FINAL ASSIGNMENT

A STUDY ON THE READING SKILLS OF EFL UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

By Flora Debora Florist

Marsha Divina

Pertra Christian University, Indonesia

            S U M M A R Y

            This Journal is about the research of EFL students’ reading skills. In this case the writer focused on the investigation of the reading skills of ten-batch-2003-students studying at an English Department of a private university in Surabaya. They were selected because they have passed all levels of reading classes.

            In doing the data collection, the writers used some steps, they are:

ü  The first step was to analyze the kinds of reading skills which were taught. The result lead the writer to focus on seventeen reading skills which were already taught, namely:

1.      Scanning

2.      Skimming

3.      Improving reading speed

4.      Structural clues: morphology (word part)

5.      Structural clues: morphology (compound words)

6.      Inference from context

7.      Using a dictionary

8.      Interpreting pro-forms

9.      Interpreting elliptical expression

10.  Interpreting lexical cohesion

11.  Recognizing text organization

12.  Recognizing presupposition underlying the text

13.  Recognizing implications and making inference

14.  Predictions

15.  Distinguishing between fact and opinion

16.  Paraphrasing

17.  Summarizing

ü  The second step of the data collection was to develop two reading test. The tests were designed in short answer type instead of multiple choices answer type to avoid respondents’ guessing in doing the test.

ü  The third step was piloting the two reading tests. This steps was aimed to help the writers to see wheter the two reading test had clear and good instruction and items.

ü  The next step was to distribute the reading tests to the students who were chosen randomly.

ü  The final step was to check and count the result of both reading tests. The rule was that if the respondents’ answer were correct or in accordance with the answer keys more than 75% the respondents got full mark, on the other hand if the respondents got less than 75%, the respondents got zero.

From the data analysis we can conclude that the higher the percentage meant the more difficult that particular reading skill for the respondents. If the percentage was low, it was assumed that the skill was easier for the respondents.

Here is the result of the data analysis, the writers got that the most difficult reading skill for these students was recognizing text organization (72.5%). According to the writers it could be because many Indonesian students were not trained to active recognizing text organization after they read a passage.

The second most difficult reading skill was paraphrasing (65%). Perhaps it was because thay had not fully understood the ideas of the original passage or sentence.

            This research was a small scale one, the findings discussed in this study showed that each reading skill had different level of difficulty for the respondents. May be the larger number of respondents could also be used to produce wider result which could be used to make generalization.

COMMENTS ON THE CONTENT

This research was based on the seventeen reading skills which were already taught by the respondents. The all seventeen reading that was tested are include in the conventional ways of reading testing. Why did I say that things? Here is my opinion supports.

v In the second step of the data collection was to develop two reading tests. In developing the tests, the writers used the following steps. First, they adopted two reading texts entitled Learning to be Funny is No Joke and The Birth of Rock by Marker and Lenier (1986) and Using the Creative Imagination and Power of the Press by Talok (1992). On the other hand, the critical reading that popular among the students nowadays mostly use the happening news taken from newspaper or magazine article. The aimed of using the happening article is that students can relates the article with their experience. This statement based on Huckin (1997), who counsels teacher to consider students’ age and interests so that the lesson will be more relevant to their experience and thus more profitable.

The critical reading not only focus on the students’ comprehension of the text, that measured by some questions related to the text, but also to help EFL readers feel they have options in the way they choose to read the text and to help them feel in a more equal relationship with the writer (Wallace 1992,80).

v  A series of question that contains seventeen skills tested to the respondents only took short time just to measure their skills seem like they are in ‘unfair judgment’. The test takers felt in underpressure condition, that obliged them to answer all the questions in the limitation time provided by the researcher.

The critical reading does differently from the concept of the test above. The critical reading may takes more time because there are three processes that have to be done by the readers. The important value that we will get from this long processes is that students participate actively to study the text. Students not only read the text then throw it away and do nothing after they finish read the text, but further they will give their personal opinion to the text which will improve their ability not only in the reading skills but also in another skills.

v  Finally we know the reason why did the most difficult reading skill for these students was recognizing text organization. The researcher said that perhaps it was because many Indonesian students were not trained to activate recognizingtext organization after they read the passage. If we concern on the advantages of critical reading, this problem that mostly faced by the Indonesian students from the lowest level to the highest could be solved. Because critical reading will train students to recognizing text organization. This research just shows us the level of reading skills difficulties, but they did not give us the solution.

