Student-Teacher's Language Awareness, An Analysis of Google Translate Results Revision

Abstract

Google Translate as a language translator technology may have drawback effects on students' accuracy and fluency. One of them is that it may make the students narrow down their sensitivity toward the language. Meanwhile, it is believed that translation is a cognitive activity in language education. It is important for the users of Google translate especially students to be aware of the errors of the results. The sensitivity toward the errors may indicate the degree of individual's language awareness. The language awareness should be developed by the student-teacher since they need to evaluate the errors made by their students in the language teaching. Therefore, this study aimed to investigate the student teachers' language awareness through the revision they made on the Google Translate results using descriptive qualitative design. The instrument was designed in an open-ended way to show the result of Google translate on the Indonesian narrative text. The participants were 9-second semester student teachers of the Indonesia University of Education. The data were the documents from participants' revisions toward Google Translate results which were categorized using cognitive categories from Lindgren and Sullivan (2006) and analyzed using error types from Naqvy (2012). The findings showed that the participants had error sensitivity although it was limited. With reference to their error sensitivity and revisions on the errors, it showed that the participants' language awareness were insufficient. Therefore, it is recommended for the teacher education to develop the language awareness specifically.