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LINGUAL: Journal of Language and Culture
Volume 10, Number 1; May 2018

Editor-in-Chief
Prof. Ketut Artawa, M. A., Ph.D

Associate Editor & Typesetter

I Made Sena Darmasetiyawan, S.S., M.Hum

Editorial Members
Dr. Ida Ayu Made Puspani, M. Hum.
Dr. Ni Wayan Sukarini, M.Hum.
I Wayan Mulyawan, S.S., M.Hum.

Reviewers
Prof. Dr. Ni Luh Sutjiati Beratha, M. A. Drs. I Nyoman Udayana, PhD
Universitas Udayana Universitas Udayana

Prof. Dr. Jufrizal, M.Hum Prof. Bahren Umar Siregar, Ph.D

Universitas Negeri Padang Universitas Katolik Indonesia Atma Jaya

Prof. Dr. Oktavianus, M.Hum Dr. Muhammad Yusdi, M.Hum

Universitas Andalas Universitas Andalas

I Wayan Arka, Ph. D. Prof. Dr. Burhan Nurgiyantoro

Australian National University (ANU) Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta

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Lingual: Journal of Language & Culture (Volume 10, No.1, May 2018)
English Department, Faculty of Arts, Udayana University 1
Table of Contents
Globalizing Higher Education in India: A step towards Multiculturalism - a Review ......................... 3
Sunita Sharma ...................................................................................................................................... 3
Hedges Used in Scientific EFL Writings ......................................................................................... 12
Yogi Widiawati ................................................................................................................................... 12
English Development as a Second Language in Relation with TV Exposure (A Case Study of
Young Learner) ............................................................................................................................... 19
N. M. Ayu Widiastuti, A. A. S. Shanti Sari D., S. A. Isnu Maharani ....................................................... 19
Lexical Richness of the Expository Writing in Indonesian by Senior High School Students ............. 23
Fara Wahyu Astridya .......................................................................................................................... 23
Reforming the Students’ Writing Errors in Collocation by Applying Collocation Learning:
Promoting Learners’ Writing Competency ...................................................................................... 30
Achmad Kholili ................................................................................................................................... 30
Reading Ability and Strategies of Students in Coastal Area of Bengkulu ......................................... 36
Fernandita Gusweni Jayanti, Anggun Citra Sari Dewi ......................................................................... 36
The Capability of Pronouncing French Phonemes by Students of English Department, Udayana
University ....................................................................................................................................... 43
Ni Luh Ketut Mas Indrawati, A.A.Istri Aryani, Putu Weddha Savitri..................................................... 43
Snowball Throwing in Teaching Grammar ...................................................................................... 52
Yanuarti Apsari................................................................................................................................... 52
 GLOBALIZING HIGHER EDUCATION IN INDIA: A STEP TOWARDS
MULTICULTURALISM - A REVIEW
Sunita Sharma
Maniben Nanavati Women’s College

sunitasharma12@yahoo.co.in

Abstract

Prime Minister Modi’s initiative “Educate in India” announced in May 2015, the objective is to attract international
students and make India, a quality higher education hub in Asia. India aspires to transition from having the second
highest student population leaving its shores to study abroad, to become a premier educational destination attracting
more international students to its shores.
The paper reviews the growth of higher education system in India, draws inspirations from the experiences of other
Asian countries and then reviews India’s piece of global cake. It also discusses the benefits of multiculturalism, which
are going to flow in the Indian economy following Internationalization of higher education.
Keywords: higher education, educate in India, International students in India, Gross Enrollment Ratio

I INTRODUCTION
India’s bold initiative “Educate in India” announced in May 2015, to attract international students
and make India a quality higher education hub in Asia is closely linked to Prime Minister Modi’s other
initiatives namely ‘Make in India’, ‘Digital India’, ‘Skill India’, ‘Start-up India’, ‘Stand-up India’ and
‘Swatch Bharat’,Chadha, B & Dugar, A.(2016). All aimed towards empowering India and making it a
global economic superpower. India aspires to transition from having the second highest student
population, leaving its shores to study abroad to become a premier educational destination attracting
more international students to its shores.
“Educate in India” is an initiative focused on higher education. Its objectives are to:
• Internationalize Indian higher education
• Encourage foreign universities to establish campuses in India
• Encourage Indian institutions to set up campuses abroad
• Making India a hub of education
• Create an “Educate in India brand Chopra, R (2015, May28)
The paper analyzes the growth of Indian Higher Education System while comparing with the
education systems of other countries, as new private and foreign universities are entering the Indian
educational system and are offering many options to the student’s, which were not available before. This
paper attempts to review the current global status of India’s higher education.
The data used is collected from various secondary sources. Interviews were conducted with
Principals of Colleges and Indian students returning after completing their higher education from foreign
universities to know the impact of multiculturalism due to internationalization of higher education.

II MATERIALS AND METHOD

The growth of higher education is determined by the size of the institutional capacity of the higher
education system in the country, this is determined mainly by the three indicators, namely number of
educational institutions – universities and colleges, number of teachers and number of students. The
higher education in India has witnessed increase in its institutional capacity since independence.

Lingual: Journal of Language & Culture (Volume 10, No.1, May 2018)
English Department, Faculty of Arts, Udayana University 3
 4 | Sunita Sharma Lingual (Vol. 10, No.1, 2018)

Table 1: Growth of Higher Education

Capacity Indicators 1950 1991 2006 2010 2012 2015

Number of University Level Institutions 25 177 367 533 574 711

Number of Colleges 700 7,346 18,064 31,324 35,539 40,760

Number of Teachers (in Thousands) 15 272 488 699 934 1261

Number of Students Enrolled (in Millions) 0.1 4.9 11.2 14.6 20.3 26.5

Source: UGC (2011a), UGC (2012) and UGC (2015)

The number of universities in the country has increased from 25 to 711 during 1950-2015.
Similarly, the number of degree colleges in the country, which were not more than 700 in 1950, has
gone up to 40,760 in 2016. The number of teachers has gone up from meager fifteen thousand to more
than twelve lakhs. Similarly, the enrollment of students has increased from merely 0.1 million in 1950 to
26.5 million in the year 2015.
2.1 THE GROWTH OF UNIVERSITY LEVEL INSTITUTIONS
In India, university-level institutions widely differ in terms of their structure and coverage. These
could be broadly divided into six broad groups: central university, state universities, institutions deemed
to be universities, institutions of national importance established under state legislation and private
universities. Although, there has been a tremendous increase in the number of these institutions, more
specifically in recent years, yet the growth trajectory has not been uniform for these different types of
university-level institutions.
Table 2. The growth of University Level Institutions in India
Type 2010 2011 2012 2015 2016

Central Universities 41 43 44 46 47

State Universities 257 265 286 329 356

Institutions deemed to be Universities 130 130 129 128 122

Institutions of National Importance (by State Legislation) 5 5 4 3 -

Institutions of National Importance (by Central Legislation) 39 39 50 - -

Private Universities 61 80 111 205 252

Total 533 562 624 711 777

Source: UGC (2011a), UGC (2012), UGC (2015) and UGC (2016)

There has been a considerable increase in the number of central universities in recent years. Their
number has increased from 18 in 2002 to 47 in 2016 (Table 2). Similarly, the number of institutions of
national importance like Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Indian Institute of Management (IIM),
National Institute of Technology (NIT) etc established by the central government has also registered a
significant increase from 12 in the year 2002 to 50 in 2012. The state universities have also witnessed a
consistent increase in their numbers. From 178 in 2002, the number of state universities has increased to
356 in the year 2016.
Many Educational institutions were provided the status of deemed to be university by the UGC
and the number of such institutions has gone up from 52 in 2002 to 130 in 2011. However, presently the
number of deemed universities showing a decline is placed at 122. Furthermore, the state universities
have also witnessed a consistent increase in their numbers. From 178 in 2002, the number has increased
to the figure of 356 in the year 2016. An unprecedented growth of private universities has been a marked
feature of expansion of Indian higher education in recent years. The number of private universities in the
 Globalizing Higher Education in India: A Step Towards Multiculturalism - A Review |5

country has swelled from 10 in 2006 to 252 in 2016. This significant growth of university level
institutions has taken place in India in recent years and in this uprise private sector has played a
significant role.
2.2 GROWTH OF COLLEGES
There has been a significant increase in the number of degree level colleges in the country from
700 at the time of independence to 40,760 in 2015 (Table 3).
Table 3. The growth of Undergraduate Colleges in India
Year Total Number of Colleges

1950 700

1991 7,346

2005 17,625

2011 32,964

2012 35,539

2015 40,760

Source: UGC (2011a), UGC (2012) and UGC (2015)

The rapid increase in the number of colleges in recent years is due to the large-scale establishment
of private colleges in all parts of the country.
2.3 HIGHER EDUCATION PARTICIPATION IN INDIA
Gross Enrollment Ratio (GER) generally measures the higher education participation in higher
education. GER measures the access level by taking the ratio of persons in all age groups enrolled in
various educational programmes to the total population in age group of 18 to 23 years. The analysis of
GER in higher education in India over years revealed that from 0.40 percent in 1950-51 reached a level
of 6 percent in 1989-90 (Table 4).
Table 4. Gross Enrollment Ratio in Higher Education in India (various years)
Year GER

1950 - 1951 0.40%

1989 - 1990 6.0%

1999 – 2000 10.0%

2009 – 2010 15.0%

2012 – 2013 19.4%

2014 – 2015 23.6%

Source: GOI (2013b), GOI (2013d) and GOI (2015)

This reached the level of 10 percent in 1999-2000 India moved from an elite system of higher
education to a mass system when it crossed the threshold of 15 percent in 2009-2010 The reports of All
India Survey of Higher Education (AISHE) have placed the GER figure at 19.4 percent in 2012-13 and
at 23.6 percent in 2014-15. The Government of India has set the target of increasing the GER to 30
percent by 2020.
The figures of GER in higher education in India referred to above are quite encouraging. However,
when these figures of GER are compared with the figures on GER of developed countries, it emerges
 6 | Sunita Sharma Lingual (Vol. 10, No.1, 2018)

that despite the considerable expansion in higher education, India’s GER is far below than the other
countries.
Table 5. Gross Enrollment Ratio in Higher Education of Select Countries
Select Countries GER in Higher Education

Brazil 34%

China 34%

Russia 77%

Argentina 68%

USA 83%

World 29%

Source: GOI (2013 b)

The GER of the USA at 83 percent is far ahead of India. The world average is 29 percent which is
also above India.
2.4 CELEBRATING THE ENTRY OF PRIVATE UNIVERSITIES IN INDIAN HIGHER EDUCATION
An unprecedented growth of private universities has been a marked feature of expansion of Indian
higher education in recent years (refer Fig. 1)
Fig. 1. The growth of Private Universities in India

Source: UGC (2012), UGC (2015) and UGC (2016)

In India 33% (252/777) of universities are in private sector, with emergence of private equity in
Indian higher education, there is a changing dynamics with reference to Governance, design and
development of the curriculum, technology-driven academic delivery process, development of the
intellectual capital, institutional v/s knowledge branding and pricing strategy. In the era of changing
science of learning, India is attracting the world’s attention.

III RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

3.1 THE ASIAN EXPERIENCE
The four native English-speaking countries – US, UK, Canada and Australia are the preferred
destinations of higher education. However, the major competition is now coming from Asian countries
like China, Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong, which have done exceedingly well in improving their
quality internally as well as globalizing their higher education to attract more international students.
Today, more and more students from third world countries are able to afford studies in these Asian
countries.
 Globalizing Higher Education in India: A Step Towards Multiculturalism - A Review |7

Singapore: It is among the first Asian countries, to start education – hub trend in 2 002, by
launching, the ‘Global School house’ initiative, with a goal to have 150,000 international students in
Singapore by 2015.
As per the QS World University ranking 2015/16 (QS, 2015), Singapore’s National University of
Singapore and Nanyang Technological University have a world ranking of 12th and 13th position,
respectively. In addition, Singapore has 11 foreign university campuses and numerous joint degree
programmes with prestigious international institutions, many of which have been lured with generous
government loans many consider Singapore as the Boston of Asia (Clark, 2015).
The quality of vocational and technical education in Singapore is among the best in the world and
a role model for countries aspiring to become education hubs. One of the major challenges facing
Singapore is the rising cost of living, thereby creating new opportunities for India.
3.1.1 MALAYSIA
The Malaysian government’s decision in the mid-1990s, to ease regulations regarding the setting
up of private higher education institutions in the country contributed significantly to the growing appeal
of Malaysia as an education hub for foreign students, and by the year 2020, the Malaysian Ministry of
Higher Education targets to have at least 200, 000 international students in higher education institutions
in the country.
Malaysia has largely attracted international students through the establishment of branch campuses
of British and Australian universities. In order to give competition to Singapore, Malaysia has located its
350 acre education campus called Educity, which is home to six international universities, close to the
Singapore border. Also, a private initiative is the Kuala Lampur Education City (KLEC) which was
launched by the government in 2007 as a 15 to 20 year project (Clark, 2015).
3.1.2 TAIWAN
To target students from Mainland China and Southeast Asia in particular, Taiwan began its
internationalization of university campuses in 2011. The Taiwanese governments “study in Taiwan”
programme attracts international students by offering programmes in English scholarships for Chinese-
language courses, relaxed work visa for pass-outs and engages staff for teaching the Chinese Language
in Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Korea, Mongolia, Indonesia, and India. Most of the foreign institutions
offer degrees and professional programs in collaboration with local institutions. The government
estimates to attract 160,000 foreign students from Chinese speaking countries by 2020. Taiwan has also
become a popular destination for training academicians particularly from countries like India, Thailand,
Indonesia and Vietnam (Clark, 2015).
3.1.3 HONG KONG
Enjoying the benefits of being a gateway to Mainland China, Hong Kong enjoys the benefits to
Mainland China, Hong Kong enjoys the benefits of an English speaking population and world-class
institutions. Beginning its efforts in making Hong Kong an international hub in 2008, foreign students
are allowed to stay after graduation to look for work.
With a US $160 million funds, Hong Kong offers scholarships, Ph.D. fellowships, and encourages
foreign universities to set up campuses in the territory. The major challenge Hong Kong faces is lack of
student accommodation and the high cost of living. The Hong Kong University and Science and
Technology (HKUST) and University of Hong Kong (HKU) ranked at 28th and 30th position according
to the QS World University Ranking 2015/16 (Clark 2016).
3.1.4 CHINA
China has progressed from having the highest number of students to being a major destination for
international students. China offers comparatively cheaper options that allow international students to
access world class education without having to empty their pockets. Nearly 25 Chinese Universities
made it to the QS World Universities ranking with four institutions, Tsinghua, Peking, Fudan and
Shanghai Jiao Tong University, making it in the top 100 universities of the world in the QS World
University ranking 2015/16. The rising economic and political importance of China has created an
upsurge in understanding China. It aims at targeting 500,000 international students by 2020. China
attracts international students keen to learn Chinese language and establishment of so-called split
campus programmes in which the first part of the course takes place at a local Chinese university with
subsequent study taking place at a foreign partner institution (Clark 2015).
 8 | Sunita Sharma Lingual (Vol. 10, No.1, 2018)

3.1.5 INDIA
The government has drawn up a scheme to invite over 200 academicians from global universities
to teach in India starting November 2015 (“Smriti Irani’s HRD Ministry has come to agreement with
global scholars to teach in India” 2015) Under the new scheme called Global Initiative for Academics
Network (GIAN), the Ministry of Human Resource Development (HRD) has agreed with academics
from various countries to teach more than 200 short term courses in Indian universities starting
November, 2015. Harvard Business School academic Michael E Porter, addressed India’s top policy
makers as a part of Niti Aayog’s Lecture series on ‘Transforming India’ on May 25, 2017. (The
Economic Time, May 21, 2017). With these lectures, the Aayog aims to bring globally renowned policy-
makers, academics, expert and administrators to India for benefit of states & centre universities. The
Indian Government has selected 10 Indian higher education institutes which are among the top 500
institutes in global academic ranking, and is providing them with substantial finance, so as to leap
forward into the top 100 on global academic rankings it aims to achieve.
India has traditionally been seen as a country, that sends rather than receives international students,
but a growing number of students from elsewhere are now choosing to study in India. Indeed, the 2015
open doors. India is gradually emerging as a preferred destination for foreign students, particularly from
the South Asian region. More US students are choosing India as a place to gain credits – 4583, students
from the US travelled to India to study at Indian institutions for part of their course in 2014-15 (India
Spend, 2017).
Table 6. Number of Foreign Students in India
Year No. of Foreign Students

1999-2000 6,988

2010-2011 27,531

2011-2012 33,156

2013-2014 31,126

2014-2015 42,126

Source: All India Survey on Higher Education 2014-15.

In 2014-15 the foreign students in India have increased by 11,000. Nepal contributed the highest
percentage that is nearly 19 percent of the total foreign students, followed by, in descending order,
Bhutan, Iran, Afghanistan, Malaysia, Sudan and Iraq.
India’s higher education as ranked 24th in the world in the QS Higher Education System Strength
Rankings 2016, as is especially well-known for the quality of its education in engineering and
technology subject. A total of 23 top universities in India, feature in the QS University Ranking: Asia
2016, including nine in the top 100, University of Delhi (66th in QS University Ranking: Asia 2016), the
University of Calcutta (108th), the University of Mumbai (145th) and Banaras Hindu University
(155th).
3.2 SHARE OF THE GLOBAL EDUCATIONAL MARKET
International students play an important role in the higher education sector of many countries like
USA, UK, France, Australia, Germany, Russia, Canada, China, Singapore and Malaysia. They
contribute significant income to the university and revenue to the local economies via expenditure on
and off campus. The Institute of International Education estimates that by 2017, the middle class across
the world is projected to increase spending on education by nearly 50% from $4.4 trillion in 2012 to
$6.2 trillion. Thus the future growth in international students will come largely from developing and
emerging economies (Ortiz, 2015).
The economic impact of international students is not limited to the money spent by them on tuition
fees, living expenses, travel and recreation alone. According to the Association of International Educate
(NAFSA), three jobs are created in the US for every seven international students enrolled (Ortiz, 2015).
According to studies, the world will be short of 56.5 million work force by 2020 (Mc Kinsey
Global Institute, 2011). No wonder, global trade of higher educational services is growing. India has a
 Globalizing Higher Education in India: A Step Towards Multiculturalism - A Review |9

number of strengths including cost advantage and a good number of English speaking professionals.
India’s geographical location also makes it a viable and attractive destination for students, particularly
from Asia and Africa.
Higher education in India is very economical as compared to the rest of the world. Many students
unable to afford higher education in the west, choose to study in India. According to a report published
by HSBC in September 2014 (HSBC, 2014), India figures as the cheapest destination for an
international student to attend a university with a mere expenditure of USD 5,642 p.a. Australia was
ranked as the most expensive at USD 42,093. The study found that a student had to pay only USD 581
as university fee in India; whereas, living expenses in India were only USD 5,062, which is less than a
fifth of the cost in Australia (‘India ranked cheapest for international students: Study’, 2014).
3.3 INTERNATIONALIZATION LEADS TO MULTICULTURALISM
The Government Of India’s ‘Educate in India’ initiative is creating enormous economic
opportunities. Internationalization of higher education leading to multiculturalism; which has socio-
cultural and financial implications for the Indian economy, notably among them are:
i. Foreign Exchange Outflows: Allowing reputed foreign universities to set-up campuses in India, is giving
an alternative choice to Indian students wanting to study in universities abroad, to access the same
universities at home at a fraction of the cost overseas and save India’s precious foreign exchange outflow.
ii. Foreign Exchange Inflows: International students bring precious foreign exchange into the country,
which is a national priority.
iii. Attractive Economic Opportunity: International students play an important role in many countries like
USA, UK, France, Australia, Germany, Russia, Canada, China, Singapore and Malaysia as they contribute
significant income to the universities and revenue to the local economies via expenditure on and off
campus.
iv. Increased Business Revenue: International students are normally charged a higher fees and they increase
the revenue of institutions, in a way, subsidizing fee of domestic students.
v. Cultural Diversity & Globalization: Cultural diversity creates a more global environment, which benefits
all stakeholders (Fig 2).
Fig. 2. Internationalization of Higher Education Leads to Multiculturalism: Its impact on various Stakeholders
Students Faculty Institutions Industry Government
 access to foreign  more exposure  have to become competitive  availability of  precious foreign
universities at home especially to electronic to survive quality exchange into the
 access to desired library  will have to bring structural employees country will
universities at  will be reading and changes in the management locally increase revenue
home, at a fraction teaching wider topics. of the institutions  globally  strengthening
of the cost overseas  will get exposed to  will have more public private knowledgeable diplomatic and
 increase in self- faculty with partnerships to ensure major employees at geo-political ties
confidence international experience, quantity and quality upgrade cost effective with other
 leadership and this will improve quality  there will be demand for rates countries.
quantitative skills of education autonomy and increase in the  Indian students
 students developed  will increase self number of autonomous going abroad will
to be global citizens confidence in teaching institutions now study in India
 promotion of inter skills  will provide better saves precious
cultural awareness,  be more motivated to infrastructure and other foreign exchange
diversity and teach innovatively facilities (e.g. sports) to outflow
engagement among  the student evaluation students
students will be taken seriously  Higher fees from students will
and will work on it increase the revenue of the
 will become more institution
performance oriented

vi. Country Ties: International students strengthen diplomatic and geo-political ties with other countries.
vii. Quality Improvement: Competition from reputed foreign universities, improves the quality of higher
education institutions in India and thus makes our higher education sector more globally competitive. When
 10 | Sunita Sharma Lingual (Vol. 10, No.1, 2018)

the students actively engage with their international classmates, it enhances their self confidence, leadership
and quantitative skills.
viii. Economics Impact: According to a report released in October 2015 (‘Indian students 3rd in generating
London’s revenue” 2015). London had welcomed over 106,000 international students and created 37,000
jobs, according to the report by London & Partners. Chinese students contributed the highest by spending
£407 million. The US was second at a spending of £217 million. Indian students, the third highest in
London, spent £130 million, which alone amounted to creating and supporting 1,643 jobs. London pitched
itself as the biggest education hub of the world.

IV CONCLUSION
The higher education system in India has shown a massive increase in the number of institutions
both colleges and universities after independence leading to increase in a number of students enrolled in
the higher education institutions. This is evident from the GER which was less than one percent in 1950-
51 and at present it is above twenty percent.
One distinguishing feature of this expansion in higher education is the rise of the private sector.
The private sector is contributing towards improving accessibility to higher education by increasing the
number of seats in various courses & introducing new courses. India has traditionally been seen as a
country, that sends rather than receives international students, but 2015 open doors and, now students
from other countries are choosing to study in India. The internationalization of higher education, leads to
multiculturalism, which has socio-cultural and financial implications for the Indian economy.
It is expected to be a precursor to future research to understand, the higher education experience in
India from an international perspective, by conducting interviews of international students studying in
Indian higher education institutes.

