UNDERSTANDING STUDENTS’ LEARNING STRATEGIES AS AN INPUT CONTEXT TO DESIGN ENGLISH CLASSROOM ACTIVITY AT SMAN 8 KOTA BENGKULU

Shift in teaching and learning process from teacher-centered to learner-centered needs more various pro-student approaches.The approaches focus on students’ learning activities.In doing their  activities,students apply different efforts because of having different individual potencies. From these individual differences, they also learn in different ways. Understanding individual differences of students such as motivation, learning strategies, attitudes,   and   learning   styles   is   necessary   for   teachers   to   set   appropriate   instructions.   Students’  differences   in learning challenge teachers to prepare and apply various instructions with the same materials in order to gain learning objectives for all students. Teachers should have skills in classroom instruction for all students and in individualized instruction for each student.

Focus of this study is on understanding   learning strategies as a front line in learner-centered   approaches in teaching and learning English as a foreign language. The great reason as the background of doing this study is to maximize the implementation of school based curriculum of English in large class with mixed-ability learners. Large class with mixed-ability of English language in the context of teaching English as foreign language makes the   greatest   challenge for language teachers to have maximal and dynamic efforts to improve students’ communicative skills.  Understanding   students’   learning   strategies   possibly   contributes teachers’dynamic and interesting efforts to where conditions they apply classroom instruction or individualized instruction in teaching and learning process. These efforts would become practical guidelines to carry out students’ learning activities, and then intensively promote and develop students’ learning autonomy.

2. Research Objectives

This study investigated learning strategies of senior high schools’students in learning   English at SMAN 8 Kota Bengkulu. Objectives of the study were to find out the more frequently use of students’ strategies in learning English and to find out more frequently use of activities in each category of strategies in learning English as a foreign language in senior high schools in Bengkulu.

SKRIPSI BAHASA INGGRIS AN ANALYSIS OF STUDENTS’ ERRORS IN CONSTRUCTING WH-QUESTIONS AT THE SECOND YEAR STUDENTS OF SMAN 8 KOTA BENGKULU

The study of English aids students in the quest for more knowledge from many international sources. There are two media for language communication:

1.     receiving   the   message,   i.e., reading and listening,

2.    and sending the message, i.e., speaking and writing.

To give clear information in communication, writing and the use of a standard format for writing are needed. So, in the fourth semester student for the year Muhammadiyah University of Bengkulu, the students were required to write an opinion paragraph on medical ethics based on a reading passage chosen from the Internet. Every student would receive 30 marks as part of the semester’s course work if they wrote it regardless of the quality of their writing. However, they had not been trained to construct a well-organized paragraph. The   researchers   realized that it is important   to   improve students’   skills   in   writing standard paragraphs because it is an important   tool   in   their   profession   and for further education. Therefore, we performed a study to evaluate the writing skills of these first-year medical students in writing a paragraph in English and identified their errors in order to develop guidelines for correction and improvement of their writing skills.

SKRIPSI BAHASA INGGRIS INTERTEXTUALITY IN BENGKULU NEWSPAPER OPINION ARTICLES ON EDUCATION

One of features  found in Indonesian newspapers especially in bengkulu newspaper is a space specifically dedicated to articles discussing ongoing issues in Indonesia. The topic covered by this feature varies and one of them is on educational issues, both nationally and regionally related issues. So, this feature becomes an open medium for its readers to discuss ongoing educational issues. However, it is also important to note   that, to a certain degree, this feature is potential to influence the public opinion either to sustain or  to challenge the current practice.

There are various linguistic aspects which may be investigated in such articles.One of them is its intertextuality. It is an aspect which has been least paid attention to. In fact, intertextuality is always present in any piece of writing. Therefore, it is interesting to investigate the intertextuality in the opinion articles on education in Bengkulu newspapers.The term intertextuality has an extensive meaning and use. It is closely related to the term text itself. When the term text is understood in general semiotics, it may refer both linguistic and non-linguistic text. However, this study is focused on linguistic text and what is meant by intertextuality should be understood from the beginning as linguistic intertextuality then. The study itself is focused on investigating its types, functions, and discursive practice. Intertextuality is not a matter of decorating a text with other texts and its application in a text does not bear any underlying meaning. It is not used by a writer   only   to   illuminate   his/her   text   without   bearing   a   certain   meaning.   The use of intertextuality does have its meaning in text though the meaning itself is not consciously construed by the writer. Even, the reason stating that intertextuality is there because it is a common practice of a certain text indicates that there   exists   the   meaning.The meaning being displayed there   is   that   it   is   as common practice. Therefore, the meaning that emerges from the use of intertextuality in a text should be perceived differently from the lexical meaning of words.

