There are three types of clause in Minangkabaunese based on the typological analysis, namely: active, passive, and topicalization one. Accordingly, each clause has special information structure which makes they are different in communicating messages. This article tries to describe the types of clauses in Minangkabaunese based on typological analysis and then the discussion is continued in order to know the information structure in each clause. This article is derived and developed based on the result of a fundamental research conducted for the first year (2008) in West-Sumatra.
Grammar is one of important aspects of a language that makes the language learnable and teachable. The teaching of grammar, especially foreign language grammar, needs a serious attention from the teachers and related institutions. Specifically in universities, the teaching of English grammar should provide the students with theoretical concepts of the English grammar and opportunity to use the concepts in their communication. The grammar teaching should also offers suitable assignments by which they may test their language hypothesis. To establish and develop the students’ knowledge about the English grammar, the use of students’ mother tongue as an instructional language in the classroom was considered effective. However, an experimental research conducted by Refnita (2006) showed that the use of Bahasa Indonesia as an instructional language of Grammar I subject was not more effective than the use of English. It is true that bahasa Indonesia is not the students’ mother tongues, but they have mastered it as almost perfectly as their mother tongues. That’s why in her research bahasa Indonesia was considered similar with the students’ mother tongues.The rejection of the proposed research hypothesis implied that pedagogical and psychological factors should be taken into account in the teaching-learning process because the success of learning English grammar does not solely depend upon the instructional language. Further analysis of the research result reflected that the students’ motivation and learning readiness even more determined the success of learning Grammar I. In relation with this phenomenon, the present article, which is based on and developed from the research result, will discuss further the pedagogical and psychological reflections of grammar teaching that need to be considered in the teaching-learning process of English grammar at universities in addition to the use of instructional language.
This article is a part of the writer’s dissertation on the development of an integrated English grammar assessment. Although some say that English grammar is not needed when someone speaks and/or writes English, it was found that incorrect use of grammar disturbed the communication. It is also believed that having good English is a must when someone wants to be a model. Standing on this position, the writer had carried out an experiment on giving an integrated assessment to train her students who will be future English teachers to develop their English grammar ability. The research was carried out in the form of an experimental research by using a one-group pretest posttest design. The sample comprised all the first year students of English Department of Bung Hatta University, Padang, West Sumatera. The research result showed that the assessment did not only help the students write more sentences, but it also helped them write more number of grammatically correct sentences. The data analysis revealed that the students improve their achievement. It was shown by the increasing mean score from 26.43 in the pretest into 50.12 in the posttest. The analysis of significance also showed that the calculated-t value (18.9052) was much higher than the table-t value (1.9837). It indicated that the integrated assessment was effective to improve the students’ English grammar ability.
Learners of a foreign language frequently face a lot of linguistic and non-linguistic learning problems and difficulties, including the EFL learners in Indonesia. The EFL learners whose native language is Minangkabaunese, for instance, may face grammatical problems dealing with phrasal and sentential constructions as the consequence of different word-order typology. In facts, there are different markedness values of word-order typology in English and those of Minangkabaunese at syntactic level of basic-grammatical construction. This paper discusses the comparison of markedness values of word-order typology of English and Minangkabaunese. Two questions as the basis of data analysis and discussion in this paper are: (i) what are the unmarked and marked word-order patterns in English and in Minangkabaunese at syntactic level?; and (ii) why do the EFL learners in West-Sumatera need to know the different markedness values? The data presented in this paper are those collected by means of a fieldresearch and supported by a library study. The analysis is based on the relevant markedness theories developed and used in Linguistic Typology. The result of data analysis tells that the S-V-O and V-O-S are the unmarked clause constructions and the O-S-V is the marked ones in Minangkabaunese. In English, however, the unmarked clause construction is only S-V-O meanwhile the others are the marked ones. Such different grammatical properties cause specific learning problems in the EFL learning in West-Sumatera.
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