urdu –in/-un, hindi –en/-on, pashtu -nah, punjabi –am, bengali -ra descend straight from arabic –een/-oon via morphological shift in which /n/ became /m/ or /r/ in the last two as /n & r/ are considered variants in indoeuropean languages as in german and greek verbal marker –en (e.g., german lieben 'to love') compared to latin -re and french -er (e.g., latin amare 'to love'); c) irregular (and zero) plural forms in english, german, hindi, urdu, and punjabi of all types derive directly from the various arabic irregular plural forms; d) persian –ha descends straight from arabic –t which became /h/, a common sound process involving final /t/ at pause in arabic; e) plural forms involving final vowel change of the /-a, -e/-i, & -o/-u/-type in english, german, latin, italian, greek, sanskrit, hindi, russian, ukrainian, polish, czech, macedonian, pashtu, punjabi, all derive from the same arabic forms; f) kurdish –kan can be analyzed as (i) a combination of the two arabic plural suffixes –t and –een/-an via morphological shift and passing /t/ into /k/ or as (ii) a variant of –an/-een into which /k/ was inserted as a result of /ee/-mutation or palatalization into /k/; g) bengali –gulu derives from the same source postulated for dravidian languages below (3.5). altaic languages the main japanese and korean zero plurals are similar to some arabic nouns in this respect like insan 'human' and mar'at 'woman' which lack plural forms altogether but may indicate plurality as well. furthermore, after certain numerals like 11100 and 1000, the singular form of arabic nouns is used as in mi'at rajul 'lit., a hundred man'. in addition, the singular form may indicate the plural, a common linguistic process as in english man is weak/great, which means all men and women. as to the japanese plural markers – tachi amd –tati, they can be considered indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 155 variants in which /t/ changed into /ch/. as such, they derive from arabic –at via reduplication. korean deul/deur can be similarly treated in which /d/ developed from /t/ with /l/ being an insertion or a mutation of /n/ in accusative -t(in) as in kaasaatin 'cupsacc.'. 4.4 austronesian languages the reduplication of nouns in the plural in malay, sundanese, and javanese to a little extent, derives from a very common, similar arabic process where nouns are repeated in certain contexts as in masha al-awladu fardan fardan 'walked the-boys individual individuali.e., the boys walked one by one'. furthermore, arabic has various strategies for emphatic reduplication by using (i) bilateral verbs like kabb v. kabkab 'pour out' and (ii) nouns of the same verbs such as masha mashi(an) 'walked walking', katab kitaba(tan) 'write writing'. as to javanese zero plural marking, this can be accounted for in the same way as for korean and japanese above. tagalog mga and maori nga can be considered variants in which /n/ developed from /n/. as such, both derive from (i) the arabic pronominal plural marker –m into which /g/ was inserted or (ii) –een/-oon via reversal, turning /n/ into /m/, /g/-insertion, and morphological shift. as to maori's vowel lengthening, it is a kind of irregular plural, a common process in arabic and many other languages above. 4.5 dravidian languages all these language use similar or identical forms, which are –gal/-kkal in tamil, -galu in kannada, -kal in malayalam, all simplified to –ulu in telugu where /g (& k)/ were dropped. this being so, they can all be considered variants. consequently, they directly relate to arabic -at which split into /k (g) & l/. an alternative route would be the one for kurdish -kan above in which /(k &) n/ became /(g &) l/ (see 3.2f). 4.6 mayan languages yucatec –o(o)b derives from arabic –u via /b/-insertion or split from /w/. yucatec –i and zero plural both obtain from the same arabic source cognates as well. tzotzil –et-ik and its variants all derive from arabic -t via reduplication and turning /t/ into /k/. 4.7 niger-congo languages yoruba awon comes straight from arabic –oon via morphological shift in which it is used as a suffix (see above). as to igbo, the first form umu derives from the arabic pronominal plural marker – (u)m via morphological shift or from –oon, turning /n/ into /m/ as in yoruba above. the second marker otutu is derived from arabic – at via reduplication and morphological shift. 4.8 bantu languages zulu –iz can be considered a variant of arabic –t from which it directly obtains via /t/-mutation into /z/ and morphological shift. xhosa iis taken direct from arabic –i via morphological shift whereas ama-/aba-, which can be considered variants in which /m/ became /b/ or vice versa, descend directly from either (i) the arabic pronominal plural marker –(u)m via morphological shift or (ii) from –oon, turning /n/ into /m/ as in yoruba and igbo above. 4.9 sino-tibetan languages mandarin –men and burmese myar can be treated as variants in the latter of which /n/ became /r/. viewed thus, both may derive from either (i) the arabic pronominal plural marker –(u)m via /n/-split from /m/ and its subsequent evolution into /r/ in burmese besides morphological shift or (ii) from –een/–oon via /n/-split into /m & n/ in one and /m & r/ in the other. furthermore, mandarin zero plural is similar to japanese and korean besides other languages, whose arabic roots have already been stated. 4.10 turkic languages all turkic languages like azeri, kazakh, turkisk, and uzbek, use the same plural marker –lar/-ler, which can be considered a variant of arabic –een/-oon and its reflexes in indoeuropean languages such as english -en via zaidan ali jassem the arabic cognates or origins of plural markers in world languages: a radical linguistic theory approach 156 /n/-split into /l & r/. another route might be arabic –at, splitting into /l & r/. no other routes may account for it. 4.11 thai-kadai languages like chinese, japanese, and korean as well as other languages, the main thai zero plural markers derive from a similar arabic process. 4.12 uralic languages finnish -(o)t and estonian –d can be considered variants, which both come direct from arabic –t, turning it into /d/ in estonian. as to finnish –a, –(o)i, and –en, they are all taken straight from the same arabic forms as shown above. hungarian –k (-ak, -ek) are all variants, coming directly from arabic -at via its mutation into /k/. 4.13 uto-aztecan languages these languages use the same or similar forms. nahuatl –meh, hopi –m, and yaqui –im can be regarded as variants via /h/-insertion or deletion. thus all may be derived from either (i) the arabic pronominal plural marker –m or (ii) –een/-oon via its mutation into /m/ plus /h/-insertion or loss; nahuatl -tin comes from a combination of two arabic plural markers –t and –een via morphological shift; nahuatl -wan is from arabic –oon/-een, turning /oo/ into /w/; and nahuatl and hopi reduplicate plural descends from a similar arabic process via morphological shift like malay above. 4.14 basque basque –ak is very much akin, in fact identical, to hungarian –k (-ak, -ek), all of which derive from arabic –at via its mutation into /k/. in summary, the total number of language families is 14 with 60 languages, all whose plural markers were traced back to arabic successfully, easily, elegantly, smoothly, and directly. it can be clearly seen in the results that plurality is a very common morphological (inflectional) feature in all world languages that is formed in the same or similar ways. that is, plural markers like –s, at, –in, -im, and vocalized in world languages are true cognates for sharing identical or similar forms and meanings, whose differences, however, are all due to natural and plausible causes and different routes of phonetic, morphological, grammatical, and semantic change. thus the results give further support to jassem's (2015i) study of the arabic origins of demonstrative pronouns and jassem's (2015j) of negative particles in 112 world languages from 12 language families, all of which had arabic true cognates. they also back up his studies on the arabic origins of personal pronouns in indo-european (jassem 2012c), chinese (jassem 2015h), and basque and finnish (jassem 2014i). in particular, they agree with his investigation of the arabic roots of indo-european number and gender markers (jassem 2012f). on a more general level, indeed, they substantiate jassem (2012a-f, 2013a-q, 2014a-k, 2015a-g) in which english, german, french, latin, greek, sanskrit and arabic were all found to be not only members of the same family but also rather dialects of the same language. this led the researcher to generally classify these languages as eurabian or urban which is a blend of indo-european and arabian languages (jassem 2015c: 41, 2015d). in light of the above picture, the results indicate that the traditional classification of world languages into families is grossly inaccurate, furthermore. as languages from different families around the world share a very limited number of the same or similar plural markers or formsi.e., –en/-an, –im, -s/-as, –t/-ot/otuto, and vocalized plural, this clearly indicates that classifying them into separate, unrelated families is certainly wrong. for example, arabic -m, akkadian and hebrew -im, mandarin men, burmese myar, hopi -m, natuatl -meh, and igbu –imu are all identical cognates, to which tagalog mga and maori nga, furthermore, can be added via the replacement of /m/ by /n/ and /g/-insertion. similarly, arabic -oon/-een, akkadian (and arabic) –in (dual), syriac -in, berber –ne, and hausa –una/-ani, english -en, german –en, persian -an, kurdish -an, urdu –in/-un, hindi –en/-on, pashtu -nah, punjabi –am, bengali – indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 157 ra, yoruba awon, and finnish -jen are identical cognates. another such example is arabic –at, hebrew -ot, hausa –ta and -ci, and amharic -te and –če, urdu –at, tzotzil –et-ik, finnish –ot, all of which are identical cognates also. also vocalized and irregular plurals are similar everywhere like arabic, latin, finnish, russian, and so on. thus, as can be clearly seen, grouping these languages into separate, unrelated families is certainly wrong. now what does all that entail? to begin with, it entails the need for reclassifying world languages on new grounds, which is a "topic of great current interest in historical linguistics" (cmpbell: 344). one such attempt is jassem (2015c-d) which grouped arabic and indo-european languages into one family, called eurabian or urban. next, this implies by necessity, on a global level, that all human languages descended from a common source language from which, in this particular case, all plural markers, just like demonstrative pronouns, negation, and personal pronouns, in all world languages are derived but are, nevertheless, used selectively and variably where some markers occur in some languages but not in others, for instance. the sheer percentage of shared plural markers between arabic and the other languages, which amounted to 100%, indicates such descent very clearly (cf. cowley (997: 172-173). what is the status of such an ancestral or early common language? this can be answered with reference to the radical linguistic theory which the results support on all theoretical and analytical grounds. theoretically, the main principle which states that all human languages are genetically related, which descended from a single parent language and survived until today with arabic and indo-european languages like english, german, french, latin, greek, and sanskrit being its closest descendants is, therefore, verifiably sound and empirically true. more precisely, all human languages stemmed from an earlier, perfect, suddenlyemerged language, called radical (world) language from which all human languages initially came and which has incessantly and variably survived into today's languages, albeit getting simpler and simpler over time. in other words, the radical language could never have died out and will never do so beyond recognition. with proper methodology, it can be easily recovered and/or identified as already shown in this work (cf. campbell 2006: 360). as this work clearly demonstrated, it seems that its closest or most conservative and productive descendant is arabic for sharing all plural markers with the other languages, thus having preserved almost all its features (jassem 2014h-k, 2015a-d). the next closest languages are european languages on the grounds of geographical proximity: i.e., the geographically nearer, the linguistically and genetically closer. in fact, all indo-european languages were already found to have descended directly from arabic (for details, see jassem 2015a-b, 2015d: 131-132; 2014ab, 2014e). so, as all the plural markers of all types, like demonstratives and negative particles (jassem 2015i-j), in all world languages can be easily traced back to arabic only, it can thus be safely said that arabic is the common source or the radical word language which has kept it almost intact. the exact time and place of the split-up between arabic and such languages is immaterial although one can safely say that the original place of the radical language has been where arabic has continuously been spoken over the ages (for details, see jassem 2015e-j). the permanence, sustenance or survival of the radical or root world language has already been established in a number of studies. the first study was jassem (2015h), which showed that demonstrative pronouns in almost all world languages (96% of speakers) are shared among them all and which, furthermore, could all be traced back to arabic. again this confirms that arabic has inherited and maintained all the features of the radical world languagei.e., arabic is the radical language itself. the second evidence came from jassem (2015j) which manifested that negation in world languages is expressed in a limited number of similar or identical markers or forms, all of which were successfully traced back to arabic also. the third, though a little more limited, evidence zaidan ali jassem the arabic cognates or origins of plural markers in world languages: a radical linguistic theory approach 158 has been provided by tracing personal pronouns in indo-european languages (jassem 2012c, 2013l), chinese (jassem 2014h), and basque and finnish (jassem 2014i) back into arabic as well. observations from other world languages such as mayan exhibit a very close relationship and lead to the same conclusion. the fourth evidence comes from divine and theological or religious terms like hallelujah (halleluiah, alleluia) which variably occurs in all world languages and is traced back to arabic (jassem 2012a, 2o14e). more precisely, hallelujah derives from a reduced and merged form of arabic la ilaha illa allah '(there's) no god but god', where halle is allah 'god' in reverse, lu is la 'no', and jah is a reduction and merger of ilaha illa iah 'god but him' via /l & i/-merger, a common sound process in arabic and some european languages like spanish and french. besides, further evidence may be derived from the biblical names of ancient prophets and persons like adam, eve, noah, abraham, saleh, hood, moses, jesus christ, charles, john, matthew, paul, peter, etc. (jassem 2014f, 2015j). as opposed to other languages, only in arabic do such names have instantly recognizable meanings and are in currently extensive practice or usage as normal words like nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs (jassem 2014f, 2015j). jassem (2015j) adduced three main reasons for postulating a radical or root world language, from which all human languages stemmed and which must have been perfect on all counts. to start with, language acquisition is impossible in isolation and without contact with and exposure to others. in other words, man acquires the language he was born into from his parents, family, and community, regardless of time and place. without them, man could never speak or utter a single, meaningful word. that is, the first language ever was perfect from its sudden start. that language was then passed down with little changes from generation to generation in the central area of the birthplace of humanity, now commonly called the middle east. secondly, as language change involves simplification in the main, it entails that the root language was fuller and more varied. in other words, it had a larger word stock or vocabulary, more word forms or morphemes, and more grammatical endings and/or structures that are variably maintained or preserved in world languages. finally, because totally new words can never be invented but are rather recombined from existing ones, the radical language must have been completely and fully developed at all linguistic levels: phonetic or phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic or lexical. as a consequence, reconstructing an old world language is needless and/or should agree with an old world language, the best representative of which is arabic; rather that proto-language, called radical language here, is still very much alive and vibrant, having variably survived into today's languages, with arabic being its closest descendant as the above data clearly shows (for detail, see jassem 2014h: 254-256, 2014i: 116-117; 2014k, 2015a-b). thus the quest should focus on relating those languages to it instead of reconstructing hypothetical, fictitious languages. the above-mentioned evidence from plural markers, negative terms, personal pronouns, religious terms, proper names substantiate that claim. jassem (20122015) followed that practice in all such studies, in fact. now, turning to the analytical level, the procedures of the radical linguistic theory all operated neatly and smoothly on all levels despite their limited occurrence due to the linguistic nature of the plural markers themselves. phonetically speaking, the sound changes were natural and plausible, cyclic and multi-directional, including processes like substitution, deletion, reversal, merger, split, reordering, reduction, and so on. morphologically, all inflectional and derivational affixes have true arabic cognates (for detail, see jassem 2012f, 2013a-b, 2013l, and 2015d). furthermore, plural markers have multiple inflectional functions (e.g., person, gender, case) and derivational ones (e.g., nouns, verbs) as happens in eurabian or urban languages (jassem 2012f, jassem 2013a-b, jassem 2015d). indonesian efl journal, vol. 1(2) july 2015 issn 2252-7427 159 semantically, morphological stability was the commonest pattern where most plural markers preserved their basic meanings across the languages, e.g., -een/-oon (-en, -in, -an), -um (-im, -m, -meh, -men, myar), -at (-t, otutu, tati), –s (-as), and vocalized plural (-a, -e/-i, –o/-u). the recurrence of morphological convergence in the data was due to formal and semantic similarity between arabic forms, on the one hand, and their cognates in other languages, on the other. for instance, -m (-im, -meh, -men) might derive from two arabic formally and semantically similar markers, which are –um and –een (see 4 above). although only one cognate might be the ultimate source in the end, no need is presently felt to specify which one it might be; the reader may judge. morphological shift was widespread; it occurred in zulu and khosa by moving the plural suffix from end to beginning of word. the same happened in niger-congo's yoruba and igbo in which it is used a separate word. it also occurred in arabic –um which moved from a pronominal plural marker to a noun plural marker in hebrew and hopi, for example. morphological divergence was not attested. morphological split affected arabic ma, which might have resulted in all -m-based and –n-based affixes, e.g., english -in and chinese and burmese -men/myar. morphological change obtained in all those languages with zero plural like chinese, burmese, japanese, korean, thai, javanese, and so on. finally, morphological variability recurred in the data, whether at the level of the different forms of the same markers within the same language such as english –s in its different pronunciations like cats, dogs, kisses or across the languages like english -s, german -t, french –s/-aux, latin -as, finnish – t, urdu –at, arabic –at, hebrew –ot, hausa – ta, japanese tati, and igbu otutu (see 4 above and 6.c below). arabic, in particular, is replete with linguistic variability of all plural types such as the suffixes –oon/-een and –oo/-ee/aa and multiple plurals of the same word (see 3.1 above). conclusion the main findings of this study can be summed up as follows: i) plural markers in all world languages are true cognates with similar or identical forms and functions, whose differences are due to natural and plausible causes and different routes of linguistic change; all can be reduced to four or five main types-s/-t-based, m-based, n-based, vowel-based, and unmarked (zero) plural, which can all easily be traced back to arabic as follows: a) arabic -um, akkadian and hebrew -im, punjabi –am, hopi -m, natuatl -meh, igbu – imu, mandarin men, and burmese myar are all identical cognates, to which tagalog mga and maori nga can be added via /g/insertion; b) arabic -oon/-een, akkadian –in (dual), syriac -in, berber –ne, and hausa –una/ani, english -en, german –en, persian an, kurdish -an, urdu –in/-un, hindi – en/-on, pashtu -nah, bengali –ra, yoruba awon, and finnish -jen are identical cognates; c) kurdish –kan, bengali –gulu, tamil –gal (-kkal), kannada –gal(u), and malayalam –ulu might have been brought about by (i) combining arabic –t and –an/-een into one via /-t & n/-mutation into /-k (g) & l/ or (ii) by /t/-split into /k (g) & l/, followed by /k/-loss in the last. d) arabic –at, urdu –at, hebrew -ot, igbu otutu, hausa –ta and -ci, and amharic -te and –če, tzotzil –et-ik, finnish –ot, and japanese tati/tachi are identical cognates via reduplication in some and passing /t/ into /s (ch)/ in others; besides, persian – ha, hungarian –k, basque –ak, and zulu – iz resulted from turning /t/ into /h, k, & z/ in that order plus morphological shift in the last; e) noun reduplication in malay, sundanese, and javanese has true arabic cognates; f) vocalized plurals in all the languages like latin, italian, german, and russian have true arabic cognates; g) irregular plurals in all languages have true arabic cognates; h) turkish, azeri, kazakh and uzbek –lar/ler derive from arabic –een/-oon or -at, splitting into /l & r/; and i) zero plural in javanese, mandarin, japanese, korean, thai, and to a little zaidan ali jassem the arabic cognates or origins of plural markers in world languages: a radical linguistic theory approach 160 extent, in english, german, hindi, urdu, and punjabi have arabic cognates. ii) the radical linguistic theory has been theoretically and analytically adequate for genetically relating plural markers in all world languages to arabic, which entails that the traditional classification of world languages into separate, unrelated families is grossly mistaken. theoretically, all these languages initially originated from one language that may be called radical or root world language, which was not only perfect from onset and outset but also has variably survived into today's languages. as arabic has, besides its phonetic and morphological capacity, variety, and complexity, the largest plural markers compared to those in the other languages, it can be safely said that it has inherited almost all the radical language features, thereby showing its incessant permanence as the most conservative of all: i.e., it is the radical language itself. analytically, the main phonetic changes were natural and plausible, cyclic and multidirectional, including substitution, insertion, reversal, reordering, split, and merger; lexically, the recurrent patterns were stability, convergence, shift, split, and variability. iii) finally, future research is needed to further substantiate the theory and to test its applicability to language teaching, lexicology and lexicography, translation (jassem 2014d, 2015a), cultural (including anthropological, historical, social, religious) awareness, understanding, and heritage for promoting cross-cultural and global understanding and cooperation in all areas of human life. acknowledgements sincere thanks are warmly extended to everyone who contributed to this research in any way worldwide. emeritus professor patrick bennett of the university of wisconsin at madison deserves special mention for suggesting casting the comparative net wider and using language mass comparisons and so does fahrus zaman fadhly, managing editor indonesian efl journal (ieflj), for support and feedback. for my supportive and inspiring wife, amanie m. ibrahim, i remain indebted as ever. references alafaghani, s. 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(5th ed.). cambridge: cambridge university press. http://www.languageinindia.com/ http://www.journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee/index http://www.journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/erjee/index http://www.academia.edu/ http://www.joell.in/ http:// http:// http://www.wals.info/ http://www.venla.info/grammar-nomines.php http://www.wikipedia.org/ http://www.mylanguages.org/korean_plural.php%202015 http://www.mylanguages.org/korean_plural.php%202015 http://www.en.wiktionary.org/ indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 65 authentic narrative texts in english translation version of holy quran: a genre-based approach puji sumarsono department of english education, faculty of teacher training and education, university of muhammadiyah malang, indonesia e-mail: pujisumarsono@gmail.com apa citation: sumarsono, p. (2018). authentic narrative texts in english translation version of holy quran: a genre-based approach. indonesian efl journal, 4(1), 65-72. