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.

Assignment 6: Code switching

 Hamers and Blanc (2000: 260), stated in The Study of Code Switching, define code mixing as a type of insertional code switching, where a constituent from language A is embedded into an utterance in language B, and where language B is clearly the dominant language.

Code switching is, according to Gumperz, which stated in The Sociolinguistic Dimension of Code Switching by Thuy Nguyen, regarded as a contextualization cue which speakers strategically use to mark their speech.

Zentella (1985), stated in Code Switching by Richard Nordquist, said that Code-switching performs several functions:

First, people may use code-switching to hide fluency or memory problems in the second language (but this accounts for about only 10 percent of code switches).

Second, code-switching is used to mark switching from informal situations (using native languages) to formal situations (using second language).

Third, code-switching is used to exert control, especially between parents and children.

Fourth, code-switching is used to align speakers with others in specific situations (e.g., defining oneself as a member of an ethnic group).

 

Gumperz (1972), in A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, said that there are two types of Code Switching; they are Situational and Metaphorical Code Switching.

In situational switching, a change of language signals a change in the definition of the speech event, involving clear changes in the participants’ definition of each other’s rights and obligation. Gumperz (1982:60-1), stated in A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, said that situational code switching is more likely to be intersentential (between sentences) than intrasentential (within sentences).

Metaphorical code switching is a change in language that doesn’t signal a change in the definition of the fundamental speech event. Interactants do not alter the basic definition of the rights and obligation, but only allude the different relationship that they also hold.

According to  Gumperz (1982), stated in Issues in Code-Switching: Competing Theories and Models by Erman Boztepe, there are  six  functions of Code Switching:

·         Quotation

Quotations are occurrences of switching where someone else’s utterance is reported either as direct quotations or as reported speech.

·         Addressee specification

In here, the switch serves to direct the message to one particular person among several addressees present in the immediate environment.

·         Interjection

Simply serve to mark sentence fillers as in the insertion of the English filler you know in an otherwise completely Spanish utterance.

·         Reiteration

It occurs when one repeats a message in the other code to clarify what is said or even to increase the elocutionary effect of the utterance.

·         Message qualification

Gumperz (1982) defines message qualification as an elaboration of the preceding utterance in the other code in Mann & Thompson’s (1986) sense.

·         Personalization versus Objectification

Personalization versus objectification signals the degree of speaker involvement in a message as in the case of, for example, giving one’s statement more authority in a dispute through Code Switching.

Sources:

A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, http://books.google.co.id/books?id=qMXdopSc7BIC&pg=PA76&lpg=PA76&dq=situational+and+metaphorical+according+to+gumperz&source=bl&ots=ndOvOKydyM&sig=d8RjDgMmHKgjo3zcZvLc3roXYpc&hl=id&sa=X&ei=oHmqT8qsM-6ciAeOmvHDAw&ved=0CD8Q6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=situational%20and%20metaphorical%20according%20to%20gumperz&f=false accessed May 9, 2012, at 7.34 pm

Code-switching, http://assets.cambridge.org/97805218/62646/frontmatter/9780521862646_frontmatter.pdf accessed on May 9, 2012, at 8.58 pm

Code switching, http://grammar.about.com/od/c/g/codeswitchingterm.htm accessed on May 9, 2012, at 7.48 pm

Issues in Code-Switching: Competing Theories and Models, http://journals.tc-library.org/index.php/tesol/article/download/32/37 accessed on May 9, 2012, at 09.23 pm

The Sociolinguistic Dimension of Code Switching, http://www.grin.com/en/e-book/124915/the-sociolinguistic-dimension-of-code-switching accessed on May 9, 2012, at 7.15 pm

THE STUDY OF CODE SWITCHING, http://www.lotpublications.nl/publish/articles/002401/bookpart.pdf  accessed on May 9, 2012, at 7.56 pm

Assignment 5: Approaches to Discourse

Speech Act Theory
(Austin 1955, Searle 1969)

Speech act theory is a logico-philosophic perspective on conversational organization focusing on interpretation rather than the production of utterances in discourse. It provides the insight that the basic unit of conversational analysis must be functionally motivated rather than formally defined one. Every utterance can be analyzed as the realization of the speaker’s intent (illocutionary force) to achieve a particular purpose.

