EFL Learners’ Perceptions on ZOOM Application in the Online Classes

Pandemic Covid-19 brings impactful aspects for several sectors, especially in the education sector. The teaching and learning process has shifted to online learning. It quite challenges the teachers as well as the students to fully support the success of the online classes.Teachers are required to be more creative in delivering the learning materials that will be given to their students. Meanwhile, students are encouraged to be autonomous learners. This paper aims to investigate the students’ perceptions toward the implementation of the ZOOM application to support the online learning process and explore how this application gives a new shape in the educational industry. The qualitative approach was chosen for this study. The data were obtained from questionnaires and interviews. Based on the findings, there are some perceptions about the implementation of ZOOM to support online learning. The result showed that most students thought implementation of e-learning should be improved continuously. Surprisingly, it gave significant changes toward the learning and teaching process, especially during covid-19 itself.

TED Talks Use in Speaking Class for Undergraduate Students

ABSTRACT The media essentially supports the teaching and learning process. Video such as from TED Talks source becomes one of the teaching media that can be used by both parties, a teacher and students to improve English skill, especially for speaking skill. In this paper, the purpose is to explore the students' responses toward the implementation of TED Talks in their speaking class. The subjects were 23 undergraduate students who have experienced to watch TED Talks video for supporting their learning process. This study applied a descriptive qualitative method. To gather data, a questionnaires that were distributed through google form with close-ended questions were employed. The findings showed that most students expressed a positive response to the use of TED Talks video to support their speaking class. They assumed that the TED Talks video encouraged them to improve their speaking skill. Besides, there were some benefits to their learning process. They mentioned that they could learn about how to deliver their ideas well, how to express their critical thinking, and how to use appropriate accent, dialect, pronunciation, and fluency. Thus, the students might overcome their difficulties in understanding the speech because of the video’s powerful topics and the delivery speech from non-native speakers.

The Study on Students' Vocabulary Size

This study intends to know the vocabulary size of English Department Students in eight semesters. The population of this research is all students in English Department, specifically in eight semesters (class of 2013). This research used purposive sampling in taking the samples, and there are 21 students as the sample obtained from 122 students as the population. The method of this research is quantitative method. The instruments which the researcher used in collecting the data are fix test to measure how large students’ vocabulary size, that divided into two test; Receptive Vocabulary Size Test (RVST) and Productive Vocabulary Size Test (PVST). In analyzing the data, it is used numerical descriptive statistic to describe students’ vocabulary mastery first, and then calculate the vocabulary size. The result of this research shows that students’ receptive and productive vocabulary size were 3,110 words and 1,841 words respectively or in general around 4,905 words,with the receptive vocabulary knowledge was higher than productive vocabulary knowledge. However, it has shown a low result for the students who learned English for about eight semesters, it should be more than that.

Challenges in teaching English writing skills: Lessons learnt from Indonesian high school English language teachers

Writing skill, among the four target language skills, is one of the skills that language learners need to master. In teaching this skill, therefore, teachers should take any effort to help learners write using the language they learn correctly. However, in the context of teaching English in Indonesia, particularly the writing skill, teachers often face challenges. The study reported in this article seeks to identify the challenges experienced by several Indonesian English language teachers in teaching English writing skills at VHS, a vocational high school, in Gorontalo, Indonesia. The participants involved were all English language teachers working at the school. Data were collected using interview and observation, and analyzed by using a thematic analysis method. The findings showed that there were four themes describing the teachers’ challenges in teaching English writing skills. They were teaching technique-related challenges, teaching time-related challenges, linguistics-related challenges, and learning motivation-related challenges. Even though the teachers are able to cope with the challenges, they still need to explore more strategies in teaching, thus the teaching and learning process can run effectively.

Metaphor in Students’ English Poems: A Psycholinguistic Analysis

This research is aimed at finding how the students of English Department of State University of Gorontalo perceive the thing as revealed in the metaphor they used in their English Poem and, as well, interpreting the metaphor. This research was designed in qualitative research methodology. The subject of research was the poems written by the students in 2010. It is found that the students used metaphor to express their feeling. The metaphor reflects the students’ perception of the reality categorized in semantic fields. In terms of the intended meaning of the metaphor, the researcher inferred the meaning by finding the metaphor predications based on the researcher knowledge of the predication.

