Beyond Words (Journal)
Not a member yet
169 research outputs found
Sort by
Senior High School English National Examination and Thinking Skills
Get PDFWhen English National Examination (abbreviated into ENE) as a norm-referenced test is designed for instructional purposes, to evaluate the result of national curriculum, it is very significant to conduct item test evaluation since it gives a clear portrait of the quality of the items and of the test as a whole. The purpose of this study was to analyze which levels of the Barrett taxonomy were more reflected in ENE items of 2013/2014 academic year and whether the proportions of items among the twenty test packages in the ENE assessing students’ Lower Order Thinking Skills (LOTS) and Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) are consistent. The researcher adopted the qualitative descriptive approach using a content analysis card to codify the ENE items. To ensure the reliability of the study, three inter-raters analyzed a sample of the test packages. The results indicated that questions asking LOTS still prevailed in ENE items. Of all the twenty test packages, the items categorized into literal level represented around 68.6% of the total number of the questions. Meanwhile, the questions belonging to reorganization came to occupy a percentage of 20.8 and the questions asking the students’ inferential level only reached 10.3%. Also, the tests were not enriched sufficiently with the evaluation comprehension since they only comprised 0.3%. The results also showed the complete absence of “Appreciation” – the highest level of thinking in the mentioned taxonomy. It is obvious that there is a shortage of items questioning students’ HOTS in the exam and they are not well-treated. Accordingly, this finding reveals that there is still much room for ENE to be the driving force in the effort to make learners critical thinkers. In the light of these data, this study recommends modifying the English National Exam by providing them with more question items that include HOTS
The Pragmatic Awareness of Indonesian Nurses in Their Interactions with Foreign In-Patients
Get PDFIn hospitals, most nurses are responsible not only for caring but also building interpersonal relationships with their patients. Joint Commission International (JCI), nurses encounter foreign in-patients. This study investigated the ability of local nurses to communicate with English speaking patients in the hospital. Pragmatic awareness is the issue that becomes the focus to obtain better understanding on the nurses’ communicative aspects. It discussed how the nurses achieved successful or unsuccessful interactions in using therapeutic principles Audio recording, observations and interviews were used to see how their pragmatic awareness were applied in terms of of pragmatic principles and speech acts. The study also looked after the strategies used when unsuccessful communication with English speaking patients was solved. Some findings showed that the participants of the study could apply 11 out of 16 therapeutic communication techniques during their interactions with foreign in-patients. Meanwhile. 7 (seven) therapeutic techniques were not frequently used. In many cases the nurses avoid to apply some techniques because they were not confident their communication would be successful. A few techniques were reported to have difficulties and led to some misunderstandings. Most of the problems experienced by these nurses was triggered by languagebarrier, or their inability to formulate utterances that suited the constructions of therapeutic communication techniques. Pragmatic awareness was seen to be the major issue. It was indicated by some misunderstandings or pragmatic failure that the nurses made signalled by unexpected perlocutionary force by their foreign in-patients. Recommendations can be made in terms of language training concerning the strategies to formulate utterances in line with therapeutic communication techniques. Furthermore. nurses’ pragmatic awareness needs to be raised by improving language knowledge, especially the one dealing with pragmatic aspects. Subsequently it is recommended that the hospital allow language instructors to assist and monitor the nurses in case misunderstanding and other forms of communication problems occur. It is also important that every nurse is provided with a guide book that allows them to use it as a reference when unexpected miscommunication take place during the caring processes
The Implementation of the Academic Writing Course Syllabus
Get PDFCurriculum change required to meet the stakeholders’ needs, whether it occurs in regular bases or in responding towards some dissatisfaction of students’ learning outcomes. This study was trig-gered by the second reason. To be more specific, it focused on how the syllabus was implemented in terms of teaching materials, classroom exercises, home assignments, and final projects. Document analyses were conducted and were validated using instrument triangulation. A semi structured inter-view was given to 18 first semester graduate students of 2013-2014 academic year. The findings were intended as a contribution and feedback towards the teaching-learning process of Academic Writing course at the English Education Department, Graduate School, Widya Mandala Catholic University Surabaya. From the analyses, it showed that the course syllabus was implemented in accordance with the learning objectives. However, there were some items evaluated in the students’ result which had not met the objectives as written in the syllabus. The gap was ultimately noted as the consequence that students were not accustomed to use the academic writing manual, and they were short of academic writing practice. Hence, some suggestions were proposed to give them more sustainable tasks to use the format, read and analyze more journal articles, as the model of writing. The result of this study was supposed to give contribution not only to the improvement of the institution’s curriculum, but also to wider pedagogical content knowledge, mainly on English as Foreign Language (EFL) teach-ing
Does “Experience” Bring about Any Significant Difference in EFL Teacher Talk?