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 HEDGES USED IN SCIENTIFIC EFL WRITINGS
Yogi Widiawati
State Polytechnic of Jakarta

yogiwidiawati@yahoo.com

Abstract

This small research aims to see how the use of hedges is used in academic EFL writing made by Indonesian
academicians. It was conducted based on the experience that for non-native English speaker like Indonesian, writing is
the tough work to do. L2 learners sometimes find difficulty to write for academic purposes or make claims. One of the
strategies that L2 learners do is by using hedging devices. The problem of this research is how effective hedges are used
to present findings cautiously with leaving room for readers to have their own interpretation. According to Levinson
(1987) with his theory of FTA (Face Treathening Act), those words mostly function as a tool for speakers or writers to
make them comfortable and save negative face. It means that the writers should choose the correct words to achieve the
communicative goal. The data is taken from 10 dissertations written in English. The method used is Decriptive-
Qualitative analysis. The study focuses on 2 kinds of hedging strategies proposed by Hyland (1996). They are writer-
oriented hedges and reader-oriented hedges. The first strategy consists of (1) passive voice, (2) dummy subjects, and (3)
abstract rhetors. The latter consists of (1) personal attribution and (2) conditionals. The results reveal that writer-oriented
hedges are the most frequent hedging device utilized by Indonesian researchers, such as: passive construction and
dummy subjects. The findings reveal that the use of passive constructions and modality (can, may, might, should) are
highly desireable by Indonesian researchers. It means that Indonesians like to let the data talk by themselves in order to
avoid a potential conflict and hence to maintain the harmony between writers and readers.
Keywords: Hedging devices, negative politeness, writing strategy

I INTRODUCTION
It is known that writing in foreign language for most Indonesian people is difficult. As EFL
learners, this will be a very tough job, especially when they have to write academic text or writing. As
members of a particular discourse community or researchers or writers, they wish to publish their works
or findings in international journal. To reach this goal, the use of hedges will be important. Hedges can
be used to conform to this academic writing (Banks, 1996).
It was Weinrich (1966) who was first introduced the word “hedge”. He called these devices as
“metalinguistic operators”. Few years later, Lakoff (1972) in his article entitled Hedges: A Study in
Meaning Criteria and the Logic of Fuzzy Concepts made this concept more popular and had the greatest
initial impact. Lakoff defined this concept as “words whose function is to make meanings fuzzier or less
fuzzy”. He said that “sort of” as an example of hedge. The following year, Fraser (1975) introduced the
hedged performative. He discussed hedged performative is based on the use of modality, such as: will,
can, must or semimodality like want to, would like to, and wish to.
Hedges are pragmatic features that the speakers or writers use to seek the assertions that they
make, toning down uncertain or potentially risky claims, emphasizing what they believe to be correct
and conveying appropriately collegial attitudes to listeners (Hyland, 1996). Myers also (1989) says that
hedges can be used to mitigate propositions. Hedges will help to reach “the optimal relevance” (Sperber
and Wilson, 2001) between speaker and listener or writer and reader. The writer should make some
choices in strategy and linguistic forms in order to adapt with his or her intention. Hedges are often
chosen to achieve the goal. According to Brown and Levinson, the definition of hedges is particles that
are used to mitigate propoisition become weak. Indonesian people are well known as friendly people and
have low-profile characters. Most of them can easily make friends with others, both local and foreign
people. They show intimacy and warmth to the sorrounding (Maryanto, 1998).
Furthermore, Brown and Levinson’s theory of politeness (1987) states an FTA is a violation of the
speakers’ or writers’ privacy and freedom of action, for which hedges provide a possible compensation.
Hence the negative politeness enables the speaker or writer to go on-record, but with the redress which
means that the speaker or writer makes an effort to minimize the imposition of his/her claims.
Hedges may also influence when writers write the text, especially the academic texts. This
argument is supported by Hyland (1996) who states that academic texts are full of hedges. Hedges
(particles, lexical, and clausal hedges) are pragmatic markers that attenuate or weaken claims. Academic
Texts or scientific texts are not only content-oriented and informative but also seek to convince and
influence their audience. An increasing number of research studies on a variety of disciplines (for

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English Department, Faculty of Arts, Udayana University 12
 Hedges Used in Scientific EFL Writings | 13

example: Hyland, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2000; Salager-Meyer, 1991, 1994, 1998; Skelton. 1997; Meyer,
1997). Furthermore, Myers (1998) examined corpus of biology research articles.
In scientific writing, vagueness can be seen as motivating factor for the use of hedges. In case of
exact data is missing or if precise information is irrelevant in prelimenary results. Hedges will protect
writers from false statements by indicating either lack of commitment of to the truth value of
propositions or a desire not to express that commitment categorally. In contrast, Salager-Meyer (1994,
151) says that hedges are “ways of being more precise in reporting results”. She adds that by doing this
way the credibility of a statement may be increased.
Along with the argument of being vague, Joanna Channel (1994) states that the language system
permits speakers to produce utterances without having decided whether certain facts are “excluded or
allowed by” them. Hedges, however, are sometimes required to capture the probabilistic nature of reality
and the limits of statements (Toulmin, 2013). In fact, the use of hedges is typical of professional writing
to make absolute statements more accurate (Hyland, 1998). Moreover hedges play critical role in
academics’ presentations of their own work (Hyland, 1998).
Hedging is an important interactional strategy which is used in communication. This strategy can
make the communication go smoothly. Therefore, to become an effective communicator, speaker should
be able know how and when using hedging devices in different process of communication. Hedging
devices here mean that verbal propositions which are employed by participants of communication (both
speaker and hearer) to prevent the conflict, to stay away from being blunt, weaken or strengthen the
illocutionary force and protect the face (Brown and Levinson 1987; Stenstorm 1994, Salager-Meyer
1994).
Leech (1983) proposes the six maxims of Politeness Principle (PP). Those are tact, generosity,
approbation, modesty, agreement, and sympathy. The tact maxim regulates the operation of the directive
speech acts and addresses the dominant type of politeness which can be measured on the cost-benefit
scale, the more costly an action, the less polite it is. Brown and Levinson (1987) claimed that in any
social interaction, participants devote much of their time to face-work. They argue that “face” is
something which concerns human beings universally and it is divided into negative face and positive
face. The first one deals with negative politeness strategy which gives the freedom of individual action
and a desire to be unimpeded. Another words, it is called strategies of independence or deference
politeness strategy. Meanwhile the positive face deals with positive politeness strategy which attempt to
save hearer’s face. This strategy is also called strategy of involvement or solidarity politeness strategy.
Look at this example: I really sort of think/hope/wonder.... (Brown and Levinson, 1987: 116).
Being polite means to be considerate conversational partner. In terms of negative politeness, being
polite means to choose the right words to express communicative message which might be felt as face-
threatening for the addressee such as refusal, criticism or claim in order to prevent conflicts. In written
communication, researchers present their own findings or claims by using pragmatics markers. Those
markers are called hedges. Hedging devices are the critical tool to prevent potential arguments and save
FTA. Look at the example: close the window if you can (Brown and Levinson, 1987:162). So by using
“if”, this sentence of command can be weakened or hedged.

II MATERIALS AND METHODS

Hedging devices are mostly used to mitigate propositions or claims. As Hyland (1996) states in his
article Nurturing Hedges in the ESP Curriculum: “Hedges therefore have an important role in a form of
discourse characterised by uncertainty and frequent reinterpretation of how natural phenomena is
understood” (Hyland, 1996:478). Furthermore he adds that academic discourse involves interpretative
statements because cognition is variably hedged, writers offering an assessment of the referential they
provide. Rather than being factual and impersonal in order to alert readers to writers’ opinion.
In addition to it, hedges are used to prevent the conflicts in order to avoid the humiliation of both
speakers and hearer or writers and readers. In the context of academic writing, authors tend to mitigate
the force of their scientific claims by means of hedging devices in order to reduce the risk of opposition
and minimise the face threatening acts (FTA) that are involved in making claims. This argument goes
along with Hyland who says that one of the functions of using hedges is to allow writers to anticipate
possible negative consequences of being wrong (Hyland, 1996:479). Academics seek agreement for the
strongest claims they can for their evidence, as this is how they gain their academic credibility, but they
also need to cover themselves againts the embarrassment of categorical commitment to statements that
later may be shown to be inaccurate. Hedges also help writers to develop and maintain relationship with
the reader, addressing affective expectations in gaining acceptance for claims. Altough academic
 14 | Yogi Widiawati Lingual (Vol. 10, No.1, 2018)

writings try to persuade and convince the readers, they can be rejected. So the writers should use the
strategy of preventing it by utilizing the hedges.
Following the Hyland’s theories about hedges seen from the relationship between writers and
readers, I made investigations on Writer-oriented Hedges and Reader-oriented Hedges. I am interested
in investigating the relationship between writers and readers because this is not much explored by
researchers, especially hedges made by L2 learners in academic writings. The Writer-oriented hedges is
a kind of strategy which facilitates the communicative strategy in which a writer can get his readers to
see the real world on his side. The writers persuade readers to accept his/her claims by seeing the
evidence through three subcategories: (1) Passive Voice. (2) Abstract rhetors, and (3) dummy subjects
(Hyland, 1996). Meanwhile Reader-oriented Hedges try to involve the readers on writers’ claims to
minimize the uncertainty from the readers which might happen. The subcategories belong to this are (1)
Personal Attribution and (2) Conditionals.
The corpora for this data were taken from 5 dissertations written in English and made by
Indonesian student writers who were studying at Faculty of English Applied Science in one of
prominent private universities in Indonesia.
The research methodology used is the descriptive qualitative. I employ this method because my
intention was to obtain insights as to the strategies utilized by post graduate student writers of English
Applied Linguistics. I studied a relatively small number of dissertations. This is in accordance with the
main characteristics and spirit of the qualitative approach which says that what stands out in a qualitative
study is the depth and breadth of the analysis, not the number of the subjects studied. A qualitative study
has nothing to do with statistical significance; rather it seeks to pursue a profound understanding on a
particular phenomenon by utilizing all resources, data, observation and even subjective interpretation.
2.1 CORPUS SELECTION
In this study, I chose the Discussion Section to be analyzed for two reasons:
a) This section contains writers’ claims of their researches;
b) This section is most important and crucial part of their dissertations.
2.2 TECHNIQUES OF DATA COLLECTION
In collecting data, I listed all proposotions found in the Discussion Sections which contain hedges.
Then investigating those hedges and put them according to the subcategories being determined. This
section includes the contexts, the graphs, the tables and the interpretations of the results.
This study used both theoretical and empirical perspectives to make sense of what happened, as
well as, the context that caused it to happen. After that I interpreted the data gained to seek answers for
research questions.
The steps that were undertaken were:
a) Hedges were identified by words, phrases and clauses based on the indicators provided by Hyland
(1998). Those were found in Result and Discussion Section in every dissertation;
b) They were classified into the subcategory being determined;
c) Those hedged units were put in the tables to show how they are distributed in percentages. By
calculating their frequency of hedges, it would be easy to look at the tendencies of the strategy of
hedges;
d) Finally I interpreted the data in relation to the strategy being used.

III RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

For this study, I investigated the section of Results and Discussions in 5 (five) English
dissertations made by student writers who were studying in the Faculty of English Applied Linguistics. I
chose the names randomly but I prefered to pick them based on the year when these dissertations were
made which ranged from 2011-2013. The names are kept in initials in order to make them unreveal from
the public. The data is as follows:
 Hedges Used in Scientific EFL Writings | 15

Table 1. Topic Selections

No Writers Titles of Dissertations Page Numbers of

numbers of hedged units in
(Initials) Result & Result &
Discussion Discussion Section
Section

1 CH The Production and Recognition of English 124 137

Word Stress: An Auditory Word Priming
Study

2 YY Verbal Communication of Emotions: A case 122 142

Study of Obama-McCain Presidential
Debates

3 IID EFL Learners’ Metaphor Competence 89 101

English Proficiency, English Exposure and
Learning Style

4 HT English Collocational Mismatches in Second 178 191

Language Writing

5 SS The Construction of Self in Academic 84 114

Writing: A Qualitative Case Study of Three
Indonesian Undergraduate Student Writers

I was interested in investigating the Result and Discussion Section because this section is
important part of the dissertation because this is the part where the student writers made their claims as
the results of their researches. When making claims, student writers try to persuade readers who come
from their academic community. In scientific writing, hedges are effective and propositional functions
work in rhetorical partnership to persuade readers to accept knowledge claims (Myers, 1985).
3.1 RESULT
Table 2. Realisation of Hedges
No. Initial Writer Oriented Reader Oriented Others

1 CH PV : 33.23 % PA : 8.54% Others:

DS : 12.34% C : 2.35% 19.33%

AR : 24.21%

2 YY PV : 38.68% PA : 10.37% Others:

DS : 19.54% C : 1.56% 17.55%

AR : 12.30%

3 IID PV : 36.25% PA : 6.35% Others:

DS : 18.64% C : 1.75% 22.56%

AR : 14.45%
 16 | Yogi Widiawati Lingual (Vol. 10, No.1, 2018)

4 HT PV : 40.25% PA : 4.92% Others:

DS : 16.56% C : 1.55% 14.4%

AR : 21.32%

5 SS PV : 28.35% PA : 17.65% Others:

DS : 19.68% C : 2.24% 16.54%

AR :15.54%

Notes:
- PV : Passive Voice
- DS : Dummy Subjects
- AR : Abstract Rhetors
- PA : Personal Attribution
-C : Conditionals
3.2 ANALYSIS
3.2.1 WRITER-ORIENTED HEDGES
From the results gained, it can be seen that the student writers often use passive constructions
(PV). This is because they prevent of being blamed of making errors in presenting their claims (Brown
and Levinson, 1987:194). Look at the sentences below:
1) Verbal communication can be expressed literally (YY, p.51)
2) The results are summarized in the following table (CH, p. 135)
3) Metaphors were produced most bylow English proficiency (IID, p.103)
From the examples above, the absence of agency (Hyland, 1996b, 444) is the central to the
charateristics of Writer-oriented Hedges. Those sentences (1, 2, and 3) are the first subcategory of this
strategy. In connection with agency, as an agent in the process of producing a piece of scientific
knowledge, a scientific writer is seeking to place discoveries in wider community.
Meanwhile the second subcategory of this strategy is dummy subject (DS). For grammarian, like
Quirk et al (1985), dummy subjects are considered to be expletive. This means that “it” in English is
regarded as “empty” subject. Look at the sentences below:
4) It seemed that learners from the high English proficiency were more serious (IID, p.162)
5) it can be seen that their vision and mission were presented in series of words (HT, p. 112)
“it” used as dummy subject and it is the most neutral of the pronouns and it is thought to be an
“impersonal subject”. Dummy subject ‘it’ can be used with other reporting verbs like “seem” like the
example in no 4 (Sinclair, 1990:331).
The last subcategory in this strategy is abstract rhetors (AR). Scientific writing can perhaps be
used to challenge the theory of classical rhetoric.Within classical rhetoric; humans are recognised as the
only actors that can speak (Myers, 1996:22). The term ‘rhetor’ can simply defined as an orator and
therefore has been understood as a practitioner of the art of using language skillfully for persuasion.
However, scientific writings can now be used to imagine a rhetorical situation in which everything is a
possible rhetor, including non-humans, such as: a piece of a research. Look at these sentences below:
6) The table above shows that words with final stress produced much less correct (CH, p.154)
7) The results showed that an average learners knew 71% of the relationship (IID, p. 104)
Usually humans are subjects of the various verbs of saying. But, in scientific writings humans are
not always the subjects of the actions that people are talking about. The data that the researchers found
can be said to be stating an argument. These can be regarded as an explanation.
 Hedges Used in Scientific EFL Writings | 17

3.2.2 READER-ORIENTED HEDGES

The second strategy is Reader-oriented Hedges which tries to involve the readers in his/her claims.
These hedges will help a scientific writer make sure that their research is reliable. Personal Attributions
(PA) are the substrategy that a writer uses not only to convey information but also professional attitude
about the reader and his/her negotiation of knowledge claims (Hyland, 1996b:446). Personal perspective
can be attributed to scientific claims. Look at the following sentences:
8) We can infer that the students will get benefit more from repetition (CH, p. 143).
9) Our interaction partner expects that we will feel this way (YY, 142).
The second subcategory of this strategy is conditional (C). Alternative opinions such as
condtionals are commonly used as personal views. Alternative conditionals are widely discussed by the
grammarian Quirk et al (1985) who argues that they may be used for open or hypothetical conditions. In
one hand, open condtionals are neutral; they leave unresolved the question of nonfulfillment of the
condition. On the other hand, a hypothetical condition conveys the writer’s belief that the condition will
not be fulfilled and hence the probable or certain falsity of the proposition. Look at the claims below:
10) If we understand the words’ meaning, we can see the speaker’s feeling (YY, p.151).
11) The result shows that if 20 items were used, then realibility of the instrument would be low (IID,
p. 87).

IV CONCLUSION
Hedging devices are often utilized by Indonesian student writers because these help them
conceptualise the claims that they are going to convey. Moreover, these devices will assist the student
writer to communicate with the readers and their academic community, because the claims will be
accepted by the readers if the writers successfully communicate it with the readers. It can be said that
hedges are communicative tools to negotiate with the potential readers. A claim can be presented by
using PV, DS and AR in which these belong to writer-oriented hedges. Meanwhile reader-oriented
hedges give the maximum degree of visibility of the writer. The writer tries to develop the relationship
with his/her reader. Reader-oriented hedges make the content of the claim more tentative. In conclusion,
the use of Writer-oriented hedges is more preferable because the empirical evidence is able to explain
and describe what the findings of the research are. So the student writers do not need to say much about
it.
The findings of the study have important implications to the study of academic writing as one of
the compulsory courses taught in Indonesian universities where English subject is still paid small
intention. In universities, English subject is only minor subject in non-English Department. It has been
indicated that writers’ awareness of the use of hedging writing is essential because the ability to use
hedging devices appropriately helps writers craft their statements to produce credible, rational, and
convincing claims.
Hedging is also important to maintain the writers’ academic credibility. Furthermore hedging will
help writers protect their reputation as scholars and minimize the damage which may arise. In science,
writers may hedge because of small samples, preliminary results, uncertain evidence or imperfect
measuring techniques (Hyland, 1996:479).

REFERENCES
Brown, Penelope and Steven C. Levinson, 1987. Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Channell, Joanna. 1994. Vague Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cherry, Roger D. 1988. Politeness in Written Persuasion. Journal of Pragmatics 12/1:63-81
Fraser, Bruce, 1975. Hedged Performative. In Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan (eds), Syntax and
Semantics 3: Speech Acts. New York: Academy Press: 187-210
_________ ,1980. Conversational Mitigation. Journal of Pragmatics 4/4: 341-350.
_________ , 1990. Perspective in Politeness. Journal of Pragmatics 14/2: 219-239.
Holmes, Janet. 1984a. Modifying Ilocutionary Force. Journal of Pragmatics 8/3: 345-365
__________ , 1984b. “Hedging Your Bets and Sitting on the Fence: Some Evidence for Hedges as
Support structure” The Relo 24/3: 47-62
Hubbler, Axel. 1983. Understatement and Hedges in English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing
Company.
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Hyland, Ken. 1996a. Talking to the Academy: Forms of Hedging in Scientific Research Articles. Written
Communication 13/2: 251-281.
________ , 1996b. “Writing without Conviction? Hedging in Science Research Articles” Applied
Linguistics 17/4: 433-454.
Johnson, B. and Christensen, L. 2008. Educational Research: Qualitative, Quantitative and Mixed
Approaches. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publication.
Lakoff, George. 1972. The Pragmatics of Modality. Chicago Linguistics Papers 8: 229-246.
__________ , 1973. The Logic of Politeness: or, Minding Your p’s and q’s. Papers from Regional
Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society 9.
Leech, Geoffrey N. 1983. Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.
Lyons, John. 1995. Linguistic Semantics: An Introductions. London: Longman
Maryanto. 1998. Hedging Devices in English and Indonesian Scientific Writings: Towards A
Sociopragmatic Study. Thesis. Jakarta: Atmajaya University
Myers, 1985. The Pragmatics of Politeness in Scientific Articles. Applied Linguistic 10/1: 1-35
Nikula, T. 1997. Interlanguage View on Hedging. In Markannen R and H.Schoder (eds). Hedging and
Discourse: Approaches to the analysis of a Pragmatic Phenomenon in Academic Texts. Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter. 188-207
Skelton, John. 1988. The Care and Maintenance of Hedges. English Language TeachingJournal 42/1:37-
48.
Sperber, Dan and Wilson, Deirdre. 1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition (2nd edition).
Blackwell: Oxford.
Prince, Ellen F., Joel Frader, and Charles Bosk. 1982. On Hedging in Physician Discourse. Proceeding
of the Second Annual Symposium on Language Studies: 83-96.
Thomas, Jenny A. 1983. Cross-Cultural Pragmatic Failure. Applied Linguistics. 4/2: 91-112.
 ENGLISH DEVELOPMENT AS A SECOND LANGUAGE IN RELATION
WITH TV EXPOSURE (A CASE STUDY OF YOUNG LEARNER)

N. M. Ayu Widiastuti, A. A. S. Shanti Sari D., S. A. Isnu Maharani

English Department, Faculty of Arts, Udayana University

ayufsb@gmail.com, sari_dewi@unud.ac.id, isnu_maharani@unud.ac.id

Abstract

The aims of this study are to know the role of young learner’s parents in choosing good and educating television program
for their child, and to describe the effects of TV exposure in their child’s English language development. A five-year-old
young learner who lives in Denpasar was observed in 2017. The data were collected by giving a questionnaire to the
young learner’s parents in order to get the description of the effects of the television programs to her language
development. As it is a following research of the previous research on English vocabulary acquisition, the results of the
observation of the young learner and the interview with her parents that have already been done are used to support the
analysis of this small research. The collected data were analysed descriptively based on approaches from Barr, et.al.
(2010), Christakis (2009), and March (2004) about English language acquisition and language development of young
children. The results show that the young learner’s parents have the important role in choosing good and educating
television program for her. It can be seen from the choices of cartoon movies as one of the television programs that is
educating as well as entertaining for a child in her age, the intensive accompaniment when she was watching the movies,
the limitation of television watching time, and also the parents’ assistance in order to help her understand the stories and
vocabulary meanings. It is true that good content, context, and the amount of daily TV viewing time as well as parental
assistance will be beneficial for the young learner’s second language development in informal learning situation. The
effectiveness of watching cartoon movies has led her to gain the positive second language development in her bilingual
condition, although English code-switching in Indonesian sentences sometimes occur.
Keywords: SLA, English, language development, TV exposure, cartoon movies

I INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND
Educating television programs may have positive effects on children’s language development
between the ages of two and five years. Close (2004:5) states that under the right conditions, children
between two and five years old may experience benefits from good-quality educational television
programs. Right conditions meant are related to good and educating television programs for children
that can encourage talk, parents accompanying, and also time limitation in television watching.
This study is in relation with the previous research about English Vocabulary Acquisition by A
Young Learner (Widiastuti, Dewi, and Maharani, 2017) that aims at finding out the English vocabulary
(as a second/foreign language) acquired by a young learner from cartoon movies and describing how she
understands the meanings. A five-year-old young learner, namely Vio, was observed and her parents
were interviewed in order to get the data. During the data collection there was an interesting fact of the
young learner, that she has had imagination and developed the stories in the movies she has watched into
a story telling. The story telling activity is supported by one of her hobbies that are watching cartoon
movies. From the previous research, Vio often watched five cartoon movies from television and
acquired more than seven vocabularies from a movie in the forms of noun, verb, adjective, adverb, and
also several phrases and sentences – though sometimes the sentences she acquired do not show the
correct structures. In order to understand the vocabulary meanings, she used referential strategy. Her
parents also play the important role in helping her to describe the vocabulary meanings by translating
them into Indonesian and explaining the difficult vocabulary she could not understand. Vio’s language
development from watching television programs is gained under the right conditions, as stated by Close
(2004) and that is in line with Hurlock’s (2000) statement that her intelligent and good discipline results
in having good development in acquiring vocabulary.
1.2 AIMS OF STUDY
Having the description that linguistic maturity of the young learner between ages two and five, the
educating television programs viewed in the appropriate amount of time, and the involvement of parents
affect Vio’s language development, and based on the background, this study has the aims at 1) knowing

Lingual: Journal of Language & Culture (Volume 10, No.1, May 2018)
English Department, Faculty of Arts, Udayana University 19
 20 | N. M. Ayu Widiastuti, A. A. S. Shanti Sari D., S. A. Isnu Maharani Lingual (Vol. 10, No.1, 2018)

Vio’s parents’ role in choosing good and educating television program for her; 2) describing the effects
of TV exposure in her English language development.

