Indonesian Journal of EFL and Linguistics
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Writing Skill of Engineering students of Government and Self-financing Colleges: A Comparative Study
Get PDFThis study compares and analyses the writing performance of engineering students studying in government and Self-financing colleges in Tuticorin district. The subjects of the study comprised of 75 randomly selected first year students from three engineering colleges located in Tuticorin district. The elicitation instrument used for the present study was essay writing and the subjects were asked to write an essay on “Advantages and Disadvantages of using mobile phone.†Descriptive method was adopted for collecting data. The errors were identified and classified into ten categorizations like verb tense, subject-verb agreement, prepositions, conditional sentences, singular/plural form, sentence fragment, word order, spelling, capitalization and double negatives. The results showed that the engineering students made seven most common errors in verb tense, subject-verb agreement, prepositions, conditional sentences, singular/plural form, sentence fragment and word order due to lack of understanding, poor acquisition of grammar rules, intra-lingual errors and interference of the learners’ mother tongue
Reflection on Background Knowledge Implementation Using Top-down Activities
Get PDFThis paper attempts to examine students’ reaction and potential challenges encountered in the implementation of activities which stimulate their background knowledge. The authors implemented lesson plan which used top-down activities to raise students’ awareness of the use of background knowledge. The analysis in this reflection paper used two evaluation questions. The result showed that there are several reactions from the students as well as problems arose during the implementation of the activities. The reactions and problems are varied determined by the type of the exercise. Additionally, more explanations and examples are needed to be supplied before and also during the activity of completing the exercises. Those are necessary because during the activities, some students seemed to hesitate and needed more encouragement. Finally, continue practice using these type of exercises might give positive result in improving students’ awareness of background knowledge in discourse
The Use of Code Switching in General English Classes for Non-English Department Students in Indonesia
Get PDFThe issue of the use of code switching as instructional languages in the class has already become a worldwide concern. Some experts may say that it is beneficial while others believe that it is not since it may become the interference for the learning. Through this paper, the researchers want to investigate the use of code switching in General English Classes for non-English Department of Sanata Dharma University. Employing a quantitative approach, specifically observation method by recording the class activity, this study tries to find out the types and analyse code switching employed by lecturers in the classes. The data analyses revealed that tag switching, intra-sentential and inter-sentential code switching are employed by lecturers and the code switching itself functions as the topic switch, repetitive and affective function. The inter-sentential code switching was mostly used by the lecturer and it mostly served as a repetitive function to explain and show their affection to student
An Examination of the Impact of Computer Skills on the Effective Use of ICT in the Classroom
Get PDFThe purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of computer skills on the successful integration of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in Moroccan higher education institutions. Actually, the survival of these institutions in the expansion of modern technologies depends on their readiness to qualify professors and students to implement ICTs for educational objectives. Because of the significant role that computer technologies play in today’s job markets, higher education institutions are required to provide the most appropriate learning and teaching conditions for both professors and students to make effective use of these new technologies within classroom practices. The findings revealed that teachers consider ICTs very essential in their teaching. However, there are low levels of computer technology integration in teaching processes.  This lack of computer technology use in instruction is attributed to several factors. One of these various factors is teachers’ computer skills. It has been found that there are statistically significant differences between professors’ use of ICT with respect to their computer skills, F (4,158) = 32.776, p<0.05
Utilizing Video for Technology Integration Support in Indonesian EFL Classroom: Usages and Obstacles
Get PDFThe use of video as a solution in supporting technology integration in EFL teaching and learning process in Indonesia still faces some obstacles in its utilization. Viewing from this issue, this study explored Indonesian EFL teacher’s perceptions on the usages and obstacles in utilizing video in teaching and learning process. Conducting a survey research by distributing questionnaires purposively to 30 EFL teachers, 22 females and 8 males, the results revealed that the Indonesian EFL teachers found that video is very beneficial in teaching and learning process, especially in delivering the learning material, building students’ background knowledge, bringing real-life language context, providing visual and audio input, and serving varieties of language expressions. It also gives positives impacts to students’ learning attitudes, including their interest, motivation, and learning styles. Even though it brings beneficiary effects, many Indonesian EFL teachers also mentioned five obstacles faced in using video in their classroom: limitation of facilities at school, lack of technical support at school, difficulties in finding suitable video, lack of skill in editing video, and less focus students on learning. Reflecting up from these results, it is suggested for EFL teachers to use video in improving the teaching and learning process in the classroom. It is also recommended for the EFL teachers to attend teacher professional development program to enrich their competence and skill in using video in teaching and learning process. Moreover, school principals’ are recommended to support the school facilities to promote technology integration at school
