1,720,961 research outputs found
AN ERROR ANALYSIS OF LEXICAL COLLOCATION ERRORS IN THE JAKARTA POST NEWS ARTICLES
Get PDFWhen speaking or using a language, one has to have acquired vocabularies, for they are vital for communicative purposes. Wilkins, as quoted in Farghal & Obeidat (1995), seconded the notion and stated that vocabularies play a more important role than grammar, as without lexis nothing can be conveyed, and grammar only conveys something little. When using a language, it is so often that non-native speakers combine words that should not co-occur together. Farghal & Obeidat (1995) affirms that collocations are quite troublesome for EFL learners, and the main sources of errors are related to paraphrasing, overgeneralization, L1 interference, interlingual transfer, intralingual transfer, and lack of collocational knowledge in English. In the process of mastering a language,however, collocation plays quite an important role (Thornbury, 2002). Hanks (1987) stated that words appear together to form collocational patterns, and yet, nonnative speakers often have word combinations in a non native like manner, making the combinations sound unnatural to native speakers. According to Benson, Benson and Ilson (2009) collocations are divided into 2 categories: grammatical and lexical. However, the spotlight of this study is on the lexical collocations. Out of 7 types of lexical collocations, the writer only opted for “verb+noun” word combinations, since such combinations always appear in sentences. The source of the data were taken from news articles from The Jakarta Post, a daily English language newspaper in Indonesia. There are two objectives of this study. First, the writer would like to see if the news articles that have gone through editing processes may still have any errors of lexical collocations. Furthermore, he would also like to analyze how the lexical collocations may possibly have contributed to the production of the English collocations in the articles. To seek the collocational errors, the writer consulted the Cambridge Dictionary, Oxford Collocation Dictionary as well as COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English). Next, after the errors were identified, the writer made a list and analyzed how the errors of the English lexical collocations might take place. The results showed that there are only around 13 lexical collocation errors found within about 20 news articles from the business category. The errors came from paraphrasing, lack of English lexical collocations, as well as L1 interference. This study showed that even advanced learners of English still produced uncommon lexical collocations. From these findings, it is highly recommended that its teaching should be a top priority in every language course
STUDENTS’ PERCEPTION OF THE TEACHING OF GRAMMAR
No full textThe objective of this study is to investigate what the students think on the teaching of grammar. In other words, this study investigates the students’ perceptions of the teaching of grammar. There are several points highlighted in this study. For instance, there have been numerous debates about whether or not to teach grammar. Some researchers have argued that it is necessary to teach grammar. Meanwhile, other researchers have claimed that it is not necessary to teach grammar. In order to know whose argument is the right one, we need to compare it with the result of the present study. The method that is used by the writer in collecting the data is by using questionnaires containing 30 items about students’ perceptions of the teaching of grammar. The subjects of this study are universities students from two universities (Atma Jaya Catholic University and Bunda Mulia University) who are majoring in English and who are taking Grammar classes. The writer distributes the questionnaires to 127 students randomly. They were asked to fill in the questionnaires within 15 to 20 minutes. The collection of the whole data lasts for about a month. After the data is collected, the writer analyzes and interprets the data by using SPSS (Statistical Program for Social Science). The results of this study have shown that there are several findings that support the theories proposed by some researchers. However, there are also some findings that do not support the theories. It is hoped that this study will be able to give some valuable insights for English teachers about what their students need in learning the grammar
THE USE OF AUTHENTIC MATERIALS IN DEVELOPING GRAMMAR PROFICIENCY
Get PDFIn the past, it had been a common practice to utilize a grammar book to learn about language rules, for it was more practical to use. However, language rules are the components of a language that learners have been trying to avoid learning inside and out due to its complexity. Many learners regard grammar insignificant as they believe that vocabulary plays a substantial role in communication. For such reason, lecturers have been endeavoring to make an appropriate instrument to make grammar teaching and learning more effective and fun. Nowadays, when it comes to language teaching and learning, lecturers make use of authentic materials to capture the interest and to stimulate students to get motivated to learn. Nunan (1988) & Martinez (2002) defines authentic materials e.g., newspaper, magazine as the material, which have been produced for purposes other than to teach languages. Cook (1981) claimed that students can get more benefits from authentic materials, from which students can get closer to the target