The Use of Brown - Levinson’s Politeness Strategies As A Realization of Sociocultural Competence Among Adult Learners of Elti Surakarta

This study focuses on analyzing the use of Brown and Levinson's politeness strategies to reflect sociocultural competence among adult learners. English is an international language in international communication to talk with people of different age, gender, status, etc. Besides, politeness strategies can reflect somebody's sociocultural competence when he/she talks to others. At the beginning of this study, preliminary research showed that English was used as a language tool in the class for adult students in conversation classes. The adult students came from different backgrounds including job, age, gender, status, culture, existence, and experience. Some of them had been abroad and communicated with the English native speaker directly. A proficiency test was used at the beginning of the research. It was continued by a sound recorder, video recorder, DCT, and interview to get the data. The findings reveal the more prominent use in bald on record and positive politeness strategies. Those strategies, based on the theory of Brown and Levinson and Celce Murcia, showed there was a close relationship between the speakers. The rest of the strategies showed that there was a distance between the speakers. In conclusion, politeness strategies were in students' interactions to reflect their sociocultural competence. The suggestion focuses on giving practices to students to increase their experiences in implementing politeness strategies.

Enhancing Saudi EFL Learners’ CAF in Narrative Writing Through Native Speaker Kids’ Reading Website

This novel study investigated the impact of English native speaker kids’ reading website on enhancing Saudi EFL university students’ complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF) in narrative writing. The rationale for this study is the scant literature in the area of estimating narrative writing in terms of CAF. The quasi-experimental method was adopted in this study through a pre-/ post-test in narrative writing. Eleven level three participants were recruited from in this study. Instruments of the study included a pre-post-test in narrative writing, and the CAF measures. A Wilcoxon signed-Rank and Mann Whitney were used in the analysis. The study results found no significant differences at 0.05 level regarding the post administration of syntactic complexity ratios except (CP/T, CP/C, and CN/C) whose results were significant. The sub-constructs of lexical density and lexical variation were enhanced partially, and as a whole, whereas there was no increase/decrease regarding lexical sophistication. For accuracy measure, the results were significant in all ratios at 0.05 level except (EFC/C, and EFTC/S ratios). Concerning fluency measures, the results were insignificant at 0.05 in all ratios except (MLC ratio). The results of the study and their pedagogical implications were discussed.

Formative Assessment in Language Evaluation Class

<p align="center">This study is intended to analyze variations of formative assessment strategies applied in Language Evaluation class. The class was taught by an English native speaker. A descriptive qualitative method was employed in the study in which interviews and classroom observations were conducted to collect the data. In addition, syllabus and materials used for the class were also used as the supporting instruments in the study. The findings set out that various kinds of formative assessment used in the respective class. They were oral question, choral questioning, a quiz, Think-Pair-Share, Think-Pair-Write-Share, pair work and group work. The delivery of each assessment technique are differed in each lesson, but are always preceded with questions before a specific technique used. The study advocates that formative assessment in higher education is highly suggested, yet real challenges lie for lecturers to apply.</p>

STUDENTS’ MOTIVATION ON ENGLISH NATIVE SPEAKER’S TEACHING

This is a descriptive research of third grade students of English Department, Gorontalo state university. It was conducted to figure out the level of students’ motivation on Englih Native speaker’s teaching. In this study, there were 20 students participating in ths research. The data were derived from questionnaire and analyzed by using simple calculation analysis, while interview was conducted to gain more information. The result showed that 40% students has high motivation with score range 61%-80%. Therefore, i can conclude that the students’s motivation on english native speaker’s teaching was categorized as High Motivation. The result of interview also showed that the students have high motivation when taught by english native speaker. It concluded that the competence in teaching and pedagogy skill of native speaker gave good impact and contribution in education.

PORTUGUESE VERSION OF THE SNAQ QUESTIONNAIRE: TRANSLATION AND CULTURAL ADAPTATION

ABSTRACT BACKGROUND: Poor appetite is common through the aging process and increases the risk of weight loss, protein-energy malnutrition, immunossupression, sarcopenia and frailty. The Simplified Nutritional Appetite Questionnaire (SNAQ) has the aim to monitor appetite and identify older adults at risk of weight loss. OBJECTIVE: To describe the process of translation and cultural adaptation to Brazilian Portuguese of the SNAQ. METHODS: The translation and cultural adaptation was developed in five steps: translation (by three of the authors of the manuscript and assembled by consensus), backtranslation (by an English native speaker), semantic evaluation (by one verontologist and one nutritionist), comprehension of content (by nutrition specialists and by a group of older persons), pre-test and the SNAQ final version development. RESULTS: The SNAQ Portuguese version maintained the original version meaning and referral. To achieve this feature, the process required some modifications to improve the understanding of older persons, such as inclusion of other options to the answers of some questions, rewritten of one question and inclusion of a meal definition. CONCLUSION: SNAQ questionnaire has been successfully translated and adapted to Portuguese. As our next step, we are validating this tool in different clinical settings in Brazil.