II MATERIALS AND METHODS

2.1 LITERATURE REVIEW
Imitation is one of the activities that often affects children’s language development in their early
age. Chomsky (2006) said that “human culture is geographically or environmentally determined, and
language development is nothing but imitation of the child’s surroundings”. Children acquire their
language through imitating vocabulary and utterances from parents, family, or surroundings.
Children’s language develops fast in certain age, and it is supported by the statement of Linebarger
and Walker (2005) that young children development starts continuously from birth until 5 years, namely
the sensitive period which is critical for language acquisition. In that period of time, children can
pronounce new vocabulary they hear and arrange simple sentences from the vocabulary they hear, even
though sometimes the sentence structure is not well organized.
Age, family, and environment are important factors in children language development, moreover,
recent research show that edutainment programs on television is another factor that can help children
acquire a language. Al-Harbi (2015) confirms two things in regards to language development; those are
1) that educational television programs for children become a resource and an alternative means of
instruction for children from low income families and children of immigrant families in order to know
the host culture and its language. This linguistic exposure offers at the least the building blocks of not
only the intonation of the language but also the passive vocabularies. 2) Language is a social
phenomenon and it is naturally used in social communicative settings. Children may develop their
linguistic skill from passive into active. Participation of parents in the interactive context is important to
help children develop their linguistic skill. Al-Harbi’s findings are related to the second language
acquisition where children can acquire other language (s) which is not their mother tongue from media,
and it means that it is possible for children to learn a foreign language through television programs.
2.2 METHODOLOGY
Teresa Violeta Umbas, a five-year-old girl and a young learner who lives in Denpasar, was
observed in 2017. She uses Indonesian as her first language with her parents and family at home and her
teachers and friends at school. She went to a kindergarten in Denpasar at the time when she was under
the observation. She usually watched cartoon movies accompanied by her parents in about 30 minutes
up to 2 hours per day.
The data were collected by giving a questionnaire to Vio’s parents in order to know whether her
parents are involved in choosing television programs for her, and to get the description of the effects of
the television programs to her language development. As it is a following research of the previous
research on English vocabulary acquisition, the results of the observation of Vio and the interview with
her parents that have already been done are used to support the analysis of this small research.
The collected data were analyzed descriptively based on the following approaches. First, Barr,
et.al. (2010) describe three important elements in children’s TV viewing, namely content, context, and
the amount of daily TV viewing time. Parents should have better understanding of media exposure;
therefore, they understand the benefit of the programs, and of parental assistance and interaction with
their children. Second, Christakis (2009) said that parents should know that media is a tool to convey
messages for people, and that they have to be selective in choosing appropriate television programs for
their children that have positive edutainment content and they have to limit the time for their children’s
TV watching. Third, March (2004) describes the effectiveness of television series for pre-school in a
study of Barney & Friends television program, taking the children aged 2 to 7 in a US day care center
who watched its same episodes over two weeks, and reports that “1) Nearly two thirds of the children
could report accurately what they had seen; 2) about 55% of the children also managed to mention some
characters; 3) sometimes children demonstrated evidence of new words in their vocabularies relating to
a specific episode”.
 English Development as a Second Language in Relation with TV Exposure (a Case Study of Young Learner) | 21

III RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

3.1 PARENTS’ ROLE IN CHOOSING THE TELEVISION PROGRAM
Vio’s favorite television program is cartoon movie. There are five cartoon movies she often
watched during the observation, namely 1) Sofia the First on Disney Junior Channel, 2) Max and Ruby,
3) Blaze and the Monster Machine, 4) Shimmer and Shine on Nick Junior Channel, and 5) Zoo Moo on
Zoo Moo Channel. Those are the kinds of edutainment movies for pre-school age. Even though the
movies have the subtitles in Indonesian, she preferred to watch the English version, because she was
interested and had the curiosity in knowing English. The same episodes of those cartoon movies are
played repeatedly in a season, so that, generally children already recognize the stories. She likes
watching those movies because they are specifically produced for children around Vio’s age, the
utterances spoken by the characters are not too fast and the vocabularies are often pronounced
repetitively (Widiastuti, Dewi, and Maharani, 2017).
The questionnaire result shows that in choosing the appropriate English cartoon movies for her
age, she was informed by her parents which ones were good or not for her. For example, if the programs
were not suitable like a monster cartoon which is more suitable for teenagers and it is only likely for
entertainment, without having education, her parents would explain in their way not to watch that kind
of program anymore. Vio’s parents often accompanied her while she was watching the movies, and it
was for helping her in understanding the stories and telling her the meanings of the English vocabularies
that she did not know. She is a typical of critical child who usually asks the reasons why she is not
allowed to do something, but often obeys her parents’ advice, so that it is not too difficult for her parents
to tell her the reasons, and that finally she receives her parents’ explanation. Besides, watching the
cartoons from television, the same titles of the cartoon can be watched from Youtube, and sometimes
when Vio went out with her parents, she watched the cartoons from Youtube, but her parents often
reminded her for watching only edutainment cartoons, mostly the same with the cartoons she often
watched on television.
3.2 EFFECTS OF VIO’S ENGLISH LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT
Vio shows the positive effects in her second language development through watching the English
cartoon movies mostly from television and sometimes from Youtube. She can acquire English as her
second language contextually, without memorizing the vocabulary and grammar, but self-understanding
in informal learning situation. As a result, her English pronunciation and intonation sound natural and
English native-like based on the influence of the native speakers in the cartoon movies. Moreover, she
can understand the positive messages from the stories, for example, friendship, motivation, and self-
confidence.
Surprisingly, from the second language acquisition through watching the cartoon movies, she also
shows further English language development, that is, she has been able to do story-telling from the
positive effects shown. She has creative ideas from seeing the interesting innovation from the cartoon
movie she watched, for example, she made a game adopted from the instructions shown in a movie
about a flight mission to an outer space, and told a story about it. She used the playing tools she has to
support her in the creative game-making and story-telling. Another example is that she drew pictures
and colored them by using her imagination from the princess story she watches – Sofia the First – then
told a story about it with the help of her parents in making the sentences. She keeps doing story telling
recently, and the following year, she has started telling a story in an event in front of people, and it is for
making her keep motivated, develop her English language skill and improve her self-confidence. Of
course, that happens with the full assistance and support from her parents.
Besides giving the effects of Vio’s English language development, it also brings about the effect of
code switching. Indonesian is her first language that is acquired in the natural processes from her
parents, family, teachers, and environment where she lives, and English is her second language that is
acquired from the subconscious situation and in informal language learning from watching English
cartoon movies with parents’ assistance and accompaniment. This makes her to be a bilingual of
Indonesian and English. Vio’s parents said that she sometimes mixed the Indonesian sentences with
English lexicon. This is considered as the usual effect of a bilingual person that the code switching
cannot be avoided.
 22 | N. M. Ayu Widiastuti, A. A. S. Shanti Sari D., S. A. Isnu Maharani Lingual (Vol. 10, No.1, 2018)

IV CONCLUSION
Vio’s parents have the important role in choosing good and educating television program for her. It
can be seen from the choices of cartoon movies as one of the television programs that is educating as
well as entertaining for a child in her age, the intensive accompaniment when she was watching the
movies, the limitation of television watching time, and also the parents’ assistance in order to help her
understand the stories and vocabulary meanings. It is true that good content, context, and the amount of
daily TV viewing time as well as parental assistance will be beneficial for Vio’s second language
development in informal learning situation. The effectiveness of watching cartoon movies has led Vio to
gain the positive second language development in her bilingual condition, although, there sometimes
exists English code-switching in Indonesian sentences.
This research was funded by the LPPM Udayana University 2017. On this opportunity, we would
like to express the gratitude to the Rector of Udayana University, the Head of Research and Community
Service Udayana University, Dean of Faculty of Arts Udayana University. The last but not least, we
would like to thank Teresa Violeta Umbas and her parents for the help and cooperation during the
observation.

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Developmental Psychology, 27(1), 47-69. http://dx.doi.org/10.1348/026151008X400445
Linebarger D, Walker D. (2005). Infants’ and toddlers’ television viewing and language outcomes.
AmBehavSci 2005, 48(5):624–645. Zoromba, Mohamed Ali, 2015 Relationship between
Language Development and Watching TV among Ifants and Toddlers (A Conference Paper).
Marsh, Jackie (2004). The techno-literacy practices of young children, Journal of Early Childhood
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Widiastuti, N.M.A., Dewi, A.A.S.S., Maharani, S.A.I. (2017). Pemerolehan Kosa Kata Bahasa Inggris
Melalui Program Televisi: Studi Kasus Anak Usia Dini (a research grant, awarded by Udayana
University 2017). A Paper presented on National Seminar on Science and Technology
(Senastek) 2017, held by Udayana University.
 LEXICAL RICHNESS OF THE EXPOSITORY WRITING IN INDONESIAN
BY SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

Fara Wahyu Astridya

Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Humanity, Airlangga University

farawahyuastridya@yahoo.com

Abstract

Learning a foreign language is often related to knowing the words which called lexical richness. This study investigates
the lexical richness in senior high school. The data was taken from the students’ writing on expository essay. Writing an
expository essay is a challenge for students where they should be able to write based on a given theme using a varied
vocabulary. The students will be capable of making a good writing. The students are gathered from three grades that
consist of 30 students in each grades. The total amount of the students will be measured by some types of lexical
richness; lexical density, lexical sophistication, and lexical variation. After investigation the results showed a significant
increase in each class, starting from grade 10 to grade 12. According to all those three measurements, grade 12 is the
highest number among others and it concludes that students in grade 12 is the most prepared and have the richest lexical
between grade 10 and 11.
Keywords: Language, Lexical Richness, English Language Teaching (ELT).

I INTRODUCTION
Learning a foreign language is often related to knowing the words and the sentences. The
knowledge of words is called lexical richness. Kyle & Crossley (2016) stated that lexical richness is the
measurement of how rich the students’ have in writing and composing the words or lexical in a good
essay. In relation to the occurrences of lexical richness, Djiwandono (2016) asserted that these
occurrences were majorly triggered by the second language use that can be further acknowledged from
its sophistication and L2 learner’s productive vocabulary. Moreover, the occurrences of lexical richness
were majorly analysed in the field of applied linguistics. In this study, the wide range of tests were
utilised to measure the lexical use in children and ESL learners.
Laufer & Nation (1995) developed a measurement which is specifically designed to evaluate the
student’s lexical proficiency level by conducting some comparison in terms of their lexical richness and
external reference point. Among the measurement test that were discovered by many scholars, a type-
token ratio (TTR) test gained its popularity due to its insight in evaluating the students’ lexical language
proficiency level. Koizumi & In’nami (2012) emphasises that the statistical analysis of TTR can be only
further calculated based on the length of the texts that are used as the data. As stated previously, the
utilization of lexical richness measurement strives towards the assessment of the students’ lexical
proficiency level by comparing their lexical richness with an external reference point.
It should be noted that in the analysis of lexical richness, the text needs to be transcribed and
formatted in advance for easy processing of data (Daller, 2010). Gharibi & Boers (2017) said that by
using lexical richness, researchers can identify the weaknesses and advantages of the object of the
research. It can also make it easier to calculate the lexical property that is controlled by a person. The
use of lexicon as a research object is based on the asumsion that every person would need good words to
write a whole good sentence.. Word selection required vocabulary richness so that later there is no
repetition of words in each sentence because it will affect the calculation of lexical richness (Caselli,
Caselli, & Goldberg, 2016; Gharibi & Boers, 2017; Suggate & Stoeger, 2017).
The use of lexical richness is very useful in calculating or measuring in large numbers of data to
simplify the collection of the data such as collecting some data from high school students as an ESL
learner. Lexical richness analysis can only be done through the use of some measurement tools in order
to analyse the raw materials or data. Laufer & Nation (1995) classify the lexical richness measurement
tools into four distinctive types that were majorly utilised as the effective tools in measuring the
description of the productive lexicon such as Lexical Originality (LO), Lexical Density (LD), Lexical
Sophistication (LS), and Lexical Variation (LV). Lexical richness provides some options of techniques
to researchers who want to collect the data in many ways, such as lexical originality, lexical density,
lexical diversity and lexical sophistication. Those terms are also having each tool to determine the
lexical richness on each student’s writing knowledge.

