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). 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