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v4i1.801. received: 15-11-2017 accepted: 29-12-2017 published: 01-01-2018 introduction language exposure is crucial for beginners or students who learn english as their second or foreign language. students are difficult to directly speak and write english if they never hear english conversation or monologue and never see the product of english in term of result of writing. in other words, listening and reading might be activities that students could do before they learn to speak and write. without any input obtained through reading and listening, learning speaking and writing will be complicated and frustrated for students. text as a product of writing is available and easily accessed around us. this circumstance, consequently, insists the ease use of reliable teaching material and effective teaching reading. one of the emerging issues in teaching reading is the use of genre-based approach. ningsih (2015) claims that since the implementation of school-based curriculum (ktsp) in 2006, the use of genre-based approach has become increasingly influential in a number of education levels and contexts such as elementary, secondary, professional, and community context. in addition, english language teaching in indonesian schools usually introduces various genres of text. the term ‘genre’ and ’type’ is often used interchangeably. they look similar but actually different. type is broader than genre. types of the text usually includes descriptive, narrative, expository, and argumentative, but genres of text cover more details such as narrative type which is categorized into some genres like science fiction, folktale, fables, myth, legend, etc. the following explanation could explain more about the different between genre and type of text. …more than one genre may share the same type. that is, the genres of advertisements and police reports may both share the text type of description. equally, a single genre, abstract: language exposure is crucial for beginners or students who learn english as their second or foreign language. students are difficult to directly speak and write english if they never hear english conversation or monologue and never see the product of english in term of result of writing. text as a product of writing is available and easily accessed around us. this circumstance, consequently, insists the ease use of reliable teaching material and effective teaching reading. as it was found in australia and also the author experience, when teacher had students to freely write, 90% of the students wrote recount and narrative texts. narrative texts have important role of narrative that every word in narrative is potentially memorable and possible to contribute to understanding text easily. in fact, it was found that there are many narrative texts in english translation of holy qur’an. however, they have their own typical. keywords: authentic, english translation of holy qur’an, genre-based approach, narrative text puji sumarsono authentic narrative texts in english translation version of holy quran: a genre-based approach 66 such as formal letters, may be associated with more than one text type; in this case, exposition and problem-solution (paltridge, 1996). elashri (2013) concludes that genre-based approach is an approach of teaching reading in which the text as teaching materials could be analyzed based on the specific of language features. for example, a text reveals recipes are known to have the feature of procedural text. although this approach is usually applied to teach writing, however, it could be modified to teach other skill like reading. the idea to apply genre-based approach then should get support in form of the availability of various kinds of text as the more various texts available the easier students and teachers do teaching and learning activities using genre-based. a source which provides plenty of genres of the text is holy qur’an. it is believed that holy qur’an which comprises of 30 chapters, 114 suras, about 6236 verses, and 600 pages for holy qur’an printed in saudi arabia, one third tells story. in addition to highlighting of holy quran which comprise of many story, emilia (2011) mentions that in australia when teacher had students to freely write, 90% of the students wrote recount and narrative texts. this similar to the author’s experience in teaching writing, when he had the students to freely write, the students mostly wrote narrative. students prefer to choose narrative instead of other type of writing since it is the easiest part in which the ideas of story have already existed on their mind. they just need to explore and construct them into a paragraph. narrative text tells series of events (gorlach, 2004) and has characters and dialogue and action (serravalo, 2010). toolan (2016) mentions the important role of narrative that every vocabulary in narrative is potentially memorable and possible to contribute to understanding text easily. thus, it is essential to explore narrative text from various sources. regarding the holy qur’an as the source of narrative texts, it would have some benefits. first, content of the holy qur’an guides people to live successfully in the world and hereafter. it leads people to have noble character as it has people and the readers to do good deeds and to avoid doing bad deeds. more specifically, the story in the holy qur’an tells about those who were successful and failed in the past so that it could be a lesson for people in order that they will not experience the same thing as it was experienced by the formers. second, as the holy qur’an is categorized as an old scripture, the english translation version keeps the originality of the language or terms so that old english appear in great quantities. varied english terms could enrich reader’s vocabulary. third, numerous texts are written for several times in different contexts. this redundancy trains readers to memorize vocabulary easily and provide more language exposure. in short, reading narrative text of english translation of holy qur’an may be able to improve english skills and guide to be better people. besides, coffman & reed (2010) argue that teacher should consider three elements that must be attached in teaching and learning process using narrative texts. first, children must be exposed to the consistent use of narrative text terms including setting, plot, and resolution. second, children must be taught that narratives have a regular composition. the development of the narrative could be described as a causal chain with one event in the story leading to another. third, children should learn that narrative texts have connectivity which is based on information that is important to the causal chain. based on the explanations above, the objective of the research is to describe narrative texts in holy quran so that the english translation version could be a source of teaching and learning english. the author hopes this study has contributions for students or readers and lecturers. students and readers can use the result of this study as the source of independent learning materials. at the same time, they could learn english and islam deeper through reading this text. for the lecturers of the english department and also english teacher at schools, it could provide indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 67 more sources of reading text to teach reading so that reading becomes more interesting. method qualitative approach was applied in this research as it was intended to describe the narrative texts in the holy qur’an. the source of the research was english translation of holy qur’an which consists of 30 chapters and 114 suras. the english translation used was according to yusuf ali’s translation. the instrument used in this research was document analysis. besides, in qualitative research the main instrument used was the author himself. it means that the research result depended a lot on the ability of the author to collect and analyze the data. the result, therefore, becomes subjective as it was interpreted by the author. some steps to collect the data were reading and understanding the whole pages of the holy qur’an, identifying narrative texts according to each sura, coding the texts according to each sura, and drawing conclusion. results and discussion based on the result of analysis, it was found that were a lot of texts which were categorized as narrative texts. among 114 suras, 19 suras consist of narrative texts and 95 suras which have no narrative text. however, when it is said that a certain sura tells a story or has a narrative text, it does not mean that the story was written in the whole sura, it is usually located in certain parts of the sura. here are the narrative texts found in english translation of qur’an which are described according to its sura. sura 2. baqara, or the heifer tells about the creation of man, grace of god for children of israil, retaliation against the attitudes of children of israel, the story of the slaughter of heifer, jews’ attitudes toward god’s messengers, and abraham prophet. an example of the text which tells about the creation of man is in sura 2. baqara, or the heifer; verse 30-39. (30) behold, thy lord said to the angels: "i will create a vicegerent on earth." they said: "wilt thou place therein one who will make mischief therein and shed blood?whilst we do celebrate thy praises and glorify thy holy [name]?" he said: "i know what ye know not." (31) and he taught adam the names of all things; then he placed them before the angels, and said: "tell me the names of these if ye are right.” (32) they said: "glory to thee, of knowledge we have none, save what thou hast taught us: in truth it is thou who art perfect in knowledge and wisdom." (33) he said: "o adam! tell them their names." when he had told them, allah said: "did i not tell you that i know the secrets of heaven and earth, and i know what ye reveal and what ye conceal?" (34). and behold, we said to the angels: "bow down to adam" and they bowed down. not so iblis: he refused and was haughty: he was of those who reject faith. (35) we said: "o adam! dwell thou and thy wife in the garden; and eat of the bountiful things therein as [where and when] ye will; but approach not this tree, or ye run into harm and transgression." (36) then did satan make them slip from the [garden], and get them out of the state [of felicity] in which they had been. we said: "get ye down, all [ye people], with enmity between yourselves. on earth will be your dwelling-place and your means of livelihood for a time." (37) then learnt adam from his lord words of inspiration, and his lord turned towards him; for he is oft-returning, most merciful. (38) we said: "get ye down all from here; and if, as is sure, there comes to you guidance from me, whosoever follows my guidance, on them shall be no fear, nor shall they grieve. (39) "but those who reject faith and belie our signs, they shall be companions of the fire; they shall abide therein." sura 3. al-i-imran, or the family of imran tells a story of family of imran, badr and uhud battle. an example of the text which tells about badr and battle uhud is in sura 3 al-i-imran verse 121-129. (121) remember that morning thou didst leave thy household [early] to post the faithful at their stations for puji sumarsono authentic narrative texts in english translation version of holy quran: a genre-based approach 68 battle: and allah heareth and knoweth all things: (122) remember two of your parties meditated cowardice; but allah was their protector, and in allah should the faithful [ever] put their trust. (123) allah had helped you at badr, when ye were a contemptible little force; then fear allah; thus may ye show your gratitude. (124) remember thou saidst to the faithful: "is it not enough for you that allah should help you with three thousand angels [specially] sent down? (125) "yea, if ye remain firm, and act aright, even if the enemy should rush here on you in hot haste, your lord would help you with five thousand angels making a terrific onslaught. (126) allah made it but a message of hope for you, and an assurance to your hearts: [in any case] there is no help except from allah. the exalted, the wise: (127) that he might cut off a fringe of the unbelievers or expose them to infamy, and they should then be turned back, frustrated of their purpose. (128) not for thee, [but for allah], is the decision: whether he turn in mercy to them, or punish them; for they are indeed wrong-doers. (129) to allah belongeth all that is in the heavens and on earth. he forgiveth whom he pleaseth and punisheth whom he pleaseth; but allah is oft-forgiving, most merciful. sura 4. nisaa, or the woman. an example of the text which tells about the vengeance of god against the transgression of the jews is in sura 4 verse 153-162. (153) the people of the book ask thee to cause a book to descend to them from heaven: indeed they asked moses for an even greater [miracle], for they said: "show us allah in public," but they were dazed for their presumption, with thunder and lightning. yet they worshipped the calf even after clear signs had come to them; even so we forgave them; and gave moses manifest proofs of authority. (154) and for their covenant we raised over them [the towering height] of mount [sinai]; and [on another occasion] we said: "enter the gate with humility"; and [once again] we commanded them: "transgress not in the matter of the sabbath." and we took from them a solemn covenant. (155) [they have incurred divine displeasure]: in that they broke their covenant; that they rejected the signs of allah; that they slew the messengers in defiance of right; that they said, "our hearts are the wrappings [which preserve allah's word; we need no more]";nay, allah hath set the seal on their hearts for their blasphemy, and little is it they believe;(156) that they rejected faith; that they uttered against mary a grave false charge; (157) that they said [in boast], "we killed christ jesus the son of mary, the messenger of allah";but they killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them, and those who differ therein are full of doubts, with no[certain] knowledge, but only conjecture to follow, for of a surety they killed him not: (158) nay, allah raised him up unto himself; and allah is exalted in power, wise; (159) and there is none of the people of the book but must believe in him before his death; and on the day of judgment he will be a witness against them;(160) for the iniquity of the jews we made unlawful for them certain [foods] good and wholesome which had been lawful for them;in that they hindered many from allah's way; (161) that they took usury, though they were forbidden; and that they devoured men's substance wrongfully;we have prepared for those among them who reject faith a grievous punishment. (162) but those among them who are well-grounded in knowledge, and the believers, believe in what hath been revealed to thee and what was revealed before thee: and [especially] those who establish regular prayer and practise regular charity and believe in allah and in the last day: to them shall we soon give a great reward. sura 5. maida, or the table spread tells about the reluctance of the jewish nation to obey the command of the prophet moses to enter into palestine and its consequences, the story of the first murder, the curse of god against the jews, the story of the prophet jesus, and the causes of god's curse on the jews. an indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 69 example of the text which tells about the first murder in the world and its consequences is in sura 5 maida, or the table spread verse 2732. (27) they said: "o moses! while they remain there, never shall we be able to enter, to the end of time. go thou, and thy lord, and fight ye two, while we sit here (and watch)." (28) he said: "o my lord! i have power only over myself and my brother: so separate us from this rebellious people!" (29) allah said: "therefore will the land be out of their reach for forty years: in distraction will they wander through the land: but sorrow thou not over these rebellious people. (30) recite to them the truth of the story of the two sons of adam. behold! they each presented a sacrifice (to allah): it was accepted from one, but not from the other. said the latter: "be sure i will slay thee." "surely," said the former, "allah doth accept of the sacrifice of those who are righteous." (31) "if thou dost stretch thy hand against me, to slay me, it is not for me to stretch my hand against thee to slay thee: for i do fear allah, the cherisher of the worlds." (32) "for me, i intend to let thee draw on thyself my sin as well as thine, for thou wilt be among the companions of the fire, and that is the reward of those who do wrong." sura 7. araf, or the heights tells about the awards of god on the prophet adam and his descendants, the story of messengers (noah, hud, salih, luth, shu’aib, moses). an example of the text which tells a story about noah is in sura 7. araf, or the heights verse 59-64. 59. we sent noah to his people. he said: "o my people! worship allah! ye have no other god but him. i fear for you the punishment of a dreadful day! (60) the leaders of his people said: "ah! we see thee evidently wandering [in mind]."(61). he said: "o my people! no wandering is there in my [mind]: on the contrary i am a messenger from the lord and cherisher of the worlds! (62) "i but fulfil towards you the duties of my lord's mission: sincere is my advice to you, and i know from allah something that ye know not. (63) "do ye wonder that there hath come to you a message from your lord, through a man of your own people, to warn you,so that ye may fear allah and haply receive his mercy?" (64) but they rejected him, and we delivered him, and those with him, in the ark: but we overwhelmed in the flood those who rejected our signs. they were indeed a blind people! sura 10. yunus, or jonah tells about the story of messengers (noah, moses, and jonah). an example of the text which tells a story about moses is in sura 10. yunus, or jonah (71-103). 71. relate to them the story of noah. behold! he said to his people: "o my people, if it be hard on your [mind] that i should stay [with you] and commemorate the signs of allah,yet i put my trust in allah. get ye then an agreement about your plan and among your partners, so your plan be on to you dark and dubious. then pass your sentence on me, and give me no respite. (72) "but if ye turn back, [consider]: no reward have i asked of you: my reward is only due from allah, and i have been commanded to be of those who submit to allah's will [in islam]." (73) they rejected him, but we delivered him, and those with him, in the ark, and we made them inherit [the earth], while we overwhelmed in the flood those who rejected our signs. then see what was the end of those who were warned [but heeded not]! (74) then after him we sent [many] messengers to their peoples: they brought them clear signs, but they would not believe what they had already rejected beforehand. thus do we seal the hearts of the transgressors. (75) then after them sent we moses and aaron to pharaoh and his chiefs with our signs. but they were arrogant: they were a people in sin. (76) when the truth did come to them from us, they said: "this is indeed evident sorcery!" (77) said moses: "say ye [this] about the truth when it hath [actually] reached you? is sorcery [like] this? but sorcerers will not prosper." (verse 78-103 can be read in the translation of holy quran). puji sumarsono authentic narrative texts in english translation version of holy quran: a genre-based approach 70 sura 11. hud, or the prophet hud tells about the story of messengers (noah, hud, shalih, abraham and luth, shu’aib, moses). an example of the text which tells a story about moses is in sura 11. hud, or the prophet hud verse 50-60. (50) to the 'ad people [we sent] hud, one of their own brethren. he said: "o my people! worship allah! ye have no other god but him. [your other gods] ye do nothing but invent! (51) "o my people! i ask of you no reward for this [message]. my reward is from none but him who created me: will ye not then understand? (52) "and o my people! ask forgiveness of your lord, and turn to him [in repentance]: he will send you the skies pouring abundant rain, and add strength to your strength: so turn ye not back in sin!" (53) they said: "o hud! no clear [sign] that hast thou brought us, and we are not the ones to desert our gods on thy word! nor shall we believe in thee! (54) "we say nothing but that [perhaps] some of our gods may have seized thee with imbecility." he said: "i call allah to witness, and do ye bear witness, that i am free from the sin of ascribing, to him, (55) "other gods as partners! so scheme [your worst] against me, all of you, and give me no respite. (56) "i put my trust in allah, my lord and your lord! there is not a moving creature, but he hath grasp of its fore-lock. verily, it is my lord that is on a straight path. (57) "if ye turn away,i [at least] have conveyed the message with which i was sent to you. my lord will make another people to succeed you, and you will not harm him in the least. for my lord hath care and watch over all things." (58) so when our decree issued, we saved hud and those who believed with him, by [special] grace from ourselves: we saved them from a severe penalty. (59) such were the 'ad people: they rejected the signs of their lord and cherisher; disobeyed his messengers; and followed the command of every powerful, obstinate transgressor. (60) and they were pursued by a curse in this life,and on the day of judgment. ah! behold! for the 'ad rejected their lord and cherisher! ah! behold! removed [from sight] were 'ad the people of hud! the other narrative texts are summarized in the following explanation. sura 12. yusuf, or joseph mostly tells about a single apostle that is yusuf or joseph. sura 15. al-hijr, or the rocky tract tells about the history of messengers (luth and abraham and his gues, and thamud people. sura 18. kahf, or the cave tells about the people of the cave —7 young men who slept soundly in the cave for 300 years old, to escape the cruelty of the king of dikyanus —, and the story of moses. sura 31. luqman (the wise) tells a story about luqman’s advices to his son. sura 32. sajda, or adoration tells a story about the entire process of the creation of a human being. sura 34. saba, or the city of saba tells about the intelligence of david and solomon, the refusal of saba people. sura 36. ya-sin tells about the story of a city that should be a lesson for the people of mecca. sura 37. saffat, or those ranged in ranks tells about the story of abraham destroyed idols, ismail slaughter, favor for the messengers (moses, aaron, elias, luth, and jonah). sura 38. sad tells about the messengers (david, solomon, ayub), adam and iblis (satan). sura 40. mumin, or the believer tells about lessons from the story of moses. sura 41. ha mim tells about ‘ad and thamud people. sura 43. zukhruf, or gold adornments tells about abraham as an ancestor who against the old tradition, the fall of the pharaoh, jesus invited his people to believe in allah. sura 44. dukhan, or smoke (or mist) tells about the story of moses and pharaoh. sura 46. ahqaf, or winding sand tracts tells about the destruction of ‘ad people. sura 51. zariyat, or the winds that scatter tells a story about the ancient people who belied the prophet. indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 71 sura 54. qamar, or the moon tells about the destruction of people of noah, ‘ad, thamud, luth, and pharaoh. sura 59. hashr, or the gathering (or banishment) tells about the expulsion of jews from medina. sura 66. tahrim, or holding (something) to be forbidden tells about the story of good and bad wives. sura 68. qalam, or the pen, or nun tells about god's temptation to the unbelievers. sura 71. nuh, or noah tells about a story of noah and his people. sura 72. jinn, or the spirits tells a story about a company of jinn converted to islam after listening to the qur’an. sura 79. naziat, or those who tear out tells about the story of moses and pharaoh as the consolation of the prophet muhammad. sura 80. abasa, or he frowned tells about the admonition of allah to muhammad. sura 105. fil, or the elephant tells a story about the doom of the god in the army of mercenaries that will destroy the ka'ba. the results above indicated that the assumption of the presence of narrative texts in the holy qur’an is truly proven. it was identified that the narrative texts in the english translation of the holy qur’an has their own typical. first, the text with the same topic is not always in a sura, some of them are written and separated in some other suras. for example, the story of jesus is written in sura 5 and 43. the story of abraham is written in sura 2, 15, 37, 43. although they are written in different sura, it does not mean that the story is reduplicated. they—the same topic in different suras—tell about different points. second, narratives have their own certain structure which distinguishes narratives from other text types. narratives have four main part namely orientation, complication, climax, and resolution (sari, tukan, & ngadiman, 2011). sari, tukan, & ngadiman (2011) explain that orientation is the earlier component of the text which introduces the content. it says about who (characters involved in the story), when (the time of the story happens), where (the place of the story), and what and why (the direction of the story). the next component is complication which is the main point of a narrative text. it tells about series of event as the heart of the text which determines whether the story interesting or not. an interesting story will be able to attract the readers’ interest and curiosity and involving them into the story. after complication, climax is the next component which provides information about the way the characters respond to the problems in complication. thompson (2017) explains that climax means a point at which the primary conflict in narrative comes to a head or when action or conflict reaches its peak. the end of the narrative is resolution. it tells the solution of the problems or complication that characters face. it can be sad or happy ending. in conclusion, resolution is the end of the story. in fact, not all narratives fulfill the components of narrative text. some do not explain clearly about orientation especially about setting. however, as it is defined that narrative text tells series of events (gorlach, 2004) and has characters and dialogue and action (serravalo, 2010), the texts that the author found above is still categorized as narrative text. as it tells series of events, theoretically, the language features usually involved are past tense, time signals, sequential order. as an example of a text fulfills the criteria of narrative text is in sura 2. baqara or the heifer verse 30-39 which tells a story about the creation of men. the criteria which are required are orientation (character and time of event), complication (dialogue and action, series of events), climax, and resolution. related to orientation, the characters appear in the text are allah, adam, adam’s wife (eve), angels, and satan. in complication, the dialogue happened between allah and angels when allah informed to angels that he would like to create a man. besides, the series of events is indicated by the process of allah created adam and then taught him names of things. after that the angels prostrated adam, but satan did not prostrate and made adam slip from paradise. finally, adam got down puji sumarsono authentic narrative texts in english translation version of holy quran: a genre-based approach 72 from the paradise to the earth. the climax is indicated by an event when adam got down from the paradise to the earth. the resolution is adam prayed to allah in order that he forgives adam’s mistake. a point differentiates between authentic and non-authentic text is the level of the difficulty of the language used. kilickaya (2004) argues that authentic may contain difficult vocabulary and structures which need more effort to understand. it is, therefore, kwaldeh (2017) proposes inter-textuality approach to understand easily quranic text. inter-textuality approach is an approach which mainly oriented to draws a network relation between texts. this is similar to contextual approach in which contextual derived from condition and text which is to understand the text based on the condition (situation around the text) and text (literal). conclusion based on the results and discussion presented above, it is concluded that there were many narrative texts which were available in english translation of the holy qur’an. they were written in 19 suras. the same topic of a narrative could be written in different suras, but they have different point to discuss. some of narratives are written in long paragraphs and some of them are in short paragraphs—even it is only two short paragraphs. it is, however, does not reduce the meaning of narrative as long as some components are fulfilled well. the suggestions are given for english teacher and further author. for english teachers, they should be aware that narrative texts found in the english translation of the holy qur’an are different from the narrative texts which are recently used in english textbook. the different mostly locates on the language expressions and vocabulary used in the english translation of the holy qur’an mostly old english which are rarely appear and used in the daily life. thus, teacher needs to guide students patiently and use some strategies such as teacher read the text first before teaching and look up in dictionary for difficult words. for further authors, it is important to study deeply about difficult language expressions and vocabulary used in the narrative text. references coffman, g. a. & reed, m. d. (2010). the true story of narative text: from theory to practices. the reading professor, 32(1), 5-12. elashri, i. b. (2013). the effect of the genre-based approach to teaching writing on the efl al-azhr secondary students' writing skills and their attitudes towards writing. retrieved november 11, 2017, from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed539137.pdf. emilia, e. (2011). implementasi pendekatan genrebased di indonesia. the material was presented in bandung, isola resort. gorlach, m. (2004). text types and the history of english. berlin: mouton de gruyter. kilickaya, f. (2004). authentic materials and culture content in efl classrooms. the internet tesl journal, 10(7). retrieved october 21, 2017, from https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed570173.pdf. ningsih, d. w. (2015). the implementation of genre based approach in teaching reading: a case study at smpn 17 in pekanbaru. journal english language teaching (elt), 1(1), 1-7. paltridge, b. (1996). genre, text type, and the language learning classroom. elt journal, 50(3), 237-243. sari, m., tukan s. l., & ngadiman, a. (2011). the structure of the narrative texts written by the students of eesp. magister scientiae, 29, 43-57. thompson, v. (2017). what is the climax of a narrative? retrieved november 12, 2017, from https://penandthepad.com/climax-narrative2140.html. toolan, m.c. (2016). making sense of narrative text: situation, repetition, and picturing in the reading of short stories. new york: routledge. indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 171 effectiveness of deploying whatsapp and flash fiction in comprehension and language pedagogy adekunle mamudu department of english and literature, university of benin, benin city, nigeria e-mail: kunlemamudu@yahoo.com apa citation: mamudu, a. (2017). effectiveness of deploying whatsapp and flash fiction in comprehension and language pedagogy. indonesian efl journal, 3(2), 171-180. received: 11-05-2017 accepted: 19-06-2017 published: 01-07-2017 abstract: many universities in nigeria are yet to embrace technology for pedagogy through the use of modern learning gadgets to enhance learning activities in their campuses. such modern gadgets include the global system of mobile communication (gsm). in every campus in the country, virtually every student owns a phone and can, thus, participate in at least a two-way communication between the teacher and the learner. interviews conducted on the poor utilisation of this gadget in schools show that lecturers believe it is highly informal and would, therefore, reduce the seriousness and effectiveness of learning if deployed in and outside the classroom. this study sets out to allay all such fears and convince school administrators that these fears are unfounded. in this research, it was found that rather than weaken the seriousness of learning, it would help the students give their best as they use their regular familiar and endearing phones to respond to their lecturers, while finding the opportunity to quickly consult other language learning-aided packages in their phones. to be specific, this paper examines students’ responses to the use of whatsapp and flash fiction in the teaching of literary comprehension and appreciation in english language to learners of english as a second language. keywords: flash fiction, whatsapp, technology, ict, english language