Writing in English has always been a difficult skill to be mastered by Indonesian students. In the English Department of Universitas Dian Nuswantoro, students often face challenges in writing concerning grammatical rules and using suitable style in various text types. This research is aimed at investigating whether the students have applied formal academic style in their academic argumentative essays. The method used to analyse the data was descriptive qualitative. The findings demonstrate that there are still some significant errors made by students in their writing. Of the nine types of academic writing style errors proposed by Yakhontova (2003), there are eight types found in the data. These include contraction, addressing the reader directly, direct question, adverb in initial or final position, interjection and hesitation filler, short form of the word or slang, inappropriate negative form, and figures at the beginning of the sentence. Furthermore, the data also reveal a novel finding that there are two other kinds of error that cannot be categorised under Yakhontova’s framework, namely the use of spoken form and emoticon. This research suggests that students’ need to be specifically taught the differences between formal and informal styles of language in speaking and writing classes. They also need to be exposed to English academic texts more so as to be accustomed to formal or academic style.
Teaching and learning process reviews can be used to obtain information about lecturers' teaching performance. They may become a useful input for the lecturers and their students. For lecturers specifically, the reviews may increase the teaching and learning process quality. This study investigates the students' reviews of their previous semester's grammar courses through the Appraisal framework (Martin and White, 2005). It focuses on the students' Attitude, including Affect, Judgment, and Appreciation. The result reveals that Affect deals with the students' emotional reactions and personal hopes towardsthe grammar classes, Judgment with the students' assessment of the lecturer's teaching skills, while Appreciation with the students' valuation on the lecturers and the importance of the grammar courses. This research also suggests that the course review not only presents the students' inputs for the teaching and learning process in the grammar class but also depicts their skills in applying grammatical rules in writing.
Expecting students to be able to speak English with proper pronunciation and intonation like native speakers is not an easy thing. So far, teaching English at the school level has focused on mastering grammar without focusing on language pronunciation (Silalahi, 2016, p. 163). Students in English Department, Faculty of Humanities, Universitas Dian Nuswantoro are required to take English Pronunciation course in their first semester. Based on the researchers’ teaching experience, one of the most common pronunciation errors was found in the intonation for question tags. This research aims to investigate students’ question tag pronunciation errors by using Praat software. It also tries to get the students’ perspective on the use of Praat as a teaching and learning aid for English Pronunciation course. This research employed qualitative descriptive method and used Dehe and Bettina (2013) research on English question tags as the analytical framework. The results showed that errors commonly occur on the pronunciation of down tags, both in conversation and sentences (68% and 53%). Meanwhile, the up tags errors were relatively lower (43%). It is most probably because the students were influenced by the intonation of Bahasa Indonesia, where questions were pronounced with rising intonation. However, after the students were introduced to Praat, the errors decreased significantly i.e., 7% for down tag in conversation, 13% for down tag in sentences, and 3% for up tags. The questionnaire reveals that students gave positive evaluation on the use of Praat in the classroom as it helped them evaluate their own pronunciation.
Linguistics has often been regarded as a theory-based discipline since its development in the 18th century. In the context of education in Indonesia, the authors identify that most of undergraduate level language-based study program takes form as a theoretical course rather than vocational one. If there is one, based on our search in the Indonesian Government Higher Education Database, rather than developing the potential of linguistics branches to the fullest in the core of curriculum, universities tend to incorporate other academic disciplines in their language-based vocational curriculum, e.g. the inclusion of tourism and banking fields of study in the curriculum. This makes the purity of linguistics as a science shades, thus public's misconception that linguistics is merely an inapplicable science is inevitable. Through a critical literature review, the authors aim to promote translation as an alternative to a language-based vocational course at the undergraduate level. We are assured that translation consisting of audio, visual, written, and sign translations can captivate the essence of linguistics in its application. In this article, we discover that each linguistics branch, from the study of sounds to generative linguistics, contributes to the success of translation. Hence, translation can benefit from theoretical linguistics ending linguistics to highly value something it owns and turn theoretical linguistics into applied one.
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