Assignment 8: Final Assignment

Ika Kurniawati Khasanah / 2201409032                                                        
Rombel 405-406

Summary 

A Study on the Reading Skills EFL University Students

This article discusses about reading skills and their difficulty levels. Realizing the important of reading for EFL students, it is then very crucial for EFL students to have good reading proficiency. Having good reading proficiency means that the reader has abilities to understand written statements or any type of written texts accurately and efficiently (Mahfoodh, 2007, p. 1).

Reading proficiency is determined by reading skills. Nutall (1996, pp. 44-124) suggests that there are three major categories of reading skills. They are as follows:

1.     Efficient reading skills are divided into five sub-skills, i.e. identifying the reason for reading, choosing the right materials, using the text effectively, making use of all resources in the text and improving reading speed.

2.      Word attack skills consist of three sub-skills: the interpretation of structural clues (both syntactical and morphological); inference from context; and the use of the dictionary.

3.     Text attack skills are comprised of eight sub-skills: understanding syntax, recognizing and interpreting cohesive devices, interpreting discourse markers, recognizing functional value, recognizing text organization, recognizing the presuppositions underlying the text, recognizing implications and making inference, and prediction.

Mcwhorter (2002, pp. 386-387, 397-398, 418-419) adds other importanta reading skills namely distinguishing between fact and opinion, paraphrasing and summarizing.

In this study the writer investigated the reading skills of ten batch-2003-students studying at English Department of a private university in Surabaya and passing all levels of reading classes. In doing the data collection, the writer used some steps, as follows:

1.    Analyze the kinds of reading skills which were taught in Reading One,Two, Three and Four classess at the department.

2.     Develop two reading tests: adopting reading texts entitled Learning to be Funny is No Joke and The Birth of Rock by Maker and Lenier for reading test one and other two reading texts entitled Using the Creative Imagination and Power of the Press by Talok for reading test two.

Each reading test consisted of thirty fouy items as the representatives of seventeen kinds of reading skills, not all reading skills proposed by Nutall and Mcwhorter before.

3.    Pilot two reading tests. The piloting was aimed to help the writers to see whether the two reading tests had clear and good instructions and items.

4.   Distribute the reading tests to ten students of English Department Batch 2003 who had already passed all reading classes.

5.      Check and count the results of both reading tests.

After that, the writer did the data analysis.

In this study:

-         Recognizing text organization skill means perceiving the pattern of how ideas hang together in a reading text.

-         Paraphrase skill means paraphrasing or restating the sentences’ original ideas into students’ own words.

-         Inference from context skill means learning words by hearing or seeing the words in the context

-         Summarizing means restatement of the important points of a passage.

-         Skimming is glancing rapidly through a text to determine its gist or main idea.

-         Compound words are those formed by two normally indepent words, such as software, spoon-fed.

-        Predicting skill means responding the text by having expectations and ideas about the purpose of the text, as well as ideas about possible outcomes.

-         Drawing the meanings of some pro-forms such as them, their by refering to a particular reading text.

-    Interpreting elliptical expression skill means a skill to recognize what elements which are omitted from a sentence or a passage.

-         Morphology (word part) skill means dividing some words into suitable parts: prefix, root an suffix.

-      Using a dictionary is by selecting, from several meanings offered in the dictionary, the one that is relevant to the given sentence or text in which a particular word occurs.

-         Interpreting lexical cohesion skill means interpreting different words which refer to a similar thing.

-    Recognizing implications and making inferences skill is by infereing the message which is conveyed by a reading text.

-         Distinguish fact from opinion is by deciding whether a particular statement which was taken from  the reading text was true or false.

-         Improving reading speed means reading in meaningful chunks.

-         Recognizing presupposition underlying the text means an ability to identify the presupposition, i.e. knowledge, experience, opinions, attitudes or emotions which the author of the reading text expect the readers to have, share, or at least understand.

-         Scanning skill is define as a quick reading focusing on locating specific information.

The result of the writer’s study is that it has been found that the most difficult reading skill was recognizing text or organization; the second most difficult was paraphrasing; and the third was inferencing from context skill. In addition, it has also been found that scanning skill and improving reading speed skill had low difficulty  level.

Comment

The content of this research article provides some information about reading skills which exist. It helps the readers know about some reading skills. As the title ‘A Study on the Reading Skills EFL University Students’, this article provides a study in determining which reading skill has high difficulty level and low difficulty level to college students who have passed all levels of reading classes. So, as the conclusion, the findings of this study shows that every reading skill has different levels of difficulty for the students. It is useful to help in constructing reading tests in any level.

This article can also be appropriate for those who are studying or working in language education, especially English education and English as ESL, to be read. It is because the intention of the study shows that having good reading proficiency is very crucial by considering reading as one of four language skills to be mastered.

