The Accuracy of Business English Curriculum to Students’ Communication Performance: The EFL Students’ Perception

Measuring the accuracy of a private university in Batam Business English course curriculum to the present needs of workplaces in Batam from students’ perception is essential. Because 85% of the university students are working, it is compulsory to maintain the gap low between what students learned in class and what is implemented in the working field. A questionnaire consists of three dimensions (curriculum, communication performance, and motivation) distributed randomly to 60 students from a population (N=328) of the third-semester students programmed Business English course at a private university in Batam. The result suggested that the curriculum needs to add more practices, peer work, and case studies to improve students’ communication performance. Students’ perspectives in the Business English course reflected a new technical vocabulary that needed to practice in a correlated context. The curriculum content’s relevance to the workplace’s contextual needs is moderately related because not all working students used the English language in their workplace. Additional focus on internal and external motivation through group work and peer work is needed to improve students’ communication performance and confidence. Finally, the existing Business English curriculum is reasonably accurate, supporting students’ communication performance, both written and oral, at their workplace.

The Interpersonal Meanings of Words and Images in Ads: An Intersemiotic Complementary View

This study aims to find out the interpersonal meaning and the intersemiotic complementary in public service advertisement of selected violence against children prevention campaign. Employing Royce’s intersemiotic complementary framework (2001), it analyzed how the visual and verbal signs work together to create common messages sent to the public as viewers/readers. Based on the analysis, it is found out that the five aspects of visual features --visual contact, social distance, involvement, power relation, and modality—have worked together to construct the interpersonal meaning. The close up shot showing the detail of the bruises on the nose emphasizing a high modality; it represents a high naturality. The boy in bruises looks directly at viewers’ eyes, demanding a help from them. The equal frame on the picture tells the readers that the boy can be part of every one’s life. It may happen in any place and the readers are asked to do take an action. In terms of verbal features, the declarative sentences are used to inform the facts. It is to highlite the clear message in the image, saying that such a violence may be taken by a mother who inherits the boy’s nose—the one who actually loves him very much, but the situation has changed her a lot. Through the way the producers organize the verbal text the readers may take their action to stop the child abuse. Both visual and verbal modes are contributes to convey interpersonal meaning. The intersemiotic complementary in the advertisement is realized interpersonally through the meanings projected in both modes through the reinforcement of address.

Implicatures in Altfatah Nando’s Short Movie Terlanjur Mencinta

YouTube has been flooded with contents within a movie genre, mostly the products by junior creators. It is therefore important to appreciate their works to maintain their creativities and innovations. Positive responses to such literary works are also required to improve their quality writing. The current study was aimed at identifying and at the same time construing the implicatures found in each act of the movie entitled “Terlanjur Mencinta” directed by Alfatah Nando. George Yule’s pragmatic theory (1996) was used in relation to implicatures caused by conversational maxims (Grice, 1975) supported by linguistic evidence-based contextual interpretation, namely utterances and stage directions. Findings show that generalized conversational implicatures were identified, namely 12 implicatures in which 42% was due to violation of manner maxim, 33% attributed to that of relation maxim, 17% due to that of quantity maxim, and 8% due to that of quality maxim. In addition, 4 conventional implicatures were found in the monologue. The study concludes that the implicatures can be easily understood through the contexts of situations. It is recommended that future researchers can formulate the ideal proportion and distribution of implicatures in a particular text in terms of quality, employing comparative rhetoric and a special research instrument.

Stance of Indonesian Writers in Journal Articles

Stance refers to attitude, feelings, judgment or commitment of a speaker towards a proposition. A speaker employs certain linguistics features to express his stance including hedges, boosters, self-mentions and attitude markers. This research aims at analyzing stance of Indonesian writers in social and hard science journal articles written in English by examining the use of linguistic features employed as stance markers. The research result shows that the writers of social science articles use more stance marker compares to those of hard science articles. Indonesian writers maintain the objectivity of academic writing as there was very limited use of self-mentions in the articles. The stance markers used by Indonesian writers represent the positive, negative or neutral type of stance.

The Emergence of an “Intersecting Circle” in Kachru’s Three Concentric Circles of World Englishes: A Case of Ethno-linguistic Neutrality in Central Nigeria

There is evidence that contemporary Nigeria is drifting towards a society of monolingual English users a component of which could be defined as lacking in ethno-linguistic identity. This trend is found among a generation of young Nigerian urban dwellers (between the age bracket of (12 and 25) who can neither communicate in their parents’ native language(s) nor indeed in any other Nigerian indigenous language; their only medium of communication is English. Although based on their childhood exposure to the English language and their relative competence in it, English can be described as their ‘‘mother tongue’’ but the fact that they are not native speakers given the socio-geographical circumstances of their birth excludes them from Kachru’s (1988) Inner Circle classification of native speakers. Consequently, these Nigerians are left without a clearly defined ethno-linguistic affiliation. This paper interrogates this emerging sociolinguistic phenomenon in especially Central Nigeria, with the aim of stimulating scholarly consciousness on the ethno-linguistic identity of this category of Nigerians, and its implications for English usage among them. The submission of the paper is that another circle, “the intersecting circle”, be created for them since they bestride both the inner circle in having English as their “mother tongue” and yet they are not native speakers of the language

