The English tense and aspect system has long posed great difficulty to second language (L2) learners due to their underlying complex concepts. This difficulty is compounded by oversimplified grammatical descriptions found in many ELT textbooks. Cognitive Grammar (CG) offers comprehensive accounts of tenses that could be useful for learners. This paper reports a quasiexperimental study investigating the differential effects of CG-informed form-focused instruction and formalist-traditional form-focused instruction on the acquisition of two English tenses, namely the simple past and the past perfect. Secondary school EFL learners (final pool: N = 36) were assigned to two groups (CG and Traditional). Learners in the CG group were exposed to CG-grounded grammatical descriptions of the tenses while learners in the traditional group received traditional accounts. Both groups performed awareness-raising tasks to enhance learning. Data were gathered from the learners' performance in a cloze narrative task. Results from an immediate post-test revealed that CG-based descriptions helped learners improve significantly and outperform learners in the traditional group. These findings indicate the superiority of a CG approach to a formalist approach to teaching the tenses and lend support to the applicability and efficacy of CG-grounded form-focused instruction in the classroom.
Cognitive Grammar (CG) is a relatively new approach to linguistics that is becoming more mainstream in recent years due to its comprehensive description and meaningful elaboration of grammar. CG proponents have been proposing this approach to L2 grammar instruction instead of a more traditional approach that relies heavily on rules. Our main interest is to investigate whether such approach is indeed beneficial to learners, particularly in the learning of English past tenses. Our goal in the current study is therefore to examine the relative effect of CG instruction on Indonesian EFL learners mastery of two past tenses, simple past and past perfect. These tenses were selected as our instructional targets since most common traditional explanation does not help learners differentiate and use them contextually (Jones Lock, 2011). Twenty-seven EFL learners studying at a senior high school in Jakarta participated in this quasi-experimental study. They were assigned to one experimental group receiving a two-week pedagogical treatment with pre-test and immediate post-test design. Statistical analyses indicate that the group significantly performed better after the treatment, notably in discourse-related test sections. The results confirm the efficacy of CG which can lend support to its applications in L2 instruction.DOI:doi.org/10.24071/llt.2018.210211
With a mission to enhance the quality of EFL teachers, the Regional English Language Office (RELO) of the U.S. Embassy in Indonesia has conducted a pre-service teacher camp where practical teaching innovations are taught alongside reflective practices and the development of social and intercultural competences. This paper aims to examine how the participants, who are pre-service language teachers, perceived their professional identity as potential EFL educators after attending Camp EPIC and to what extent the program contributed to this process of professional identity formation. The study employed a mixed-methods survey where a total of 45 participants of Camp EPIC 2018 were purposively selected. They were asked to provide descriptions of themselves as teachers before and after the teacher camp, which were then analysed qualitatively using thematic analysis. As for the quantitative data, a set of thirty-three Likert-scale items were examined using Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The triangulated data indicated that the participants’ perception was positively altered after the camp. While some mentioned that they were more resourceful and creative with teaching ideas, others showed a higher level of self-efficacy concerning their competence. These changes could be attributed to four major features of the camp: reflection, feedback, resource exploitation, and collaboration.
Congruent with the rapid development of internet users worldwide, social media advertising has been mushrooming on various social network platforms, including Instagram. Among the many forms of advertising that marketers have relied on is influencer advertising, which pertains to hiring popular Instagram influencers to endorse particular products or services on their Instagram accounts. This study explores how these Instagram influencers use both texts and images to convey their advertising messages. Further, the study explores the differences in how male and female influencers construct their endorsement posts. A total of 20 advertisement posts were collected from 10 influencers and were analyzed from the multimodal approach integrated with the concepts of linguistic metafunctions in Systemic Functional Linguistics. Then, the gender differences in texts and images were elaborated. It is shown that interpersonal language dominates the language used in the captions, despite the specific differences in the linguistic items used by men and women. Likewise, in the images, the influencers seem to consistently put the spotlight on themselves rather than on the products to captivate the followers' attention. The findings of this study will eventually contribute to the literature on advertising language and multimodal analysis.
The popularity of online advertising is increasing alongside the rising number of internet users, and one of the online platforms to advertise one’s products or services is Instagram. On Instagram, many advertisers opt for one viable alternative way of advertising: social media influencers. They typically hire popular figures to endorse their products, and the influencers will then post an image and a caption, persuading their followers to buy the products. It is intriguing to investigate how they make use of images and texts in Instagram to strengthen their persuasive act. Therefore, this paper aims to present a multimodality analysis where both the linguistic features and the images of Instagram advertisements of influencers are explored in relation to their communicative intent. The sample was built up from 24 Instagram ads posted by 13 Indonesian influencers. Several salient lexicogrammatical features were pinpointed, and the images were analyzed following the social semiotic approach called visual grammar. The findings revealed that the Instagram ads demonstrated vast amount of colloquial and informal language use, which was intended to establish familiarity with the audience. The image analysis also showed that influencers had roles to display themselves in the image to build credibility and trust as credible reviewers. The study has contributed to explicating how diverse language use on the internet is vis-à-vis traditional media, particularly the discourse of influencer advertising.
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