THE BENEFIT OF THIS RESEARCH TO THE TEACHER

In my opinion the benefit of this research are:

ü  The main benefit is that teacher know the level of reading skills difficulties faced by the students in the test. By knowing the level of reading skills difficulties, teacher could concern more to the most difficult reading skill by giving them some solutions to solve the questions.

ü  The other benefit is that teacher further could find the best method to solve the students problem in mastering the recognizing text organization skill. As a teacher we can not force the students to master this difficult skill instantly, but we have to help them to find the most appropriate method to make it understandtable to the students.

ü  As the test designer, we also take an important role. After knowing the level of difficulties faced by EFL University students in mastering reading skills, we should realize that they are weak in certain reading skills. So that when we design the test, we have to consider this problem.

SEX, POLITENESS, AND STEREOTYPES

 

This section discusses about the way language is used, linguistic attitudes, and also the evidence that women and men use language differently. There three main explanations of this section, they are Women’s language, Gossip, and Sexist language.

1.     Women’s Language

Women’s language and confidence

Features of “women’s language”

ü  Lak off suggested that women’s speech was characterized by linguistics features such as the following:

ü  Lexical hedges or fillers, e.g. you know, sort of, well, you see.

ü  Tag questions, e.g. she’s very nice, isn’t she?

ü  Rising intonation on declaratives, e.g. it’s really good.

ü  ‘Empty’ adjectives, e.g. divine, charming, cute.

ü  Precise color terms, e.g. magenta, aquamarine.

ü  Intensifiers such as just and so e.g. I like him so much.

ü  “Hypercorrect” grammar, e.g. consistent use of standard verb forms.

ü  “Superpolite” forms, e.g. indirect request, euphemisms.

ü  Avoidance of strong swears words, e.g. fudge, my goodness.

ü  Emphatic stress, e.g. it was a BRILLIANT performance.

The internal coherence of the features Lako ff identified can be illustrated by dividing them into two groups.

• First, there are linguistic devices which may used for hedging or reducing the force of an utterance.
• Secondly, there are features which may boost or intensify a proposition’s force.

Features which may serve as:

ü  Hedging devices                                             

ü  boosting devices

ü  Lexical hedges                                                 

ü  intensifiers

ü  Tag questions                                                     

ü  emphatic stress

ü  Question intonation

ü  Superpolite forms

ü  Euphemisms

The hedging devices can be used to weaken the strength of an assertion while the boosting devices can be used to strengthen it. For example, it’s a good film can be strengthened by adding the intensifier really (it’s a really good film) or weakened by adding the lexical hedge sort of (it’s sort of a good film). However, some of these devices serve other functions too, as we will see below.

Lakoff claimed both kinds of modifiers were evidence of an unconfident speaker. Hedging devices explicitly signal lack of confidence, while boosting devices reflect the speaker’s anticipation that the addressee may remain unconvinced and therefore supply extra reassurance. So, she claimed, women use hedging devices to express uncertainty, and they use intensifying devices to persuade their addressee to take them seriously.

Women boost the force of their utterances because they think that otherwise they will not be heard or paid attention to. So, according to Lakoff, both hedges and boosters reflect women’s lack of confidence.

Lakoff’s linguistic features as politeness devices

(/ indicates rising intonation)

/

I did my exams in sixty three was it?

The tag question is a syntactic device listed by Lakoff which may express uncertainty.

The tag in this exchange functions not to hedge but rather to strengthen the negative force of the utterance in which it occurs. So, here we have a tag which could be classified as a boosting device. Treating all tags as signals of uncertainty is clearly misleading.

Many linguistic forms have complex functions. Similar results have been found when other so-called “hedges” such as you know and I think have been analyzed. They are used differently in different contexts. They mean different things according to their pronunciation, their position in the utterance, what kind of speech act they are modifying, and who is using them to whom in what context. Like tags, they are often being used as politeness devices rather than as expressions of uncertainty.

Interaction

There are many features of interaction which differentiate the talk of women and men. Mrs. Fleming’s distinction reflects one of them. This explanation will explain two others; interruption behavior and conventional feedback.

Interruptions

In-same-sex interactions, interruptions were pretty evenly distributed between speakers. In cross-sex interactions almost all the interruptions were from males. In other contexts, it has been found that men interrupt others more than women do.

