CONTINUOUS PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT: TEACHERS' VOICES

Being professional English teachers requires knowledge and competences that should be continuously nurtured to sustain their expertise, and one of the programs in Indonesia is the so-called Continuous Professional Development as officially declared by the Indonesian government in 2012. Certified teachers generally undergo either short- or long-term training experiences to update their teaching knowledge and skills. However, little empirical evidence has been conducted to examine the sustainability of such training practices on the teachers' professionalism. Henceforth, this study is aimed at investigating how such English teacher professional development training practices have been carried out and what teachers expect from such training. To that end, a survey is conducted involving a number of teachers drawn randomly from different six provinces. i.e. East Java, West Java, Lampung, East Borneo, South Sumatra, and East Papua throughout Indonesia. Descriptive statistical analyses are exerted to analyze the data collected. The findings suggest that a more down-to-earth reflective training as continuous professional development is in compelling need.

CHALLENGES IN PRESENTING ACADEMIC CRITICISM: CASE STUDY OF INDONESIAN STUDENTS

Presenting academic criticism in academic papers is one of the most challenging study tasks for students from Non-English-Speaking Background (NESB) countries studying in Australia. Most lecturers in Australian university expect students to engage in critical discussion and put their adversarial position in academic writing. This study investigates the challenges experienced by Indonesian students studying in Australia in presenting academic criticism. Data were collected through questionnaires along with two focus group interviews of Indonesian graduate students in Australia. The study has found that cultural values, socio-political situations, and previous educational experience in Indonesia have contributed to participants’ limited writing experience and limited critical literacy practice. All of these have manifested to their struggle of presenting academic criticism and writing according to the expected dominant discourse in Australia.

EDUCATIONAL NEUROSCIENCE FOR SECOND LANGUAGE CLASSROOMS

Today’s classrooms, including second language classrooms, are created to be more engaging, effective and empowering for learners to develop their knowledge, interests and experiences. One effort is to consider how the brain learns in the classroom; what the brain is able to do, and what is not. Educational neuroscience is a transdisciplinary convergence of neurosciences to translate neuroscience research into classroom practice, including how a second language is learned. Therefore, every teacher, including second language teachers should know about neuroscience. Educational neuroscience is a wide field which still remains open for further investigation. Exploring the latest findings from neuroscience research, this paper proposes seven second language classroom principles. The principles are developed mostly based on research on declarative memory, instead of univcrsal grammar, which is developed based on mentalistic philosophy.

USING ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES TO TRIGGER THE STUDENTS’ CRITICAL THINKING IN ESSAY WRITING CLASS

The advancement of technology and information in this 21st century brings heavy consequences on the environment. Therefore, the young generation needs to be introduced and educated about the environmental issues so that they become an active agent in environmental protection. The use of environmental issues in the language classroom offers wide opportunity for the students to think and respond critically to the environmental problem. This paper is intended to describe the students’ ability in writing an essay by using an environmental topic about the use of water. The design of the study is content analysis design. The sujects of the study were 32 students of 2017 batch taking essay writing course in the academic year 2018-2019. The instrument used was mainly documentation. The result of the study showed that almost two thirds (72%) of the students were able to state a thesis statement. The majority of the students (88%) were able to give elaboration and explanation in the body of the essay, but 66% of them failed to give details and examples. Most of the students developed the essay by using cause and effect, problem solution, and reasoning paragraph organization. Not not all students were able to write a proper conclusion for the essay. The conclusions written by the students mostly contained advice (62%) of what others should do to preserve nature.

TEACHING SPEAKING: EXPLORING METHOD OF TEACHING AND ORAL CORRECTIVE FEEDBACK IN EFL LEARNERS’ CLASSROOM

This study investigates teaching speaking in EFL learners' classroom as teaching speaking is a vast area of research. This study, however, limits the focus to types of methods and oral corrective feedback. This study involves two groups of participants, namely a group of EFL learners and an English teacher. This qualitative study employs observation. Afterward, the unstructured interview with the English teacher is conducted to give further data. Through the observation, it is found that the teacher does some particular activities in teaching speaking. The lesson is opened by group work and the teacher conducts a dialogue and chain drill. The lesson eventually is closed by pair work and role play. The analysis shows that the teacher uses several methods in doing those five activities. Those are communicative language teaching, audio-lingual method, and cooperative language learning. From those three, the audio-lingual method dominates the class activities. Additionally, this study finds that the teacher employs several types of oral corrective feedback. Those are recast, explicit correction, clarification requests, and elicitation. These findings indicate that there is a relationship between methods and oral corrective feedbacks used by the teacher.