language. This research is conducted to find an answer to the question of the potency of authentic materials in learning grammar rules, specifically Gerund and Infinitive. The participants of this study were the second semester students of the English Department, who were then categorized into two dissimilar groups: control and experimental. The control group had a grammar book in the grammar teaching and learning, while the experimental group utilized an authentic material, such as a snippet taken from a short video. The media used to assess learners’ grammar competence were pre-test and post-test, which were then analyzed and compared to see the effectiveness of each instrument in developing learners’ competence in the specific grammar rules. The results of this study displayed that both instruments, such as the grammar book and the authentic material were of little significance to the improvement of students’ grammar knowledge. In other words, despite the fact those instruments play their role in developing students’ proficiency, the rise was just utterly trivial
THE EFFECTIVENESS OF SMALL GROUP DISCUSSIONS IN THE TEACHING OF CONDITIONAL CLAUSES
Get PDFIn the past, when it came to teaching grammar, it had been a common practice that teachers were the ones to more actively engage in the teaching and learning process and students only needed to pay attention to the lecture. Teachers believed it worked more effectively than other methods, since they would give many examples necessary and provide comprehensive explanation on the targeted grammar rules. However, grammar is one of the language components that are often considered challenging and relatively trivial in language learning, and for that reason, language learners are often reluctant to learn the rule of a language inside and out. Up until now, teachers have been trying to find ways or methods that might work to make learning more effective, one of which is small group discussion, where learners are expected to get more involved in a discussion, increase student participation, promote critical thinking, and so on. The participants of this study were the students of the English Department who were taking the English Grammar class. The participants were divided into 2 groups, where the first group serves as a control group and the second as an experimental group. Pre- and post-tests about the application of conditional clauses were administered to both groups to find out and measure the effectiveness of each method: lecture and group discussion methods. The results show both methods worked in boosting the students’ understanding and scores. However, lecture method worked more effectively in this study. The study also shows that getting students to actively involve in the teaching-learning process when they are not ready will not produce favourable results, as there are possible reasons that hinder the process. Keywords: Effectiveness; Small Group Discussions; Lecture; Conditional Sentence
A Pragmatic Analysis of English Lecturers’ Interpretation of Implicatures in Smudge the Cat Memes
Get PDFInternet memes have become the object of numerous studies over theyears. M emesoften contain implicatures or additional implied meaning, especially when they flout or violate some conversational maxims. This implied meaning can sometimes be difficult to interpret which may lead to misunderstanding the meme itself. Therefore, this study aims to examine what kinds of maxims are flouted and what is the implicature behind the internet memes. Additionally, this research explores how English lecturers in a private university in North Jakarta interpret the implicature of the memes under study. A total of 5 memes are used in this research, all of which are Smudge the Cat memes collected from a Facebook group dedicated to posting various memes of this popular white cat. The data is analyzed qualitatively since it does not involve any numerical calculations. To collect the data for the lecturers’ interpretation of the memes, an online questionnaire was distributed via Google Form. The findings reveal that the main maxim that is violated in the memes is the maxim of manner as most of the replies in the memes can be said to be ambiguous. The implicature behind the memes vary depending on the meme itself, and some of the lecturers had difficulty identifying the additional implied meaning of the memes
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
A Comparative Analysis of the Intensifiers Quite, Rather, and Pretty Used by Americans and British People: A Corpus Study
Get PDFWords have many different meanings and this can cause problems for nonnative speakers of English. Because words can mean many different things depending on the sentence that they appear in, Indonesian learners of English often have trouble telling the different meanings apart, especially when the words are synonyms or from specific group of words like intensifiers. From this, the writer would like to do a research on the topic of the comparison between American and British English. The research is limited to comparing the intensifiers quite, ratherand pretty. The data is taken from COCA for the American English and BNC for the British English. The result shows that in general, the three intensifiers are more or less similar in meaning, with only slight differences. The usages of these three intensifiers by Americans and British people are also not too different.Keywords: intensifier, American and British people, corpu
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