Lingual: Journal of Language & Culture (Volume 10, No.1, May 2018)
English Department, Faculty of Arts, Udayana University 23
 24 | Fara Wahyu Astridya Lingual (Vol. 10, No.1, 2018)

Lexical richness measures can be used to compare students’ writing. Some previous studies
discussed about non-native speaker (NNS) and native-speaker (NS) as also mentioned by Lu & Ai
(2015). They compared among writers with diverse L1 backgrounds in college-level English writing.
They found out that there are significant differences between EFL learners who were grouped and those
who were not grouped by their L1 backgrounds with NNS and NS. Unlike previous studies that more
often compare between NNS and NS, the current study more focused on NNS. Therefore, the researcher
choosed Indonesian EFL senior high school students to perceive the lexical richness level based on their
writing.
Basically, the measurement of lexical richness strives towards the calculation of how the spoken or
written text contains various distinctive words that are used in text that is utilised as the data. Gregori-
Signes & Clavel-Arroitia (2015) and Hanafiah & Yusuf (2016) further formulate four fundamental
aspects in measuring the lexical richness such as Lexical Originality (LO) that concerns in calculating
the words’ proportion that is utilised by only one learner in a group, Lexical Density (LD) which
examines the lexical words’ proportion in the data, Lexical Variation (LV) which strives to calculate the
occurrences of various distinctive lexical words that appeared in the data, and Lexical Sophistication
(LS) that focuses the analysis in calculating the use of advanced words in the data.
In relation to the definition of Lexical Originality (LO), Laufer & Nation (1995) define LO as the
measurement in lexical richness which focuses on the calculation between the learner’s performance
relative to the group and the written composition. In this case, there is a strong correlation between two
variables namely the group and the index. If the number of the group gradually changes, it will
automatically affect the index number respectively. This method provides information about the use of
individual vocabulary with respect to fellow creatures. Such statistics is useful but it cannot stand alone
as it varies across different compositions of an individual or it would change as the group changes. This
can only be determined by adding the unique words number associated with one learner in a group that
will be further divided by the calculation of the whole tokens. The umber of tokens is “the total number
of word forms, which means any word occurring more than once in the text is calculated each time it is
used”.
In Indonesia, the teaching of English as a foreign language seems to be on the crossroads due to
different curriculum implementation (Tantra, 2015). This means that every school in Indonesia has their
own way to teach English to the students. One of the lessons that must be taught in every curriculum in
Indonesia is writing. In high school, writing has been taught from grade 10 and continues until grade 12
so that the students are required to be able to write an essay in English. There are four main types of
writing; expository, descriptive, persuasive, and narrative. The researcher thinks that expository can be a
perfect type of writing due to the fact that expository writing is a kind of genre that trigger the learner to
present and support a point of view with several reasons and evidences (Manik & Simurat, 2015).
In relation to the investigation of lexical richness, there are several numbers of researches that
examine the occurrences of lexical richness in the ESL/EFL learners’ composition. First is a thesis by
Rebecca White from University of Wellington who conducted a study in examining the lexical richness
of the adolescent writing. White (2014) focused her study on how the vocabulary knowledge of the
adolescence develops through this period by further relating this factor to the subjects’ background that
were in New Zealand secondary schools. This study further utilised a mixed method. A quantative
approach was applied to determine the vocabulary use in authentic essays written by the subjects that
were further classfied into three different groups: 13-14, 15-16, and 17-18 that are ranged from eight
different schools in New Zealand. The implementation of qualitative approach is used to identify the
teacher’s perspectives on the impact of the secondary school bakground of the students in the
development of vocabulary. This study analysed the essays using three distinctive lexical richness
measurements such as Lexical Variation (LO), Lexical Sophistication (LS), and Lexical Density (LD).
The result of this study reveals that the time between years 11 and 13 (age 15-18) constitutes a period of
significant lexical development in the areas of lexical variation, lexical sophistication, and lexical
density. In contrast, the time between years 9 and 11 (age 13-16) only shows development in the area of
use of lower-frequency words (beyond the first 3,000 words of English).
Second thesis by Pritomo (2012), he examined the lexical richness in teacher talk of a native and
non-native English teacher in oral production in teaching English. The result revealed that 28% of the
occurrences of lexical richness were derived from the teacher’s oral production which further
categorized as fair where the occurrences of lexical richness in the teacher’s written production also
yielded the total number of occurrences as same as the teacher’s oral production. Another study was
conducted by Lu (2012) who analysed the relationship of lexical richness to the quality of ESL learners’.
 Lexical Richness of the Expository Writing in Indonesian by Senior High School Students | 25

He identifies the measurements which strongly correlate to the quality of ESL learners’ oral narrative,
and also to understand the correlation between these measurements. In his research, he provides ESL
teachers and researchers with a robust tool to assess the lexical richness of ESL language data samples
which may be effectively used as indices of the quality of ESL learners’ speaking performance.
Based on the explanation and some previous studies above, this study has a totally different
subject. The previous studies concern more on the lexical richness and syntactic complexity on NS
(native speaker). It is quite different with this current study because although the measuring instruments
are the same, this study focuses more on EFL learners as non-native speakers in high school.
Nevertheless, the researcher will develop about how the implementation on using lexical richness in
applying on their writing. Therefore, the aim of this study is finding out the level of lexical richness in
students’ writing skill in making expository essay in Indonesian High School students.
In using lexical richness, each technique is useful in measuring the students’ proficiency of the
vocabulary in learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL). The aim of this study is focused on the
Lexical Richness of the Expository Writing in Senior high school students and the comparison between
those three levels in lexical richness.
Based on the previous studies, this present study has different tools in analysing the data. The
previous studies are more concern about the students’ proficiency level by identifying the writing texts.
Most of them are not using spesific tools to analyze the data. Here in the current study, the researcher
uses lexical richness as a measurement tool to identify the correlation between narrative and expository
essays written by EFL students. The reason the researcher retrieves data by comparing the narrative and
the expository since the narrative is considered more connected to everyday life, so that the students find
it easier to tell the story by using common words (Cummins & Quiroa, 2012). Therefore, the aim of this
study is finding out the lexical richness in students’ writing skill of narrative and expository writing by
Indonesian Senior High School students.

II MATERIALS AND METHOD

Lexical richness has four different types of tool to measure the data; they are lexical originality,
lexical diversity, lexical density and lexical sophistication. In this study, the researcher only use three
types of lexical richness, exclude lexical originality as explained in introduction. Since there are so
many steps to achieve the goals of this study, it needs an approach to guide how to reach the impeccable
research. It is very compatible for this study, since it uses lexical richness techniques in data retrieval.
Both techniques are using some tools to retrieve the data.
In this research, the respondents are high school students. The students are selected through a
selection held annually by selecting a rating with a minimum score of 35.00. The high school students
are proved capable in English as Foreign Language. The sample was based on three academic year level
groups representing three different stages of senior school education, the beginning, middle years and
final year of senior high school. The participants of the study are grade 10, 11 and 12 which in each
class has different number of students. All grades are divided into 13 classes which consist of 7 science
programs, 5 social programs and one language program. Each class has approximately 30 to 35 students
with total amount of all classes is around 100 students. The selected class is a class that represents each
class in the category that has high competency class among the others. In addition, in the selection of the
data students are asked to write an expository essay with a predetermined theme. Each student will be
assessed based on the results of their writing ability whether it meets the criteria of lexical richness. The
assessment is based on how rich the vocabulary they use in the sentences.
In collecting the data, the researcher applied two steps. First, the researcher started to choose the
class which has the highest rank among other classes. The last procedure, the researcher asked the
students to write an expository essay with a specified theme in a spesific time. Furthermore, the time
required to work on the essay is 90 minutes for 350 words according to what their teacher usually did
before. Those terms apply for all the classes from grade 10 to 12.
There are two ways that are followed by the researcher in examining data of the present study.
Firstly, the researcher analyzes the lexical richness which has three different ways of measuring the data;
lexical density, lexical sophistication and lexical variation. Analyze the lexical density is using Lexical
Complexity Analyser (LCA) that strives to calculate the ratio of content words to the total number of
words in students’ written texts. Next is lexical sophistication that measured using two ways of
measurement: mid- and low-frequency words also academic words. Mid- and low- frequency words are
measured by using Vocabprofiler while academic words is using Academic Word List (AWL) to
analyze the data. The last is type-token ratio (TTR) which is used to measure lexical variation. Secondly,
 26 | Fara Wahyu Astridya Lingual (Vol. 10, No.1, 2018)

the researcher compares the lexical richness in grade 10, 11 and 12 based on those three types of
measurements. Lastly, the researcher interprets the results based on all the measurements of lexical
richness.

III RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

In this section, the results and discussion are presented. After identifying and selecting the data
which found in students’ expository writing done by 95 students, it found out that there are a significant
increase based on the three measurements; lexical density, lexical sophistication, and lexical variation.
Those three types of lexical richness have their own way to measure the sample of data as mention
below.
The sample data obtained from students of each grade 10, 11, and 12. Below is a table with details
of words and types of words of each student’s essays.
Table 1. number of words from each grades
Grades

X XI XII

Token 8.370 9.765 9.943

Type 7.450 7.102 7.036

TTR 0.89 0.72 0.70

Token per type 1.12 1.37 1.41

Lexical Density 0.89 0.93 1.13

As seen in table 1, it showed that among the three levels, the 12th grade write with the most
number of words (tokens) which eventually led to the appearance of the most types among others. In
determining the token, the researcher uses the measurement by submitting the full of students’ essays. In
contrast, type is the total number of different words that occur in a text and it shows in the 10th grade.
The type token ratio (TTR) shows that 10th grade has the highest percentage among others. TTR is the
ratio obtained by dividing the type (number of different words) that occurs in text or speech with the
token (total word count). Token per type is calculated from the number of token and divided by the
number of type. High TTR shows high lexical variations while low TTR indicates otherwise. The result
shows that 12th grade also has the highest number since the number of words in the essay is the highest
of all. Means that grade 12 has the highest lexical variation among others.
TTR is also connected to lexical density which can be determined by how many words in the
students’ texts. After the findings, then the researcher separates the each of content words in each grade.
Based on the table above, grade 12 indicates that has the highest percentage and it implies that 12th
grade students write the essay in some variety of words. Selection of words used in text can also affect
the percentage of lexical density. As mentioned before, lexical density is determined by the content
words in the text. Various content words consist of verb, noun, adjective and adverb used in the text. As
more variety of content words used, the more likely it will affect the quality of the texts. By seperating
the each of content words, it can simplify the calculation of lexical density.
After finding the type token ratio of each essay from each grade, the researcher calculates based on
each type of lexical richness. Each type uses a calculation application, Lexical Complexity Analyzer
(LCA). By simply entering data from each essay of each student, later will appear the results of each
type as listed below.
 Lexical Richness of the Expository Writing in Indonesian by Senior High School Students | 27

