No abstract

The practicality and limited space of SMS have become features encouraging the emergence of various forms of SMS language. An analysis of SMS from 20 Acehnese female students in the University of Syiah Kuala was therefore carried out to inspect the elements of language employed within the text messages. The data of 110 SMS gathered through a mobile device were thoroughly analyzed and later categorized into linguistics and discoursal features. The result showed that female students tend to write about their psychological conditions in SMS by employing logogram and pictogram. A number of findings on omitted letters and nonstandard spelling were also indicated in their SMS. They rarely used initialism and shortening in writing the text messages because it is believed that these features can diminish intelligibility. These females also wrote complex messages and employed various languages into their text messages, including the national language (Indonesian), the language of their religion (Arabic), the language from media influence (Japanese), and their mother tongue (Acehnese). Their circumstance of being multilingual has expanded their linguistic performance in employing, typing, and inventing lively SMS. It is also interesting to discover that these texters created new symbols that are not generally found in SMS to identify their reciprocal relationship of the same culture and belief.

This study focused on teachers’ materials adaptation as a part of teaching strategies to ensure learning success. Given that such activity is not something light to engage in and requires expertise, the researchers looked at how the process of materials adaptation was carried out. These included what was added, removed, and modified as well as the challenges confronted during the adaptation process and classroom implementation. This study sought perspective from a qualitative case study approach. Documents, classroom observations, and interview were employed to gather data from one senior high school teacher in Aceh, Indonesia. The results were analyzed based on frameworks of language teaching materials analysis, principles of teaching materials, and materials adaptation. Research findings suggested that materials adaptations mostly concentrated on adding and modifying, with less emphasis on eliminating, simplifying, and rearranging. Furthermore, the altered materials aided language learning in various ways. Nevertheless, several modifications made raised issues, such as the lack of a feeling-sharing session with the materials and an inappropriate difficulty level. Inaccessible sources of materials, fear of producing irrelevant information, time constraints, a lack of professional training and school assistance, learners’ uncooperative behavior and low competences were also identified as problems in materials adaption.