learners introduction today’s world has become technologically driven in all ramifications. education as a large industry cannot be exempted from this embrace. in nigeria, however, there is a very slow realisation and acceptance of this new dawn, this new way of getting things done in our universities. in and out of classroom learning remains in the conservative claws of the traditional methods of learning. the result of this is isolation, where stake-holders cannot effectively perform in accordance with the requirement of the new techniques and methods when faced with their counterparts from technology-embracing parts of the world. in learning english, the teaching of comprehension skills is very crucial, and it occupies a prominent place in the course outline. this is because the possession of comprehension skills enables optimum performance in the language as a second language. almost all students have learnt the use of the mobile phone as a device, and more attractive to this study is their mastery of, and delight in the use of the effective communicative precision of whatsapp. according to wikipedia (2016), whatsapp messenger is a freeware, cross-platform and end-to-end encrypted instant messaging application for smart-phones. the availability of this portable device to a large number of students, and the almost limitless possibilities in learning, endear it to the teaching and learning of english comprehension skills in the university. the fact that it is interactive and can post a common text, in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/freeware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/cross-platform https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/end-to-end_encryption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/end-to-end_encryption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/instant_messaging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/smartphone adekunle mamudu effectiveness of deploying whatsapp and flash fiction in comprehension and language pedagogy 172 this case, flash fiction, explains the suitability of the medium as an interesting meeting ground for learning activities. flash fiction, on the other hand, is an emerging prose form that emphasises extreme brevity, compactness and relevance. its dwelling place is essentially the social media, where it is drawing a rather large audience. there are divisions among writers as to the exact length of this new genre of prose fiction, but the average word length has been put at under two thousand words. flash fiction is a shorter brother of the short story. in these days of the social media, where everyone has access to a hand-held device that enables quick communication and easy access to virtually every nook and cranny of the world, the need for sharing common experiences and observations that shape our lives has given birth to a type of narrative, so short in its rendition that it is named flash fiction. some critics believe that the name is taken from the impact that moving light makes on a shinning surface like a pan. its impact is loud and blindingly bright, but it has only a very short lifespan. it is one way everybody tells their story of significance, yet it is also an avenue for practised writers to share their stories with the world. flash fiction is well adapted to various applications of the social media, but it seems to be very effective on whatsapp. as a younger and shorter brother of the short story, flash fiction enjoys most features of the short story. its operational space is smaller and it must, therefore, choose a smaller area or object of focus and deplore a very tight narrative framework, thus endearing itself much more to the art of poetry. as a piece of fiction, with the quality of poetry, it lends itself to good use as a good learning and teaching text arising from its compact wholeness. the suitability of flash fiction for this study is stemmed on the fact that though brief, the form presents in every episode, a complete story contained within itself. this, therefore, makes it more comprehensible to the learnerreader. it provides the needed elements of text appreciation and comprehension. as a literary text, characterisation, plot, setting, theme, point of view, and language are completely provided and examinable. this is as against the use of extracts, excerpts, and summaries of longer materials. to this end, an attempt to teach literary comprehension in english using whatsapp guarantees a better delivery and comprehension as the students have a personal access to the text through their phones which they cherish very much. many researchers have looked at the new media and its suitability for use in enhancing effective learning. one of such is the work of murugan and sai (2016). in their work, they extol the qualities of the mobile phone and its many adaptable applications as an effective learning tool, as a technological breakthrough that should be embraced as its benefits are multifaceted. their research findings are that the mobile phone is a blessing to the teacher and l2 learner of english. another researcher, manan (2016), writes specifically on the use of whatsapp. manan observes that students find the use of whatsapp very attractive and as a result, it should be put to serious academic use, especially for the learning of english language among foreign speakers. he found that whatsapp provides fun and relaxation to students, as well as shielding them from face to face communication with their teacher, whom they might be shy to speak to. besides, the tool is capable of providing the enabling environment to enrich the vocabulary of learners. indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 173 method the experiment method which involves the direct observation of the students’ behaviour was deployed in this research. an experiment is a research design in which the researcher manipulates or varies an independent variable in a controlled setting in order to observe or measure the impact of the variation or manipulation on another variable called the dependent variable (yomere & agbonifoh1999, p. 43). as an experiment, the research was designed to accommodate the observation and manipulation of a class of fifty students and their reactions to literary appreciation and comprehension learning over six weeks using selected flash fiction stories. as the second step, survey design was adopted. the essence of this was to find out from the students if the procedure had imparted on their use of language generally and to obtain information for their behaviour by using questionnaire. the questionnaire sought to know the reasons for their choices, preferences, and other behaviours. results and discussion there were six meetings, during which six pieces of flash fiction were learnt. the population of the class was 50, but attendance varied from class to class in the physical presence of the students. however, the number remains constant for the whatsapp meetings since the population of the platform on whatsapp remained 50. but, attendance was marked by each student’s phone indicating whether they were online or not. responses from the students included contributions to the discussion as well as questions that required answers from the lecturer. assignments were regularly given to the students to be submitted on paper or posted on whatsapp on alternate weeks. the summary of the study is shown in the table below. table 1. a summary of students levels of participation meeting story studied attendance responses / questions medium assignments first meeting “mannahatta” by john keene 46 10 white board 32 second meeting “a man without shoes” by per petterson 50 42 whatsapp 46 third meeting “tweet” by sabrina orah mark 47 12 white board 20 fourth meeting “if she were to lay down” by molia dumbleton 50 40 whatsapp 38 fifth meeting “forty-four goats” by simon harris 48 18 white board 25 sixth meeting “before the storm” by alex sheal. 50 46 whatsapp 47 the results obtained from the experiment as tabulated, it can be seen that in the first meeting, the story “mannahatta” by john keene was studied in the classroom with 46 students in attendance. this first http://www.triquarterly.org/contributors/john-keene adekunle mamudu effectiveness of deploying whatsapp and flash fiction in comprehension and language pedagogy 174 meeting was the traditional classroom meeting where the chalk board and the regular methods of teaching were deployed. as usual, the teacher stood in front of the class like a boss, directing and dictating the procedures in the class. students were expected to conform in obedience to the general school regulations. the learning atmosphere looked quite tensed and as expected, officious. the students restricted themselves only to the story under appreciation and had no time to check their spellings, tenses, reading and writing skills as it was not built into the lecture for the day. the total responses from them was 10, consisting of 2 questions and 8 responses. the 2 responses were offered by the same student who was very active in the class. the 8 contributions came from 8 students as appointed by the lecturer when contributions were not forth coming. 32 students responded by submitting their assignments for this lecture in the next class. but, in the second meeting, where whatsapp was deployed, there was a marked difference in student participation. here, per petterson’s “a man without shoes” was studied. the whatsapp platform indicated a total presence of 50 students as being online. out of this, 42 students posted comments and responses to the questions that were asked. they, in turn asked questions freely. it was observed, however, that some of the students delayed in responding to the questions they were asked. at the end of the class, an assignment was posted for the students to do and revert to the lecturer through the same medium. surprisingly, 42 students posted their assignments back to the lecturer’s box. in the third meeting, the class discusses the story entitled “tweet” by sebrina mark. a total of 47 students were in attendance. the white board medium was used for the lecture. out of this, there were a total number of 12 responses for both questions and direct contributions. of the assignment given, 20 students submitted their handwritten assignments. in the fourth meeting, the platform remained 50, but only 46 students were online for the lecture. of this, there were 40 responses by way of questions and discussion of the story which ranged from vocabulary, meaning, character interpretation, and literary devices. there were 38 turned in assignments for the fourth meeting. the fifth meeting, alternately, was a classroom lecture conducted through the traditional learning aid of the white board. there were 48 students in the class and 18 responses all together, including questions and contributions to the discussion. on the assignment given, only 25 complied by submitting a printed assignment to the lecturer. finally, the sixth meeting which was whatsapp driven had 50 students online. of this number, the meeting recorded 48 responses and a total submission of take-home assignment compliance of 47. our observation from the first two meetings, which represents the two variants of learning methods, indicated that students were getting tired of the traditional method of teaching and learning. the traditional class has become boring and restrictive, especially with the presence of an officious lecturer who does not tolerate side talks, jokes, quick check up of facts from dictionaries, the thesaurus, handbooks and the phone. the students appeared sluggish and unhappy to contribute to the discussion as a result of lack of confidence and a general feeling of incompetence in the english language, which is a second language to them. their inability to answer questions, indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 175 except prompted by the teacher, shows their lack of interest in learning through this restricted method that takes away their confidence. their refusal to ask questions as well was an indication that the morale was low, despite the interesting story being discussed in class. in the bid to conform to the course requirements and pass the examination, a significant number of the students (32) submitted their assignments to the lecturer. an analysis of the assignments submitted indicated a better performance in the take-home assignment. in the assignments, the students appeared to have taken more time to cross check their spellings and use of grammar unlike the poor syntactic and semantic presentations that were recorded in the class. it was found that students expressed themselves rather freely as against the shyness expressed in the class. the explanation for this is that outside the classroom and free from that restrictive environment, students were able to express themselves on paper. they were not shy of anybody and were not constrained by the lecturer’s bossy approach to learning. it is a fact to be noted that the students also had the opportunity to consult their books and other resources to improve their spellings, rules of syntax, and semantic accuracy before turning their assignments in. it is safe to conclude that classroom learning is restrictive and inhibiting as shown by the behavioural pattern of students in the first classroom experiment especially in an esl context. the experiment has also revealed that students prefer to submit written assignments to contributing in class in order to avoid being made jest of or in order to avoid the teacher’s reprimand. while only nine people spoke in the class, 32 persons submitted their assignments. this large turn in of assignments may however be attributed to the fear of losing marks, but it could also be a signal that students wish to be left to learn in an environment that is devoid of stress and tension as the classroom provides. they feel more confident when they write their assignments outside the restrictive classroom. a comparison of the classroom and the whatsapp session, from the results obtained above, indicates a deeper finding. first, the attendance level is higher for the whatsapp meeting, indicating a general preference for the medium as an alternative to the chalk board classroom. the whatsapp class records a near 100% attendance judging by the online indicator on the teacher’s phone. beyond the high level of attendance, is the level of participation of the class. the result shows that 42 responses were recorded in the whatsapp meeting. this is a great improvement on the 8 contributions that were made in the traditional classroom meeting. the analysis indicates that there were delays in student’s responses to questions. this was later found to be the periods used by the students to consult dictionaries, the thesaurus, handbooks, and the internet before posting their responses. their responses were found to be better and more accurate as against their classroom presentations even when there were only a few responses. their spellings, concord, syntax and semantics appeared to have improved well over their class performances and the take home assignment. at the end of the meeting, a takehome assignment was also given to the students to be submitted in the next class. in compliance, 42 students were found to have submitted their assignments to the teachers whatsapp box. the implication of this is that students are drawn more to their phones and the whatsapp media seems adekunle mamudu effectiveness of deploying whatsapp and flash fiction in comprehension and language pedagogy 176 to provide fun to them. using the new media to them appears to create a feeling of relaxation and fun. it takes away the stress of the classroom and the rigours of compliance with the teacher’s classroom drills. a noticeable trend, however, was the regularly increasing interest and performance of the students in the whatsapp classes. at the third meeting which reverted to the traditional classroom method, there was a slight increase over the first meeting. out of a total number of 47 students who were present in the class, a total of 12 responses were recorded which is an improvement over the number of responses in the first encounter of 8. it is also possible that the title and content of the story that was studied could have motivated the students to attempt to contribute to the discussion and to ask questions as they deemed fit. this sebrina mark’s story possesses the quality to attract the students as the title is in a familiar domain—the internet—which students have found very attractive in their daily lives and are in a hurry to take it into the classroom for some serious business. of the assignment given, 20 students submitted their hand-written assignments in the next meeting as against 32 who submitted in the first class which was also the traditional class. perhaps, the students had tasted the online submission method and preferred it. they must have felt reluctant to go back to the old method they had been forced to comply with. the interest of the students continued to grow in the fourth meeting by their compliance with the submission of their assignments. as at the last whatsapp class, 42 students submitted their assignments as against the 46 students who submitted in the fourth meeting. there were 50 students online when the lecture was ongoing. in the fourth meeting, the platform remained 50, but only 46 students were online for the lecture. of this, there were 48 responses by way of questions and discussion. the discussion ranged from interpretation, character, new words and meanings, and identification of literary devices. this indicates that the students interest in the new media was sustained even though there was no major change in figures. generally, it showed their preference for the whatsapp forum for learning well over the chalk board. the fifth and sixth meetings become the last experiments on each of the methods provide very interesting results. in the fifth meeting which was a chalk board meeting, there were 48 students in the class out of which 18 students made contributions in the class, while 23 submitted their assignments. a positive response here is that the students’ level of contribution in class had risen noticeably over time, from the initial class response of just 8 students, responses grew into 18. it could be safe to say that their confidence levels had been raised very high due to their engagement with the hand-held device. they were becoming bold and their shyness was dropping. they also seemed to have overcome the fear of their lecturer. this fifth meeting was by far, their most productive traditional class. but, in the sixth meeting, it was very clear that their preferred mode of learning is through whatsapp. there were 50 students online, out of which 46 made contributions and 47 submitted their assignments into the lecturer’s whatsapp box. these figures speak for themselves and would be hard put to deny the obvious. at this point in the experiment, the equilibrium is almost reached, indicating a near 100% indication that whatsapp remains the preferred option of study to the students. indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 177 from the results above, it is quite evident that students prefer learning with the hand-held device of their phone in general, and the whatsapp platform in particular. from the six meetings, alternately held through the media of the white board and the whatsapp, the level of interest and performance by the student is quite clear. the results show that students feel free to contribute to discussions through whatsapp than through face-to-face discussion in the class. the results also show very clearly that students are more attracted to their assignments if submitted directly to the teacher’s textbox than the traditional hand written assignments. it was also found that there were more correct answers posted on whatsapp than the ones given verbally in the class. a second step design which was essentially a confirmation study was also conducted. in the confirmation study, many of the students agreed that they were quite shy in the class as they found the classroom quite restrictive. this, they said, prevented them from contributing freely in the class. they said that they were scared of being laughed at by their course mates for making mistakes or for being unable to provide the correct answers to questions asked in the class. some respondents agreed that the technology provided by whatsapp enabled them to quickly consult other pages on the internet for explanation and clarification which enabled their understanding of aspects of the stories. in addition to these, students found whatsapp more attractive for learning because they didn’t have to assemble in the classroom all the time. besides, some of the students agreed that being in possession of their phones provided some measure of confidence as they have grown quite fond of these hand-held learning and pleasure devices. on the question of if the use of whatsapp had imparted on their use of the english language comprehension, aside from literary appreciation of flash fiction, the positive response was overwhelming. the respondents agreed that the hand-held device enabled and granted them quick access to other sites and language teaching aiding applications and content that enhanced their quick consultation where adequate assistance was provided. it was found among the students that a general eagerness to learn through the new medium was quite obvious. during the experiment, they looked forward to the whatsapp classes over the white board meetings. the students cherished their phones and saw them as confidants, trusting in them and the answers they provided. during the whatsapp meetings, it was found that the students, through their responses, appeared to be different people, with new lives. they contributed freely, without fear or inhibitions. they asked questions at will and reminded everyone on the platform of activities that had earlier taken place on the course. our findings agree with the research findings of research earlier conducted in this field by murugan and sai (2016), and the studies of manan (2016), whose paper specifically focused on the use of whatsapp for learning purposes. the findings showes that whatsapp and other ict media, if deployed to learning environments, will enhance academic learning in no small way. all the studies observe that students love their phones and will be very comfortable with them as learning tools. they have mastered their operations and have other learning applications that could help them to do quick check ups on relevant needs while learning. as a hand held device, it individualises technology and becomes a viable tool for the students to learn from adekunle mamudu effectiveness of deploying whatsapp and flash fiction in comprehension and language pedagogy 178 different parts of the world. the findings are, perhaps, a reflection of the global demand by youths and even the elderly for a more learner-friendly environment driven by affordable technology. conclusion this research has proven that the neglect of information technology (ict) for the purpose of teaching and learning in the nigerian university takes its toll on the students who are denied the benefits of the use of the new media for learning purposes. the results show clearly that students feel free to express themselves through the whatsapp medium, engage more in take-home assignments, and are able to consult other information pages in the course of carrying out their assignments. this enables them to learn faster and also broaden their academic horizon as well as sharpen their skills in the use of the english, both in literary comprehension and language communication activities. managements of nigerian universities should be encouraged to embrace the new media and be at breast with the rest of the technology-driven world. this will benefit the students and the government, as well as the nation in general. governments through its education managers will do well to replicate this research and upon conviction that students learn better with the new media, in this case, whatsapp, will need to put in place a programme that will ensure that educational institutions are mobilised to take a step on the next rung of the ladder towards our joining the rest of the word to embrace information communication technology. one wonders why we have continued to tie the education sector to the traditional learning method that has become boring, repetitive, and obsolete. furthermore, universities must wake up and drive the country through the embrace of information technology to share the new trends in pedagogy with the rest of the now globalised village. students are willing and waiting for the adoption and deployment of this trend in schools. it is a method that will prove its mettle with time by proving sceptics wrong. the days of the traditional classroom, whiteboard are fast running out as students are acquiring degrees online through the distance learning methods that thrive on information technology. that seems to be the future of learning for the world and would require a quick adoption so that no one is left behind by this fast moving train of new teaching and learning aids, driven by technology. the paper has also debunked the thinking that deploying ict for pedagogy will encourage truancy in the campuses. if well managed, the use of whatsapp to teach english generally will enhance the efficiency of both the teacher and the learner. it will provide access to information more quickly, more readily, and more abundantly. by sweeping it under the carpet or dismissing it with a wave of the hand does not lay the issue to rest. what is required is a research determined fact as to whether deploying whatsapp to the classroom will breed truancy, mediocrity, laziness, all leading to a decline in the quality of education in the country. references dumbleton, m. (2014). if she were to lay down. retrieved from: www.kenyonreview.org/kr. keene, j. (2013). mannahatt. retrieved from: www.triquaterly.org/issues145/manhattan. manan, n. a. (2017). whatsapp mobile tool in second language learning. indonesian efl journal, 3(1), 87-92. mark, s. o. (2014). tweet. retrieved from: thecollagist.com/thecollagist/2014/5/6/t weet.html. murugan, a., & sai, g. t. b. (2017). the wonders of technology in teaching and learning english. indonesian efl journal, 3(1), 5768. indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 179 petterson, p. (2014). a man without shoes. retrieved from: https://apublicplace.org/magazine/details /a_man_without_shoes. sheal, a. (2014). before the storm. retrieved from: www.3ammagazine.com/3am/beforethest orm. simon, h. (2015). forty-four goats. retrieved from: https:/billchance.org/2015/06/07/. yomere, g. o., & agbonifoh, b.a. (1999). research methodology in the social sciences and education. benin city: university of benin press. adekunle mamudu effectiveness of deploying whatsapp and flash fiction in comprehension and language pedagogy 180 golf ball two golfers were approaching the first tee. the first guy goes into his golf bag to get a ball and says to his friend "hey, why don't you try this ball." he draws a green golf ball out of his bag. "use this one you can't lose it!" his friend replies, "what do you mean you can't lose it?!!" the first man replies, "i'm serious, you can't lose it. if you hit it into the woods, it makes a beeping sound, if you hit it into the water it produces bubbles, and if you hit it on the fairway, smoke comes up in order for you to find it." obviously, his friend doesn't believe him, but he shows him all the possibilities until he is convinced. the friend says, "wow! that's incredible! where did you get that ball?" the man replies, "i found it." (source: http://www.study-express.ru/humour/funny-stories.shtml, picture: www.google.co.id) http://www.study-express.ru/humour/funny-stories.shtml indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 73 the analysis of teacher and students talk in indonesian efl classroom interaction shilvia nur meida department of english education, faculty of teachers training and education, university of kuningan, indonesia e-mail: shilvianurmeida@gmail.com fahrus zaman fadhly department of english education, faculty of teachers training and education, university of kuningan, indonesia e-mail: fahruszf@uniku.ac.id apa citation: meida, s. n., & fadhly, f. z. (2018). the analysis of teacher and students talk in indonesian efl classroom interaction. indonesian efl journal, 4(1), 73-82. doi: 10.25134/ieflj.v4i1.886. received: 19-11-2017 accepted: 22-12-2017 published: 01-01-2018 abstract: this research analyzes teacher and students talk in indonesian efl classroom interaction in university of kuningan in second semester who are taking speaking 2 subject. this qualitative data was from observation, note taking, and interview. the result of classroom observation found the content cross as the most dominant characteristic in teacher and students talk, it means that most of the teaching learning process devoted to asking questions and lecturing by the lecturer. the proportation of content cross was 65.55% in the first meeting, 95.88% in the second meeting, and 97.44% in the third meeting. while, in the additional data, the most dominant category found was teacher talk. it means that all of teacher talk categories appear in each meeting. the proportation of teacher talk is 38.16% in the first meeting, 55.11% in the second meeting, and 54.83% in the third