Table 2. Comparison of Each Grade

X XI XII

Lexical Density 0.89 0.93 1.13

Lexical 0.15 0.26 0.32

Sophistication

Lexical Variation 0.59 0.53 0.51

After calculating the data of each text above, it indicates that in grade 10 lexical density shows as
the most frequent types compared to the others. Lexical density basically calculated from noun, verb,
and adverb of each text and then grouped into one. Then, summed and calculated the average per
sentences. The measurement focuses on the amount of content words such as nouns, lexical verbs,
adjectives and non-grammaticalized adverbs which is normally used in a text, while the function words
are included into the remaining words, which serve a grammatical purpose (Schmitt & Schmitt, 2013). It
also counts the percentage of lexical word present in a text divided by the total number of words.
Lexical words stands for noun, adjectives, verb and adverbs. Then, lexical density of a text can be
calculated by expressing the number of content carrying words in a text/sentence as a proportion of all
the words in the text/sentence (Bestgen, 2017). The short coming of this method is that it ignores
syntactic structure of composition and other cohesive devices present in a given composition.
Next is lexical sophistication which measured by looking for what text that has the academic
words and to determine low and high frequency, and it shows up that grade 10 has the lowest score. It is
possible since grade 10 has less knowledge of writing an essay. Lexical sophistication is calculated by
the proportion of low-frequency or advanced words in a text out of the total number of words (Milton,
2009). Lexical Sophistication, it is obtained by comparing the advanced level words used in the
composition with the total number of the words used in it. This method has a drawback. It is based on
the number of advanced words, which are relative to the exposure and learning. It means this is not a
reliable measure of productive vocabulary.
The last is lexical variation where it can be found by finding out the type token ration in each
essay. As explained before, type token ration is measured by dividing the number of words (token) by
the number of types. Grade 12 shows the lowest score and it can be concluded that student in grade 12
rarely repeating words in a sentence. This technique is quite similar with lexical density since both of
them are measuring about the content words in an essay, but lexical variation is focusing on the range of
different words used across a text, or in other terms, the extent to which repetition is lacking (White,
2014). It is measured by type/token ratio. If a composition has greater number of different words, it
would be a better composition. This method is only sensitive for different numbers of words but it does
not point out the quality of different words used in composition.

Figure 1. Comparison of Each Grade

From the chart above, it can be seen more clearly that the three types of lexical richness is a
significant increase from grade 10 to 12. Lexical density is the highest percentage among other types. It
could be due to the easy calculation. Basically to determine the lexical density of a text, we only need to
sort out between verbs, nouns, adverbs, and adjectives. After grouping each type of content words, the
author calculates using a tool called LCA. Without these tools, the data can actually be calculated
manually by simply adding up each content words and then dividing it by the total number of words in a
text. The disadvantage is to use the manual way later will take a lot of time. In lexical density, it can also
 28 | Fara Wahyu Astridya Lingual (Vol. 10, No.1, 2018)

be seen that from grade 10 to grade 12 there is a steady rise. It can be interpreted that students' writing
ability can be measured from the grade level. The higher their grade, so does their ability to write.
Slightly different from lexical density, this type of lexical richness has a fairly low percentage
level compared to other types. It concluded that there are few high school students in using academic
words. Selection of words used by the students is still common words, so writing the sentence does not
have a good meaning. In fact, it is expected to write an essay expository, students can learn to find and
write with words that are not common so that it can provide lessons for students to later have a wealth of
vocabulary. Yet, on the chart above shows the same thing with lexical density where there is a steady
increase of classes 10 to 12.
In lexical variation, the measurement tool used is TTR where the TTR counts the number of words
in a single text, and the number of words repeated several times in a sentence. The comparison is called
lexical variation. TTR (type token ratio) is to calculate the number of tokens divided by type in one text.
After that the result of this division, the number or percentage can be called as lexical variation. Based
on the Figure 1, lexical variation includes high enough percentage. It can be interpreted that high school
students make texts by using words that are quite a lot where from the beginning they were told to write
350 words within one hour. On average all students comply with the rules by writing according to the
provisions. It can not be ascertained that the more tokens, the more types.
Different from the previous two types of lexical richness, the percentage of lexical variation
decreases. The decrease here is good, as the percentage decreases, indicating that less repetition of the
word is used in every sentence. Here it can be concluded that 10th graders most often repeat words in a
single sentence. Students in grade 11 show different things where the students are not too many in using
word repetition. Decreasing percentage also occurs in the 12th grade where the students in the class
already know how to write a good essay. The selection of words they use also includes academic words.
They also understand the rules to avoid repeating the word in every sentence.

IV CONCLUSION
Based on the results and discussion above, the lexical richness can be measured by three types;
lexical density, lexical sophistication, and lexical variation. Each of three types have a measurements
which can be used in measuring how rich the lexical on high school students’ writing. Writing basically
is one of the most arduous aspects on high school curriculum. In writing, students can explore their
thoughts or ideas to express their feeling with their own words. Yet, in high school curriculum, writing
can be so difficult for students since it becomes one of the requirements to pass their exam. In general,
writing has four types; expository, descriptive, persuasive, and narrative. The reason why expository is
chosen to be the sample of the data is because expository is the hardest of them all. In writing
expository, students are asked to write based on the theme that chosen by the teacher, so the students
somehow has limited words to write the essay. It challenges the students to explore the new vocabulary
through their writing.
This is why the lexical richness has the important roles in students’ writing. Using lexical richness
to be the measurements is one of the simple way to find out how rich the lexical that students’ have in
their writing. As explained before in results and discussion, it showed that according to three types of
lexical richness, all of them showed the significant increas from grade 10 to 12. It means that as the
grade progresses, the students also show the progress on the vocabulary. Students in grade 10 still
master a little vocabulary so the choice of words they use is still limited and often written repeatedly.
Students in grade 11 have started to use vocabulary that is quite in accordance with the given theme. In
the 12th grades, students more concern about the choice of words they use in their writing. They
improve their writing skills by choosing some words worthy of use in their writing. By measuring the
lexical richness, the aim of this study is the teacher and students will know how good and rich their
writing based on the selected words they use.
The significance of the study is that the research may useful for the next students and also the
teacher. For students, it can be useful for them in the future so that they can be more creative in putting
their ideas into their writing. By knowing their level of lexical richness, they can use their error or lack
of vocabulary especially to make their writing much more interesting. In addition, this study is expected
to be useful for teachers who teach English in high school to improve students' writing skills by knowing
their level of lexical richness. Moreover, this can also be expected to the next researcher to be their
reference if they later want to examine the level of lexical richness in different subjects.
 Lexical Richness of the Expository Writing in Indonesian by Senior High School Students | 29

REFERENCES
Bestgen, Y. (2017). Beyond single-word measures: L2 writing assessment, lexical richness and
formulaic competence. An International Journal of Educational Technology and Applied
Linguistics.
Caselli, N., Caselli, M., & Goldberg, A. (2016). Inflected words in production: Evidence for a
morphologically rich lexicon. Quartely Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69(3), 432–454.
Cummins, S., & Quiroa, R. . (2012). Teaching writing expository responses to narrative texts. The
Reading Teacher, 66(6), 381–386.
Daller, J. T.-. (2010). Operationalizing and measuring language dominance. International Journal of
Bilingualism, 15(2), 147–163.
Djiwandono, P. (2016). Lexical Richness In Academic Papers: A Comparison Between Students’ And
Lecturers’ Essays. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 5(2).
Gharibi, K., & Boers, F. (2017). Influential factors in lexical richness of young heritage speakers’ family
language: Iranians in New Zealand. International Journal of Bilingualism.
Gregori-Signes, C., & Clavel-Arroitia, B. (2015). Analysing Lexical Density and Lexical Diversity in
University Students’ Written Discourse. 7th International Conference on Corpus Linguistics,
198(Cilc), 546–556. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2015.07.477
Hanafiah, R., & Yusuf, M. (2016). Lexical Density And Grammatical Intricacy In Linguistic Thesis
Abstract: A Qualitative Content Analysis. Consortium of Asia Pacific.
Koizumi, R., & In’nami, Y. (2012). Effects of text length on lexical diversity measures: Using short texts
with less than 200 tokens. System, 40(4), 522–532. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2012.10.017
Kyle, K., & Crossley, S. (2016). The relationship between lexical sophistication and independent and
source-based writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 34, 12–24.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2016.10.003
Laufer, B., & Nation, P. (1995). Vocabulary Size and Use: Lexical Richness in L2 Written Production.
Oxford University Press.
Lu, X. (2012). The relationship of lexical richness to the quality of ESL learners’ oral narratives. The
Modern Language Journal, 96(2), 190–208.
Lu, X., & Ai, H. (2015). Syntactic complexity in college-level English writing: Differences among
writers with diverse L1 backgrounds. Journal of Second Language Writing, 29, 16–27.
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Manik, S., & Simurat, J. D. (2015). Improve Students’ Narrative Writing Achievement Through Film at
SMA NEGERI I PALIPI. International Journal of English Linguistics, 5(2).
Pritomo. (2012). Lexical Richness in Teacher Talk of a Non Native English Teacher in the Foreign
Language Classroom. Universitas Negeri Malang.
Schmitt, N., & Schmitt, D. (2013). A reassessment of frequency and vocabulary size in L2 vocabulary
teaching. Language Teaching.
Suggate, S., & Stoeger, H. (2017). Fine Motor Skills Enhance Lexical Processing of Embodied
Vocabulary: A Test of the Nimble-Hands, Nimble-Minds Hypothesis. Quartely Journal of
Experimental Psychology, 70(1), 2169–2187.
Tantra, D. (2015). Teaching English As A Foreign Language In Indonesia: A Literature Review.
Lingual: Journal of Language and Culture, 4(1), 1–5. Retrieved from
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White, R. (2014). Lexical Richness In Adolescent Writing, Insights From The Classroom: An L1
Vocabulary Development Study. Victoria University of Wellington.
 REFORMING THE STUDENTS’ WRITING ERRORS IN COLLOCATION
BY APPLYING COLLOCATION LEARNING: PROMOTING LEARNERS’
WRITING COMPETENCY
Achmad Kholili
University of Islam Malang

achmadkholili93@gmail.com

Abstract

As a language, English has now spread all over the world and has been known by quite a few people currently. English is
known as crucial and salient to learn. The language quite reveals complexities that make some people sometimes give in
to continue studying it. It has such as grammar, linguistic terms, and other rules that play a very significant role while
applied to daily life. One of the rules that are quite hard to do is combining words within a sentence called as collocation.
This paper aims at investigating whether the students at University of Islam Malang have known about collocation. In
this study, the researcher conducted a quick survey. The data was collected with an open-questionnaire containing five
different sentences in which the students should translate the Indonesian sentence into English correctly using a correct
combination of words. The result of the study revealed that the students from University of Islam Malang still have been
committing errors in combining words in a sentence; it is due to their little acquaintance with collocation even having no
knowledge of it. Since it has happened to the students, by conducting this small research, the researcher expects that the
students may learn much more about collocation either from this paper or other resources with regards to collocation
learning in English.
Keywords: English, Collocation, Students of University of Islam Malang

I INTRODUCTION
One of the propositions with which is most frequently dealt by EFL while practicing English is
writing. This issue, in fact, not only occurs to the EFL student but happens to the ESL students as well
both beginners and advanced students of English. L2 learners, for the most part, assume that writing in
English is rather complex. They claim that they do not only have to think about how to arrange the
words in a sentence, but also have to consider the grammatical structure and appropriate vocabulary that
will be used in the sentence itself. In writing English, a writer not only thinks about how to present an
idea in the text but also reckons the language usage he/she uses. Thomas (1988:14) states that usage
designates rules of a less basic and binding sort, concerning how we should use the language in certain
situation. It is obvious that usage in writing such as words is of great importance to use. It is closely
related to how we should utter words well in a sentence. Both EFL/ESL are sometimes confused about
how to use some words in the sentence. Thomas (1988:14) also notes that usage establishes the ground
rules of writing, circumscribing what you are free to do. It is also clear-cut explanation from him that
words become the most important fundamental rule that will bring a good idea in the text. One of the
factors which have a profound impact on students’ writing ability is word combination in a sentence
called as Collocation. In this case, the writer focuses on the students’ writing ability to collocate words
in a sentence since the writer has found that so many students of English both EFL/ESL have yet to be
able to do such thing so far. It is claimed by a linguists that one of the factors that learners of language
are successful in learning language is because of the social customs of native speakers in which the
social customs involve the way to converse and to write in a language that native speakers practice in
their daily life. One example is collocation. Ellis (1985:11) states that learners who are interested in the
social and cultural customs of native speakers of the language they tend to be more successful.
According to Michael (2006: 06) a collocation is a pair or group of words that are often used together.
The combination sound natural to native speakers, but the students of English have to make a special
effort to learn them because they are often difficult to guess. The statement above gives us awareness of
how to collocate the words well in order to be natural. The students sometimes have difficulty to
collocate their words in a sentence. As a result, they make errors and eventually sound unnatural.
Therefore, this study aims at improving the students’ ability to collocate the words in the sentence by
practicing collocation learning. The students, later on, may learn not only arranging the words but also
collocating the words well in a sentence based on the rules of English collocation.

