Improving Students’ Writing Skill through Marking System Feedback

Writing is one of the four language skills that the learners should master. The 2013 curriculum also says that one of the English language competencies specified in high school level is that students must be able to compose short written texts using coherent text structures and linguistic elements fluently and accurately. In line with that this study aims to find out whether the marking system feedback can improve students' writing skill. This is a two-cycle classroom action research at SMA Negeri 1 Sewon. The subjects were 26 tenth grade students of class X MIPA 1. The data were collected from observation, written documents, writing scores, and questionnaire. The study results showed that by applying the marking system feedback, students' writing skills improved. The mean scores of the students' writing ability in the pre-cycle was 63.65 at the poor category, the first cycle was 73.65 at the fair category, and the second cycle was 81.35 at the good category. In addition, students tend to give positive responses to the implementation of the marking system feedback. As many as 88.46% think that the feedback is useful in writing activities and can help them in correcting their mistakes, 73.08% think that the technique makes them understand the grammar better, and 80.77% say this technique leads them to be more careful in their writing and also motivates them to improve their composition.

Investigating Indonesian EFL Teachers’ Perceptions on Blended Learning Strategy Amid Post-Covid-19 Era

One of the good news of the new normal era is all humankind’s sectors are opened gradually by following the restricted health protocols. Without an exception, the educational sector is also allowed by the government to open schools in the green zone. As a result, a blended learning strategy is inevitably essential to support this post-covid-19 era. Blended learning strategy is a novel pedagogical approach where the online and offline systems are combined to promote more purposeful, organized, and meaningful learning dynamics for learners. This current small-scale qualitative study aimed to investigate the specific benefits of a blended learning strategy based on Indonesian EFL teachers’ perceptions. Thus, 5 open-ended written narrative inquiry questions were sent to two randomly invited Indonesian EFL teachers working in different elementary school institutions. The obtained research results unveiled that the effective utilization of blended learning strategy had successfully promoted more meaningful language learning enterprises, elevated EFL learners’ learning motivation, and increased their proactive learning behaviors. However, it should also be pondered carefully that the more contextualized language learning approaches, as well as stable internet connection, are urgently needed to strengthen the effectiveness of this learning approach. Due to the obtained research results, it is reasonable to be expected that Indonesian EFL experts, teachers, practitioners, and policy-makers can establish more collaborative networking to better design more qualified and meaningful blended learning activities in the future.

Teachers’ Strategies in Teaching Speaking at English Courses as a Foreign Language in Kampung Inggris

A successful learning process is determined by teaching strategies that are used by teachers. The strategies will affect the learning output of students. Many graduated students claim that they need more experience to study English. One alternative way to improve their ability is to join an English Course in Pare East Java-“Kampung Inggris”. The aim is to investigate how teaching speaking is done and what the strategies used to make and help students to speak in fun way. The focus of this research is to expose the uniqueness of those strategies. It belongs to ethnography research using observation, interview, and documentary. The populations are from four English courses that were elected by purposive sampling. The result shows that the most often teaching speaking strategies are pronunciation class, grammar for speaking, academic speaking, impromptu and public speaking.

Development of English Teaching Module for Electrical Engineering Study Program

The proper teaching materials determine successful teaching-learning. Teaching materials are required to adapt to the current situation of the institution, curriculum, and learners. The new curriculum adopted by the Electrical Engineering Study Program required the updated version since English courses had been replaced by the first and last semester of both the D3 and D4 programs. Developing the new teaching materials for the study program aimed to provide relevant issues and teaching strategies that could boost students' motivation in the classroom. Thus, the developed teaching materials were to propose the teaching and learning that fit the learner's needs. The research objective was to develop new teaching modules for the Electrical Engineering Study Program that were much more interactive, effective, and efficient for the learners to study English within the Electrical Engineering context. This research applied Research and Development (R&D) model adopted from Borg and Gall comprising six stages, namely: (1) needs analysis, (2) designing the product, (3) proposing the product, (4) evaluating the product, (5) testing and (6) disseminating the product. As a result, the new teaching module was redesigned to provide English teaching and learning effectively and efficiently that could be easily understood and helpful for the student to achieve the learning outcomes as expected.

The Implementation of Short English Movie to Improve Students’ Vocabulary Mastery in Interpretive Listening Class

This paper aims to investigate the students’ vocabulary mastery improvement after the implementation of a short English movie in Interpretive Listening class. There were 15 students of Interpretive Listening class of STKIP SoE as the participants. The researcher used Classroom Action Research as the method and collected the data by using test, in the form of pretest, posttest and observation for the students’ vocabulary mastery. The result of the study indicated that short English Movie can improve students’ vocabulary mastery. The improvement covered, the students’ being active in the process of teaching and learning in the classroom.