meeting. in addition, the result of note taking and interview indicated that the interaction always happened in teaching learning process among students although the lecturer’s role is still dominant. keywords: teacher and students talk, fiac analysis system, speaking skill introduction teaching is the activity of organizing student activities and providing good learning facilities so that students can learn well. in contrast, learning is the activity of increasing students’ knowledge about the lesson which is done by teacher. in teaching and learning process in the classroom, there is always an interaction between teacher and students. in classroom interaction, teacher and students have to make a good communication in order to make students understand the materials being taught. as brown (2001, p. 165) says,“…interactionis, in fact, the heart of communication: it is what communication is all about.” similarly, dagarin (2004, p. 128) argues that classroom interaction is “two way process between the participants in the language process, the teacher influences the learners and vice versa.” in indonesia, english as efl (english as foreign language) is still difficult to be used especially in applying it into interaction during english speaking classroom. it is happened since the efl students have common native languages (brown, 2001, p. 180). besides, brown (2001, p. 116) also states that foreign language context are those in which students do not have ready-made contexts for communication beyond their classroom. efl (english as a foreign language) context is a greater challenge for the students. the need for english speaking mastery has increased due to the status of english as a global language which is recognized in every country (crystal, 2003, p. 3). hence, the students who study english have to master it well, so the goal of shilvia nur meida & fahrus zaman fadhly the analysis of teacher and students talk in indonesian efl classroom interaction 74 english teaching and learning process could be achieved. from the statement above, the problem of interaction in the classroom especially in english speaking classroom can be solved if the teacher teaches their students for mastering english well and good in communication with their classmates. the students have to realize that doing interaction in language classroom is very important. as rivers (1987, p. 4) states “interaction plays significant roles in the language classroom since it can increase students’ language store.” further, the interaction in the language classroom has profits to the students’ ability and achievement in speaking. this research identifies the categories of teacher and students talk appeared in indonesian efl classroom interaction. ideally, the students can be more active than teacher and they can do good interaction in the classroom. if in the teaching-learning process the teacher talk too much, it will cause the students cannot speak up freely. this study is conducted because today the students should be the centre of the learning process. student-centred learning, as the term suggests, is a method of learning or teaching that puts the learner at the centre (machemer et al, 2007, p. 9; boyer, 1990). flanders (1970) as cited in arockiasamy (2012) classifies verbal behavior into three categories; 1) teacher talk consisting of indirect talk (accepting feelings, praise or encouragement, accepting or using ideas of students, asking questions) and direct talk (lecturing/lecture, giving directions, criticizing or justifying authority); 2) students talk consisting of two categories, including student talk response (response to teacher’ talk) and student talk initiation (expressing own ideas, initiating a new topic, freedom to develop opinions, etc.); and 3) silence or pauses or confusion. based on the description above, this research is conducted to find out the teacher and students talk categories appeared in indonesian efl classroom interaction, and to find out the most dominant category of the teacher and students talk categories that appear in indonesian efl classroom interaction. method this descriptive qualitative research undertook at department of english education of the university of kuningan. the participants who involved in this research were the students who were taking the speaking 2 subject in second semester, especially the students in class 1a (consisting of 23 students). the data were then collected through observation, note taking and interview. furthermore, to investigate the talk of teacher and students in the classroom interaction, this research employed fiac (flanders interaction analysis categories) analysis system by flanders (1970). the data would be then analyzed by using the four steps of fiac analysis system, as follows. step 1: coding the verbal interaction, the observer translates the observed behavior into a descriptive code. each verbal behavior is recorded as a number of categories, for example: actual classroom verbal interaction recorded as category teacher : what’s the color of a banana? students : yellow. teacher : yes, right! the color is yellow. 4 8 2 step 2: plotting the coded data into the matrix, to plot the numbers recorded, for example an observation recorded is 6, 5, 7. hence, the beginning and end of the coding should have the same number of the categories. it is the tradition of adding number 10 in the beginning and at the end. hence, the number will be written in this way 10, 6, 5, 7, 10. the writer conducted plotting the coded data into the matrix, for example the table below. indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 75 10 1st pair 6 2nd pair 5 3rd pair 7 4th pair 10 sequence of the pair: (10, 6), (6, 5), (5, 7), (7, 10). the matrix consists of ten rows and ten columns. the first number of the pair represents ‘row’ and second number of the pair represents ‘column’. for example, in the first pair (10, 6), the number 10 represents row and the number 6 represents column. every pair overlaps the other pair. total tallies of the matrix (n). below is the sample matrix of the flanders’ coding system. column row 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 total 1 0 2 0 3 0 4 0 5 / 1 6 / 1 7 / 1 8 0 9 0 10 / 1 total 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 0 1 4 (n) step 3: analyzing the matrix, in a complete matrix, some areas have tallies than others. a heavier concentration of tallies in a certain area gives information about who is talking and what kind of talking is taking place. below is the example . 1. content cross: a heavy concentration in a column 4 and 5 and row 4 and 5 indicates teacher dependence on questions and lectures. 2. teacher control: a concentration on column and row 6 and 7 indicates extensive commands and reprimands by the teacher. column row 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 1 teacher supports student 2 3 4 content cross 5 6 teacher control partici pation 7 8 9 10 shilvia nur meida & fahrus zaman fadhly the analysis of teacher and students talk in indonesian efl classroom interaction 76 3. teacher support: a heavy concentration of tallies in column and row 1, 2, and 3 indicates that the teacher is reinforcing and encouraging students’ participation. 4. student participation: a concentration of tallies in column 8 and 9 reflects student responses to the teacher’s behavior. step 4: analyzing the additional data, as follows: teacher’ talk, lecturing, direct teaching, indirect teaching, and silent. adding the tallies in any column and comparing that number to the tallies in other columns can determine the percentage of time spent on that activity. for example, adding up all the tallies in column 10 and comparing that number to tallies in the other columns on the matrix will show how much classroom time the teacher and students in silent. for example: columns 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 total numbers 4 8 5 10 5 9 6 7 6 20 total for all columns : 80 total for column 10 : 20 proportion of classroom time spent silent: column 10 = 20 column 1-10 4+8+5+10+5+9+6+7+6+20 = 20 x 100 80 = 25% results and discussion based on the three meeting that have been conducted at the speaking subject of second semester of english department in the university of kuningan, it was found that all categories in teacher talk, studets talk, and silent or confusion had been applied by the subjects. the result of the first meeting in the first meeting on april, 29 2015, almost all categories of flanders interaction analysis categories (fiac) analysis system appeared in classroom interaction. yet, one category which did not appear in this meeting is the 7th category; criticizing or justifying authority. based on the result of step 3 of the previous part in the first meeting, the most dominant characteristic of categories found was the content cross which consisted of 4th and 5th category, that are two of the teacher talk categories. the proportion of content cross in the first meeting was 65.55% showing that the lecturer spent more time in teaching learning process for asking questions and lecturing. the lecturer still spent more time than the students. the proportion of content cross in this meeting was the lowest one compared to the second and the third meeting. the second dominant characteristic was the students’ participation or can also be called as the student talk which consisted of the 8th and 9th category, that are the categories of student talk. the students actively participated in responding the teacher’s question and talking initiation. the proportion of student’s participation in the first meeting was 60.66% meaning that the students were active enough in the classroom interaction. the proportion of student participation in this meeting was highest one compared to the second and the third meeting. the third dominant characteristic was the teacher control which consisted of the 6th and 7th category, that are two of teacher talk categories. it spent 6.66% of teaching learning process in the first meeting. it showed that the teacher spent a little time in giving directions and criticizing or justifying activity. the proportion of teacher control in this meeting was higher than the second meeting but it was lower than the third meeting. while in teacher support which consisted of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd category, that are three of teacher talk categories, the lecturer only spent 4.11% of the teaching learning process in the first meeting. it showed that the teacher was rarely in accepting feeling, praise or encouragement indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 77 and accepting students’s ideas. the proportion of teacher support in this meeting was lower than the second meeting but it was higher than the third meeting. from the additional data based on step 4 in data presentation, the other characteristics of classroom interaction could be analyzed. the characteristics of classroom interaction in the first meeting are summarized below. 1. the most dominant characteristic of the additional data was teacher talk which consisted of all teacher talk categories from the 1st – 7th category. the proportion of teacher talk in the first meeting was 38.16% meaning that the lecturer still dominated the classroom interaction. the proportion of teacher talk in this meeting the lowest one compared to the second and the third meeting. 2. the second dominant characteristic of the additional data was direct teaching which consisted of the 5th, 6th, and 7th category. it spent 25.22% meaning that the lecturer spent more time in direct teaching to her students (lecturing, giving directions, and criticizing or justifying authority). the proportion of direct teaching in this meeting the lowest one compared to the second and the third meeting. 3. the third dominant characteristic of the additional data was lecturing (5th categoty), it is one of the teacher talk categories. it spent 21.88% meaning that the lecturer was giving facts or opinions about content or procedure expression of her own ideas, giving her own explanation or citing an authority other than students. the proportion of lecturing in this meeting was the lowest one compared to the second and the third meeting. while in indirect teaching (1st and 4th category) that are some categories of teacher talk. lecturer spent 12.94% in indirect teaching in the first meeting. it was the highest compared to the second and the third meeting. furthermore, in silent or confusion (10th category) the classroom spent 1.16% in the first meeting. it means that there is still silent or no interaction between lecturer and students and it was the lowest one compared to the second and the third meeting. the result of the second meeting in the second meeting on may, 6 2015, almost all categories of flanders interaction analysis categories (fiac) analysis system appeared in classroom interaction. yet, one category which did not appear in this meeting was the 7th category; criticizing or justifying authority. it is one of the teacher talk categories. based on the result of step 3 of the previous part in the second meeting, the most dominant characteristic of categories found was the content cross which consisted of the 4th and 5th category, that are two of the teacher talk categories. the proportion of content cross in the second meeting was 95.88%, showing that the lecturer spent more time in teaching learning process for asking questions and lecturing. the lecturer dominanted the classroom activities and it was higher than the first meeting but it was lower than the third meeting. the second dominant characteristic was the students’ participation or can also be called as the student talk which consisted of the 8th and 9th category, that are the categories of student talk. the students participated in responding the teacher’s question and talking initiation. the proportion of student’s participation in the second meeting was 35.55% meaning that the students were active enough in the classroom interaction. the students’s participation in the classroom activities was still high but it was the lowest compared to the first and the third meeting. the third dominant characteristic was the teacher support which consisted of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd category, that are three of teacher talk categories. it spent 11% of teaching learning process in the second meeting. it showed that the teacher was rarely in accepting feeling, praise or encouragement and accepting students’ ideas. the lecturer’s role in supporting the students in the classroom activities was the highest one compared to the first and the third meeting. while in teacher control which consisted of 6th and 7th category, that are two of teacher talk categories. lecturer only spent 3.33% of the teaching learning process in the second meeting. it showed that the teacher spent a little time in giving directions and criticizing shilvia nur meida & fahrus zaman fadhly the analysis of teacher and students talk in indonesian efl classroom interaction 78 or justifying activity. the time of teacher control in the classroom activities was the lowest one compared to the first and the third meeting. from the additional data based on step 4 in data presentation, the other characteristics of classroom interaction could be analyzed. the characteristics of classroom interaction in the second meeting are summarized below. 1. the most dominant characteristic of the additional data was teacher talk which consisted of all teacher talk categories from 1st – 7th category. the proportion of teacher talk in the second meeting was 55.11% meaning that the lecturer still dominated classroom interaction and it was the highest one compared to the first meeting and the third meeting. 2. the second dominant characteristic of the additional data was direct teaching which consisted of the 5th, 6th, and 7th category. it spent 43.16% meaning that the lecturer spent more time in direct teaching to her students (lecturing, giving directions, and criticizing or justifying authority). in the second meeting, the lecturer’s direct teaching was higher than the first meeting but it was lower than the third meeting. 3. the third dominant characteristic of the additional data was lecturing (5th categoty), it is one of the teacher talk categories. it spent 41.5% meaning that the lecturer was giving facts or opinions about content or procedure expression of her own ideas, giving her own explanation or citing an authority other than students. in the second meeting, lecturing was higher than the first meeting but it was lower than the third meeting. while in indirect teaching (1st and 4th category) there are some categories of teacher talk. lecturer spent 11.94% in indirect teaching in the second meeting. it means that lecturer still spent much time in indirect teaching but it was lower than the first meeting and it was higher than the third meeting. furthermore, in silent or confusion (10th category), the classroom spent 9.33% in the second meeting. it means that there is still silent or no interaction between lecturer and students in this meeting and it was the highest one compared to the first and the third meeting. the result of the third meeting in the third meeting on may, 13 2015, almost all categories of flanders interaction analysis categories (fiac) analysis system appeared in classroom interaction. yet, one category which did not appear in this meeting is the 2nd category; praise or encouragement. it is one of the teacher talk categories. based on the result of step 3 of the previous part in the third meeting, the most dominant characteristic of categories found was the content cross which consisted of the 4th and 5th category, that are two of the teacher talk categories. the proportion of content cross in the third meeting was 97.44%, showing that the lecturer spent more time in teaching learning process for asking questions and lecturing. the lecturer dominated the classroom activities and it was the highest one compared to the first and the second meeting. the second dominant characteristic was the students’ participation or can also be called as student talk which consisted of the 8th and 9th category, that are the categories of student talk. the students participated in responding the teacher’s question and talking initiation. the proportion of student’s participationin in the third meeting was 36.17% meaning that the students were active enough in the classroom interaction. the students’ participation in the classroom activities was still high but it was lower than the first meeting and it was higher than the second meeting. the third dominant characteristic was the teacher control which consisted of the 6th and 7th category, that are two of teacher talk categories. it spent 8.66% of teaching learning process in the third meeting. it showed that the teacher spent a little time in giving directions and criticizing or justifying activity. in the third meeting, spent time in teacher control was highest than the first and the second meeting. while in teacher support which consisted of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd category, there are three teacher talk categories in which the lecturer only spent 3.55% of the teaching learning process in the third meeting. it indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 79 showed that the teacher was rarely in accepting feeling, praise or encouragement and accepting the students’ ideas. in this meeting, the lecturer’s support to her students was the lowest one compared to the first and the second meeting. from the additional data based on step 4 in data presentation, the other characteristics of classroom interaction could be analyzed. the characteristics of classroom interaction in the third meeting are summarized below. 1. the most dominant characteristic of the additional data was teacher talk which consisted of all teacher talk categories from the 1st – 7th category. the proportion of teacher talk in the third meeting was 54.83% meaning that the lecturer still dominated classroom interaction but it was higher than the first meeting and it was lower than the second meeting. 2. the second dominant characteristic of the additional data was direct teaching which consisted of the 5th, 6th, and 7th category. it spent 47.05% meaning that the lecturer spent more time in direct teaching to her students (lecturing, giving directions, and criticizing or justifying authority). in the third meeting, the lecturer’s direct teaching was the highest one compared to the first and the second meeting. 3. the third dominant characteristic of the additional data was lecturing (5th categoty), it is one of the teacher talk categories. it spent 42.72% meaning that the lecturer was giving facts or opinions about content or procedure expression of her own ideas, giving her own explanation or citing an authority other than students. in the third meeting, the lecturing was the highest one compared to the first and the second meeting. while in silent or confusion (10th category) spent 9% in the third meeting. it means that there was still silent or no interaction between lecturer and students in this meeting and it was higher than the first meeting but it was lower than the second meeting. furthermore, in indirect teaching (1st and 4th category) there are some categories of teacher talk. lecturer spent 7.77% in indirect teaching in the third meeting. it means that the lecturer still spent time in indirect teaching but it was lower than the first and the second meeting. the result of note taking there is the interaction between lecturer and students in the classroom activity. in the first meeting, the students spent more time than the lecturer in expressing their own ideas, their initiating, and their opinion in the classroom interaction and the lecturer was active enough in classroom interaction but the percentage of teacher talk was dominated by the students. yet, in the second and the third meeting, the lecturer spent more time in giving facts or opinions, giving her own explanation or citing an authority other than students. then, the students was also active enough in classroom interaction in expressing their own ideas, initiating and opinion, but the percentage of talk was more dominated by the lecturer. furthermore, there was silent or confusion in the classroom interaction in each meeting although the percentage was low. the result of interview based on the twelve questions of interview that the researcher was submitted to the interviewee, the researcher could be interpreted the result of interview as follows. 1. there is an interaction between the lecturer and the students in the classroom. without the interaction, the process of teaching and learning cannot work well and the material of the subject cannot be delivered to students. so, it can be concluded that the interaction in the classroom has important role in the teaching and learning process. 2. the lecturer is able to distinguish which students who are exited or not in teaching and learning process, because the lecturer could see their facial expression. she also could feel the students’s desire in learning the material. 3. the lecturer praises the students who can answer her questions relating to the material in the classroom. that praises became the reward to the students in order to increase students’ spirit and desire in learning the material in the classroom. shilvia nur meida & fahrus zaman fadhly the analysis of teacher and students talk in indonesian efl classroom interaction 80 4. the lecturer repeated students’ answer with her own words. it was done to make the other students understand about the student’ answer since the lecturer’s talk usually could be more understood than the students’ words. 5. the lecturer always asked the students in the teaching learning process about the material that had been learned. it was because the lecturer wanted to the students’ understanding about the material. 6. the lecturer always gave the fact and her opinion about the material in classroom. usually, that fact and opinion based on the theory from the experts, books, and her experience. 7. in the classroom, the lecturer always gave the direction and instruction to the students in the teaching learning process. the lecturer usually gave direction and instruction related to the material learned. 8. the lecturer corrects or adds the students’ answer. yet, that was related to the students’ answer itself and that activity was done rarely by the lecturer. 9. the students always gave the response to the lecturer when the lecturer asked them. because if the students did not respond, the interaction in the classroom would not be work well and the teaching and learning process will not be effective. 10. the students always gave their ideas and opinion about the material in the classroom. usually, they expressed their ideas and opinion about the material because the lecturer always asked them. yet, some students usually gave their ideas or opinion without being asked. they expressed their ideas or opinion because they were very enthusiastic in the teaching process learning process. 11. in the teaching learning process, sometimes, there is no interaction occurred between all participants in the classroom and between the lecturer and the students. 12. the students are always given the time to conveyed their ideas or opinion about the material. it was done to make the students more active in the classroom. conclusion in each meeting of speaking 2 subject, almost all of the categories of fiac system appear. there are teacher talk, students talk, and silent or confusion. but, there are two categories which does not appear; the 7th category (criticizing or justifying authority) in the first and the second meeting and the 2nd category (praise or encouragement) in the third meeting. the most dominant characteristic in speaking 2 subject class was content cross. it means that the category that mostly appear are the 4th (asking questions) and the 5th (lecturing or lecture) category of teacher talk based on flander interaction analysis categories (fiac) system. it reflects that most of the teaching learning process was devoted to asking questions and lecturing by the lecturer. the proportation of content cross in the first meeting was 65.55%, in the second meeting 95.88%, and in the third meeting was 97.44%. furthermore, based on step 4 (the additional data), the most dominant characteristic or category in speaking 2 subject class was teacher talk. it means that all of teacher talk categories appeared in each meeting. it also shows that the lecturer spent more time in the classroom than the students. the proportation of teacher talk in each meeting; the first meeting was 38.16%, the second meeting was 55.11%, and the third meeting was 54.83%. although, in each meeting the lecturer dominated the talk or interaction in the classroom, the students were still active enough in the classroom interaction. the result showed that the students’ participation (students’ talk response and students’ talk initiation) was high enough from the total teaching learning process. moreover, it could be said that the interaction in the speaking 2 subject class was in three ways communication; there were interaction between the lecturer to the students, the students to the lecturer, and the students to the students. the interaction between teacher and students could be seen from the teacher’s activity in asking question, giving direction, accepting feeling, praising or encouraging, accepting or using students’ indonesian efl journal, vol. 4(1) january 2018 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 81 ideas, and criticizing or justifying authority. the interaction between students to the teacher could be seen from the students’ activity like students’ talk response and students’ talk initiation. the the students to the students interaction appeared when the students had a discussion with their groups or partner. references arockiasamy. 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(1987). interactive language teaching: interaction as the key to teaching language for communication. new york: cambridge university press. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=31&ved=0cb4qfjaaob4&url=http%3a%2f%2fstxaviersbedcollege.org%2fsim%2ftechnology_arock.pdf&ei=t4h2vi_2kik78gx6iohwcg&usg=afqjcnfutdf_d2omxjxq5ojj1bp0u51upg http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=31&ved=0cb4qfjaaob4&url=http%3a%2f%2fstxaviersbedcollege.org%2fsim%2ftechnology_arock.pdf&ei=t4h2vi_2kik78gx6iohwcg&usg=afqjcnfutdf_d2omxjxq5ojj1bp0u51upg http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=31&ved=0cb4qfjaaob4&url=http%3a%2f%2fstxaviersbedcollege.org%2fsim%2ftechnology_arock.pdf&ei=t4h2vi_2kik78gx6iohwcg&usg=afqjcnfutdf_d2omxjxq5ojj1bp0u51upg http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=31&ved=0cb4qfjaaob4&url=http%3a%2f%2fstxaviersbedcollege.org%2fsim%2ftechnology_arock.pdf&ei=t4h2vi_2kik78gx6iohwcg&usg=afqjcnfutdf_d2omxjxq5ojj1bp0u51upg http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=31&ved=0cb4qfjaaob4&url=http%3a%2f%2fstxaviersbedcollege.org%2fsim%2ftechnology_arock.pdf&ei=t4h2vi_2kik78gx6iohwcg&usg=afqjcnfutdf_d2omxjxq5ojj1bp0u51upg http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=31&ved=0cb4qfjaaob4&url=http%3a%2f%2fstxaviersbedcollege.org%2fsim%2ftechnology_arock.pdf&ei=t4h2vi_2kik78gx6iohwcg&usg=afqjcnfutdf_d2omxjxq5ojj1bp0u51upg indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 159 evaluating a synchronous online teacher development program on creating call teaching materials corry caromawati departments of informatics, faculty of industrial technology, institut teknologi nasional e-mail: corrycaromawati@gmail.com apa citation: caromawati, c. (2017). evaluating a synchronous online teacher development program on creating call teaching materials. indonesian efl journal, 3(2), 159-170. received: 19-05-2017 accepted: 28-06-2017 published: 01-07-2017 abstract: this study investigated the effectiveness of a four session online teacher’s development program on creating call teaching materials. the sessions were conducted through a synchronous computer-mediated video communication platform and set two learning outcomes; 1) fostering teachers’ technological skill to create a computer-based teaching material, 2) building teachers’ knowledge to evaluate the qualities of a computerassisted language learning (call) material using the call appropriateness framework (chapelle, 2001). the sessions were designed based on the project-based learning framework and tpack-in-action model. this case study collected the data through the screen captured videos, chat logs, teachers’ reflection journals, teachers’ final projects, and teachers’ material evaluation skills demonstrated by the end of the tdp. the data were then analyzed qualitatively. the results showed that despite some significant time ineffectiveness and technical issues, the sessions successfully achieved the learning outcomes. additionally, the teachers considered the overall sessions useful in developing their technical knowledge to develop call materials and assuring their quality. these results advocate for some technical supports from the institution and strong commitment of the participating teachers. keywords: synchronous learning, online teacher’s development program, call introduction the rapid development of technology inevitably influences the practice of english language learning and teaching. therefore, many higher educational institutions in indonesia have provided their students computer and its applications for learning english. unfortunately, due to the lack of teacher’s technological knowledge, many invested technology cannot be functioned as much as expected. this reality becomes a concern of the stakeholders. some of them consider it as a waste of money and some think that technology is not actually needed. despite the skeptical thoughts, many still hold on hope that the technology support provided can be utilized to facilitate their students’ language learning by developing the teacher’s knowledge through long-term or short-term training or workshop. these teacher’s training programs or workshops in this study are treated as teacher’s development programs (tdps). teacher’s knowledge is indeed one of very crucial aspects to assure the effectiveness of the use of technology for instructional purposes (kadel, 2005). thus, it is not surprising that many tdps on computer-assisted language learning (call) are offered in this particular context. call here refers to any computer-related application used for language instructional purposes. a number of call tdps are offered online to overcome distance and time barriers (dede, 2006), particularly when they are corry caromawati evaluating a synchronous online teacher development program on creating call teaching materials 160 internationally offered. being delivered online, these tdps benefit the teachers not only to deal with distance and time issues, but also to get them more confident in using technology. in practical realization, these online tdps are delivered either synchronously or asynchronously. they use tools such as moodle, futurelearn, schoology, etc. to deliver them asynchronously, and utilize adobe connect to deliver them synchronously. a countless number of these tdps offer teachers to learn how to use technology to develop teaching materials and assuring the appropriateness. of these tdps, however, little is known if the material evaluation is performed in a structured way. in general, the term materials itself is defined as anything which are used to facilitate the learning of a language (tomlinson, 1998), while the term call materials is used to include call products created using technological resources (levy, 1997) encompassing tasks, software, website, online courses, programs, packaging and learning environments (levy & stockwell, 2006). based on the definition, it means that teaching materials are created in order to support learners’ language learning process. for that purpose, the process of second language acquisition (sla) is often used as a foundation for decisions that go into the design and evaluation for call (chapelle, 2009; hubbard, 2006). thus, as teachers develop call teaching materials, chapelle (2003) strongly suggests that they need to possess understanding of what become the foundation of quality materials from second language (sla) perspectives. to achieve this goal, chapelle (2001) had developed a framework to help teachers better evaluate the appropriateness of a call teaching material that they have developed. this framework has six criteria to judge from the material, they are language learning potential, meaning focus, learner fit, authenticity, positive impact, and practicality. first, language learning potential refers to the degree of how much the call material evaluated provides an opportunity to learn a new language or skills. second, learner fit refers to the degree of how much the call material evaluated is suitable for the learners based on their proficiency level, cultural background, learning strategies, etc. third, meaning focus refers to the degree of how much the call material draws learner’s attention to meaning of the targeted language, not only focuses on forms, being taught by the teachers. fourth, authenticity, on the other hand, refers to the degree of how much the task (of the call material) conducted in class relates to the students’ world outside the classroom walls. fifth, positive impact refers to the benefits of using the call material to the students beyond the language learning itself. lastly, practicality refers to the feasibility of using the call material use. it means the teachers need to ensure the availability of the resources such as software, hardware, and any other technology-related tools. by using this framework, teachers will be able to develop appropriate call materials for the students in their context whenever they apply their technological knowledge and/or acquire any new one. it means they combine their technological along with pedagogical knowledge not only to create call materials but also to assure their quality. in this digital era, teachers have roles either as call practitioners, developers, researchers, or trainers (hubbard & levy, 2006). for the purpose of classroom practice, most teachers are expected to be at least the users (practitioners) and creators (developers) indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 161 of call materials. thus, it is crucial to integrate the knowledge and skills of developing call teaching materials and assuring their quality. cohen, et al. (1993) as cited in desimone (2011) defines the term teacher development in general as “teachers’ experience through a vast range of activities and interactions that can increase their knowledge and skills, improve their teaching practice, and contribute to their personal, social, and emotional growth.” this experience is needed to empower them developing their professional skills. empowerment is an important process to enable teachers engage in, share control of, and influence events and institutions that affect their world (murray, 2010). in call, hubbard and levy (2006) also emphasize the importance of tdps in order to help fostering teacher’s knowledge and skills to integrate technology into language classroom. in designing tdps, there are some frameworks recognized such as situated learning, reflective learning, and project-based learning (healey, et al., 2011). it is important to have a framework and a model in designing a teacher’s development program. the framework used in this study was the project-based learning. this framework is believed to provide a much richer and more lasting impression of the requisite knowledge and skills (p. 145). on the other hand, the model employed in the present study was tpack-in-action model applied by tai in her study in 2013. she applied this model to promote teachers’ technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge (mishra & koehler, 2006) needed by teachers to integrate call properly. in developing countries such as in indonesia, where many teachers have low level of technological knowledge, many call tdps including the online ones only focus on how teachers develop their technological knowledge without providing the underlying appropriateness principles of the materials they develop. thus, it is important for tdp designers and providers in indonesian context to be aware of this issue. additionally, since the number of international programs offered online to indonesian teachers is increasing, it is also important to explore the effectiveness of the programs offered. however, little research has done to investigate the effectiveness of online tdps, more specifically the synchronous ones. given the facts aforementioned, the present study investigated the effectiveness of a synchronous online teacher’s development program in order to foster the teachers’ knowledge to develop call teaching materials using a particular computer authoring tool, and to evaluate the appropriateness of the materials that they have developed. it sought answers to following research questions: 1. to what extend was the online collaborative learning successful to english teachers in indonesia? 2. what was the participants’ perception regarding their online learning experience and the benefits they gained? method the participants volunteered in this project were two female in-service english lecturers named lolita and amrita from a private university in bandung, indonesia. for the purpose of privacy, their names in this study was not their real names. these two teachers were professional english teachers. they graduated from a well-known university of education in bandung, indonesia, and possess an english education degree. both were highly experienced in terms of teaching english as a foreign language as they started teaching english since 2006. nonetheless, they had different degree of corry caromawati evaluating a synchronous online teacher development program on creating call teaching materials 162 experience in terms of technological knowledge. amrita integrated limited, if any, usage of the available technology for teaching. in the regular basis, however, she used the internet and computer to access information about a particular topic in english language such as grammar, vocabulary, or activities that might help her execute her lesson plans. on the other hand, lolita had more experience using technology in her efl classes. during her teaching career, she had incorporated several coursework and tools to support her teaching practice. both had no experience using jcloze and no structured way to evaluate materials. this study investigated a distant teacher development program (tdp) delivered real time. it was distant since the researcher was living in the united states of america (usa) when the study was conducted. the two participants, however, lived in indonesia. the tdp prepared the teachers to be call developers by setting two main objectives, to foster the teachers’ knowledge on creating a technologybased teaching material and to evaluate its appropriateness using the suggested framework. to afford the target skills, the tools involved was j-cloze particularly. it is one of the quizzes available in an authoring tool called hot potatoes. thus, by the end of the training, the participants were expected to be able to create a j-cloze quiz as a call teaching material. afterwards, they were expected to be able to judge the appropriateness of each other’s product. to achieve the learning outcomes, the participants joined four sessions of online collaborative learning which was initially allocated within two hours slot each. these four sessions were designed based on the tpack-in-action model. some technological-based or call tools were utilized in the tdp. they included a synchronous computer mediated communication (scmc) application, google hangouts and whatsapp to communicate remotely. the considerations of using google hangouts were first, it has some necessary features for online learning and collaboration such as group chat and screen sharing. second, even though the participants had never used hangouts prior to the workshop and were not familiar with it, google had been widely used in indonesia and considered user friendly. asynchronous computer mediated communication such as e-mail was used to send the reflection journals and whatsapp chat were used to facilitate questions and answers regarding the technical issue or content of the training. a brief introduction to google hangouts was conducted in a pre-session slot, and participants were also assigned to download hot potatoes 6.3 and dropbox before the sessions. considering the 12hour time difference, it was considered the best to have sessions on saturday and sunday mornings (us time) or saturday and sunday evening (indonesian time). case study research method was applied in this study since it investigated a particular individuals from a particular community (gilhamm, 2010, p. 1). the data was analyzed using qualitative method. the data collected was from different sources such as screen captured videos (scv) of the sessions using screencast-o-matic pro, observation and field notes (o & fn), participants’ reflection journals (rj) sent by email, chat log (cl) in whatsapp chat application, and the artifacts (ar) created and their justification on the artifacts (jus). this set of data collection was used to answer the research questions. the screen captured videos (scv) provided some evidence of what was going on during the sessions so that some justification whether it went indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 163 smoothly as planned could be determined. the data from the recorded sessions was supported by some other data collection particularly from the observation and field notes. additionally, we also communicated in whatsapp (cl) when anything unexpected happened during the sessions, or to coordinate the sessions. this recorded data was also used to support the analysis. however, the teachers’ reflection journals (rj) and their products (ar) provided essentially important data sources in this study. ar provided information of the teachers’ feeling and perceptions on every session of the training. on the other hand, the artifacts created by the participants and their evaluation played a role to support the justification of the achievement of the targeted outcomes of the sessions. results and discussion the results from the pre-session interview revealed that these two teachers had never created a call material in jcloze prior to the sessions, and they were even unfamiliar with hot potatoes. additionally, they claimed that they used their instinct as a teacher to evaluate whether a (call) material is appropriate or not. in other words, they had not had a structured way to evaluate call material prior to the tdp. thus, they were excited to join the sessions. the sessions were timely planned and agreed way ahead before they were started. some initial technical trials were also conducted to get the participants ready and familiar with the main tools they were going to use, google hangouts, hot potatoes, and dropbox. these trials were considered to be technical training. even though the training was conducted, some timing and technical issues were inevitable. the first timing problem was setting the most convenient time for both countries, the united states and indonesia. the settled time schedule, at the weekends, was apparently the participants’ family time. thus, sometimes the participants had to leave the sessions to take care of family matters. this strongly affected not only the time efficiency but also the execution of the collaborative work particularly between the two participants. another factor affected the sessions was the low proficiency level of one of the participant’s technological knowledge. she was left behind compared to the other participant’s comprehension and task completion when it involved technology. the second issue was slow and unreliable internet connection which made the participants were not able to receive clear voice or lost connectivity to the forum. when the former occurred, we tried to solve the problem by using the chat box in google hangouts to deliver the message (as shown in figure 1) to keep the communication going and hoping to get better internet connection. when the later happened, one of them would disappear in the middle of the session. for example, amrita failed to join the first session due to this trouble. another example, lolita lost her internet connection and missed the detail information regarding the homework on creating a quiz. this caused some misunderstanding that led her creating a quiz using a j-match instead of j-cloze. therefore, when she converted the quiz into j-cloze, we found some errors due to the incompatibility of her product. this problem also caused the minimal collaborative work between lolita and amrita that made amrita only worked with the instructor for most of the time. corry caromawati evaluating a synchronous online teacher development program on creating call teaching materials 164 figure 1. one of the participants encountered problem hearing the voice clearly (scv) the aforementioned issues led to some significant change to the session realization. it affected the time efficiency and the effectiveness of the sessions themselves. despite the issues, it is important to note that this study showed that pairing a novice and more expert technology users can be beneficial. lolita, the participant with higher technological knowledge proficiency helped and motivated her partner quite a lot. for example, when amrita could not get the invitation to join the session, she initiated to call her first, and then sent the invitation to me. another example was when she had a problem to upload the quiz into dropbox, lolita guided her as shown in figure 2. figure 2. lolita helped amrita to upload the quiz into dropbox (cl) regardless of the issues discussed above, the sessions were finally completed successfully. they covered all the target activities. after the workshop finalized, the whole data gathered was analyzed to answer the research questions. to answer the first research question, the achievement of the learning outcomes was investigated. the teachers’ final products including their evaluation were analyzed to justify whether or not the workshop achieved its objectives. the assessment was conducted not only by the instructor but also involved another rater to boost the reliability of the assessment. the results of the data analysis showed that, despite the issues aforementioned, the sessions obviously helped foster the teachers’ knowledge of developing a call material and evaluating it. the teachers obviously gained knowledge of creating a teaching material in j-cloze of hot potatoes 6.3. additionally, they also acquired translation: lolita : c’mon, amrita, you can do it! instructor : what’s your problem, amrita? amrita : i can’t remember how to upload the j-cloze exercise. i forgot to write the steps! amrita : it’s complicated, the weather, my health, and lots of things going on! lolita : once you saved it as a web page, you upload it to dropbox to get the link, and then you use it in the blog. indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 165 knowledge to upload it to dropbox, as well as compile it with its context and a help option in a wordpress blog. it is acknowledged from the pre-session interview that these skills had not been possessed prior to the tdp. in the last session, lolita and amrita demonstrated their new skills that they had gained from the four online meetings. they showcased their products including their justification of the appropriateness of their products. they tried each other’s product and provided peer feedback as the evaluation of its qualities. in addition to the teachers’ own justification and peer feedback on their learning products, the instructor also provided feedback to their products. additionally, the instructor assessed their ability in judging their own as well as their peer’s product. in her piece of work (see figure 3), amrita targeted this exercise for students in product design department taking english class ii. thus, she chose a video presenting tips for making excellent logo. her decision to focus on singular and plural nouns was based on her knowledge that her students lacked of language accuracy, particularly in differentiating singular and plural forms. the task designed by her was completing the quiz to predict the vocabulary, listening and watching a video on youtube, comparing the previous answer to the prior answers. figure 3. amrita's j-cloze quiz (ar) lolita’s learning product (see figure 4), on the other hand, targeted engineering and design students taking english course in her institution. her product mainly focused on verb phrases. this exercise allowed the students to learn appropriate idiomatical expressions in any given contexts. even though there were some dislocation of the words on the exercise caused by the format changing from jquiz to jcloze, lolita practically was able to create a quiz in jcloze. corry caromawati evaluating a synchronous online teacher development program on creating call teaching materials 166 figure 4. lolita's j-cloze quiz (ar) in addition to technological knowledge, these two teachers also demonstrated to develop their skills to evaluate call materials, particularly their own projects in the tdp and their partner’s project (peer evaluation). their material evaluation was based on the call material appropriateness framework developed by chapelle (2001). their attained knowledge can be assessed through their justification of their own products as well as judging their peer’s product. as seen on table 1, even though considered not perfect, both products showed to have good qualities overall. this may lead to the indication that the learning outcomes of the sessions were achieved. moreover, it is very interesting to see that the qualities of amrita’s product was considered slightly higher than her partner. her product has more quality on meaning focus, authenticity and positive impact criteria. her mostly full attendance in the forum might have helped her gain more comprehension on the task. table 1. judgement evaluation on the final products (jus) qualities lolita’s amrita’s language learning potential good good learner fit good good meaning focus somewhat meaning focus primarily focus on meaning authenticity somewhat authentic authentic positive impact unknown content knowledge practicality good good based on the evaluation from the two participants and the instructor, both products had good quality of language learning potential since they provided an opportunity for students. one product offered an opportunity to learn singular and plural countable nouns as well as developing the students’ listening skills, the other offered an opportunity to learn verb phrases. the evaluators considered both products suitable for the students in their context considering the students’ language proficiency level. regarding the meaning focus criteria, lolita’s product indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 167 did not have a full context. as a consequence, it was considered not as highly meaning focus as expected. amrita’s product, however, provided a full context of the whole vocabulary introduced since they were within a contextual text. regarding authenticity criteria, amrita’s product was considered more authentic than lolita’s considering her text was relevant to the students’ field of study. while lolita’s product was not highly related to the students’ target language use domain. not only the authenticity criteria, but the two products also had different degree of positive impact criteria. amrita’s product offered another knowledge that the students could afford; content knowledge. lolita’s product, on the other hand, did not provide any other impact. these two products, nonetheless, were considered to have equal degree of practicality since their institution provided computer and could provide hot potatoes. considering the teachers’ demonstrated skills and knowledge discussed above, the instructor considered that the online workshop to some extent achieved the objectives. therefore, regardless of the technical issues occurred during the workshop, it benefitted the teachers by affording new knowledge to them. furthermore, the data from the teacher’s reflections was analyzed to look at their perception regarding the online learning experience that they had completed and the benefits they gained. the results from the data analysis showed that the teachers’ perception focused not only on the learning experience overall but also on the tools employed in the online learning. these two focuses were interpreted to be perception on the online learning experience considering the tools were inseparable parts of the program. on the tools employed in the program, the participants brought up google hangout as the platform used to deliver the synchronous online program. as stated previously, the two participants had never used google hangouts for a video conference prior to the tdp. given the fact that the two participants also had different prior technological knowledge, it was not surprising to find out that both participants went through different experience using it for the first time. lolita, as she possessed higher technological knowledge than that of her partner, found it easy to use. it was found on her learning reflection journal that is shown in the excerpt below: “even though it was my first time using google hangouts, it turned out that it is very user-friendly and linked to some apps and websites.” (lolita-rj-journal 1). on contrast, amrita kept encountering trouble in the pre-session, even though she had gone through a technical trial with me and self-trial with her spouse previously. her technical issues were mainly caused by her low level of technological knowledge. in the beginning of the tdp, this issue occurred and caused her a lot of frustration. it was seen from her first reflection journal shown below: “some hours prior to the first session, i couldn’t wait for the session to begin … however, the connection was very bad and i could not do it …. it had been great but when the session began, it was slowing down. i often had to reconnect. and when i could connect, i couldn’t hear the others’ voices but my own. i tried to fix the audio but i did not know how to do it. i wanted so much to do (join) the session but my limited ability in operating the laptop seemed to hinder it. i was very frustrated. i wanted to fix it but i didn’t know how.” (amrita-rjjournal 1) corry caromawati evaluating a synchronous online teacher development program on creating call teaching materials 168 it is important to note that this perspective was only found in the beginning of the first session. after the first session, it was observed that the position was changed. as discussed earlier in this section, lolita confronted more technical issues than amrita in most of the sessions. besides the tools, particularly google hangout as the platform, the teachers also brought up the interactivity of the tdp. it is interesting to find out that they had different opinions. amrita considered the sessions highly teacheroriented, while lolita saw it differently. she claimed that the tdp was delivered interactively. there were shown in the excerpts taken from the reflection journals below: “that i didn’t really feel the collaborative atmosphere as the instructor was the only person who knew more and the other participants had less knowledge about the lesson.” (amrita-rj-journal 3). “i think the sessions were delivered in an interactive way.” (lolita-rjjournal 2). this different perceptions might have been caused by some issues when lolita had to leave the forum to take care of family matters, and then the instructor led the collaborative project together with amrita alone. additionally, when assigning the collaborative evaluation on the model of the tdp to both participants, lolita also had an issue that she could not join the session. it made amrita worked alone with the instructor, who apparently became the leader of most of the steps in the tdp. regardless of the issues encountered during the sessions, the participants considered the sessions in the tdp useful and had opened their mind about the appropriate call teaching material. in their reflection journals, they admitted that prior to the tdp, they had developed and used teaching materials without being able to justify their quality. after the sessions, they claimed to have not only learnt how to create a material in hot potatoes, but also how to evaluate its qualities. below are the excerpts from their journals: “i am very thankful for having a chance to join this project. the workshop is really useful. this is not only helping me to brush up on the theories but