The Character of Rip van Winkle: Representation of Disappearing Cultural Identity

─ The purpose of this research is to explore how an ethnicity is represented in a story that has a historical setting and how this ethnic group was placed in American history. The short story of Washington Irving, "Rip Van Winkle", published in 1819, was very popular in America. This story was recycled in the form of stories for children, made into plays, etc. What Americans always remember about Rip Van Winkle character is his laziness. The story of "Rip Van Winkle" is traced through Stuart Hall's Representation theory. This theory states that representation can give meaning to an identity, and the New Historicism method is used to uncover that fictional stories are tied to the world that produced them. The result shows that Rip's character is a representation of Dutch ethnicity who felt losing their cultural identity. Rip's character in the story is a representation of Dutch New York ethnicity, and he was the main character in the story who was narrated as a lazy man. Thus, what always presents in America's memory is the lazy Dutch because of the representation of the character of Rip, but the other characters who were narrated less in the story are not remembered, even though they played a role in establishing America.

Persuasive Language in Political Campaign

This study is aimed at exploring the persuasive language strategies used by the candidates of mayor of Gorontalo in the mayoral electoral campaign of 2018. The data, in form of utterances, were taken from the speeches of their political campaign by using video recording. After the data were collected, those were firstly classified into the types of persuasive language strategies, then analyzed and interpreted regarding the function and the way the speaker used those strategies to persuade the audience. The result showed that the three candidates used the similar strategies to influence the audience of their political campaign. Those strategies are reason and logic, evidence, attack, appeal to a sense of justice, appeal to the hip-pocket nerve, appeal to patriotism, repetition, and colloquial language. However, based on the interpretation, the different political background of the candidates influenced the way they used the strategies.

Emotions Evoked from “Too Good at Goodbyes” Song by Sam Smith

Music is one means to express the soul. Sad genre music is one of music with high emotional pressure. High emotional pressure allows triggering emotions in someone who hears it. According to Sloboda and Juslin (2001), the music can induce emotions in its listeners and is perceived by listeners as expressive of emotion. The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of music with the sad genre for emotions from the song "Too Good at Goodbyes" by Sam Smith. In this study, the researchers found that the majority of respondents revealed that sad music can trigger emotions in the soul. Descriptive qualitative research with questionnaire methods was used in this study to obtain the valid data. Questionnaire was used in this research as an instrument of research to get the real data from the participants.

Lexical Devices in Political Speech (A Study on Gorontalo Mayoral Election 2018)

The use of language in political campaign speech is always interesting to be observed. It mostly contains language features which are intended to convince or persuade people to vote someone into power. Therefore, the language used in political speech has always attracted linguist’ attention to conduct the study of political discourse. This study is aimed to identify and analyze the lexical devices in political campaign speech delivered by the politicians in Gorontalo mayoral election 2018. The data of the lexical cohesive devices are analyzed based on the theory of lexical cohesion proposed by Halliday and Hasan in 1976. Halliday and Hasan have divided the lexical cohesion into two types; reiteration and collocation. Furthermore, the reiteration has four sub-types; repetition, synonym/near synonym, superordinate, and general word. The data identification reveals that the reiteration and the collocation are both found in the speeches. They are successfully used as the tools to deliver the speakers purposes and intentions. Hopefully, this study gives more knowledge and insight to others, especially to the language learners, about how the lexical devices are used in political speeches, and more importantly about how language plays its roles to make people get convinced and persuaded.

Students’Ability in Reading TOEFL

TOEFL is a standardized test which measures the students’ skill and ability in English. This test is one of the requirements for English Department students before they take the theses examination. Hence, the students must be prepared well before taking the test in order they can get the standard score of TOEFL as has been required by English study program. During the pre-observation, it has been found that many students of English study program still have difficulty in having the TOEFL test that it finally gives impact on their TOEFL scores. For this reason, this research is conducted as an effort to analyze and get information about the students’ ability in TOEFL test, especially in the reading test. This research is analyzed qualitatively by taking the English Department students as the participants. The data are collected by using two instruments; observation and documentation, and it analyzes through some steps such as identifying the result of students’ test and analyzing them to obtain the answer of the research question. This research analyzes the students’ ability in reading toefl refers to Philips’ theory in toefl reading skill. The result of this research shows that the students have a high percentage in find pronoun referents. While find definition from structural clues is the lowest one. Thus, the students and lecturers should pay more attention to the strategies in reading toefl and have more practice in doing the test.