Feedback

Another aspect of the picture of women as cooperative conversationalists is the evidence that women provide more encouraging feedback to their conversational partners than the men do.

In general then research on conversational interaction reveals women as cooperative conversationalists, whereas men tend to be more competitive and less supportive of others.

2.     Gossip

Gossip descries the kind of relaxed in-group talk that goes on between people in informal contexts. In Western society, gossip is defined as “idle talk” and considered particularly characteristic of women’s interaction. Its overall function for women I to affirm solidarity and maintain the social relationships between the women involved.

The male equivalent of women’s gossip is difficult to identify. In parallel situations the topics men discuss tend to focus on thing and activities, rather than personal experiences and feelings. Topics like sport, cars, and possessions turn to feelings and reactions.

3.     Sexist language

Sexist language is one example of the way a culture or society conveys its values from one group to another and from one generation to the next. Language conveys attitudes. Sexist attitudes stereotype a person according to gender rather than judging on individual merits. Sexist language encodes stereotyped attitudes to women and men. In principle, then, the study of sexist language is concerned with the way language expresses both negative and positive stereotypes of both women and men. In practice, research in this area has concentrated on the ways in which language conveys negative attitudes to women.

Code-Switching Lesson

by Rebecca Wheeler & Rachel Swords

Why teach code-switching?

Code-Switching Lessons will speak to any teacher who finds that his or her classroom is becoming increasingly diverse. While fifty or sixty years ago the students filling our classes may have been overwhelmingly white native English speakers, that’s clearly not the case now.

Now multicultural, multilingual, multidialectical diversity is the norm. Our students come to us from down the block but also from Thailand and China, from South America and Latin America, and from Russia and the Ukraine. Our students are white but also Native American, African American, and Hispanic and come from the bayous of Louisiana as well as the boroughs of New York, with all the attendant differences in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. With diversity of homeland comes diversity of languages, with English as a second language; with diversity of ethnic and U.S. regional groups comes diversity of dialects and diversity of culture. Our classrooms have become culturally and linguistically diverse, and we need teaching strategies that celebrate and use that diversity as a springboard to wider knowledge.

What are the essential features of a successful code-switching approach?

Refined over nearly ten years of classroom practice and grounded in research, Code-Switching Lessons has the following characteristics:

• It is grounded in student language, written and oral.

• It uses a graphic organizer as an analysis tool.

• It applies the scientific method to grammar discovery.

• It builds on the rules of vernacular and adds Standard English

Cambridge University Press

978-0-521-86264-6 - Code-switching

Penelope Gardner-Chloros

It is quite commonplace for bilingual speakers to use two or more languages, dialects or varieties in the same conversation, without any apparent effort. This phenomenon, known as code-switching, has become a major focus of attention in linguistics. This concise and original study explores how, when and where code-switching occurs. Drawing on a diverse range of examples from medieval manuscripts to rap music, novels to advertisements, emails to political speeches, and above all everyday conversation, it argues that code-switching can only be properly understood if we study it from a variety of perspectives. It shows how sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, grammatical and developmental aspects of code-switching are all interdependent, and findings in each area are crucial to others. Breaking down barriers across the discipline of linguistics, this pioneering book confronts fundamental questions about what a “native language” is, and whether languages can be meaningfully studied independently from individuals who use them.

Code-switching is the mixing of words, phrases and sentences from two distinct grammatical (sub) systems across sentence boundaries within the same speech event. It is observed that all the studies on the phenomena reviewed so far above are silent on the implication the phenomena have on language acquisition right from childhood. It is this area that this study focuses and explores in order to verify what the situational implications are in respect of the acquisition of language in childhood.

(Nordic Journal of African Studies 15(1): 90–99 (2006)

Code-Switching and Code-Mixing:

Style of Language Use in Childhood in Yoruba Speech Community

AYEOMONI, M.O.

Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria

“as^signment 5”

INTRODUCTION

History

Systemic Functional approaches to genre have contributed richly to how genre is understood and applied in textual analysis and language teaching over the last twenty-five years.

Theory

Functional Linguistics (SFL) operates from the premise that language structure is integrally related to social function and context. Language is organized the way it is within a culture because such an organization serves a social purpose within that culture. “Functional” thus refers to the work that language does within particular contexts. “Systemic” refers to the structure or organization of language so that it can be used to get things done within those contexts. “Systemic” then refers to the “systems of choices” available to language users for the realization of meaning (Christie, “Genre Theory” 759; emphasis added).