also teaching me how to use and maximize hot potatoes. in addition, this workshop has reminded me to consider the qualities of a material when designing it. we have to be in students' shoes. we have to know what they need and what interests them.” (lolita-rj-journal 5) “they (the sessions) have changed my opinion about material development and technology in teaching …. now, every time i want to use materials, i simultaneously think about what qualities that the materials have and how they can be used to help students learn the language.” (amrita-rj-journal 1) in addition to their perception on the usefulness of the online tdp, the teachers even set more expectation for the future implication of call in their institution. their expectations can be a reflection on their feeling or perspective over the tdp. from the wishes, it can be interpreted that they had positive learning experience. lolita, for example, hoped that the knowledge afforded from the workshop as well as this kind of online learning could be implemented in the institution where she worked. she wrote on her journal, “i hope we can apply this knowledge and this online learning model at the university where we teach as soon as possible” (lolita-rj-journal 5). amrita, moreover, not only claimed to have gained knowledge from pedagogical point of view, but also from the managerial perspective. it was because she was a part of the english indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 169 language coordinator team. from the excerpt below, she stated that she had afforded inspiration of managing the language laboratory where the english team was based. “being long in the profession, many times i only used available materials to teach without thinking deeper about the quality of the materials and how it could affect the achievement of the teaching goal. so, the workshop had opened up my mind, and gave me ideas of other possible ways to manage our language lab” (amrita-rj-journal 1). from the discussion above, it could be interpreted that the participating teachers considered the sessions useful. not only giving them an opportunity to learn new knowledge, but the tdp also gave them a new kind of learning experience that they thought to be a possible way to apply in their context. therefore, despite the frustrating feeling dealing with the internet connection and unfamiliar technological tool in the beginning of the tdp, it was concluded that the teachers perceived the online tdp beneficial and worth implementing in their context. even though the synchronous online tdp achieved the learning outcomes, it is still far beyond perfection. there are some aspects needed consideration and refinement. first, considering the technical issues related to the internet connection and time effectiveness, it is important to find some solutions to them before implementing the same model of tdp. a technical support from the institution will be favorable to allow teachers being online without internet issues. another support from the institution such as allowing the teachers join the sessions during their working time will also boost the effectiveness more considerably. besides the tdp, this present study has also some imperfection that can be improved for further studies. the limitation of the present study includes the fact that there were only two teachers participated. the results might have been different if there were more teachers involved. therefore, for future practice, the number of the participating teachers should come into consideration when employing the same tdp for the future studies. additionally, more assessors will also be needed for higher reliability. conclusion this study explored the effectiveness of a synchronous online teacher’s learning as a teacher’s development program (tdp) in a private higher education in indonesia. the effectiveness of the tdp was looked through the achievement of the learning objectives and the teachers’ feelings and perspectives toward the tdp. the data provided evidence that the workshop overall achieved its objectives. it afforded new beneficial experience for teachers such as being in an online learning, and developing their own call teaching material using j-cloze in a tutoring tool, hot potatoes. teachers also gained new knowledge of evaluating the appropriateness of a teaching material and put more hope to implement call in their instructional practice. from the teachers’ perspectives, they believed that the tdp was beneficial in terms of providing a new way of knowledge transfer as well as developing their knowledge. the results of this study provided some take-home lesson learnt. the first lesson was that pairing teachers with different level of technological knowledge can be beneficial where the more expert helped the weaker, but at the same time it gave frustration to the weaker one when she realized that she was left behind. the second lesson was that to achieve the optimal benefits out corry caromawati evaluating a synchronous online teacher development program on creating call teaching materials 170 of a synchronous online tdp, supports from institutions and strong commitment of the teachers are needed. the last but not least lesson from this study was that teachers’ prior knowledge will help them afford any new knowledge they learn from a tdp. therefore, it is important for teachers to keep updating their knowledge. references chapelle, c. (2001). computer applications in second language acquisition. new york: cambridge university press. chapelle, c. (2003). english language learning and technology. philadelphia: john benjamin publishing company. chapelle, c. (2009). the relationship between second language acquisition theory and computer-assisted language learning. the modern language journal, 741–753. dede, c. (2006). online professional development for teachers: emerging models and methods. cambridge: harvard education press. desimone, l. m. (2011). a primer on effective professional development. phi delta kappan, 92(6), 68-71. healey, et al. (2011). tesol technology standards: description, implementation, integration. virginia: tesol, inc. hubbard, p. (2006). evaluating call software. in calling on call: from theory and research to new directions in foreign language teaching. san marcos: calico, 5. hubbard, p., & levy, m. (2006). the scope of call education. in p. hubbard & m. levy (eds.), teacher education in call (pp. 3– 21). philadelphia: john benjamins. kadel, r. (2005). how teacher attitudes affect technology integration. learning & leading with technology, 32(5), 34. levy, m. (1997). call: context and conceptualization. oxford: clarendon press. levy, m., & stockwell, g. (2006). call dimensions. options and issues in computerassisted language leaning. new york: lawrence earlbaum associates. mishra, p., & koehler, m. j. (2006). technological pedagogical content knowledge: a framework for teacher knowledge. teachers college record, 108(6), 1017–1054. murray, a. (2010). empowering teachers through professional development. english teaching forum, 1, 2-11. tai, s. d. (2013). from tpack-in-action workshops to classrooms: call competency developed and adopted into classroom teaching. (thesis doctoral). ames, iowa: iowa state university. tomlinson, b. (eds). (1998). materials development in language teaching. cambridge: cambridge university press. indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 23 identifying teacher professional identity in the content of pre-service teachers’ reflection on teacher’s teaching practicum martina mulyani english education study program, stkip pasundan cimahi, indonesia e-mail: martinamulyani@gmail.com muhammad handi gunawan (corresponding author) english education study program, universitas pendidikan indonesia, bandung, indonesia e-mail: handi_gunawan@upi.edu i putu indra kusuma english language education department, universitas pendidikan ganesha, bali, indonesia e-mail: indra.kusuma@undiksha.ac.id apa citation: mulyani, m., gunawan, m. h., kusuma, i. i. i. (2022). identifying teacher professional identity in the content of pre-service teachers’ reflection on teacher’s teaching practicum. indonesian efl journal, 8(1),pp. 23-32. https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v8i1.5584 received: 07-09-2021 accepted: 12-11-2021 published: 30-01-2022 introduction teaching practicum has been described as a pivotal event for pst to develop psts’ teaching competence and experience the transition from being students to teachers (gao & benson, 2012; trent, 2013). however, teaching practicum can be one of the most challenging, and frustrating programs for psts. during teaching practicum, they may experience a learning journey that can involve struggle, loneliness, and conflict they face in real classroom environment (gao & benson, 2012; trent, 2013). yet, with all of the weakness of teaching practicum, this program can be seen as training session for pst to learn to negotiate, to adjust themselves, and to fit the school life. during teaching practicum, psts are exposed to the life of a professional teacher and having experienced doing some parts of the teacher’s job. hence, the psts are expected to have identity or strong sense of learning or teaching (maaranen & stenberg, 2017). with this in mind, it seems essential to capture the psts’ sense of professional teacher identity after they got through teaching practicum program. psts’ reflection on teaching practicum seems to be worth researching since it reveals their effort and struggle to cope with the challenges, fit the context and be reflective. one of the tools to analyze the content of reflection is ‘onion model’ of reflection. the model consisting of five phases of structured reflection is offered by korthagen & vasalos (2005). the levels in this model move from the outer world towards the person’s inner world, the first level being environment; the second level abstract: teaching practicum is believed to be a program crucial for pre-service teachers to gain their teacher professional identity (tpi). the pre-service teachers (pst) who are able to fit the context and be reflective to cope with challenges in the program are believed to have the sense of tpi. hence, a pst o pre-service teachers is expected to have deeper focus of reflection after experiencing teaching practicum. one of the tools to identify the tpi among psts is onion model, the model containing the five phases of structured reflection. even though there are a large number of researches that examine the reflection of teaching practicum through the eyes of psts using a number of different tools, few are concerned with the focus of pst’s reflection to determine their tpi. this research employed case study and onion model as the tool of analysis, the study scrutinized the tpi among six psts who possess different intentions in joining the teacher college. the finding showed that, as a training session, teaching practicum is able to sharpen the tpi among psts. however, it cannot change those with multiple identities and fixed personalities who may think that conflicts in identities can lead to diminished well-being. keywords: pre-service teacher; teacher professional identity; teaching practicum. mailto:handi_gunawan@upi.edu https://doi.org/10.25134/ieflj.v7i2.4564 martina mulyani, muhammad handi gunawan, & i putu indra kusuma identifying teacher professional identity in the content of pre-service teachers’ reflection on teacher’s teaching practicum 24 behavior; the third level competencies; the fourth level beliefs; the fifth level identity; and the last level mission. the ‘environment’ means the class, the students, the school, and ‘behavior’ the teacher’s actual behavior in the school context. ‘competencies’ represent a potential for behavior, whereas ‘beliefs’ are defined very closely as meaning the same thing as personal practical knowledge or theory. ‘identity’ refers to how a person sees his or her (professional) identity, and ‘mission’ is concerned with to what end the teacher wants to do his/her work or what he/she sees as his/her personal calling in the world (korthagen & vasalos 2005). in essence, teaching practicum is a way to put psts' commitment to teaching to the test, and their efforts toward fitting the program can be assessed by the onion model the tool to identify their changing focus of reflection. when psts’ reflections on teaching practicum move from outer to inner layer of reflection, the psts can grow their identity for teaching. in reverse, when the psts’ reflection touch only superficial layer of onion model, the psts exhibit only their practical knowledge of being a teacher or teaching. by far, there are a range of researches regarding teaching practicum with a variety of researches outcomes mostly resulted from the perspectives around psts which were analyzed using different tools (lawson, çakmak, gündüz, & busher, 2015). however, the analysis of the structure of focus in pst’s reflection using “onion model is still underutilized. concerning this, the research tries to investigate the sense of psts concerning teacher’s professional identity by identifying the focus of their reflection on teacher’s responsibilities as a major components of the professional identity. it is expected that onion model can capture the professional identity among psts. teaching practicum has been described as a pivotal event for pst to develop their teaching competence and experience the transition from being students to teachers (gao & benson, 2012; trent, 2013). however, teaching practicum is believed to be one of the most challenging, and frustrating program for pst. during teaching practicum, pst may experience a learning journey that can involve struggle, loneliness, and conflict they face in real classroom environment (gao & benson, 2012; trent, 2013). further, referring to ‘bronfrenbrenner’ theory, gao & benson clarify that such situation may discourage pst from becoming a professional teacher in the first place. moreover, gao & benson point out some problems that become the most prevalent concerns of pst. they are “unruly pupils” and the prospect of teaching as career (gao & benson, 2012). likewise, it is evident that the public has frequently placed teachers in positions where they are subjected to public censure of their personal and professional behavior instead of empowering them with professional authority (gao, 2008). in hongkong for example, english language teachers are required to have good command of the language. so, when they failed to meet the expectation, they were blamed for perceived 'falling' standards in english (gao, 2011). moreover, students who are good at school have a greater tendency to choose other professions other than teaching, making local school teachers profession appear incompetent and unrespected to the general public. consequently, many high school graduates are reluctant to become teachers as the result high school students often take teaching as their last option (gao & benson, 2012). in addition to unruly pupils” and the prospect of teaching as career , rabinovich & morton (2016) found out that during practice teaching, psts also experience multiple identities (e.g. being a student, a teacher, even a mother) which can be conflicting. the way psts perceive their ‘self’ determine their attitude towards the clash. if pst consider themselves as flexible, they will be able to see conflicting identities as selfverification process to heighten their well-being. in contrast, pst with fixed or stable perspective will assume conflict as lower wellbeing. consequently, they will try to avoid clash by cancelling each other out. previous researches regarding multiple identities reveal that number of identities and positive psychological outcomes is not quite straightforward. when the meanings offered by one’s multiple identities clash, the effect on one’s well-being is likely to be negative (rabinovic & morton, 2016). some researches, which go in line with this, are the one from brook, garcia, & fleming (2008) who conclude that multiple identities which own incompatible sets of values and/or competing demands on one’s time may have negative effect on one’s well-being and the research from london, rosenthal, levy, & lobel, (2011) indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 25 who describe the effects of incompatibility between one’s gender and professional choice. specifically, tpi is conceived as how teachers view themselves as teachers (teacher –self) and how they are recognized as such or teacher profession (berger & lê van, 2019). clarifying the concept of teacherself and tpi, berger & lê van propose a selection of major components that constitute a teacher’s professional identity. one of them is sense of responsibility. in indonesia, being teacher is regarded to be an honorable job yet, it is a less preferred profession. a teacher is considered as a low paying job (suwandi, 2012) but, bears many responsibilities to do. on the other hand, the teacher’s responsibilities are constituted with four outcomes: motivation, achievement, relationships with students, and quality of instruction (lauermann & karabenick, 2013). the responsibilities of a professional teacher are complicated, interestingly anyone pursuing a career in teaching appear to be aware of them. in fact, some psts are often idealistic and report altruistic motives for choosing the profession (lapsley & woodbury, 2016). however, not all psts actually have intention to be teachers meaning that not all psts have strong motivation to pursue their career in teaching. concerning this, brook, garcia, & fleming (2008) and london, rosenthal, levy, & lobel, (2011) found out that those with strong teacher professional identities are believed to have strong motivation, self-efficacy beliefs, affective commitment, and perception of expertise and to be confident about tackling all the challenges of teaching. on the other hand, those with minimal sense of teacher identity may feel incompatible and may feel insecure about choosing teaching as their profession. reflection is a systematic way of thinking which people learn from experiences. palacios (2021) describes reflection as a meaning-making process that moves a learner from one experience to the next with a better understanding of one’s relationships with and connections to other (people’s) experiences and ideas. in relation to teaching, reflection is considered to be one of the most important issues in teacher education. it is seen as a key element in a teacher’s professional development. one’s professional development may stagnate if the teacher does not get accustomed to systematic reflection (maaranen & stenberg, 2017). viewing the importance of reflection, korthagen & vasalos (2005) believe that teachers and psts are supposed to have deep level of reflection. thus, teaching programs should act as training to help psts reach such levels. concerning this, korthagen &vasalos (2005) offer five phases of structured reflection. it is the ‘onion model’ of reflection. the levels in this model move from the outer world towards the person’s inner world, the first level being environment; the second level behavior; the third level competencies; the fourth level beliefs; the fifth level identity; and the last level mission. the ‘environment’ means the class, the students, the school, and ‘behavior’ the teacher’s actual behavior in the school context. ‘competencies’ represent a potential for behavior, whereas ‘beliefs’ are defined very closely as meaning the same thing as personal practical knowledge or theory. ‘identity’ refers to how a person sees his or her (professional) identity, and ‘mission’ is concerned with to what end the teacher wants to do his/her work or what he/she sees as his/her personal calling in the world (korthagen & vasalos, 2005). the essential thing from the onion model, according to korthagen & vasalos (2005), is awareness of having a choice as it is associated with personal autonomy. they clarify that in teaching, reflection may begin with experiencing problematic situation in which the psts realize the gap between ideal situation and their limitation to cope with that. then they have awareness to find core quality needed to realize ideal situation and overcome the limitation. finally, they are able to actualize the core quality so that they feel confident and relaxed in the classroom and release themselves from their limiting belief that this is something which can only be achieved by very experienced teachers. korthagen & vasalos believe that actualization allow psts to have conscious wanting to create changing or development. with regard to onion model, maaranen & stenberg (2017) conducted a study concerning student teachers’ reflection on personal practice and practicum experience. the study revealed that the reflection located mostly on the outer levels, identity and mission did also appear though. the study which connected the reflection of personal practice directly to practical experience showed that students’ reflection moved from idealistic to more practical. this mean that the students still cannot martina mulyani, muhammad handi gunawan, & i putu indra kusuma identifying teacher professional identity in the content of pre-service teachers’ reflection on teacher’s teaching practicum 26 free themselves from their limiting belief. the fact that the students appear to lose their confidence to attain the ideal situation and try to fit the situation by becoming more practical. with regard to the theory of teacher professional identity, onion model, and teaching practicum, it seems that teaching practicum is a program allowing psts to examine their commitment for teaching. their sense of teacher professional identity may represent in their focus of reflection. when pst can move from outer to inner layer of reflection, it means pst can grow their identity for teaching by releasing themselves from limiting belief. in reverse, when the psts’ reflection touch only superficial layer of onion model, it means the psts show only their practical knowledge of being a teacher or teaching. method this study intends to seek the answer to questions about pst’s reflection on teacher’s responsibilities. considering that motivation can constitute teacher’s responsibility (lauermann & karabenick, 2013), the study began with a little survey to identify the motive of the psts’ joining the teacher college. the study also can be categorized as case study as it selected several psts as cases to whom the study deeply analysed their reflection regarding teaching practicum. selecting the cases, the study invited 30 psts who just finished teaching practicum to answer the open-ended questions related to the pst’s dream job, and their reason why they joined teacher college questionnaire. however, there were only 17 psts who returned the questionnaires. based on the obtained data, there are 3 types of motives that background the psts’ choice of studying in teacher college pst: 1) pst who intrinsically want to be a teacher and make it as their choice of career, 2) pst who do not want to be a teacher at all, 3) pst who think that they just make use of the opportunities come to them and joining a teacher college is the opportunity they have. the following is the table displaying the distribution of the 17 psts. table 1. distribution of the 17 psts types of pst number of pst status 1 12  single 2 2  married 3 3  single the study then selected 6 psts out of 17 psts. they represented psts with 3 different types of motivation. 2 singles psts who are willing to be a teacher considered teacher profession as a secure job which provides them with good future as well as opportunity to manage their working time. some of them also added that by becoming teachers they can be useful or meaningful for others. here are some expressions of first type of pst. “ya saya ingin menjadi guru karena profesi guru memiliki waktu yang fleksibel, maksudnya tidak perlu berangkat pagi dan pulang sampai sore atau full time masih berbagi waktu dengan yang lain.” (syifa nurul) (ya …i want tobe a teacher as this profession provides me flexible time. i do not need to go early and arrive home late or working full time. i still have some time to share with others.) “sosok guru tuh, bener-bener kerja tapi share ilmunya juga jadi kaya akhiratnya dapat dunianya dapat, seneng lihat anak-anak mengerti jadi kita memiliki kepuasan tersendiri.” (misdwi) (a teacher is hard work. one can also share his/ her knowledge get salary in return as well as reward for their good deed. besides, a teacher may experience feeling satisfied recognizing that students can comprehend the material.) both of the students wanted to make teaching as their dream job. therefore, they decided to pursue their study in the teacher college. employing onion model to analyze the pst’s statements related to the reason why they decided to join the teacher college, the study found out that syifa focused on environment and behaviour. syifa observed the teachers who seem to be able to manage their responsibility although they do not spend much time at work. based on her observation, syifa thinks that by becoming a teacher, she may have some time to spare. unlike syifa, misdwi focuses her reflection not only on behaviour but also on belief. misdwi recognizes that a teacher has to work hard. the teacher can get salary from their job as well as rewards for their good deed. she believed that a good teacher will feel satisfied knowing that indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 27 their students can comprehend the material given. these two psts seemed to represent idealistic psts who are frequently reported to have altruistic motives for choosing the profession (lapsley & woodbury, 2016). distinguishing point of view are shared by 2 married students who have already become mother for their young kids. they refused to be a teacher as they assumed that a teacher owns a responsibility which seemed difficult for them to bear. “saya tidak ingin jadi guru karena saya tidak suka anakanak dan tidak suka berfikir.” (sri utami) (i do not want to be a teacher since i do not like children and to think as well) “tanggung jawab guru itu berat, dan saya belum berpikir bisa mengemban tanggung jawab tersebut.” (tanti) (teacher has a big responsibility and i do not think that i can take it.) these two pst hold multiple identities-as a mother, a student and a teacher. those identities own incompatible values that seem to hamper the pst’s wellbeing. hence, the psts are force to select only compatible identities (brook, garcia, & fleming, 2008). in this case, these two psts focused their reflection on teachers’ behaviour and belief. they could identify the teachers’ responsibilities, so they thought that the teachers are supposed to have proper knowledge of pedagogy and subject matter, be able to administer the teaching well, and care about their students. based on their assertion, they concluded that being a mother and a teacher at the same time could harm their wellbeing. besides the two contrastive groups, there is the third group containing 2 singles who thought that becoming a teacher was the only opportunity coming to them. they failed the test in other universities and were able to pass in a teachercollege. they decided to be students of a teacher college either because of the subject matter or the only opportunity they have. some of their answers are as follows: “saya ingin melanjutkan sekolah ke jenjang yang lebih tinggi.” (risky) (i want to pursue my study.) “saya tidak ingin menjadi guru. inginnya menjadi pramugari tetapi karena saya pendek .. jadi ga jadi. setelah gagal jadi pramugari saya ingin jadi perawat tapi saya kan jurusan waktu sma nya ips bu ..jadi ya saya masuk ke sini. sebenarnya juga saya masuk karena bahasa inggrisnya saya suka bahasa inggrisnya…bu…” (shaskia) (i did not want to be a teacher, i wished i could be a steward but the problem is my height. then i wished to be a nurse yet, i took social science class when i was in secondary school. so i decided to enrol to this teacher college, i like the subject matter only though.) the third type of psts paid attention to competencies. both psts have passion in learning especially learning english. they seemed to be indecisive when it comes to career choice. what they knew was that they might have more opportunity to get better job when they continued studying in tertiary level of education. the result of questionnaire clearly revealed various motivation of psts’ taking teacher college as the choice of their higher education. their behaviours were influenced by environment. such as teaching schedule, the available opportunity, and the teacher behaviour. influence the psts’ motivation for joining teachers’ college. the psts who have intention to be a professional teacher at the first-place exhibit idealistic and altruistic view regarding teaching. on the other hand, those with dual identities mother and teacherthink that teacher’ responsibilities are hard for them to bear. being a pst and a teacher are two different things. they seemed to believe that being a pst and a mother at the same time will not ruin their well being. however, they viewed a professional teacher with its responsibility may be incompatible with their current identity as a mother. hence, they appear to be hesitant to choose teaching as their choice of career although they decided to study at the teacher college. other psts who have no intention to be a teacher but join teacher college think that they have competencies either in subject matter or in pedagogy. the psts’ motivation for teaching is supposed to be strengthened during teaching practicum since the ptss can not only observe but also experience “real “ teaching. however, like two sides of coin, the challenges the psts experience during this training program can strengthen or weaken pst’s professional teacher identity (gao & benson, 2012). this research then will investigate how students view their experiences by scrutinizing their focus of reflection regarding teaching practicum. martina mulyani, muhammad handi gunawan, & i putu indra kusuma identifying teacher professional identity in the content of pre-service teachers’ reflection on teacher’s teaching practicum 28 results and discussion it has been stated earlier that 6 psts representing different kind of motivations were interviewed to reveal their reflection regarding teaching practicum and teacher’ responsibilities. the data from interview were analyzed using onion model which offers six level of reflection moving from the outer world towards the person’s inner world. the first level being environment; the second level behavior; the third level competencies; the fourth level beliefs; the fifth level identity; and the last level mission. (korthagen & vasalos, 2005). it is expected that the psts’ reflection will move from the superficial level to inner level. the followings are the psts’ reflection after having teaching practicum. syifa is already a freelance teacher who works in a private school. her reflection is as follows: “ya bu, kan waktu tahun kemarin kating itu bermasalah dengan pamong di sekolah ini. jadi saya siap siap takut juga mengalami hal yang sama. tapi alhamdulillah ternyata baikbaik aja.” (since my senior had bad experience teaching in this school. so i decided to make better preparation for teaching practicum as i feel afraid of getting through the same. yet, alhamdulillah, things went well.) “yang pasti ikuti aja kemauannya. datang harus tepat waktu, dan rpsnya harus detil.” (the most important thing is that just doing what she wished for, for example, arriving at school punctually, and making lesson plan in detail.) “jadi ya walaupun banyak tuntutan, saya belajar banyak dari ppl.” (so, although demanding, i learn a lot from teaching practicum.) syifa’ reflection represents the struggle of attending teaching practicum. the working culture of a school and the coordinating teacher’s behavior forced her to be committed and responsible – two components of teaching professional identity. however, with her competence, she managed to face the difficulties and challenges. her sense of teacher identity reveals as she was able to say that she learned a lot from teaching practicum although it was demanding. in brief, syifa’ reflection regarding teaching practicum ranged from environment to identity. the working culture of school and the demand of the coordinating teacher made her to behave as required. despite struggling to cope with all the load assigned to her, syifa was able to show her abilities to handle it all, even her teaching professional identity as well as her ability to gain new insights. misdwi is a pst who is still single and has motivation to be a teacher. the following is her reflection towards teacher’s responsibilities. “tanggung jawab guru sebagai pengajar, yang mana lebih menekankan kepada tugas dalam merencanakan dan melaksanakan pengajaran.” (as a teacher, a teacher should prepare and carry out teaching well.) “lalu tanggung jawab guru sebagai pembimbing yang mana guru memberi tekanan kepada tugas untuk siswa, kemudian memberikan bantuan kepada siswa dalam pemecahan ,masalah yang dihadapinya.” (as an adviser, a teacher should provide task and help students to solve the problem.) “kemudian tanggung jawab guru dalam pendidikan di sekolah, yakni setiap guru harus menguasai cara belajar mengajar yang efektif, mampu membuat satuan pelajaran, mampu memahami kurikulum dengan baik, mampu mengajar di kelas, mampu menjadi model bagi siswa, mampu memberikan nasihat, menguasai tehnik-tehnik pemberian bimbingan dan layanan, mampu membuat dan melaksanakan evaluasi.” (as a manager, a teacher should recognize the effective teaching strategy, be able to make lesson plan and deliver the lesson, comprehend the curriculum, do assessment, and know the best for his/ her students.) “intinya guru tersebut harus kreatif, guru bisa menerapkan ice breaking, games, menampilkan video yg menarik, atau mengadakan reward entah itu hadiah kecil-kecil atau nilai tambah. biasanya siswa lebih suka sesuatu yang visual dan membuat mereka penasaran.” (overall, a teacher should be creative, he/ she can make lesson plan, apply ice breaking, carry out games, provide interesting movie or reward to enhance the learning as students commonly learn more through vision, also learn from their curiousity.) “sehingga, jika saya jadi guru, saya harus bisa membuat rpp dengan detail karena ternyata bu, guruguru ternyata sering ga buat rpp ya... jadi saya harus buat rpp nanti. selain itu saya harus indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 29 bisa menghandle siswa di kelas dengan baik, dan membuat pembelajaran menarik.” (so, when i become a teacher later, i should be able to make a detailed lesson plan, as in fact, teacher seldom make it. i also should be able to manage the class, handle the students and make learning interesting.) misdwi focused her reflection on the behavior, competencies and beliefs of the teacher. she was able to list a wide array of competencies required by the teacher, and she believed that a teacher should be creative to make learning interesting. her sense of teacher’s identity is exposed when she said that she had intention to create a meaningful lesson plan, administer the class and lesson well, although she observed that many teachers did not make lesson plan. in other words, her reflection that focused on identity and mission reveals her commitment to be a good teacher although she gained unexpected picture of professional teacher during teaching practicum. sri utami is a pst who has already got married and leads multiple identities. aside from being a pst, she is also a mother and a wife. she doesnot want to be a teacher because she thinks that coping with her only daughter is already challenging, how much more a teacher who has to handle many students. her reflection can be found below: “alhamdulillah pas ppl siswanya baik bu, berbeda dengan kelasnya (nama temannya)…… jadi ga ada masalah.” (alhamdulillah, the students in my class behaved different from the class of…. so it was no problem.) “ppl bermanfaat karena saya banyak belajar dari siswanya. ternyata banyak yang baik juga jadi saya ingin membuat mereka suka belajar.” (ppl is advantageous since i learned a lot from the students. in fact, there are a lot of good students so i really want to facilitate them learning.) “guru harus sering-sering membuat game kelompok agar murid sedikit percaya diri.” (the teacher must frequently make group work to endorse their confidence.) “kalau dari guru pamongnya hampir ga ada karena memang saya hanya sekali melihat mereka mengajar, selanjutnya mereka menyerahkan pada kita.” (i learned only a little from the cooperating teacher since i only once observed their teaching, for the rest, they just handed in the class to us.) sri’s reflection puts emphasis on environment. her statement clearly poses her concern for unrully students. however, her interaction with students in the school changed her assumption about students. sri, who thought that students were not easy to talk to, found out that she was able to interact with them well. she believed that the students would feel like to learn if the teacher provides fun learning. therefore, during teaching practicum, she facilitated students learning by providing game to raise the students’ confidences. her reflection highlights the value of confidence in overcoming challenges. sri utami was able to gain assurance once she could manage the unruly students. as a result, her teaching profession identity emerged and she was able to create fun learning experiences with her students. this finding indicates the importance of tenacity in overcoming limitations to grow the teaching professional identity (korthagen & vasalos , 2005). tanti is also a mother of one son. she had ever worked in several companies before deciding to pursue her study in the teacher college. she has no interest in teaching as she assumed teacher as a job with lots of responsibilities. however, she is interested to join teacher college because it is located near her house. the following is her reflection of teaching practicum. “alhamdulillah …udah beres tapi kan bu keburu pandemi…jadi cuma sebentar, saya cuma dua kali tatap muka. saya tahu kalau tanggung jawab guru itu bukan hanya mendidik secara akademik. tapi ada peran untuk mendidik secara ahlak juga.” (alhamdulillah..it is done. yet it lasted only less than a month, since covid 19 outbreak occurred. i had got only two times meeting. i have already known that a teacher has responsibility for educating students academically and personally.) “dan keberhasilan guru bukan hanya dilihat dari bagusnya nilainilai siswanya. dalam persepsi saya guru itu harus bisa mendidik.” (the success of a teacher can be seen merely on the grades of his/ her students. in my perception, a teacher should be able to educate as well.) “selain dari itu, ada lagi tanggung jawab guru sebagai salah satu pengemban tugas di sekolah, martina mulyani, muhammad handi gunawan, & i putu indra kusuma identifying teacher professional identity in the content of pre-service teachers’ reflection on teacher’s teaching practicum 30 seperti ada tugas untuk menyelesaikan administrasi sekolah dan tugas khusus lain yang di berikan oleh sekolah.” (in addition, a teacher is responsible for carrying out school administration and other task given by the school.) “sehingga saya berpikir jika saya belum mampu mengemban tanggung jawab tersebut.” (therefore, i think i cannot afford taking the responsibilities.) her reflection represents her focus on the responsibilities of teacher which describe environment, teacher’s behavior, and competencies. viewing the teacher’s responsibilities, she feels doubtful of her ability in coping with the responsibilities. when asking the reason why she refused to be a teacher, she answered this way: “ya..sebenarnya bukan ga ingin jadi guru. mungkin nanti bu, kalau sekarang mah ..repot soalnya tanggung jawabnya banyak saya lihat bu tetangga saya mah pulangnya malam hampir setiap hari.” (yea..actually i did not mean to refuse the job (teacher). may be later, at the present time..i am afraid i cannot make it. i know a teacher has lots of responsibilities to bear. in fact, my neighbor arrives home from school late in the afternoon or even in the evening almost every day.) the data from interview show that she currently has other identities conceived to be important and she may think that having multiple identities will lower her wellbeing (rabinovich & morton, 2016). risky is a pst who did not have any intention to be a teacher. here is her reflection: “siswa ditempat saya mengajar itu kurang gimana gitu behaviornya …kaya buang sampah sembarangan, kelasnya kotor.” (the students in class where i taught were ignorant…they littered so the class was in mess and dirty.) “gurunya ga pernah marah..malah sebelum mengajar acaranya selalu beres beres dulu ,….jadi belajarnya hanya sebentar.” (the teacher never got angry instead she always tidied up the class by herself before teaching and it consumed the learning hour. as a result, students got only little time for learning.) “nah dari situ saya belajar kalau jadi harus bisa tegas, dan harusnya ada piket,..” (with that reason, i encouraged myself to be strict. i believed that there should be someone in charge of the cleanliness of the classroom.) “harusnya siswa nya diajak untuk beres beres,…jangan gurunya aja…” (the teacher was supposed to ask students to clean the classroom together. she can not just do it alone.) her reflection revolves around environment, behavior and belief. she thought that the students in the school, where she did practice teaching, were little bit lazy and ignorance while the teacher was too lenient. risky observed that the cooperating teacher did the cleaning alone without the help from the students. as the result, the cooperating teacher used more time for cleaning instead of teaching before the lesson. risky believed that keeping the classroom clean is the responsibility of not only the teacher but also the students so she expected that the teacher should have reminded the students to behave as required. having encountered such situation, risky had mission to make herself as a strict and disciplined teacher who is able to manage the class and the students. with refer to risky’s reflection, it can be seen that the conflict during teaching practicum can strengthen psts’ teaching professional identity (gao & benson, 2012; trent, 2013). in the case of risky, she wanted to be a teacher who can gain respect from her students. shaskia is a pst who actually has no intention to be a teacher. joining a teacher college was the last option she had as she failed to join several other universities. the following is her reflection towards teachng practicum. “ppl membuat saya bisa membuat pengalaman dalam mengajar.” (teachng practicum provided me with some experiences in teaching.) “tetapi kadang melihat murid murid saya di tempat saya seperti kurang mengerti dalam pembelajaran bahasa inggris selain itu juga kurang motivasi” however, the students in my place of teaching seemed to be confused and unmotivated to learn english.) indonesian efl journal (ieflj) p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 volume 8, issue 1, january 2022 https://journal.uniku.ac.id/index.php/ieflj/index 31 “karena gurunya juga kurang memotivasi murid. selain itu, gurunya juga menjelaskan materi dengan singkat lalu beri tugas dengan alasan agar murid tidak ribut, ya…” (the teacher also did not motivate the students to learn. besides, the teacher just presented the material then asked students to do the tasks so that they would not make noise.) “walaupun gimana gitu saya mengikuti cara mengajar guru tersebut.” (nevertheless, i just imitated the way they taught the students.) “sebenarnya jika saya jadi guru saya ingin membuat murid termotivasi dalam belajar bahasa inggris selain itu juga ingin membuat murid tidak berfikir bahwa pelajaran bahasa inggris itu sulit. karena kebanyakan murid ditempat saya ppl berfikir kalau pejaran bahasa inggris itu sulit.” (if i were a teacher i would motivate students and make them have a willingness to learn english as english is not as hard as they thought.) her reflection exhibits her experience in teaching. she paid attention to environment. looking at the students and the behavior of teachers when delivering material. shaskia avoided conflict with the cooperating teacher by following the way the cooperating teacher taught. nevertheless, her teaching experience raised her sense of teachers’ responsibilities, and commitment. during teaching practicum, she had learned that the students had relatively high affective filter in learning english. she believed if the teacher could lower it probably by providing more interesting way of delivering the lesson, the students would be more easily comprehend english and would not consider english as difficult subject to learn. therefore, she has a mission to make the english lesson more interesting and less challenging so the students will not consider english as a tough subject to learn rather they will have motivation to learn english. shaskia’ reflection which demonstrates her concern of learning process in classroom represents her sense of teaching professional identity. like risky, shaskia’s case also posed the an example of challenge in teaching practicum that enhances psts’ sense of teaching professional identity (gao & benson, 2012; trent, 2013). viewing the psts’ focuses of reflection, the study identifies the move of the focus before and after teaching practicum as it can be seen in the following chart. figure 1. focus of reflection the chart illustrates the move of psts’ focus of reflection from outer layer to inner layer of onion model. after teaching practicum, the reflections focus more on identity and mission rather than on behavior and belief. the pst attempted to be a good teacher for their students and whenever they found something unexpected, they determined to do it better in the future time. the chart also shows the move from inner layer to outer layer of reflection. it seems teaching practice has discouraged tanti, a pst with multiple identity to bear identity of professional teacher. the experiences seemed to have convinced her that the identities she holds have incompatible values that can harm her well being. eventually, the reflections taken from six students who share different identities and motivation reveal that teaching practicum offers martina mulyani, muhammad handi gunawan, & i putu indra kusuma identifying teacher professional identity in the content of pre-service teachers’ reflection on teacher’s teaching practicum 32 prominent contribution to shape the pst’s teaching professional identity. conclusion teaching practicum program can promote pst’s professional teaching identity. the evidences revealed the change of the focus of the psts ‘ reflections before and after teaching practicum. employing onion model, the study found out that most of the students’ reflection move from outer to inner layer of onion model. this means teacher professional identity among psts has grown during teaching practicum. however, teaching practicum can not change those with multiple identity and fixed personality who may think that conflicting identity can lower their well being. references berger, j. l., & lê van, k. 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(2013). from learner to teacher: practice, language, and identity in a teaching practicum. asia-pacific journal of teacher education, 41(4), 426–440. https://doi.org/10.1080/1359866x.2013.838621 indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 203 mental process of writing for academic purposes: a case study of indonesian writers fahrus zaman fadhly department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia e-mail: fahruszf@uniku.ac.id nurul hasanah department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia e-mail: nurul.hasanah24116@gmail.com vina agustiana department of english education, university of kuningan, indonesia e-mail: v.agustiana08@gmail.com apa citation: fadhly, f. z., hasanah, n., & agustiana, v. (2017). mental process of writing for academic purposes: a case study of indonesian writers. indonesian efl journal, 3(2), 203-214. received: 16-05-2017 accepted: 21-06-2017 published: 01-07-2017 abstract: this study was aimed at reconstructing the mental processes involved in academic writing. this qualitative case study involved two lecturers in university of kuningan since they were considered able to engage mental processes in their steps of writing for academic purposes or scientific manuscript. the data were obtained through in-depth interview. as result, there are some mental processes involved in the writing activity experienced by the writers. those mental processes are differently involved in the steps of writing starting from brainstorming, planning, drafting, revising, editing, until proofreading stage. besides, this study revealed the ways how the writers develop their writing in case of producing a long composition without losing the essence of the paper, how the writers overcome the sticking in their writing process, the writers’ special writing features and what they expect from the reader after reading their writing. it also revealed that the differences experienced by the participants in each stage of writing are strongly influenced by their areas of interest, writing behavior and their writing style. keywords: mental process, academic writing, stages of writing introduction writing is a skill that is required in many contexts throughout life (bowker, 2007). it is a mental activity considered to be difficult and have many temptations. thus, some writers may have their own strategy in building a good construction of their writing. writing is one of language skills demanded to master especially for the academicians since they have to be able to develop science, technology and art for the nation advancement. in fact, there are many people interested in writing because it is so beneficial. for example, when people are asked to write an academic paper or erudition, they needs to know how to write well, the kind of good writing, the kind of reference and the steps to write the paper in order to get satisfactory product. irvin (2010) stated that when people are speaking, they face the three dimensional situation, while in writing they are restricted only in two dimensional setting of the flat page. it is metaphorically described as if people have a blindfold over their eyes and their hands tied behind their backs; they mailto:nurul.hasanah24116@gmail.com fahrus zaman fadhly, nurul hasanah, & vina agustiana mental process of writing for academic purposes: a case study of indonesian writers 204 cannot see exactly whom they are talking to or where they are. thus, in writing, people might not know who their readers are. separated from the audience in place and time, people, here is the writers, imaginatively have to create this context. the words on the page are silent, so the writers must use clear and appropriate punctuation and word choice to communicate their tone (irvin, 2010). the writers also cannot see their audience to measure how the communication is being received or what kind of response will come along their writing. writing is an activity that is not happening all at once. like the way people are thinking, writing takes time to reach its intended point before producing satisfactory results. davis and lovejoy (1993) stated that writing process is not a rigid, step-by-step activity. it usually involves many twists and turns, much doubling back and leaping forward. still, it is possible to see the difference in the three stages depending on whether the writers are planning their writing, completing a first draft or revising their piece of writing. this happens most in academic writing. academic writing refers to a particular style of expression that researchers use to define the intellectual boundaries of their disciplines and their areas of expertise (jones, 2003). it is the style of writing that investigates the state of an issue and presents the writers’ position based on the evidence of their research. characteristics of academic writing include a formal tone, use of the third-person rather than first-person perspective, a clear focus on the research problem under investigation, and precise word choice. like specialist languages adopted in other professions, such as, law or medicine, academic writing is designed to convey agreed meaning about complex ideas or concepts for a group of scholarly experts. writing involves starting, progressing and finishing a complicated, challenging combination of tasks. it requires the writers to activate lots of different skills and orientations, sometimes at different stages and phases in the process, sometimes all at the same time. some researchers have claimed that writing can be experienced as one of the most difficult of all skills, requiring an intricate combination of neurological, physical, cognitive and affective competencies (levine, 2004). while the others might claim that even if writing makes complicated demands on their skills and abilities, it is possible to make writing easy, or at least easy enough for it to feel worth tackling regularly and with good effect. however, all of these things are pertinent to what is called mental process. mental process or mental function is all the things that individuals can do with their minds (halliday, 1985). these processes include perception, memory, thinking (such as imagination, belief, reasoning, etc.), volition, and emotion (nemes, 2008). however, sometimes people use the term cognitive function or cognitive process instead. this can be revealed by many definitions given by some experts or psychologists who state that mental and cognitive processes are two things chronically involved in human mind activities. although some other psychologists say that cognition belongs to one of mental branches, it becomes no matter since these two things are crucial for people in exploiting their mind abilities. this present study was conducted to explore more about how mental processes do give significant values for the writers in writing for academic purposes. coming from this pretension, the researcher tried to compose a little analysis based on some proofs obtained through interviewing the two kuningan indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 205 academic writers and redraw the result in this paper. referring to the rationale of this study, the researcher had drawn two major research questions: “what are mental processes involved in the academic writing of two academic writers? and “how will mental process be engaged with two academic writers in their writing for academic purposes?” method this qualitative case study was based on the theories proposed by gay, mills and airasian (2012), miles and huberman (1994), and fraenkel and wallen (2009). gay et. al. (2012) defined a case study research as a qualitative research approach in which researchers focus on a unit of study known as a bounded system, for example, individual teacher or lecturer. similarly, miles and huberman (1994) described a case study as an investigation of a phenomenon that occurs within a specific context. in case study, a single individual, group, or important example is studied extensively and varied data are collected and used to formulate interpretations applicable to the specific case. according to fraenkel and wallen (2009), what case study researchers have in common is that they call the objects of their research cases, and they focus their research on the study of such cases. this study was undertaken in university of kuningan, kuningan, west java. the population taken was the lecturers who used to write for academic purposes. the researcher involved two lecturers teaching at university of kuningan as the participants of the research. those lecturers are mr. marwito wihadi and mrs. vina agustiana who are well-known as the authors of several published journals which some of them were inserted in english review: journal of english education. two of their journals chosen in this research are entitled fostering students’ wisdom in an interactively argumentative writing project and combining product and process-based approaches to teaching writing discussion texts. these place, population and sample were chosen because the researcher was eager to identify how mental process affected the participants’ process in writing for academic purposes. also, the researcher expected to examine whether the participants conducted the academic writing following the same stages or they used another steps in their own. in this research, the researcher used semi-structured interview which consisted of a series of questions designed to elicit specific answers from respondents with regard to writing experiences, perceptions of self, and mental activities involved in their writing. interview is used to obtain information that can later be compared and contrasted in the data analysis (fraenkel & wallen, 2009, p. 446). therefore, the researcher posed some questions deeply related to the problem focus. thus, the data needed in this research can be collected maximally. results and discussion the study was conducted to analyze the mental process engaged in writing activity. there are several kinds of mental processes found in this research result, such as perception, attention, memory, passion, disposition, and so on. those processes were involved in the mental process of the brainstorming stage, mental process of the planning stage, mental process of the drafting stage, mental process of the revising stage, mental process of the editing stage, and mental process of the proofreading stage. besides, the researcher also found the way how the writers develop their writing in case of producing a long writing without losing the essence of the fahrus zaman fadhly, nurul hasanah, & vina agustiana mental process of writing for academic purposes: a case study of indonesian writers 206 paper, how the writers overcome the sticking in their writing process, the writers’ special writing features and what they expect from the reader after reading their writing. the detailed explanations of those findings of this research are presented in the following sections. mental process of brainstorming stage the most difficult part of writing can be putting down the first words on a blank page. to help people get started, it is suggested to create a good writing environment that is free of distractions and make a writing schedule (kellog, 1994). writing prompts and brainstorming can also help the writers figure out what they want to write about, making it easier for them to get started and keep them thoughts flowing on the page. during writing process, writers might have many ideas in their mind related to the topic of their paper. sometimes it seems good since it can cause the paper filled with much information. however, there is also a situation where the writers get difficult because the ideas