It has principal problems like: the lack of a one-to-one matchup between discourse function (IF) and the grammatical form.

Interactional Sociolinguistics
(Gumperz 1982, Goffman 1959-1981)

It centrally concerned with the importance of context in the production and interpretation of discourse. It has grammatical and prosodic features in interactions for its unit of analysis.

According to Schiffrin (1987), interactional sociolinguistic focused on quantitative interactive sociolinguistic analysis, esp. discourse markers (defined as ‘sequentially dependent elements which bracket units of talk). She argues for the importance of qualitative and quantitative / distributional analysis in order to determine the function of the different discourse markers in conversation.

Ethnography of Communication
(Dell Hymes (1972b, 1974)

According to Hymes 1972:56, speech event refers to ‘activities … that are directly governed by rules or norms for the use of speech’

It concerned with understanding the social context of linguistic interactions: ‘who says what to whom, when, where. Why, and how’.

There are problems in this communication such as: lack of explicitness on the relationship between genre and other components of the speaking grid and their expression in language. And the second problem is the recognition of the close relationship between speech events and their social/cultural contexts.

Pragmatics
(Grice 1975, Leech 1983, Levinson 1983)

It formulates conversational behavior in terms of general “principles” rather than rules. It also provides useful means of characterizing different varieties of conversation.

This principle is the broken down into specific maxims:

· Quantity (say only as much as necessary)

· Quality (try to make your contribution one that is true)

· Relation (be relevant)

· Manner (be brief and avoid ambiguity)

The problem in pragmatics is: it implies that conversations occur co-operatively, between equals where power is equally distributed etc.

Conversation Analysis (CA)
(Harold Garfinkel 1960s-1970s)

CA is a branch of ethnomethodology. It is use to understand how social members make sense of everyday life.

Models conversation as infinitely generative turn-taking machine, where interactants try to avoid lapse: the possibility that no one is speaking.

There are some problems in CA:

a) lack of systematicity- thus quantitative analysis is impossible;

b) Limited I its ability to deal comprehensively with complete, sustained interactions

c) Though offers a powerful interpretation of conversation as dynamic interactive achievement, it is unable to say just what kind of achievement it is

Variation Analysis
(Labov 1972a, Labov and Waletzky1967)

Labov & Waletzky argue that fundamental narrative structures are evident in spoken narratives of personal experience.

The overall structure of fully formed narrative of personal experience involves six stages:

1) Abstract

2) Orientation

3) Complication

4) Evaluation

5) Resolution

6) Coda

The problem in data analysis is the data was obtained from interviews.

Assignment 4: Discourse Analysis

Discourse analysis is the study of how stretches of language used in communication assume meaning, purpose and unity.

Deborah Tannen says that Discourse analysis is sometimes defined as the analysis of language 'beyond the sentence'. This contrasts with types of analysis more typical of modern linguistics, which are chiefly concerned with the study of grammar: the study of smaller bits of language, such as sounds (phonetics and phonology), parts of words (morphology), meaning (semantics), and the order of words in sentences (syntax). Discourse analysts study larger chunks of language as they flow together.

Discourse analysis has been used to understand a wide range of texts including natural speech, professional documentation, political rhetoric, and interview. Some discourse analysts consider the larger discourse context in order to understand how it affects the meaning of the sentence.

Types of Discourse Analysis:

Conversation Analysis

CA is an approach to the study of social interaction, embracing both verbal and non-verbal conduct, in situations of everyday life.CA focuses on a fine grained analysis of the ways in which language is used.

Ian Hutchby and Robin Wooffitt, in their book Conversation Analysis. Polity, 2008, cited in http://grammar.about.com/od/c/g/conversationanalysisterm.htm say that:

"CA is the study of recorded, naturally occurring talk-in-interaction. But what is the aim of studying these interactions? Principally, it is to discover how participants understand and respond to one another in their turns at talk, with a central focus on how sequences of action are generated."

