Assignment 8: A Study on the Reading Skills of EFL University Students

This is a paper of a mini research. The purpose of the research is to investigate kinds of reading skills that EFL University students have difficulty with.

Studies have shown that EFL students who read a lot seem to acquire English better than those who don’t. Realizing the importance of reading for EFL students, it is then very crucial for EFL students to have good reading proficiency. Having good proficiency means the reader has abilities to understand written statements or any type of written texts accurately and efficiency. In this paper the researchers used seventeen skills in reading to measure the EFL students’ reading ability.

They do some steps in this research. The first step was to analyze the kinds of reading skills. The second step was to develop two reading tests. They used two texts in the test. The first reading text covered twelve skills and the second text covered seven skills. The third step was piloting the two reading texts. This was aimed to help the writers to see whether the two reading tests had clear and good instructions and items. The fourth step was to distribute the reading test. And the last step was to check and count the result of both reading tests.

After the test held, they start to check and count the result. The first step was to analyze the result of each reading test. In here they counted the correct and the wrong answers of each reading skill. The second step was to list seventeen kinds of reading skills which were tested in the reading tests. They made the percentage of the seventeen skills. The higher percentage meant the more difficult that particular reading skill for the respondents. If it was low, it was assumed that the skill was easier for the respondents.

From the research, they found that the most difficult reading skill was to recognizing text organization. The second most difficult was paraphrase. The third was the inference from context. Then the easiest reading skill was scanning. And the two easiest skills were recognizing presupposition underlying the text and improving reading speed.

So, from the research we can conclude that each reading skill had different level of difficulty for the respondents.


This research is so useful for teachers because they now know students problem whenever they're reading a text. this might help teachers to find the appropriate method in teching reading.

Assignment 7: Sex, politeness and stereotypes

Some dialectologist argued that women were using language which reinforced their sub-ordinate status. Social dialect research focused on differences between women’s and men’s speech. Robin Lakoff identified a number of linguistic features used more often by women.  She suggested that women’s speech was characterized by linguistics features like:

• Lexical hedges or fillers, e.g. you know, sort of, well, you see.
•  Tag questions, e.g. she’s very nice, isn’t she?
•  Rising intonation on declaratives, e.g. it’s really good.
• ‘Empty’ adjectives, e.g. divine, charming, cute.
•  Precise color terms, e.g. magenta, aquamarine.
• Intensifiers such as just and so, e.g. I like him so much.
• ‘Hypercorrect’ grammar, e.g. consistent use of standard verb forms.
•  ‘Superpolite’ forms, e.g. indirect request, euphemisms.
•  Avoidance of strong swear words, e.g. fudge, my goodness.
•  Emphatic stress, e.g. it was a BRILLIANT performance.

Lakoff didn’t claim her list was comprehensive. But many researchers treated it as definite. Lakoff identified can be illustrated by dividing them into two groups”

1.      Linguistic devices which may be used for hedging or reducing the force of an utterance.

2.      Features which may boost or intensify a proposition’s force.

According to Lakoff, both hedges and boosters reflect women’s lack of confidence. Most researchers, but not all, claimed women used more boosters or intensifiers than men.

Lakoff said that tag question may express uncertainty. But actually not all tags are signal of their uncertainty. Tags may also express affective meaning, may function as facilitative or positive politeness devices, providing an addressee, etc. And sometimes the tag is not to hedge but to strengthen the negative force of the utterance.

The difference between women and men in ways of interacting may be the result of different socialization. Women like to gossip. In gossip session women provide a sympathetic response, focusing almost exclusively on the affective message rather than its inferential content.

Meanwhile man discussion tend to focus on thins and activities, rather than personal experiences and feelings. Men provided conflicting accounts of the same event, argued about a range of topics. Their talks contrasted completely with the cooperative, agreeing, supportive, topically coherent talk of the women. It explains why women and men sometimes miscommunicate.

Sexist language

Feminists have claimed that English is a sexist language. Sexism involves behavior which maintains social inequalities between women and men. There are number of ways in which it has been suggested that the English language discriminate against women. Animal imagery is one example where the images of women seem considerably less positive that man. Women may also be described or referred to in terms of food imagery. There are lots of English metaphors available to describe women include the number of derogatory images compared to those to describe men.

The basis for claims that English renders women invisible is the use forms such as he and man as generic forms. The use of man as a generic form has a long history. But its generic use is no longer acceptable to many English speakers because this meaning has become overshadowed by its masculine meaning.

The relative status of the sexes in a society may be reflected in the language used about women and men. Women are often assigned subordinate status by virtue of their gender alone, regardless of their actual power in a particular context.