The English Scanning Skills of Bilingual and Monolingual Indonesian Students

Abstract

Studying the reading competence of Indonesian EFL within the framework of bilingualism can be challenging for language researchers. That may be because the area has not yet deeply explored by Indonesian researchers, while Indonesia provides a vast array of data due to its diverse linguistic background. The present small study investigates the English scanning skills of forty-three Indonesian EFL primary level students. Forty nine percent of the subjects are monolinguals, i.e. they use only Indonesian both at home and school. The rest are bilinguals: they use Indonesian and local languages interchangeably at home. The result of the study shows that in general the Indonesian monolinguals have a better performance in comparison to their bilingual counterparts. By and large, Indonesian young generations nowadays are more exposed to English than their parents or grandparents. Indonesian first graders of primary schools, especially those living in big cities, are now learning English at least once a week within around fifty to sixty minutes per session. Even kindergarten pupils have started learning simple vocabularies of English at schools, which can be related to a common belief that the younger a child learns an additional language, the easier it is for her/him to grasp, and eventually use the new language (Zacharias 2010, pp. 75, 58). Besides that, today"s youngsters see more English texts around them, e.g. advertisements in billboards, newspapers, magazines and internet, mobile phones, smart phones, and hear more English programs broadcasted by the national and foreign private TV stations or channels. In Keywords

The English Scanning Skill of Bilingual and Monolingual Tourism Students in Denpasar Tourism Academy

“…It can be seen from their answer in the open-ended questionnaire. This questionnaire was adopted from Da Silva (2014). This questionnaire also gives the information about subjects' contact toward English, their attitude toward English, and subjects' language background.…”

“…In fact, learning English requires constant practice, patience, and access to the language itself. A lot of parents have registered their children to English courses or bilingual schools to help them get good English grades at school and a lot of exposures to English language (Da Silva, 2014). It can be seen that parents' ambition and situation are being able to see their children to win the competition in the job market in the future.…”

“…Furthermore, sufficient practices and exposure on English language learning are not given to students to learn English properly. It may assume that the exposure of English can be one of the factor that makes students learn English better and get better score in the class (Da, Silva, 2014).…”

“…They are considered as monolingual because they only use Bahasa as their national language. Besides, some of Indonesian also have their own mother tongue or it is called by local languages that they acquire from their family and environment in daily conversation and social events (Da Silva, 2014). This situation also occurs in Bali where the people, including tourism students in this case, speak 2 languages -Bali as their mother tongue and Bahasa Indonesia-or it is called by bilingual.…”

“…Another important point about students with bilingual ability is that they have only control over their spoken language and they may know only a little about the written from of their language. Da Silva (2014) added that in scanning skill, monolinguals performed better than bilingual shown by the difference of mean score gained by the students. It is likely because of using Indonesian as the only language spoken both at school and at home supports the monolinguals' scanning skill acquisition and according to Jalalipour, Majdinasab, Khedri, & Chadorian, (2017), they found that the environment of monolingual students is supported by many resources of English language because the educational level of monolingual students' parents in some activities such as storytelling to children and being interested in participating in reading activities, such as reading newspaper, it seems that monolingual children were in better educational and environmental conditions for acquiring reading skills.…”