FROM UNSUNG HERO TO SAVAGE HERO: SHAPING CHARACTERS’ ROLES IN THE ADAPTATION BETWEEN LITERARY WORKS AND MOBILE LEGENDS: BANG BANG! MOBA

This paper examines adaptation study of famous heroes from various literary works (such as Mahabharata, Arthurian legend, Journey to the West) and a Multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) ‘Mobile Legends: Bang Bang!’ (MLBB) by Moonton. This paper focuses on how fictional heroes and divine figures like Gatotkaca, Lancelot, Freya and Sun Go Kong are presented and shaped into different in-game roles. Mobile Legends: Bang Bang! a game designed for mobile phones, provides two opposing teams fighting one another to reach and destroy the enemy’s base while defending their own base for control. Descriptive analytical method with documentation obtained from books and research journals was used to analyze the media; in addition, the theory used was based on Damono’s theory of adaptation (2012) and Elleström’s modalities (2010) by analyzing the element changes in the adaptation study. The conclusion is that the heroes’ roles are shaped differently due to their true nature and motives from the original literary works.

ENHANCING THE SPEAKING SKILL USING METACOGNITIVE STRATEGY (A CASE STUDY ON HIGH-ACHIEVER STUDENTS IN A PRIVATE UNIVERSITY IN NORTH MALUKU) INTRODUCTION

This paper reports a qualitative case study which aims to investigate the use of metacognitive strategy in developing the autonomous students’ speaking skill which is based on the participants' metacognitive awareness and kind of metacognitive strategy use. Six autonomous learners are considered as high-achiever students who took part as the participants through purposive sampling. The in-depth interview, based on the Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL), was chosen in order to grasps the data regarding their speaking learning using metacognitive strategies, which then analyzed using a thematic analysis. The findings revealed that most of the High-Achiever students were having difficulties in their speaking learning as they just started to study proper English when they decided to attend the university. Thus, to allow them make the best use of their metacognitive strategy, they applied cognitive knowledge strategies and socio-affective strategies in dealing with their metacognitive processes such planning, monitoring, and evaluation in their speaking learning. Moreover, in developing their metacognitive awareness, the participants were found affected by two factors, self-appraisal and self-management.

STUDENTS’ PERCEPTION ON THE USE OF ESTAFET WRITING GAME AND PICTURE BASED-CREATIVE WRITING TO NURTURE LOVE OF WRITING

This To create a quality education, mainly on EFL instruction, the EFL teachers need to be empowered by improving their teaching quality. The students, in addition, should also be engaged during the instructional activities. Due to the fact that love of “writing” as one of the language skills is not yet established among the EFL university students, the effort of finding out an innovative way of helping them to establish love of creative writing is a must. One of the ways is collaborative writing through Estafet Writing Game and Picture-Based-Creative Writing strategies. Thus, this article aims at describing the students’ voices on the use of those strategies to establish love of creative writing. The study conducted through a reflective survey to 165 EFL university students reveals that most of the respondents prefer Estafet Writing Game to Picture-Based Creative Writing in terms of its effectiveness to build their creativity and and spontaneity of writing skills. To sum up, these strategies are pedagogically meaningful to improve the EFL students’ creative writing, because they can collaborate with their peers and promote their cooperative communication. Therefore, it is useful to establish love of writing and to stimulate their ideas for writing.

USING GEOSEMIOTIC APPROACH, LEARNERS CREATE FOR DEVELOPING MULTIMODAL COMPETENCIES: TASK-BASED

In the digital age, the notion of text has broadened to include digitally constructed multimodal texts. Meaning-making in everyday life is not only based on verbal language as the only mode, but also visual images. Students need more learning assignments and activities to develop their multimodal communication skills. To meet this need, a project utilizing linguistic landscape as a learning context is created for its rich multimodal representations. Task-based approach is adopted to facilitate a triple-track solution: improving students’ general English and display English proficiency, raising the students’ multimodal literacy, and developing their collaborative skill. The reason to employ task-based approach is because it strengthens the learners’ opportunity to do real-world-relevant projects to promote both their language acquisition and their collaborative skills. The project is completed when learners in teams give their presentations as their learning out comes.

THE ANALYSIS OF BRAINSTORMING STRATEGY ON TEACHING WRITING IN THE UNIVERSITY LEVEL

This research was aimed to analyze a brainstorming strategy on teaching writing, especially in writing a short story for the second-semester students of the English Department in (STKIP) PGRI Tulungagung in the academic year 2017/2018. This research was conducted using qualitative methodology. The researcher observed and analyzed the writing class where the lecturer was applying a brainstorming strategy. Qualitative data had been collected from observation of the teaching-learning process, interview with the lecturer and the students, and also questionnaire given to twenty students in that class. The data was in the form of observation, interview transcripts, and the results of the questionnaire. In this research, the researcher involved twenty participants to fill the questionnaire. There were six students from those twenty students and the lecturer who were involved in the process of interview. The result of the research showed that implementing a brainstorming strategy in writing class could improve student's skills in writing, especially writing a short story. The brainstorming strategy helped students to generate their ideas and express the ideas into a systematic paragraph. The students also felt that this strategy could improve their writing. When the lecturer applied a brainstorming strategy, the students could do their writing assignments better and also got good results. Thus, the researcher suggested that the lecturer and the students to apply a brainstorming strategy in ordered that the students’ writing skills could be improved.