Systemic-Functional Linguistics (SFL) is a theory of language centered around the notion of language function. While SFL accounts for the syntactic structure of language, it places the function of language as central (what language does, and how it does it), in preference to more structural approaches, which place the elements of language and their combinations as central.

SFL starts at social context, and looks at how language both acts upon, and is constrained by, this social context.

• Context concerns the Field (what is going on),
• Tenor (the social roles and relationships between the participants),
• The Mode (aspects of the channel of communication, e.g., monologue /dialogic, spoken/written, +/- visual-contact, etc.)

Systemic semantics includes what is usually called 'pragmatics'. Semantics is divided into three components:

1. Ideational Semantics (the propositional content);
2. Interpersonal Semantics (concerned with speech-function, exchange structure, expression of attitude, etc.);
3. Textual Semantics (how the text is structured as a message, e.g., theme-structure, given/new, rhetorical structure etc.

Child language development

Some of Halliday's early work involved the study of his son's developing language abilities. This study in fact has had a substantial influence on the present systemic model of adult language, particularly in regard to the metafunctions. This work has been followed by other child language development work, especially that of Clare Painter. Ruquaya Hasan has also performed studies of interactions between children and mothers.

Language and social context

A great deal of the work in SFL can be traced to Halliday’s Language as Social Semiotic, in which Halliday describes how “the network of meanings” that constitute any culture, what he calls the “social semiotic,” is to a large extent encoded in and maintained by its discourse-semantic system, which represents a culture’s “meaning potential” (100, 13). This is why, as Halliday argues, language is a form of socialization, playing a role in how individuals become socialized and perform meaningful actions within what he calls “contexts of situation.”

In an updated version of the Teaching Learning Cycle that attempts to address some of these concerns, Feez and Joyce add a separate categorycalled “Building the Context” which precedes text modeling. The context building stage of the cycle employs ethnographic strategies for “learners to experience and explore the cultural and situational aspects of the social context of the target text” (Feez 66). Such strategies include research, interviews, field trips, role-playing, and cross-cultural comparisons.

On the theoretical front, critics have raised concerns about SFL’s view of genre and its trajectory, moving as it does from social purpose/ text structure to register analysis to linguistic analysis. While Martin is careful to note that genre realizes ideology, which he defines as the “system of coding orientations engendering subjectivity—at a higher level of abstraction than genre” (“Analysing” 40), and while Christie and Martin have acknowledged the role of genre “in the social construction of experience” (Genres and Institutions 32), the SFL model, critics note, does not examine the ways in which genres not only realize but also help reproduce ideology and social purpose. That is, bytaking “genres at their word,” such a view of genre also takes social purposes at their word, thereby ignoring why certain social purposes exist in the first place as well as what institutional interests are most served through these purposes and their enactments.

These orders of abstraction are organised into three levels or strata - semantics, lexicogrammar and phonology (or graphology).   

·        Semantics is the interface between language and context of situation (register). Semantics is therefore concerned with the meanings that are involved with the three situational variables Field, Tenor and Mode. Ideational meanings realise Field, interpersonal meanings realise Tenor and textual meanings realise Mode.

·        Lexicogrammar is a resource for wording meanings, ie. realising them as configurations of lexical and grammatical items. It follows then, that lexicogrammar is characterised by the same kind of metafunctional diversification discussed above. This takes us back to our discussion in section three where we showed that functional grammar included three separate analyses, each describing the construction of one of three different kinds of meaning which all operate simultaneously in each clause.

·        Ideational (experiential and logical) meanings construing Field are realised lexicogrammatically by the system of Transitivity. This system interprets and represents our experience of phenomena in the world and in our consciousness by modelling experiential meanings in terms of participants, processes and circumstances. Resources for chaining clauses into clause complexes, and for serialising time by means of tense, address logical meanings.

·        Interpersonal meanings are realised lexicogrammatically by systems of Mood and Modality and by the selection of attitudinal lexis. The Mood system is the central resource establishing and maintaining an ongoing exchange between interactants by assuming and assigning speech roles such as giving or demanding goods and services or information.

·        Textual meanings are concerned with the ongoing orchestration of interpersonal and ideational information as text in context. Lexicogrammatically textual meanings are realised by systems of Theme and Information. Theme selections establish the orientation or angle on the interpersonal and ideational concerns of the clause whereas Information organises the informational status or relative newsworthiness of these concerns.