English Language Teaching Strategy for ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) Students

This study aimed at investigating the realization of English language teaching strategies for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) students, especially in terms of the implementation of teaching strategies. This study took place at SMPLB of Curup, Bengkulu, Indonesia. There was only one English teacher who taught ASD students, and the teacher was involved as the subject of this study. The data were garnered form interviews and document analysis. The data were further analyzed using an interactive model extending to data collection, data condensation, data display, and drawing conclusions. The results showed that the teacher used three strategies in teaching children with autism, namely developing oral language comprehension, echolalia, and communication skills enhancement through the PECS method. In addition, the teacher also modified the form of the strategy according to the needs of students with autism.

Investigating Students’ Perceptions of Language Terms through Technology at Dehasen University

The Covid-19 pandemic has made various changes in all aspects of life, such as economy, social, politics, lifestyle and education. This can be seen from the government urging the public to limit their activities and enforce self-isolation so as to encourage increased access to technology. Technology has become a very important role and is needed in the current situation because the government urges to reduce social activities. Likewise in the field of education, with the Covid-19 pandemic, all learning processes at all education levels are conducted online. This is the basis for the findings of several previous studies related to the emergence of several new terms used by the government and socialized to the public related to pandemics. From those several previous studies, the researchers saw that there was no research related to the level of public understanding of new terms that appeared during the Covid-19 pandemic. Therefore, this study aims to determine the level of student understanding of new terms that emerged during the Covid-19 pandemic. This study used a survey method for students at University of Dehasen Bengkulu using a questionnaire. From the research result, it can be concluded that most students at University of Dehasen Bengkulu, specifically Physical Education Study Program do not know the new terms. This is because many of Physical Education students are in remote areas which are very affected by the weather and electricity, so accessing information on TV and the internet often faces obstacles.

The Impacts of Explicit and Implicit Instructions of English Connectors on EFL Students’ Reading Comprehension

There have been many studies on English grammar, but a dearth of studies has been conducted in the cross-sectional fields such as seeking how the field of grammar makes contributions to reading comprehension. Accordingly, the current study sought to find out the impacts of explicit and implicit instructions of English connectors on EFL students’ reading comprehension. 50 third semester students from an English department at a university in Bengkulu were incorporated as the samples. Adopting a quasi-experimental method, those 50 students were split into two classes, the so-called experimental and control classes. Students in the experimental class were taught English connectors explicitly, and those of the control class were taught English connectors implicitly. Before eight times of treatments in the form of the two ways of instructions, students of the two group were given a valid and reliable reading comprehension pre-test, and a similar construct of post-test was given after the eighth treatments ended. The data of the current study were analyzed by deploying paired sample t-test and independent sample t-test. The present study revealed that explicit and implicit instructions of English connectors had positive impacts on EFL students’ reading comprehension. However, the explicit instruction of English connectors enhanced EFL students’ reading comprehension more significantly and more effectively. It is recommended that further studies be conducted to replicate the present study in different contexts for the sake of providing rich data to confirm the current study’s results.

Student' Perception and Problems in Learning English Using Google Classroom During the Covid-19 Pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic has occurred across the world. This causes all segments of human life to be disturbed including the education sector. The teaching and learning process tends to run ineffectively and should be done online. Online learning offers a learning process that can be done not only in the classroom but anywhere and anytime. One of the applications that can be used is Google classroom. This study aims to determine students' perceptions and problems in learning English using Google Classroom during the Covid-19 Pandemic at SMAN 6 Kota Bengkulu. This research was a mixed-method research involving 443 students in the academic year of 2020/2021. The data were collected using a questionnaire in the form of a Google form consisting of 50 questions with 4 answer choices, namely strongly agree, agree, disagree, and strongly disagree, and semi-structured interviews. The data obtained were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. The results of this research indicate that the students have a positive perception in learning English using Google classrooms during the Covid-19 pandemic at SMAN 6 Kota Bengkulu with the average score obtained was 1160 and was in the positive category. Moreover, the data obtained from the interview showed that most of the students experienced problems in learning English skills using Google classroom caused by lack of vocabulary. In addition, the problems in using the Google classroom application were in the opening and uploading files or videos. These findings are expected that the teachers should change their teaching habits by offering students innovative opportunities to improve their self-confidence, to control their learning, and to practice their language skills. The students should be more creative to solve the problems during learning English by using Google classroom even in the online process or not.

Demotivating Factors of EFL Learners of Indonesian Undergraduate Students during Pandemic Covid-19: Gender Differences

Pandemic covid-19 precedes education to adapt with this disruptive situation. The needs of teaching and learning continuity suggests online learning as one of the solutions along with its challenge. This study aim to investigate whether gender differences influence demotivating factors of EFL Learners of Indonesian Undergraduate Student during pandemic covid-19 situation Surveys design was utilized to verify the hypothesis in this research. On the basis of Kikuchi’s (in press) qualitative study, this study employed 34-item questionnaire that consist of five categories;((a) Course Books, (b) Inadequate School Facilities, (c) Test Scores, (d) Noncommunicative Methods, and (e) Teachers’ Competence and Teaching Styles) to gather quantitative data. Having cluster random sampling as sampling technique, the participants were 368 EFL Learners of Indonesian Undergraduate Student from private universities in Jakarta. The findings of the research revealed that gender did not influence demotivation factors on online learning during pandemic situation. However, the finding indicated the absence of face-to-face teacher in online learning significantly influence demotivating factors on learning English, as non-communicative approach and teacher performance being the most cited factors. Additionally, the result of the study can be the basis of further research on demotivating factors in learning English.