An Investigation of Different Language Choice through Personal Pronouns in the Twitter
Get PDFThis study aimed to find evidence regarding the use of personal pronouns in the discourses produced by males and females. Personal pronouns were chosen as the object of analysis, as several studies has suggested them as one of the features that may distinguish the gender of the authors. This study analysed publically available corpus, Rovereto Twitter N-Gram Corpus (RTC), utilized by Herdagdelen (2013). It is gender-of-the-author tagged, which makes the author’s gender analysis easier. The corpus was analysed using AntConc (Anthony, 2014). From AntConc’s concordance analysis, it was found that women utilised more personal pronouns, especially the ones that can create closer bond. On the other hand, men have greater tendency to distant themselves using generic pronouns than women. In conclusion, men and women in this study may use personal pronouns differently. Keyword: Personal Pronoun, Twitter, AntCon
The Impact of Language Policy in the Basic Education Core Curriculum in Thailand
Get PDFOver the last 10 years, much research has been completed in the area of English language policy in Thailand. The majority of studies have focused on the pedagogy and methods involved in the teaching practices of Thai EFL educators at primary school level (Prapaisit de Segovia & Hardison, 2009; Tongpoon-Patanasorn, 2011) and secondary school level (Darasawang & Watson Todd, 2012; Nonkukhetkhong, Baldauf, & Moni, 2006). The present study delves deeper into teaching practices and addresses how English language policy is perceived and interpreted at the classroom level through the practices of Thai English teachers in a rural government secondary school in the northeast part of the country. To date, there is only one study which examines the impact of English language policy in the core curriculum on the teaching practices of EFL teachers at both primary and secondary school level has been completed (Fitzpatrick, 2011).In an effort to frame the present study, we apply Hornberger’s (2006) integrative framework as an attempt to support case study methodology. This approach provided us the opportunity to research “one or more instances of a phenomenon in its real-life context that reflect the perspective of the participants involved in the phenomenon†(Gall, Gall, & Borg, 2007, p. 447). And, it offered a grounded view of how this English language policy is being enacted in Thailand
Dayak Students’ Attitude toward Bilingualism in West Kalimantan Indonesia
Get PDFAmid many studies investigating language attitudes, very few studies placing their emphasis on attitudes toward bilingualism. This study sets out to examine how Dayak students react toward two languages (i.e. Indonesian and Dayak Language) that have existed in their surrounding for quite a long time. This study was quantitative in nature, despite containing some elements of qualitative data. The study employed questionnaires that consisted of 20 main questions and 1 open-ended question. The questionnaires then were distributed online to 32 Dayak students studying in university with various discipline backgrounds. The results indicate that Dayak students in this study share a positive attitude toward bilingualism, although the rate varies if we investigate the smaller components of the attitudes. It is reported that the students are very positive in a surficial level of attitudes (i.e. cognitive components), yet slightly low in emotional dimensions (i.e. affective components). Further, the students also seem doubtful to implement their belief and feeling into real action, for example in education (i.e. readiness for action). This paper concludes by summarising key findings and acknowledging research limitations, especially concerning with generalisability and participant’s sociolinguistic aspects
CALL in Post-Method Era
Get PDFThis paper touches on the influx of technology in language learning and teaching with a focus on the post-method era. Scrutinizing this phenomenon within the framework of Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL) shows how technology has stimulated a transformation of language pedagogy from the traditional teacher-centered and text-bound classrooms to student-centered and interactive paradigms. While the former paradigm is based on methodology, the latter is guided by principled eclecticism in which teachers make use of a set of macro-strategies so as to make decisions while teaching, instead of reliance on methods that dictate ‘how to teach’. The teaching principles capitalize on teachers’ sensitivity to local contexts rather than general methods. Though CALL has been mooted as panacea for ELT flaws in the method and post-method eras, it is not a one-size-fits-all model. Due to changeable and diversified technological innovations, it is impractical to adopt an electronic device or application for all contexts. Accordingly, the post-method pedagogy puts the onus on language teachers to make informed choices that best fit the particularity of their teaching situations.Â
The Effect of Teaching Summarization Strategies on Reading Comprehension of Science and Humanities Iranian High school Students
Get PDFThis study investigated the effect of teaching summarization strategies on the reading comprehension of English as Foreign Language (EFL) high school students. To this end, 80 high-school students from science and humanities sections were divided to two groups of 40 each. Two reading comprehension tests were developed and administered as pre-test and post-test. The obtained data that was analyzed using SPSS software showed that EFL learners in both groups showed significantly more improvement in their reading comprehension from the pre-test to the post-test. However, the numerical findings obtained from the paired samples t-test showed that students in the science group outperformed those who were in the humanity group and their scores seemed to be more statistically significant. The major pedagogical implication of this study is that summarization strategy can help to improve the reading comprehension of EFL high school students in Iran