The social meaning of intertextuality is construed in relation to a certain social practice to which a particular sort of text adhered. The behavior of how it is paradigmatically used across texts in the same genre is the major clue to disclose its social meaning. A scientific   journal   article   and   a newspaper article, though both are written on the same topic area, certainly differ in many respects. What makes them to each other different is its discursive practice.

People may talk about “a discourse of educational advertisement”.They certainly talk   about series of advertisement texts concerning with education. However, they do not talk only about the number of the texts, but also most importantly features shared by those texts. Since each feature brings with it a social-interactional meaning, its discursive practice constitutes its social practice.On the basis of the discursive practice of certain features,then,   people may talk about “a commercialization discourse in education”for instance. writer excerpts the text being intertextualized. And, finally, it is related to the textual function which is fulfilled by the intertextuality in the text. 

THE IMPROVEMENT STUDENTS’ SPEAKING SKILL BY USING GUESSING GAMES TECHNIQUE

As a professional teacher in the language teaching, especially the teaching of English as a foreign language, teacher mostly spend much of time on appropriate teaching methodologist for greater effectiveness in students acquisitions on English, designing, and implementing materials, test, and practice teacher are responsible to educate the students from little or no knowledge to sufficient English speaking environment. Most of the teaching technique before, found the teacher in the classroom by applying traditional and monolingual principle ways of teaching with unsatisfactory. In the classroom, the teacher must create the situation that can encourage real communication, many activities can be designed to make majors’ element lively. Games is one of the techniques that can be applied in teaching speaking because games in one of potential activity that gives students feeling of freedom to express themselves. Games are also potentially useful to encourage students of interact with each other orally. 

Class of Word

In the all approach, word has been grouped based on the lexical meaning. In this situation we got the terminology of noun, pronoun, adjective, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction and interjection.
MacFadyen (2008) states that, traditional grammar classifies words based on eight parts of speech: the verb, the noun, the pronoun, the adjective, the adverb, the preposition, the conjunction, and the interjection.

Each part of speech explains not what the word is, but how the word is used. In fact, the same word can be a noun in one sentence and a verb or adjective in the next.

 In the modern approach, word has been classification based on the word classes in the nation this classification could be reduce the ambiguous of the word as in the ancient approach. Those words divided into two classes (1) Content words and (2) function words. Content words are the words that have the lexical meaning. The members of the content words are noun, personal pronoun, verb, adjective, and adverb. Whereas function words are the words which have a little or no lexical meaning but still have a function.

Good and Bad Grammar

There still remains a usage of the term grammar that we have not mentioned, in instances such as; she wrote me a nice letter,but her grammar was awful. Here the speaker is passing  a judgement on someone’s use of language. He is evaluating a piece of english usage againts some supposed norm, called ‘good english’or correct english. The norm is usually what is called ‘standard english’ or educated english usage.

            The use of double negation (They didn’t have none), for example : is not intrinsically ‘bad grammar’ it merely represent a non-standard english usage. Double negation may not be appropriate in the english of public communication, but in more casual or intimate circumstances among certain groups of english speakers it may well constitute a normal feature of english grammar (Jackson,1985:2)

The Scope of Grammar

In his definiton of the ‘science of grammar’, Bacon described the concern of grammar as ‘speech and word’. The linguistic study of a language , or variety of a language, is often said to comprise three components: phonetics/phonology, grammar,semantic. The three aspects of linguistic study are, however, not independent of each other.

1. Phonetics and phonology

Phonetics and phonology are both concerned with the pronunciation of language, how language sounds, the transmission of utterances through the medium of sound.

2.   Semantic

Semantic is the study of meaning. In a way, nearly all of language study is concerned with how language means. Semantic is often conceived as being wider in scope than lexicology, concerned not only with the meaning of words, but also with the meaning of sentences and with meaning relations between words and between sentences.

Language is sometimes viewed as the means by which meanings are transmitted in sound via the organising principle of grammar. The study of grammar is often subdivided into syntax and morphology, the former dealing with the structure of sentences, and the latter with the structure of words.