are too much and they might feel confusing in choosing which ideas will be put on their writing. as a writer, having ideas is one of the most important parts of craft. however, it often seems like one of the most difficult and challenging parts of the whole process. young (1940) said that an idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements. some people like to wait for inspiration to strike. inspiration is not just a desirable thing, it is an integral part of the writing process. every writer needs to find inspiration in order to produce inspired writing, and sometimes it can come from unlikeliest sources. however, the most common sources for getting inspiration to write can come through reading books, journals, articles, or surfing on the internet. in this research, the researcher found that there are some similarities and differences of how the writers get inspiration to write their journal. participant a said that he would like to sort out which ideas are related to his study now and to the previous study. he would prioritize the ideas related to his previous study so that there would be a good correlation. he would also limit the ideas, whether or not they are in accordance with his interests. for example, since his interests are in teaching writing, teaching speaking, toefl, sla, and sociolinguistic, he would still limit the ideas up to those 4 areas only. so the scope of his research will be only around those fields, not widen to anywhere else. almost similarly, participant b tends to use brainstorming in overcoming the abundant ideas in her mind. she might be stuck at first about what she will write. therefore, she would make brainstorming and then a mind mapping after she decides the topic she will discuss in her topic. also, her first step is modeling by reading related previous study so she will have provision for writing. in brainstorming, writers can freely write anything they wants. there is no rule about how many words they have to write. they can write as many as possible the words that come into their mind related to the topic of the writing they are going to make. in brainstorming, the writers can refer to various references or they can also rely on the knowledge they have had before which is considered appropriate or related to their writing topic and seems proper to be put in their writing later. in the stage of brainstorming, there is no certainty whether or not the words should have been proper or right since this process can be done in the next stage where the writers feel have poured out all keywords in their mind. the researcher analyzed that there is mental process involvement in the way the writers get inspiration to write down indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 207 in brainstorming. the writers pay attention to the topic they will use in their writing. they also use perception towards things they find in the source they are reading. it is necessary to be selective in finding an appropriate source for their writing. this point belongs to the volition in which the writers need to be careful in making decision on what topic or idea they will pour out in their writing. however, these processes are strongly influenced by the writers’ thought about the environment. how they view the world could be useful in getting inspiration for their writing. mental process of planning stage after writing several keywords related to her writing topic, the writers can freely but carefully select which ideas are more appropriate to be developed in their writing later. in the stage of planning, the writers should have had an image of how those ideas they have chosen in brainstorming will be developed. in this stage also, the writers ensure that they have collected the materials or data needed in their writing. however, these materials or data might be unused or replaced with the other data the writers might find during the writing process. this happens since while writing, the writers might keep searching for the other data resources because they feel the ones they have got before are insufficient or less strength to support their writing. also, considering the value to put in their writing might be important before their write their paper. participant a tends to consider a value as a renewal. he would like to share what has not been known by other people. although what he writes is not actually something new in this world but it is minimally new for the reader. of course, the writer will firstly see who his target to be. for example, if the target reader is from the level of university students, the writer tends to put something that seems to be new for the reader. ideally, it should be new for all, both the students and the researcher. participant b might make an outline first, a draft. but if she has to make a research report, she will make a plan. she will formulate the questions to be proposed. then participant b will make a title, next continue to the research design, what method will be applied. after that, participant b will make this outline as a sub-chapter. next she will determine what topic to be used in each paragraph. the writers process the information they have got related to the ideas of their writing and pour out all the words in the paper. here, the writers need to be careful in choosing which one will be put on their writing after making a draft or an outline. they also need to think hard to make each word and sentence is correlated between each other. it is necessary to make sure they develop the ideas in appropriate word choice and language structure. writing the research paper is not as overwhelming as some may initially think. the research paper essentially is a search on work that has previously been studied by usually an expert in the field. the only task that is required of the writers is to unearth their work. even though this task may seem simple, many writers encounter problems organizing and writing the research paper because they fail to research the general topic before they decide on a thesis statement; they fail to provide an appropriate thesis statement; they fail to provide a connection between the thesis statement and all of the topic sentences in the paper; they fail to support the paper with adequate information that is relevant only to the topic of the paper; or they fail to correctly cite their sources. in this point, the researcher found that the writers’ memory is involved much in the way they consider what values to put in their writing. they use fahrus zaman fadhly, nurul hasanah, & vina agustiana mental process of writing for academic purposes: a case study of indonesian writers 208 their experience and perception based on their education background to make their writing have high value so the reader can get worthy knowledge and information. also, here the writers involve their habit in their writing process in which this belongs to disposition aspect. here the writers might use their memory in order to make their writing be more effective. the knowledge and information they have ever got are extremely useful to help them compose a good writing. they also need to focus and pay attention to the main topic they have determined at the first time they intend to write. however, their perception of the topic will also help them choose which ideas are suitable to put first on their writing. it is necessary to give priority to those which are more valuable to be involved in their writing rather than the ones that can only be additional information. mental process of drafting stage having done with the stage of brainstorming and planning, the writer can start writing and developing the ideas she has written before. those ideas are developed in form of sentences and paragraphs. as the beginning, the sentences she writes can be simple form. while the content or the relevance of each paragraph can be concerned later. in this stage of drafting, the writer ensures that what she has provided in brainstorming is developed well. it can be said that this stage or process of drafting is 50 percent from the whole of her writing since in this stage, the writer has poured out the ideas in her mind and inserted the data needed to support her ideas. it is only the writing tidiness in the drafting stage that has not been concerned fully since this stage still prioritizes the delivery of ideas or analysis result (since here what is meant by the writing is academic writing with the sample is journal). participant a will firstly make a draft. for example, what he will write in introduction, what he will input in methodology, and what he will present in finding and discussion. in short, participant a will make a draft first instead to make a full paper. participant a stated that he would like to make a draft by referring to the sources. then, when he cites someone’s opinion, he will not just cite it but also rewrite with his own words in accordance with the meaning. this part takes much time. for participant a, the main factors of his writing continuity are the network connection and books availability. before going to write, participant a would first ensure that the internet connection is online. then he would sort out or select which book he needs and put it on his table. similarly, participant b would also make a draft and then make outline of the sub-chapter for each chapter. next, she will make outline of the paragraph in each sub-chapter. so, the outlining helps her to make mind mapping. she just needs to develop what she has written in the outline become paragraphs. there she would know which idea she needs to write and which ones need to be omitted. while for the content itself, participant b used to share with her colleague, best friend, and anyone who is related to her writing. she would taking anyone, even her students can be the site to get more information for supporting her writing. both participant a and participant b have different priority in their writing according to the way they decide their standing position. if participant a concerns about how his ideas would be accepted by the reader, while participant b concerns more about how her ideas could be delivered well to the reader. in deciding their standing position, the writers emphasizes the perception of their writing purposes. they use disposition to help deciding the point of view they are going to use. here the indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 209 writers also pay attention to how the reader might catch the message of their writing. they also imagine if they are in the reader position, how the reader will see the meaning in their writing. however, volition plays an important role in the way the writer determine how their writing would be understood by the reader. having ideas for the paper, some writers might find it difficult to support those ideas. support and elaboration consist of the specific details and information writers use to develop their topic or ideas. the key to developing support and elaboration is getting specific. good writers use concrete, specific details, and relevant information to construct mental images for their readers. they supply their readers with sufficient details to comprehend what they have written. they also select only the details that will support their focus and delete weak and irrelevant information. they got the ideas through reading the others’ writing, journals, articles and books. most of the sources are related to their research. being apart from who the author is, the participants would still read her writing since it might give much valuable information to support their ideas. in drafting, the writers might get stuck and hard to continue their writing. participant a said that if he gets stuck, he tends to give himself a rest first and then do another activity that can relax his body and mind. also, he would force himself to write anything, although in the end it would be deleted. on the other hand, participant b said that when she had proposed a title and the problems, if it seems hard to be evolved, she would try to find a new topic that might be easier for her to develop. in short, both participant a and b tend to read any kind of references to get information that can support their ideas, such as journals, articles, or books that are related to their research and it does not matter whether the author is wellknown or just an ordinary person. the kinds of mental processed involved in this point might include attention, perception and volition. the writers, again, need to focus on the topic of their writing. it is important since it can help them to find the appropriate source to support their writing development. their perception of something they find in a source, for example, a journal or an article, will also affect their final decision on what suitable information they will add to support their idea. mental process of revising stage after composing a draft, the writer continues to the stage of revising where in this stage the writer needs to check her writing content, whether or not the sentences are correlated each other. besides, in revising stage, the writer can change, add or reduce some sentences that seem unnecessary to be poured out in the writing. the writer can also replace the sentences that seem simple become more complex and good-quality. the prevailing of data resources used in the writing also needs to be checked so the writing content can be answerable and more credible. simply, the revising stage is the strengthening stage of the writing content, both the theories applied and the result of analysis, whether or not they have been suitable with the main topic and answered the problems that have been formulated before. research has shown that the number one reason writers do not pass standardized writing prompts is lack of idea development. their pieces are just too short. they have not spent enough time elaborating on their ideas and using details. the first thing to do in developing an idea of a paper is learning to add sufficient information, elaborate the fahrus zaman fadhly, nurul hasanah, & vina agustiana mental process of writing for academic purposes: a case study of indonesian writers 210 information, and give some relevant examples to strengthen the theories which would also keep the writing effective although the length is longer. participant a said he would like to add reference for one case or one topic. then he would give review for each reference he had added. participant a tried to enrich the information by seeing one topic from many point of views. since this study is related to academic writing, that is journal, the writer would insert the other’s research to make the writing length appropriate with the target of the paper that is required. after all finishes, participant a will reread and change the sentences to be not monotonous or simple. he will mix with compound and complex sentences. the sentences that can be reduced will be omitted. on the other hand, participant b tended to develop her idea by firstly referring to the genre of her paper. then she would elaborate each theory and topic she had put in her writing. after that, she would develop those elaboration she had done. for example, in a text there is a topic, an issue, then the first point and its elaboration, the second point and its elaboration. in addition, participant b would like to add some relevant examples so her paper can be longer but the essence of her writing would not fade or even be lost. the more examples she could give, the longer writing she would produce. after finishing, the paper is reviewed to adjust the effectiveness and compatibility of the language used, grammar, coherence, topic quality, and so on, both related to the content and writing format. here, the mental processed involved in this point include thought, attention, activity and volition. the writer can choose several additional sources to help them overcome the block they find in their writing process. it is also important to give rest to the brain so it can work effectively. they can also do some activities that can recharge their mind. the writers also have to focus and pay attention to their writing purpose. if it has a deadline and needs to be finished sooner so the writers have to ignore another thing that seems not too important to be prioritized instead of their writing completion. mental process of editing stage after revising the content of her writing, the writer needs to check her writing manner start from the spelling, grammar, until the effective diction or word choices. almost similar to the revising stage, in the process of editing, the writer can also change some sentences that are too wordy become simpler without losing the essence of those sentences. the similar word repetition also needs to be handled by looking for the synonym of the word. the most important is the correlation between each sentences and paragraphs, since the jumping sentence or paragraph will cause the reader difficult to understand the content of the writing. the editing process is needed to make the writing become clearer, more interesting, and understandable for the reader. also, if the writing is an academic writing or scientific paper where the result will be published, then the writer should ensure that her writing has been suitable with the prevailing writing principles, and has fulfilled the writing rules that are required. in editing, participant a considered the words that are too wordy to be abbreviated. then the words that appear repeatedly will be replaced with synonym. and in compose an academic writing a writer needs to read the others’ work to make the writing well quality indeed. well quality which means that first, the writer should ensure that the reference he uses is up to date, thus the previous study inserted should also be up to date, and it is important to concern indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 211 about many dictions or word choices or terms that have to in accordance with the science. from there, participant a will learn the words that are commonly used. for participant b, after the paper is revised, it needs to be edited once more. actually, reviewing and editing can be done in several time until the writer gets satisfied enough with the paper she writes. the obstacle found by participant b is that she get a little difficult to make her writing become unique and unusual. she wished her paper to become special. she tends to use uncommon language or word choice. the paper might be simple but it must have a high value. after finding the answer of her research problem and explained it in the paper, a writer might have something more to get from that research report, especially after the paper has been published. writers might have some expectation from the readers after reading their paper. participant a said that he wished that the readers would do what he had suggested in his paper. at least, they would consider that what he had observed or studied is important for them and they are willing to share it to the others. on the other hand, participant b said that she wished that her writing could be a new information for her reader. he wished that the readers could realize that what has never been written by the others, it had been written by her. she also wanted her writing to become a guidance and inspiration for people so they can develop what she had written. in editing, the writer needs to ensure that he has reached the end of her writing. although it has not been completely perfect, but at least there is nothing more to discuss since all the questions have been answered. there are thought and language involvement in the way the writers close their writing. it includes the writers’ way to draw a conclusion from their writing. the language use here also give a great affect to the readers where by reading the conclusion in understandable structure and sentence they might not need to go back to the beginning of the paper only to find the main essence of the writing. mental process of proofreading stage having done with editing the writing draft, the writer can continue to proofreading stage that functions to ensure that the whole writing has accuracy and consistency both in the grammar and the spelling of each word. if form the beginning the writer has chosen to use british style in her writing, then until the end of her writing has to use british style. or if the rule is that the writing has to use american style, then the writer has to consistently apply the american style in the whole of her writing. the proofreading stage is the final stage of the writing process, so in this stage it is hoped that there is nothing left anymore. even though the writing cannot be said as perfect, but at least it has answered all the problems that have been formulated and ready to be published or read by the other people. participant a tends to position himself as if he is a reader. he imagines how the reader will catch the message he delivers. also, he likes to act as if he is explaining what he will serve in his paper. this point belongs to disposition aspect. participants a tries maximally to make people understand his paper although the number of pages are limited. in most of his writing, the writer concerns more about the reader who may have the same interest, but they have no much knowledge in that field. participant b said that her writing style might be influenced by her thesis writing style. since her lecturer is wellknown as a neat person, so during her thesis composing she was taught to be a neat writer. participant b was sure that fahrus zaman fadhly, nurul hasanah, & vina agustiana mental process of writing for academic purposes: a case study of indonesian writers 212 people must be able to distinguish her writing with the others’ by comprehending and going along her paper carefully. participant a said that closing his writing means retelling the essence of the research and then revealing the shortcoming of his paper. he also added the suggestion for the readers to continue what he had done and put in his research. participant a said he could finish his writing in a week for fastest. it usually happens when he only focus to continue his writing. moreover when he had deadline, at least a half in a day he would force himself to write. he would try to write every day even just a sentence or a paragraph. however, participant a said that finishing his writing in a short time could give a feeling of dissatisfaction in case of the content. if it takes more than one week, he was sure that his writing could be better because he would have time to correct the grammar and fix the content. on the other hand, participant b said that she used to close her writing by concluding the whole of her paper. she would firstly summarize from the beginning, the middle until the end of her writing and then make a syntheses. after that she would draw a conclusion from the findings and discussion in accordance with the problem she had questioned. here, mental processed involved in this point include passion, motivation and disposition. the tendency to be different from the other writing and the desire to have a great writing and get the reader satisfied with their writing can help the writers find their special character or feature in their writing style. each writer have their own passion in creating a paper. however, both writers wish that their writing can be useful for the reader. in conclusion, both writers expect that the readers will get valuable knowledge after reading their writing and it must be good if the readers follow what the writers have suggested in their writing. shortly, the writers wish that their writing can achieve the main purpose they have made. conclusion regarding the research objectives, the researcher undertook this research to explain the mental processes involved in academic writing and how these processes are engaged in each step or element of the writing process. the data in this research were gained by interviewing two lecturers who are used to write for academic purpose. the analysis revealed that there were some kinds of mental processes are involved in the way the writers start until close their writing. these are also strongly influenced by their areas of expertise, their areas of interest, their behavior and their writing style. as the result of this research, there are some aspects in mental process involved in the writers’ writing process. those are attention, perception, memory, motivation, passion, disposition, imagination, volition, activity, thought and language. those aspects could be found in each step or elements of the writing, start from the brainstorming, planning, drafting, revising, editing until the proofreading stage. the researcher analyzed that there is mental process involvement in the way the writers get inspiration to write down in brainstorming. the writers pay attention to the topic they will use in their writing. they also use perception towards things they find in the source they are reading. it is necessary to be selective in finding an appropriate source for their writing. this point belongs to the volition in which the writers need to be careful in making decision on what topic or idea they will pour out in their writing. however, these processes are strongly influenced by the writers’ thought about the environment. how they view the indonesian efl journal, vol. 3(2) july 2017 p-issn 2252-7427, e-issn 2541-3635 aisee the asso ci atio n of indones ian scho lars of engli sh educatio n 213 world could be useful in getting inspiration for their writing. in planning, the writers might use their memory in order to make their writing be more effective. the knowledge and information they have ever got are extremely useful to help them compose a good writing. they also need to focus and pay attention to the main topic they have determined at the first time they intend to write. however, their perception of the topic will also help them choose which ideas are suitable to put first on their writing. it is necessary to give priority to those which are more valuable to be involved in their writing rather than the ones that can only be additional information. the kinds of mental processed involved in drafting might include attention, passion, motivation, perception and volition. the writers, again, need to focus on the topic of their writing. it is important since it can help them to find the appropriate source to support their writing development. their perception of something they find in a source, for example, a journal or an article, will also affect their final decision on what suitable information they will add to support their idea. the writers might find it is hard to have a perfect moment to finish their writing, while some others might think the scarce source is the factor of why their writing cannot develop smoothly. however, the writers’ passion and intention also influence the continuity of their writing process. less motivation can also make the writing process blocked and hard to be completed well. when writers have a great passion and motivation, they will get spirit to complete their writing as soon and good as possible. having target and intention to finish the writing sooner and paying attention and focusing only on their writing will help the writers to be motivated to have their writing completed in a satisfying way. then, in revising stage, the mental processed involved in this point include thought, attention, activity and volition. the writer can choose several additional sources to help them overcome the block they find in their writing process. it is also important to give rest to the brain so it can work effectively. they can also do some activities that can recharge their mind. the writers also have to focus and pay attention to their writing purpose. if it has a deadline and needs to be finished sooner so the writers have to ignore another thing that seems not too important to be prioritized instead of their writing completion. in editing, the writer needs to ensure that he has reached the end of her writing. although it has not been completely perfect, but at least there is nothing more to discuss since all the questions have been answered. there are thought and language involvement in the way the writers close their writing. it includes the writers’ way to draw a conclusion from their writing. the language use here also give a great affect to the readers where by reading the conclusion in understandable structure and sentence they might not need to go back to the beginning of the paper only to find the main essence of the writing. here, mental processed involved in proofreading include passion, motivation and disposition. the tendency to be different from the other writing and the desire to have a great writing and get the reader satisfied with their writing can help the writers find their special character or feature in their writing style. each writer have their own passion in creating a paper. however, both writers wish that their writing can be useful for the reader. in conclusion, both writers expect that the readers will get valuable knowledge after reading their writing and it must be good if the readers follow what fahrus zaman fadhly, nurul hasanah, & vina agustiana mental process of writing for academic purposes: a case study of indonesian writers 214 the writers have suggested in their writing. shortly, the writers wish that their writing can achieve the main purpose they have made. references bowker, n. 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