With regard to the role of English in Indonesia that is mainly used for academic purpose, it is important to sharpen the two skills, reading and writing, more than the other two skills, listening and speaking. Based on that fact, this study focuses on reading skills, especially in reading comprehension skills. Reading comprehension skill is closely related to literacy levels that nowadays considered important by educational institution. The data was taken from reading comprehension questions in English USBN question sheet and the students’ answer sheets. The participants are students of XII grade of SMK NU Ungaran that are randomly chosen. The result of this study showed that Out of 50 students, 59% of them are best cope with editing task, followed by 56% in dealing with reading comprehension task, 50% of gap-filling task, 48% with short answer task and the least is 22% in vocabulary task. This meant that the proficiency level of reading comprehension of students in XII grade SMK NU Ungaran still needs to elevate. They were still lack in term of vocabulary and understanding the ideas implicitly delivered in the text.
This research aims to describe and analyze communication strategies used by learners in the acquisition of a second language. In this case, this research analyzes the use of communication strategies in which English is the language of instruction.This study involved 21 students at the Department of English Language and Literature, in one of the state universities in Semarang, Indonesia. These students are second year students in the English Language and Literature Department. This research is a case study in the purpose of investigating the communication strategies used when the participants are engaged when the learning activities take place. The participants are given a conversation project in pairs and exposed to a variety of setting such as in the restaurant, in the professor’s room, and in a company. Data collection was carried out through video and audio recordings. The data obtained are then categorized into 13 categories of communication strategies (Dornyei, 1995) and sorted to obtain the frequency of occurrence. The findings indicate that the students mostly use time-gaining strategy (36%) to overcome the problem in their communication with the interlocutors. It is then followed by the use of meaningless words which occurs very frequently (18%) from all utterances, “repetition” strategy which occurs rather frequently about 16% of the total, literal translation (13%), and “use of non-linguistics means” (10%). In conclusion, choices of communication strategies are highly influenced by the level of the conversation tasks given (Wongsawang, 2001). The occurrence of certain types of communication strategies depends on the tasks given to the students and the level of difficulty of those tasks.
This study presents the ways self regulation exists in the siblingship. How the older sibling influence the decision making towards the younger sibling or vice versa. In this case the decision making is based on where they study. These siblings are in the same university even they are in the same study program. This paper observes how they are affected to each other while they are in the same school. This paper uses interview as the method. In the findings will be revealed why they decide to be in the same university and in the same study program.
ESP is designed for a particular group of people in a specific context. The materials used are related to the learners' specialized field of study. One of the factors which is of utmost importance in language learning in general and ESP in particular is to see whether course books and other materials are useful for the purpose of the course or not. The aim of the paper is evaluating the ESP course book entitled English for International Tourism. Cunningsworth’s (1984) checklist is used to evaluate this book. Instead of the authors’ claim this book is communicative, the evaluation result shows that the exercises within the book mainly use drilling task which means it is more structural rather than communicative.
Students’ writing quality has become the focus of education research nowadays. A good quality writing should fulfil the requirements of coherence and cohesion. Coherence shows how the sentences in the text are arranged which usually follow certain structure, and cohesion shows how they are connected to each other. This study aims to investigate the students’ writing quality in both aspects. Using systemic functional linguistics approach, 10 students’ writing on recount text is analysed. The result of the study reveals how good the students on the fourth semester can write the text and what devices they use to establish the quality. The students can follow the generic structure of recount texts well. However, only 50% has reorientation. In addition, they employ different thematic progressions,
