The importance of English reading skills in developing overall English literacy has made reading instruction one of the primary focuses in Indonesia's English teaching. Regardless of the high value of reading skills, the teaching of reading has not been successful in developing the reading comprehension ability of Indonesian students. This exploratory case study research examines teachers' beliefs and practices in teaching reading in Islamic secondary schools. It focuses mainly on how teachers view good reading instruction and the problems they encounter in teaching reading. Additionally, this paper explores how teachers implement reading instruction in their contexts. Data were obtained from 31 senior Islamic secondary school English teachers from six different provinces in Indonesia. Data collection methods comprised document analysis, participant classroom observation, personal in-depth interviews, written guided reflections, and focus group discussions. The data were analyzed using the constant comparative method. The research findings show that despite admitting the importance of teaching reading in schools, the English teachers of Islamic senior high schools found teaching reading challenging. The teachers identified several problems in reading instruction in their classrooms, such as lack of strategies to teach vocabulary, limited repertoire of strategies to teach reading, the use of teaching materials, and improving students' reading motivation and autonomy. As a result, they have not been able to implement classroom practices that effectively develop students' reading comprehension. This issue calls for the innovation and development of teaching reading strategies to improve reading instruction quality in Islamic secondary schools in Indonesia.The importance of English reading skills in developing overall English literacy has made reading instruction one of the primary focuses in Indonesia's English teaching. Regardless of the high value of reading skills, the teaching of reading has not been successful in developing the reading comprehension ability of Indonesian students. This exploratory case study research examines teachers' beliefs and practices in teaching reading in Islamic secondary schools. It focuses mainly on how teachers view good reading instruction and the problems they encounter in teaching reading. Additionally, this paper explores how teachers implement reading instruction in their contexts. Data were obtained from 31 senior Islamic secondary school English teachers from six different provinces in Indonesia. Data collection methods comprised document analysis, participant classroom observation, personal in-depth interviews, written guided reflections, and focus group discussions. The data were analyzed using the constant comparative method. The research findings show that despite admitting the importance of teaching reading in schools, the English teachers of Islamic senior high schools found teaching reading challenging. The teachers identified several problems in reading instruction in their classrooms, such as lack of strategies to teach vocabulary, limited repertoire of strategies to teach reading, the use of teaching materials, and improving students' reading motivation and autonomy. As a result, they have not been able to implement classroom practices that effectively develop students' reading comprehension. This issue calls for the innovation and development of teaching reading strategies to improve reading instruction quality in Islamic secondary schools in Indonesia.
This study designed to improve students’ writing skills through Edublogs of one Senior High Schools in Indonesia. Based on the preliminary observation, there were problems found in the field such as students’ poor writing skills and low interest toward writing, inappropriate teacher’s style in teaching, the role of media and the unsuitable utilization of internet facility. Regarding to the result of the observations, students had some problems in recount text writing those are the generic structure, the purpose and the language features. In addition, they had no capability to make a self-reflection on their mistakes in their own writing. It happens since their English teacher has a tendency to to directly correct their mistakes.This current research was an action research study consisting of two cycles. There are 23 students involved in this study. The data of this study were qualitative and quantitative. The qualitative data were obtained, the first, by observing the teaching and learning process during the implementation of the actions and the second, by interviewing the students and the collaborator about the actions implemented. Furthermore, the qualitative data were in the form of field notes and interview transcripts. Meanwhile, the quantitative data were gained by assessing the students’ writing skills through the pretest and posttest. The qualitative data were analyzed using the qualitative data analysis those are data collection, data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing and verification. The results of this study show that Edublogs is an effective media that can be used to improve students’ writing skills qualitatively and quantitatively. Qualitatively, using Edublogs, teaching and learning process became more interesting. The students enjoyed the writing process. The students’ problems in writing can be reduced by using Edublogs in teaching-learning process by applying writing stages through Edublogs. Quantitatively, the average score gained by the students in cycle one was 67.37 while in cycle two is 72.58. The results, however, show that students’ writing skill improves significantly through blogging activity. Thus, it can be concluded that the students are more enthusiastic and more interested in writing English.
Listening is considered as the basic skill in learning a language. Listening lets students gain input in the form of audio. Due to the 2013 curriculum, schools are provided with English textbook prepared by the government. This textbook is used for the listening input which may affect the output of listening process. Therefore, the researchers are interested in conducting a research related to the weaknesses of the K13 English textbook When English Rings a Bell. The researchers want to know the weaknesses of the listening material in the textbook which can be known from the teachers’ perception. This research used qualitative and quantitative method. The instruments of this research are observation, questionnaire, and interview. The result of the study shows that there are several weaknesses of the listening material existing in the K13 English textbook. These weaknesses may affect to the output of language learning and cannot develop students’ listening skill. Therefore, it is expected that the government would take more attention on the listening material for students to help them better input for listening activity.
Vocational High School is course with aim to prepare the students to have specific skills by having practical activities based on its study program. It has the same purpose with English for specific purposes (ESP) course which aims to meet the students’ specific language need. ESP courses help students to use English appropriately as well as accurately to perform their jobs in a various situations where they encounter their English language function. ESP course often begins with the students’ need. Students’ need analysis is needed to be identified to be able to meet the effective learning material based on what the students really need. This study aims to investigate the writing materials needs of eleventh grade students of Office Administration study program in Vocational High School from viewpoints of students. This study used descriptive qualitative analysis with questionnaire and interview method to collect the data. The subjects of the research were eleventh grade of Office Administration students that consisted of 34 students by using purposive sampling. The result indicated that the students have several needs in terms of target needs and learning needs. Target needs are divided into necessities, wants, and lacks. Based on the result of target needs, the students are lack of component of writing skills including express ideas, write with correct organization, use correct grammar, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling, and use appropriate vocabulary based on the context of the text. Thus, the students need and want to learn those components of writing skills. Meanwhile, learning needs are divided into input, procedure, setting, and accessibility. The input is divided into content of materials, activities, and design. The teachers should pay attention more on those aspects to fulfill the students’ need to help them transition successfully to their future careers after graduation.
This study reports the use of engagement in high-rated and low-rated EFL undergraduate students’ argumentative essays. The engagement here refers to one of the aspects in interacting with the readers, which is called metadiscourse (Hyland, 2005a). The data in this study were ten highest-rated and ten lowest-rated argumentative essays written by first-year undergraduate students. The data were coded manually by two raters to maintain data validity. The results reveal that high-rated essays contain less engagement than low-rated ones. However, it also shows that the engagement in high-rated essays was more varied and grammatically sophisticated than those in low-rated essays. Furthermore, while this study reveals that the higher number of engagement used in argumentative essays does not always coincide with the improved quality of the writing, it implies that the writing quality and score do not depend on the number of engagement expressed but more on the ways students use the engagement effectively. Thus, the explicit teaching on how to use engagement effectively in persuasive writings may be useful for the students to build more persuasive arguments as well as to improve their writing quality.
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