TEFL in the Postmethod Era

This study aims to review the implementation of steps in teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL) from a post-method point of view. The research is an analytical study using a literature review approach to describe the results and to draw conclusions. The results of the literature analysis show that basically there is no fundamental theoretical difference between the method and post-method. Regarding the implementation of teaching English from the post - method point of view, there is no fundamental difference found on the steps of teaching English in methods that existed before the era of post-method. Therefore, the energy of debate between proponents of method and post-method can be directed to find the best and appropriate steps in teaching English to students.

Human Representation on Environmental Speech in Terms or Transitivity Process

The role of activists in raising humankind’s awareness regarding environmental or ecological issues or phenomenon has gained so much attention since it is spread and told in many different ways. One of them is taken by sharing the idea through speech and statements that are being spoken before the world leaders, politicians, and any other occasions. This study focuses on the speech of an environmental activist regarding climate change, Greta Thunberg. The analysis was conducted on the transitivity analysis, i.e. the distribution of experiential meaning on the speech that was presented at the United Nations Conference of the Parties on Climate Change, 2018. The result shows: 1) the distribution of material process is the dominant one (41,8%), followed by relational process (19,4%), mental process (17,9%), verbal process (14,9%), behavioral process (3%), and existential process (3%); 2) through the process distribution, human beings seem to have their big roles in causing the climate change, but at the same time they are the ones who can prevent it. Therefore, the speech is regarded as beneficial discourse based on Stibbe’s ecolinguistics standard. This type of discourse has to be promoted in order to raise ecological awareness in society.

ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDUCATION PROGRAM SECOND-YEAR STUDENTS’ SPEAKING DIFFICULTIES IN AN ACADEMIC SPEAKING CLASS

Academic Speaking class is the last speaking class that students at an English Language Education Program (ELEP) have to take. However, to pass this class is not very easy because the students had to be able to speak in an academic context. Seeing this phenomenon, the researchers tried to identify the second-year students’ difficulties in the Academic Speaking class, in a private university in Central Java. There are three research questions in this research, “What are ELEP second-year students’ speaking difficulties in Academic Speaking class?”, “What factors contribute to the speaking difficulties in Academic Speaking class?’, and What strategies do the Academic Speaking students employ to overcome the difficulties?”. This research used both qualitative and quantitative approaches that took place at an ELEP and involved 38 participants from three Academic Speaking classes. The data were taken using questionnaires and interviews. This study acknowledged 8 difficulties in speaking English, difficulties in dealing with anxiety, over-using mother tongue, giving a spontaneous response, learning unfamiliar and strange accents, expressing ideas, finding the right lexicon, ordering the right grammatical patterns, and dealing with a competitive environment. Subsequently, the factors which contributed to the difficulties were students’ lack of confidence and lack of vocabulary. The findings of the study are hoped to be advantageous for both students and teachers in the Academic Speaking class.

STUDENTS’ PERCEPTION TOWARDS THE IMPLEMENTATION OF ONLINE FORMATIVE ASSESSMENT IN ENGLISH LEARNING

The Indonesian government policy due to the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic requires all students and teachers to carry out the learning process online. Starting from various learning strategies to the assessment process must be carried out by applying an online system. In line with this policy, this study was conducted with the aim of investigating the implementation of one type of assessment, namely formative assessment in online learning situations. This study focuses on students’ perceptions of the implementation of formative assessment in English learning. By using a mixed-method research design, data collection was carried out through survey and interview methods. The samples of this study were 215 students of a Junior High School in Bali, Indonesia and involved 8 students from the entire sample as participants in the interview. The survey results showed that students had a positive perception of the implementation of online formative assessment. This is also supported by information obtained in the interview process, in which students feel that this type of online formative assessment is comfortable to carry out, especially because of the use of simple and easy tools. In addition, students also feel that there are things that make online formative assessment less effective, such as the unavailability of feedback which also causes students to be less interested in this type of assessment. Through this study, it is hoped that it can provide various information for students and teachers for the purpose of improving the quality of the implementation of formative assessment in English learning.

EFL STUDENTS’ STRATEGIES TO IMPROVE THEIR VOCABULARIES IN CRITICAL READING CLASS

This research attempts to find out students’ strategies to improve vocabularies size in Critical Reading class of second semester students at English Education Program of STKIP SoE. A descriptive qualitative method was used in this research. There were 21 students involved as the research participants and willing to be interviewed. The result of this research showed that students applied strategies, such as listening to the songs, watching movie, reading, and listing difficult words to improve their vocabularies. By applying those four strategies, students were able to understand vocabularies in context without any assistantship, understand the words in foreign language, repeat the words several times, describe the conversation in mother tongue, pick some words when reading books, remember the words that they get, and write down some difficult words.