Rabu, 27 Juni 2012

8th Assignment: Final Assignment of Topic in Applied Linguistics
Maulina Adzkiyah (2201409033 405-406)


A STUDY ON THE READING SKILLS OF
EFL UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

By:
Flora Debora Floris
Marsha Divina
Petra Christian University, Indonesia

SUMMARY

The study attempts to investigate kinds of reading skills that EFL (English as a Foreign Language) University students have difficulty with. For this purpose, two reading tests which covered seventeen kinds of reading skills were developed and administered to ten students of batch 2003 studying at an English Department of a private university in Surabaya, Indonesia. The analysis showed that each reading skill had different level of difficulty for the respondents.
Studies have shown that EFL students who read a lot seem to acquire English better than those who do not. They “do not only improve in their reading abilities, but also improve in using and increasing their English abilities and knowledge. Reading proficiency is determined by reading skills. According to Wassman and Rinsky (2000, p. 2, cited in Suparman, 2005, p. 141),

To understand all the printed materials in English, high reading proficiency is of paramount importance without which the information will not be comprehended. However, it takes an “effective reader” to make sense out of the print which EFL students are bombarded daily. Thus, becoming an effective reader means the reader has reading skills and knows how to use them effectively.


There are three majors categories or reading skills suggested by Nuttal (1996, pp. 44-124). They are:
1.      Efficient reading skills
2.      Word attack skills
3.      Text attack skills
Method
There are some steps used by the writers in doing the data collection. They are mentioned as follows:
1.      The first step was to analyze the kinds of reading skills.
2.      The second step was to develop two reading tests.
Steps:
a.       The writers adopted two reading texts for reading test one and other two reading texts for reading test two.
b.      They developed test items based on those reading texts.
3.      The third step was piloting the two reading tests.
4.      The next step of the data collection was to distribute the reading test to ten students of English Department Batch 2003 who had already passed all reading classes.
5.      The final step of the data collection was to check and count the results of both reading tests.

The followings are the step done by the writers to analyze the data:
1.      Analyze the results of each reading test.
2.      List seventeen kinds of reading skills which were tested in the reading tests.
3.      Calculate the percentage of incorrect answer for each reading skill.
Discussion
The most difficult reading skill for these students was recognizing text organization. The second most difficult reading skill was paraphrasing. However, it was found that in this study vocabulary skill was the third most difficult reading skill. Since there were only three wrong answers from the total respondents’ answers toward scanning skill’s items, it could be assumed that students did not have much difficulty with this skill. The other reading skills which had low difficulty level were improving reading speed and recognizing presupposition underlying the text.
Conclusion
From the study, it can be conclude that each reading skill had different level of difficulty for the respondents.

COMMENT

Reading, one of the four language skills, is actually skill that as important as the others. But in our environment reading skill is usually underestimated compared to the others such as speaking skill. This study has successfully showed us that there are some factors that may cause the low level of reading skill. There are seventeen reading skills that studied in the research. I think, this research has proved that each reading skill should be developed in order to improve reading ability of the respondents.

BENEFIT FOR LANGUAGE TEACHING

Since it was found in the study held by the writers that each reading skill had different level of difficulty it could be found that there are some benefits we got. For example, a teacher might take a look on this study to prepare the lesson plan on the topic of reading and to make it more understandable to students in order to achieve the objectives of the lesson. The teacher could adapt the findings from the study to decide which reading skills should get more attention than the others. Another benefit was that teacher could be informed that reading skill was actually not as simple as people thought. Many people did not know that actually there are seventeen skills under covered by reading skill. By this study, teacher could consider the proportion of improving reading skill so that none of the skills would be underestimated or even gone.

Rabu, 13 Juni 2012

7th Assignment : Sex, politeness and stereotypes

This part of the book told us about styles and registers, the way language was used, and linguistic attitudes, the issue of ‘woman’s language’ was one which illustrated all those concepts. The first part of the chapter told us about Women’s language and confidence. An American linguist, Robin Lakoff, argued that women were using language which reinforced status; they were ‘colluding in their own subordination’ by the way they spoke. The example given showed that social dialect research focused on differences between women’s and men’s speech in the areas of pronunciation, and morphology, with some attention to syntactic constructions. According to her there are some linguistic features of ‘women’s language’:
a) Lexical hedges or fillers
b) Tag questions
c) Rising intonation on declaratives
d) Empty adjectives
e) Precise color terms
f) Intensifiers
g) ‘Hypercorrect’ grammar
h) ‘Superpolite’ forms
i) Avoidance of strong swear words
j) Emphatic stress.
Those ten features were unified by their function of expressing lack of confidence. The internal coherence of the features Lakkof identified could be illustrated by dividing them into two groups. First, there were linguistic devices which might be used for hedging or reducing the force of an utterance. Secondly, there were features which may boost or intensify a proposition’s force. She claimed women used hedging devices to express uncertainty, and they used intensifying devices to persuade their addressee to take them seriously. According to her, both hedges and boosters reflected women’s lack of confidence. But, even if those features were said to differ women’s language from men’s language, it was still difficult to know how to interpret such apparently arbitrary differences between them without a theoretical.
Second part of the chapter told us about Interaction. There were many features of interaction which differentiate the way women and men spoke. In this section of the chapter there were two features discussed. They were interrupting behavior and conversational feedback.
  Interruptions
In the same sex-interactions, interruptions were distributed between speakers. In cross-sex interactions almost all the interruptions were from male. It had been found that men interrupted others more than women do. Men interrupted more, challenged, disputed, and ignored more, tried to control what topics were discussed, and were inclined to make categorical statements. Women were evidently socialized from early childhood to expect to be interrupted. Consequently, they generally gave up the floor with little or no protest.
  Feedback
Another aspect of the picture of women as cooperative conversationalists was the evidence that women provided more encouraging feedback to their conversational partner than men did. Research on conversational interaction revealed women as cooperative conversationalists, whereas men tended to be more competitive and less supportive of others.
The differences between women and men in ways of interacting might be the result of different socialization and acculturation patterns.
Then, the chapter explained about Gossip. It was described Gossip as the kind of relaxed in-group talk that went on between people in informal contexts. Its overall function for women was to affirm solidarity and maintain the social relationships between the women involved. It focused on personal experiences and relationships also personal problems and feelings.
The last part explained was Sexist language. It was concerned with the way language expressed both negative and positive stereotypes of both women and men. However, in reality, it was more concerned with language conveyed negative attitudes to women. It was said that based on linguistic data supports the view that women were often assigned subordinate status by virtue of their gender alone and treated linguistically as subordinate, regardless of their actual power or social status in a particular context.
The relative status of the sexes in a society may be reflected not only in the ways in which women and men use language, but also in the language used about women and men.