The Benefit

In my opinion, this study is useful for teachers. Teachers can get information about difficulty levels of the reading skills mentioned in the study. The findings can also be used to contsruct an appropriate reading test in what level they teach. In other words, they can distribute each reading skill in their reading test items appropriately. As the result, teachers can know how their students’ reading proficiency, how their students accomplish the reading test. The result can be used to determine students’ progress in learning process.

To develop or improve their ability, teachers can also conduct further research with larger number of respondents, with a help from their students, so that wider result for English education can be produced. It is like the writer stated in conclusion and suggestion. As a consequence, perhaps later teachers can successfully teach students in achieving good reading proficiency.

SUMMARY

Ika Kurniawati K. / 2201409032
Rombel 405-406

Sex, Politeness and Stereotype

Women’s language and confidence

Robin Lakoff, an American linguist, argued that women were using language which reinforced their subordinate status; they were colluding in their own subordination by the way they spoke. She shifted the focus of research on gender differences to syntax, semantics, and style.

Features of ‘women’s language’

Lakoff suggested that women’s speech was characterized by linguistic features such as the following:

1.      Lexical hedges or fillers, e.g. you know, sort of, you see, well. à hedging devices

2.      Tag questions, e.g. she is very nice, isn’t it?. à hedging devices

3.      Rising intonation on declaratives, e.g. it’s really good. à hedging devices

4.      ‘Empty’ adjectives, e.g. divine, charming, cute.

5.      Precious colour terms, e.g. magenta, aquamarine.

6.      Intensifiers such as just and so, e.g. I like him so much. à boosting devices

7.      ‘Hypercorrect’ grammar, e.g. consistent use of standard verb forms.

8.      ‘Superpolite’ forms, e.g. indirect requests, euphenism. à hedging devices

9.      Avoidance of strong swear words, e.g. fudgr, my goodness.

10.  Emphatic stress, e.g. it was a BRILLIANT performance. à boosting devices

Lakoff had identified a number of linguistic features which were unified by their function of expressing lack of confidence, by the fact that all the forms identified were means of expressing uncertainty or tentativeness. However, other researchers ignored this functional coherence. The internal coherence of the features Lakoff identified can be illustrated by dividing them into two groups: (1) linguistics devices which may be used for hedging or reducing the force of utterance (weakening the strength of assertation), and (2) features which may boost or intensify  a proposition’s force (strenthenoing it).

Lakoff’s linguistic features  as politeness devices

-          Tag question is a syntactic device listed by Lakoff which may express uncertainty, with raising intonation. It focuses on the referential meaning of an assertion. But tags may also express affective meaning (positive politeness devices), with falling intonation. They also may soften the negative comment.

-          Other so-called hedges such as you know and I think are used differently in different contexts and often used as politeness devices rather than as expressions of uncertainty.

Other facts about politeness device, Western female usuallly used more politeness devices that male. As the contrary, for example in Malagasy, the men used more politeness devices that the women.  So, actually many factors influenced the differents pattern of language use by women and men.

Interaction

There are many features of interaction which differentiate the talk of women and men.

Interruptions

Based on one of the researchs conducted, in same-sex interaction, interruptions were pretty evenly distributed between speakers. In cross-sex interaction almost all the interruptions were from males. In general, research on conversational interaction reveals women as cooperative convrsationalist, whereas men tend to be more competitive and less supportive to others.

Explanation

The societally subordinate position of women reflected in these patterns of socialisation. The norm for women’s talk are solidarity stressing (agreement sought and disagreement avoided), whereas for males it is to be those of public referential-oriented interaction. The public model is an adversarial one, where contradiction and disagreement is more likely thatn agreement and confirmation of the statements of others.

Gossip

Gossip (‘idle talk’ in Western society) describes the kind of relaxed in-group talk that goes on between people in informal contexts. The function is to affirm solidarity and maintain the social relationship between the women involved. It may include critisim of beahiours of others, but women tend to avoit criticising people directly. A common male reaction to this behaviour is to label it two-faced.

Sexist language

Basically the study of sexist language is concerned with the way language expresses both negative and positive stereotypes of both women and men. Practically research in the area has concentrated on the ways in which language conveys negative attitudes to women.

Can a language be sexist?

Feminists have claimed that English is a sexist language. Sexist involves behaviour which maintains social inequalities between women and men. There are a number of ways in which it has been suggested that the English language discriminates against women. For example, animal imagery is one example where the images of women (bitch, old biddy, and cow) seem considerably less positive that for men.

Generic structures provide further evidence to support the claim that English language marginalises women and treats them as abnormal. Words like generic he and man can be said to render women invisible. However, they is nowadays the most frequently heard pronoun in informal speech, and it is spreading to more formal context.

The categories discussed in this section reflect the society’s view of women in many English-speaking communities. It will be different with other cultures.