Immigration in The Postcolonial Era: Mimicry and Ambivalence in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Arrangers of Marriage

It is well established that immigration brings about fundamental changes and the immigrant faces significant challenges in the new culture. The present research uses Homi Bhabha’s critical theories of mimicry and ambivalence to determine the effects of ‘state of mimicry’, and to pinpoint the ‘site of identity’ in the immigration experience in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s The Arrangers of Marriage (2009). The results indicate that antagonist’s (Ofodile) ‘state of mimicry’ continuously grows him apart from his wife Chinaza (protagonist) and intensifies gender inequality against her in their relationship. In addition, the results indicate that protagonist’s ‘site of identity’ is fluid and not fixed, and this place-less-ness of identity is because of the never-ending comparison between her past with the present situation she experiences as an immigrant.

Encourage Students’ Affective Value in EFL Class Through Cooperative Learning

In this modern era, education is required not only to be able to create intelligent students but also to be able to create students who have good attitudes. The attitude that is needed when they are in the midst of society. Such as tolerance, respect for the opinions of others, mutual cooperation and the others. Considering that these attitudes have begun to decrease by the times and the advancement of civilization. Therefore, an educator is expected to be able to develop the ability of students not only in the cognitive domain but also in the affective domain. In this case, the lecturer as educator can give directly positive suggestion or creating a good teaching and learning that contain some valuable meaning. Implementing cooperative can covered both cognitive aspect and affective aspect. The method of study is qualitative approach which descriptive design.This paper aims to describe what attitudes can be developed by applying cooperative learning methods and what strategies in cooperative learning can be done to encourage affective values ??of students. To Achieve the aims of this study, the researcher conducts the research in State Islamic Institute of Madura (IAIN Madura). The subject is the students of English department in the first semester.The result showed that cooperative learning can improve respect, tolerate and solidarity value of the students. The model of cooperative learning that create those values are Number Head Together. Jigsaw, and Think Pair-share

Genderized Implications of Bride Pricing Culture in Igbo Land

The study aims at ascertaining the actual implication of bride pricing system in traditional marriages in Igbo land. A total of fifty respondents (thirty women and twenty men) from the five states that make up the southeast zone in Nigeria were selected for the study. Being a qualitative research, the study adopted the ethnographic research design and employed a purposive non-probability sampling method in selecting the respondents. The study made use of focused group discussions, unstructured interview and participants’ observation method as instruments of data collection. The collection of data lasted for a period of six months from June 2020 to November 2020. The research is anchored on Radical and Snail sense Feminism theories and data for the study were analysed using descriptive thematic method. Findings from the study reveal that payment of bride price does not reduce women to mere commodities in Igbo land. It also reveals that it gives undue privileges to men in Igbo land among other findings. Finally, it was shown that Igbo men and women still regard bride price payment as an important aspect of their culture which should not be abolished.

The Usage Specification of Registers in Social Media Instagram

This research is entitled ‘The Usage Specification of Registers in Social Media Instagram’. The aims of this research are identifying and mapping the usage specification of registers in social media Instagram. It also aims at finding find out the function of the usage of the registers. This research is a combination of qualitative and quantitative research. The method applied for this research was observation method with note-taking techniques. The method used to analyze the data was discourse analysis method. To answer the problems formulated in this research, the register theory of Halliday was applied (1994). Keywords: specification, register, social media, instagram This research is entitled ‘The Usage Specification of Registers in Social Media Instagram’. The aims of this research are identifying and mapping the usage specification of registers in social media Instagram. It also aims at finding find out the function of the usage of the registers. This research is a combination of qualitative and quantitative research. The method applied for this research was observation method with note-taking techniques. The method used to analyze the data was discourse analysis method. To answer the problems formulated in this research, the register theory of Halliday was applied (1994). Keywords: specification, register, social media, instagram

Improving Creative Writing for Young Learners using CTL Post COVID 19

The research aims to implement contextual teaching and learning approach in writing skill which is integrated in the lesson plan. The methodology conducted in the study is a case study taken in one of elementary school in Indonesia. The purpose is to investigate the improvement of students’ writing skill post covid 19. There are five strategies of contextual teaching and learning approach, namely relating, experiencing, applying, cooperating, and transferring (REACT). The implementation is providing practices on descriptive and narrative writing. The assessment is the learning project related to real-world context and writing story telling. The results of the research are expected to give impact for enhancing the students’ creative writing, to provide learning process which is practical in real world situation, and to assign a lesson plan which is relevant with the current development in English language teaching. Keywords: contextual teaching and learning, creative writing, lesson plan, REACT