Discursive Psychology

DP is a form of discourse analysis that focuses on psychological themes. It starts with psychological phenomena as things that are constructed, attended to, and understood in interaction. DP applies the notion of discourse to psychological topics such as memory and attitudes.

Critical Discourse Analysis

CDA is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of discourse that views language as a form of social practice and focuses on the ways social and political domination are reproduced in text and talk.

Foucauldian Discourse Analysis

FDA focusing on power relationships in society as expressed through language.

Frame Analysis

Is a type of discourse analysis that asks, What activity are speakers engaged in when they say this? What do they think they are doing by talking in this way at this time?

Approaches to Discourse Analysis:

Speech Act Theory

Speech act theory attempts to explain how speakers use language to accomplish intended actions and how hearers infer intended meaning form what is said.

Interactional Sociolinguistic

IS is a sub discipline of linguistic that uses discourse analysis to study how language users create meaning via interaction.

Ethnography of Communication

EOC is a method of discourse analysis in linguistics, which draws on the anthropological field of ethnography. It takes both language and culture to be constitutive as well as constructive.

Pragmatics

Pragmatics is the study of the aspects of meaning and language use that are dependent on the speaker, the addressee and other features of the context of utterance.

Ethnomethodology

Ethnomethodology is a perspective within sociology which focuses on the way people make sense of their everyday world.

Variation Analysis

VA is the variation of the language that the speakers use.

words: 516

References:

Coulthard, Malcolm. 1985. An Introduction to Discourse Analysis New Edition. UK: Longman Group Limited.

Discourse Analysis, http://www.cprjournal.com/documents/discourseAnalysis.pdf accessed April 12, 2012 on 01.48 pm

Hutchby, I., and Wooffitt, R. (2008). Conversation Analysis. http://grammar.about.com/od/c/g/conversationanalysisterm.htm accessed April 15, 2012 07.41 am

Tannen, Deborah. Discourse Analysis, http://www.lsadc.org/info/ling-fields-discourse.cfm accessed April 12, 2012 on 01.56 pm

Assignment 3: Celce-Murcia, Dornyei, & Thurrel's model of CoCo (1995)

Widdowson (1989, p. 135), cited by Celce-Murcia, Dornyei and Thurrell (1995), said that:

Communicative competence is not a matter of knowing rules for the composition of sentences and being able to employ such rules to assemble expressions from scratch as and when occasion requires. It is much more a matter of knowing a stock of partially pre-assembled patterns, formulaic frameworks, and a kit of rules, so to speak, and being able to apply the rules to make whatever adjustments are necessary according to contextual standards.


Five competencies model according to Celce-Murcia, Dornyei, and Thurrell:
1. Discourse competence
Discourse competence concerns the selection, sequencing, and arrangement of words, structures, sentences and utterances to achieve a unified spoken or written text.
There are many sub-areas that contribute to discourse competence: cohesion, deixis, coherence, generic structure, and the conversational structure inherent to the turn-taking system in conversation.

2. Linguistic competence
Linguistic competence is historically the most thoroughly discussed component of our model and, for this reason, our discussion of it will be very brief.
It comprises the basic elements of communication: the sentence patterns and types, the constituent structure, the morphological inflections, and the lexical resources, as well as the phonological and orthographic systems needed to realize communication as speech or writing

3. Actional competence
Actional competence is defined as competence in conveying and understanding communicative intent, that is, matching actional intent with linguistic form based on the knowledge of an inventory of verbal schemata that carry illocutionary force (speech acts and speech act sets).
It must be noted that the conceptualization of actional competence is mainly restricted to oral communication; a close parallel to actional competence in written communication would be "rhetorical competence," which includes analysis of the "moves" and "lexical routines" typical of any given written genre.

4. Sociocultural competence
Sociocultural competence refers to the speaker's knowledge of how to express messages appropriately within the overall social and cultural context of communication, in accordance with the pragmatic factors related to variation in language use.
There are four variables in this competence: social contextual factors, stylistic appropriateness factors, cultural factors, non-verbal communicative factors.