Get PDFThe rationale for the present study is based on the fact that understanding the teaching pro-cess and the development of teachers is incomplete unless the teachers' classroom behavior, especially their talk, is objectively explored. To this end, four male teachers offering Eng-lish as a foreign language (EFL) were recruited and divided into two groups, namely inex-perienced and experienced. To secure the objectivity in data collection they were observed in their classes and one lesson of each teacher was audio-recorded. The audio-recordings were then fully transcribed and analyzed through micro structural approach of schema theo-ry. The approach is based on the assumption that any word uttered by the teacher represents a specific concept commonly known as a schema. The schema enters into a hierarchical re-lationship with other schemata to constitute species, genera and semantic, syntactic and parasyntactic domains of language. The teachers’ talks were thus parsed into their constitut-ing schema types, species, genera and domains and certain codes were assigned to them to run statistical analyses. The findings showed that the inexperienced teachers significantly outnumbered their experienced counterparts in all schema categories and thus challenged “experience” as an effective variable in EFL teachin
Lexical Complexity of Decision-Making Writing Tasks: Form-focused Guided Strategic Planning
Get PDFThe present study is an attempt to investigate the effect of form-focused guided strategic planning on lexical complexity of learners’ performance in writing tasks. The twenty intermediate level participants of the study performed an unplanned and then a planned decision-making task. In the planned task condition, the participants were provided with form-focused guided strategic planning which contained detailed instructions about how to plan, by being instructed to focus on form. The guidance included an explanation of the necessary structural and lexical patterns employed to express the learners’ views while developing a comparison-and-contrast paragraph in each task. The results of the statistical analysis indicated that the participants produced a written product with a greater lexical complexity in their performance of the task in the form-focused strategic planning condition. The findings emphasize the importance of guided strategic planning as a task condition in syllabus design for task-based language teaching and the necessity of incorporating this task feature for accomplishing lexical complexity in decision-making writing tasks
Applying Second Language Acquisition Research Findings to Materials: A cognitive-interactionist perspective
Get PDFIn recent years, ELT publishers have been criticised for not incorporating the findings of second language acquisition (SLA) research into the design of their teaching materials. The first aim of this article is to inform teachers of key research findings from the cognitive-interactionist approach to SLA by discussing five environmental ingredients that contribute to optimal L2 learning. The second aim of this article is to demonstrate how these research findings can be practically applied to the selection and adaptation of teaching materials. It is the author’s hope that teachers will be encouraged to apply this knowledge to their teaching contexts, and be motivated to keep themselves informed of SLA research findings.
Keywords: materials development, SLA research, cognitive-interactionis
Wisdom as an Outcome of Critical Thinking in the School Curriculum
Get PDFAbstract
This article considers a way of enacting critical thinking in the school curriculum. An alternative to adopting a formal framework of critical thinking which may not be exhaustive or include desirable components, involves working towards the generation of wisdom—defined as the quality of having the experience, knowledge and insight to think and act aptly in a specific context for a particular purpose—as a way for learners to make meanings that potentially have personal and social significance. The article uses a real-world example to illustrate how critical thinking can be driven by inquiry and underpinned by explanation to demonstrate practical knowledge and understanding in specific circumstances.
Keywords: wisdom, critical thinking, curriculum, instruction, task design, classroom practic
Authority, Academic Discourse and Ideology in the ESL Writing Class: An ESL teacher’s experience
Get PDFThis paper describes an ESL teachers’ perspective on teaching ESL writing to advanced second language learners reflecting on her experience as an ESL teachers drawing on the students’ responses to survey questions. It shows that writing in English as a Second language has political, cultural, and historical aspects since the “nature and functions of discourse, audience, and persuasive appeals often differ across linguistic, cultural, and educational contexts” In addition, acquiring the discourse proprieties is challenging because they represent culturally bound, conventionalized, and abstract characteristics of academic prose that are frequently absent in written discourse in rhetorical traditions other than the English dominant educational environments. ESL teachers should get the awareness of the needs and challenges that the face and understand the linguistic, cultural, and educational background they are coming from in order to help them overcome these challenges which also should dictate the instructional pedagogies, curriculum and assessment.
Keywords: academic discourse, ESL writing, teacher’s perspective, ideolog