English Department Students’ Anxiety in Interacting Orally with an English Native Speaker Lecturer

Anxiety has a debilitating effect on the oral interaction of English Department students with English native speaker (ENS) lecturer. Thus, the present study seeks to discover the perceived factors that cause anxiety among students in interacting with ENS lecturer in the classroom. Informed by a qualitative approach, data were collected mainly using group semi-structured interviews, and analyzed using a thematic analysis approach. The study revealed that the English Department students reported four perceived factors, namely,; limited English proficiency, fear of being misunderstood, lack of self-confidence, and fear of negative evaluation. The study suggests that even though ENS has minor influence in students’ anxiety, it remains important for teacher and teacher educators to continuously encourage students to practice speaking English in and off classroom situation.

Politeness Strategies of Disagreement by English Native Speaker Students

This research paper investigates the speech act of disagreement performed by English native speaker students. Particularly, it attempts to examine the politeness strategies used by English native speaker students in realizing disagreement. The data were obtained using Discourse Completion Task consisting of six situations that were completed by twenty students. The results showed that a total of 113 utterances of disagreement were found. The most frequently used strategy was negative politeness (41.6%) since this strategy becomes the most suitable strategy to minimize the imposition of disagreement utterances. The rank is then followed by positive politeness (29.2%), bald on-record (25.7%), and off-record (3.5%).

Expert-Like Use of Hedges and Boosters in Research Articles Written by Polish and English Native-Speaker Writers

The present study compares the use of main interpersonal metadiscourse markers - hedges and boosters - in a corpus of 40 research articles from the area of applied linguistics, written in English by native speakers and Polish writers. Used as communicative strategies, these words and expressions increase (boosters) or reduce (hedges) the force of arguments. In order to gain an in-depth insight and to achieve greater precision, in the analysis the author utilizes a concordance tool WordSmith 6.0 (Scott 2012). The results point to important discrepancies in the usage of these text features by authors representing different native languages and cultures. The study has important implications for developing competence in writing for publication in English as a Foreign Language.

Teaching Reading Skills to Non-English Native Speaker Students: The Numbered Head Together (NHT) Technique and Students’ Reading Ability in Bengkulu

The purpose of this quantitative study with a quasi-experimental approach was to examine the significant increase and difference of students’ achievement in reading after being taught through the Numbered Head Together (NHT) technique with recount texts for the second grade students at one Junior High School in Bengkulu, Indonesia. The sample of this study was 72 second- grade students divided into two classes: experimental class and control class. The experimental class was treated by being taught through the Numbered Head Together (NHT) technique while the control class was taught using conventional method. To collect the data, pre-test and post-test techniques were used. The result of paired sample t-test showed that there was a significant positive effect of Numbered Head Together (NHT) technique toward the students’ reading ability. Implications of findings and suggestions are discussed.

A micro process-product study of a CLIL lesson l

We begin by comparing two models for the simultaneous teaching of language and content: immersion, and content and language integrated learning (CLIL). Following a brief summary and critique of research on CLIL, we describe a micro process-product laboratory experiment with young adult native speakers of Arabic for whom English was the L2. The same fifteen-minute lesson about an amateur anthropologist’s alleged discovery of a hitherto unknown indigenous tribe in the Amazonian jungle was delivered by nine surrogate teachers to nine groups of four surrogate students in three baseline English native speaker groups, three baseline Arabic native speaker groups and three CLIL groups. Findings on language use in the nine lessons are related to content learning and vocabulary knowledge. The short-term, artificial nature of the study precludes generalisations to real CLIL programs, which was not our intention. Rather, we wish to suggest that process-product laboratory studies of larger scale and longer duration, paired with classroom studies employing a similar design and research methodology, offer a useful approach to identifying strengths and weaknesses of CLIL programs largely ignored to date.