5. Strategic competence
Strategic competence is knowledge of communication strategies and how to use them.

There are five strategies: avoidance or reduction strategies, achievement or compensatory strategies, staling or time-gaining strategies, self-monitoring strategies, interactional strategies.

References: Celce-Murcia, M., Dornyei, Z. and Thurrell, S. (1995) Communicative Competence: A Pedagogically Motivated Model with Content Specifications, http://escholarship.ucop.edu/uc/item/2928w4zj#page-1, accessed April 9, 2012 on 7.32 pm.

Assignment 2 :The History of Language Teaching and Methodology

Approaches
• Traditional approaches (up to the late 1960s)
• Classic communicative language teaching (1970s to 1990s)
• Current communicative language teaching (late 1990s to the present)

Traditional Approaches (up to the late 1960s)
Approaches which were develop up to the late 1960s :
• Grammar-translation
• Direct
• Reading
• Audiolingualism
• Oral-situational
• Cognitive

Grammar-translation
• Instruction given in the native language
• Focus on grammatical parsing
Weakness(es):
• Students are not able to use the language for communication
• The teacher use the native language

Direct Approach
• The use of mother tongue isn’t permitted
• Target culture and the grammar is learned inductively
Weakness(es):
• The teacher must be a native speaker or at least a native like
• The teacher use the native language

Reading Approach
• Only use grammar for the reading comprehension
• Translation is a respectable classroom procedure
Weakness(es):
• Reading comprehension is the only language skill emphasized
• The teacher doesn’t need to have a good proficiency in the target language

Audiolingualism
• Pronunciation is stressed from the beginning
• Grammatical structures are sequenced and rules are taught inductively
Weakness(es):
• Language is often manipulated
Requirement(s):
• The teacher must be proficient only in the structures, vocabularies, etc.

Oral-Situational Approach
• The spoken language is emphasized
• New items (lexical and grammatical) are introduced and practiced situationally

Cognitive Approach
• Language learning is viewed as rule acquisition
• Pronunciation is de-emphasized, vocabulary instruction is important

Classic communicative language teaching (1970s to 1990s)
Approaches which were develop in 1970s to 1990s:
• Affective-Humanistic
• Comprehension-Based
• Communicative

Affective-Humanistic Approach
• Respect is emphasized for the participants
• Learning the target language is viewed as a self-realization experience
Requirement(s):
• The teacher should be proficient in the target language

Comprehension-Based Approach
• Listening comprehension is viewed as the basic skill
• Learners should not speak until they ready to do so
Requirement(s):

The teacher should be a native like

Communicative Approach
•Skill like listening, reading, speaking and writing are integrated from the beginning
•Classroom materials and activities are often authentic
Requirement(s):
•The teacher should be able to use the target language fluently and appropriately

We still can use those approaches nowadays, but before we decide which approach, method and technique that we’ll use, we better consider about:
•Assess students’ needs
•Examine instructional constraints
•Determine the attitudes and learning styles
•Identify
•Specify

Current communicative language teaching (late 1990s to the present)
Because of the disappointment of grammar-translation method and audio-lingual method then appear a new method called CLT. In the current CLT, it involves learners as active participants in the interpretation, expression and negotiation of meaning.
The principles of CLT apply equally to reading and writing activities because it involves students in the interpretation, expression and negotiation of meaning. It’s not concerned with face-to-face communication.
The essence of CLT is the engagement of learners in communication in order to allow them to develop their communicative competence. CLT doesn’t focus on rules of syntax, discourse and social appropriateness.

The characteristics of current CLT activities are:

• it emphasize on the interaction, expression and negotiation of meaning
• it use materials that have connection to the students’ lives and interests
• it develops students’ communicative competence through grammatical development
• grammar learned inductively and deductively

References:

• Celce – Murcia, M. 2001. Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language Third Edition. Unit 1. Teaching Methodology, Topic 1 & Topic 2

• Richard, J.C. 2005. Communicative Language Teaching Today. New York: Cambridge University Press