The First Language Interference toward Students’ English Speaking as Foreign Language

This research aims at analyzing the first language interference toward students’ English speaking as foreign language made by sixth semester students in course design subject, such as phonological interference (pronunciation), grammatical (morphological and lexical), and lexical interference (vocabulary), and the factors that caused interference of the first language. This research is descriptive qualitative. The findings of the research explained that students made three types of interference categorized as phonological interference such as pronounce the word incorrectly (vowel, diphthong, consonan, and allophonic variation), grammatical interference such as in morphological (singular-plural agreement) and syntactical (subject-verb agreement, phrase, comparative adjective, possessive adjective, and parallel structure), and lexical interference such as in vocabulary (combining between Indonesian and the English language). The data showed that students often make error in phonological aspect. The factors that caused first language interference are lack of knowledge, Indonesian transfer, and lack of vocabularies of foreign language that mastered by students or respondents.

Using Process Writing Approach (PWA) to Teach Writing Descriptive Text

The research aim was to find out whether or not there was a significant difference in students' writing performance from descriptive passage among learners who practiced using the Process Writing Approach and those who were not. The design of that research used quasi-experimental. Participants were selected from X TKJ 3 being the experimental group and X TKJ 2 being the control group. Instruments of this study used a written test. There were five topics about the descriptive text in which students chose one of the issues. A paired sample t-test and independent-sample t-test were used to investigate the data. The outcome acquired from the paired sample t-test confirmed that students' writing achievement increased in the descriptive text after using the process writing approach. Independent-samples t-test analysis revealed that pvalue (0.008) was lower than άvalu (0.05). Further analysis indicated a significant difference in students' writing performance from a descriptive passage within learners who practiced using the Process Writing Approach.

Students’ Difficulties in Writing Descriptive Text at the Seventh Grade of SMP Sint Carolus Bengkulu

The objective of this research was to investigate the students’ difficulties in writing descriptive text, the most dominant difficulty faced by the students, and the students’ strategies to overcome these difficulties. This study was conducted at the Seventh Grade of SMP Sint Carolus Bengkulu. This is a descriptive quantitative study. The instruments used in this research were questionnaire and interview. Based on the results, it was found that students experienced difficulties in the three aspects of the study, namely linguistic, psychological, and cognitive difficulties. In each of these aspects, organization is the highest one followed by behaviour, feedback, grammatical items, and vocabulary. In organizations, difficulties in developing ideas are the most difficult. Anxiety is the highest difficulty in behaviour, while the lack of practice is the most difficulty in the feedback. The difficulty in using connectors is the highest point in the grammatical items, and the lack of vocabulary is the most difficulty in the vocabulary. Based on the questionnaire and interview results, organization was the most difficult aspect in writing descriptive text. To overcome the difficulties, the students choose to master vocabulary and learning from other sources such as books or the internet while the others like to read from dictionary. Finally, it is also suggested for other researchers to carry out similar research in a broader scope, as well as a description, especially about the mechanic that get negative results.

Gender Based Students’ Learning Autonomy in English Flipped Classroom

This research is aimed at finding out the effectiveness on applying flipped classroom to enhance learning autonomy and how its impact on gender based students’ learning autonomy. The researchers was applied convergent parallel mixed methods design. The populations of this study were senior high school in Pangandaran and the researchers selected a particular class. The class which participated is X MIPA 4 which consist of 11 male and 19 female as the experimental group and X MIPA 1 as the control one which consist of 12 male and 18 female. The totals of participants are 60 students. The data collected from pre-post Learning Autonomy Questionnaire (LAQ) and pretest-posttest as quantitative data and interview as qualitative data. The questionnaire was analyzed by using SPSS 16.0 for Windows. The result showed there is a significant difference in students’ learning autonomy between students who are taught by means of flipped classroom and those who are not. Moreover, female indicates more autonomy than male in both class even before or after the treatment. Pretest-posttest indicated although the score of autonomy is increased, it does not have significant impact on their narrative reading comprehension test. On the other hand, based on the interview both female and male students respond positively about applying flipped classroom to enhace their learning autonomy even though there is no huge difference for male. In conclusion, flipped classroom has given a good impact in students’ learning autonomy even for female or male students although not give significant impact in students’ learning outcomes especially in narrative reading comprehension.

Portraying Coronavirus through Metaphors in Online Mass Media Headlines

Online mass media apply metaphors in their headlines to influence the public’s minds regarding a particular issue. Drawing on Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) Conceptual Metaphorical Theory on understanding, this paper aimed to explore the Coronavirus through metaphors in three notable online mass media headlines in Indonesia and internationally. A qualitative approach was used to analyze the data. The data, consisting of 30 headlines concerning Coronavirus, were collected from headlines of three online mass media and then classified and mapped based on the Conceptual Metaphorical Theory. The process of data analysis was adapted from Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP) to gain in-depth insights into the use of metaphorical expressions in mass online media. The findings showed that 10 types of metaphors were used in 30 headlines. The two most frequent conceptual metaphors of Coronavirus were Coronavirus as War and Coronavirus as Enemy. Accordingly, online mass media intended to strongly describe the danger of Coronavirus through metaphorical headlines. It may undoubtedly raise people’s fear and anxiety of Coronavirus. Nevertheless, metaphors in online mass media headlines could further function as a preventive rhetorical tool to educate people about Coronavirus as well as equip them with the knowledge to protect from the virus. In conclusion, the metaphors in international and Indonesian online mass media headlines were able to either provide a negative or positive viewpoint toward Coronavirus.