Lingual: Journal of Language & Culture (Volume 10, No.1, May 2018)
English Department, Faculty of Arts, Udayana University 30
 Reforming the Students’ Writing Errors in Collocation by Applying Collocation Learning: Promoting Learners’ Writing Competency | 31

II MATERIALS AND METHOD

2.1 LITERATURE REVIEW
In this part, the researcher provides a clear account of collocation based on the theoretical
perspectives; this consists of the definition of collocation including what collocation is and why we learn
it, varieties of collocation including metaphor, intensifying and softening adverb communicating, and
several examples of collocation including three topics such as behavior, weather, and religion. Michael
and Felicity (2008: 04) notes that collocation means a natural combination of words; it refers to the way
English words are closely associated with each other. For example, Pay and Attention, Go with
Together, Blond goes with Hair and Heavy with Rain.
Michael clearly states that collocation is a combination of words arranged to be natural, this is the
reason why the EFL/ESL have to learn collocation both writing and speaking so as to be native speaker-
like. As Michael (2008: 04) says “English learners need to learn collocation because they will help you
to speak and write English in a more natural and accurate way”. Collocations are not just a matter of
how adjectives combine with nouns. They can refer to any find of typical word combination. For
example Verb + Noun (e.g. arouse someone’s interest, lead a seminar) Adverb + Verb (e.g. flatly
contradict) Noun + Noun (a lick of paint) and so forth (Michael and Felicity, 2008: 06).
In addition to the reason above, learning collocation is also of great benefit i.e. use the words you
know more accurately, sound more natural when you speak and write, vary your speech and your
writing and understand when skillful writer departs from normal patterns of collocation. (a journalist,
poet, advertiser, etc.)
Michael & Felicity (2008: 16 – 20) states that there is a wide range of collocation as follows:
2.1.1 REGISTER
In most languages, particularly in English, you will find formal and informal expressions. For
example, if your close friend hosts a party, then you say “Thanks for the party, it was a blast”. This is
informal expression. However, when your boss was the host, then you would probably say. “Thanks for
the party, I really enjoyed it”. It was informal expression. L2 learners should also consider using both
formal and informal language. Example of the register as follows:
The police are investigating/looking into the arms deal (Neutral)
The cops are trying to dig out info about the arms deal (Informal)
The police are conducting an investigation into the arms deal (Formal)
2.1.2 METAPHOR
2.1.2.1 Metaphor based on the Body
Collocation Example Meaning

Face up to the fact You are never going to run in Accepted the reality
the Olympics. It’s time you
faced (up to) the fact.

Shoulder the blame Although others were Take responsibility for

responsible for the problem, Sue something bad
decided to shoulder the blame.

Have an eye for Gina has an eye for detail, so Is good at noticing
ask her to check the report

2.1.2.2 Metaphor based on Weight

Heavy can be used to means serious or difficult
e.g. heavy responsibility / a heavy burden.
It means “a difficult responsibility”.
2.1.2.3 Metaphor based on Movement
Run into difficulty
 32 | Achmad Kholili Lingual (Vol. 10, No.1, 2018)

Walk straight into

Run into trouble
Jump to the conclusion
2.1.3 INTENSIFYING AND SOFTENING ADVERB
Deeply offensive (intensifies – very/extremely)
Slightly offensive (softener – a little bit)
2.1.3.1 Intensifying adverbs
These words below means “extremely or completely”
Jane enjoys doing housework, you should see her flat – it’s always spotlessly clean.
It was downright rude of Antonio to tell Paul that she looked older than her own mother
I feel thoroughly ashamed etc.
2.1.3.2 Softening adverbs.
Slightly means “a little bit” it can be used with a wide range of adjectives. For example:
The spokesman and the insurance scheme was only slightly different from the old one.
The chief executive said he was mildly surprised by the public interest in the firm’s plans
(Mildly also collocates with amusing/ed, irritating/ed, offensive)
Alfredo Scaiussi’s new film is loosely based on nineteenth century novel. (Loosely also collocates with
centered, structured, related, connected)
This film is faintly amused
Faintly is fairly formal
Faintly also collocates with amused, surprised, patronizing, absurd)
2.1.4 ALTERNATIVE TO VERY
Highly unlikely, educated, recommended not appreciate, influence, interesting

Strongly influence Appreciate

Greatly appreciate, influence

Utterly absurd, ridiculous sorry, busy, glad, lonely

Thoroughly Enjoy

Several examples of collocation, based on different topic

2.1.4.1 Behavior (Conduct)
Adj. Good, Discreditable, Immoral, Improper, Unprofessional. Criminal, Fraudulent, Negligent, Wrongful
personal, Homosexual, Sexual, Business, Professional.
Verb + Conduct: engage in, regulate
e.g. The committee concluded that the senators had engaged in improper conduct
Conduct + Verb: constitute something
e.g. Conduct constituting a crime
Prep. By, Toward,
e.g. The violent conducted by the strikers was condemned
2.1.4.2 Weather
Summer
Adj. Last, Next, This (Coming), Early, Late, mid (also Midsummer), High, Good
 Reforming the Students’ Writing Errors in Collocation by Applying Collocation Learning: Promoting Learners’ Writing Competency | 33

e.g. it seems to be a good summer

Summer + Noun:
Noun: Temperature, Weather, Sunlight, Sunshine, Breeze, Gale, Sky, Term.
e.g. there are two being run on the summer term
2.1.4.3 Religion
Adj. great, major, orthodox, alternative
e.g. Islam is one of the great world religious.
Verb + Religion: Belong to, Have, Follow, Practice, Abandon, Reject, Defend,and Spread.
Do you still practice your religion?
Religion + Verb: Be Based on something, Originated from something, Develop, Spread
e.g. He believes that all religions originated from a single source
Prep. By, In a/the
In their religions, mountains are sacred
Note: Improvement & additional information
2.2 METHODOLOGY
The researcher seeks to provide the data of the study. The data was collected from the students’
writing results in translating the words in a sentence based on their background knowledge of
collocation. The researcher acquired the data from the postgraduate program of University of Islam
Malang consisting of 5 students, particularly in Class C of the first semester. The data was derived from
on the16th of January, 2018 while the students were studying one of their subjects of English. At that
moment, the researcher conducted a small research through surveying their writing ability in English.
The researcher used scientific instrument i.e. direct questionnaires. The researcher provided the students
with questionnaires that contain the words in Indonesian in order for the students to be able to translate
them into English easily. The researcher then went over the students’ errors in writing with regard to the
collocation.
The following are the questions that are to be answered by the students. In this section, the
students are assigned to translate the sentence into English using their own background knowledge of
collocation. They are as follows:
“Pertemuan itu akan ditunda sampai minggu depan”.
“ Ibu saya saat ini sedang menjalani pembedahan”.
“Saya sangat menganjurkan agar dia belajar dengan orang orang yang berpendidikan”.
“Setelah seminggu, dia mendapatkan teman baru”.
“Saya dapa tmenarik kesimpulan bahwa dia telah melakukan kejahatan”.
The data obtained by observation. The researcher provided some questions that will subsequently
be answered by the students. Students are asked to answer the questions immediately on the paper. In
this case, the researcher limited the study. He only carried out the research on five students since the
time was limited. The questions above consist of five series of questions. Each student received one
question. The researcher directly observed the students’ writing singly by walking around them.
Students are only given fifteenth minutes to complete their tasks. When the time is up, the students must
submit it.

III RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The students’ writing errors in combining with words in the sentence are accounted for below. The
followings are the findings taken from some of the students’ writing errors in collocation.
Pertemuan itu akan ditunda sampai minggu depan
Yasin: “The meeting will be postponed until next week”.
Ibu saya saat ini sedang menjalan ipembedahan
Umi: “My mother is passing through surgery right now
 34 | Achmad Kholili Lingual (Vol. 10, No.1, 2018)

Saya sangat menganjurkan agar dia belajar dengan orang-orang yang berpendidikan
Yogi: “I very encourage that he studies with educated people”.
Setelah seminggu,dia mendapatkan teman baru.
Rinda: “After a week, he got a new friend”
Sayadapatmenarikkesimpulanbahwadiatelahmelakukankejahatan.
Dini: “I can make a conclusion that he has done a crime”.
The results of the students’ writing errors in collocation are discussed as follows:
(Pertemuan itu akan ditunda sampai minggu depan)
Yasin “The meeting will be postponed until next week”.
This sentence has a wrong combination of word. Michael and Felicity (2008: 08) notes that
adjourn is very strongly associated with meeting and trial. Yasin writes a word “postponed” in the
sentence, so it is wrong. Although postponed has the same meaning as adjourn, adjourn is appropriate
vocabulary to be collocated with “meeting and trial”. The sentence must be “the meeting will be
adjourned until next week.
(Ibu saya saat ini sedang menjalani pembedahan)
Umi – “My mother is passing through surgery right now”
Passing through is not collocated with surgery. Colin, et al (2009: 774) states that surgery is
collocated with some verbs: Verb + Surgery: have, undergo, perform, need, require. Thus, pass
through is not appropriate verb for surgery, she can use “undergo” or “perform”. That should be: My
mother is undergoing surgery right now.
(Saya sangat menganjurkan agar dia belajar dengan orang-orang yang berpendidikan)
Yogi: “I very encourage that he studies with educated people”
This is also obvious that the word “encourage” is not appropriate for suggestion or
recommendation. The best word to replace it is “recommend”. Whereas “very” is not natural either to be
used in the sentence since “recommend” has a particular adverb “Strongly”. Thus, the sentence must be
“I strongly recommend her studying with highly educated people. As Colin, et al (2009:628) suggests
that in giving advice to do something, the adverb of recommendation is “Strongly”. For example: I
would strongly recommend that you get professional advice.
(Setelah seminggu,dia mendapatkan teman baru)
Rinda: “After a week, he got a new friend”
The verb “get” is not collocated with friend. Instead friend is collocated with make, find, become,
remain, stay, win, and have. (Colin, et al. 2009: 329). Therefore, it is supposed to be “After a week, he
made a new friend”.
(Saya dapat menarik kesimpulan bahwa dia telah melakukan kejahatan)
Dini: “I can make a conclusion that he has done a crime”.
Although that is grammatically correct, based on the collocation, however, that is wrong. The verb
“make” is not collocated with “conclusion” and neither is do with crime. Colin, et al.(2009: 146) notes
that the Verb + Conclusion: draw, arrive at, come to, reach. While the Verb + Crime: carry out,
commit, report. For example: “You committed a crime”. “Many crimes are never reported to the
police”. Therefore, the Dini’s sentence above is error in collocation. The sentence should be “I can
draw a conclusion that he has committed a crime”.

IV CONCLUSION
It is very important to recall that most EFL/EFL Students, so far, still have been committing errors
in collocation; especially in placing the word with which word it should collocate. These errors are
caused by their lack of knowledge on collocation even having no knowledge of it. Therefore, since the
researcher has discovered some mistakes from the students, the best way to improve their writing ability
is by learning collocation. The students will subsequently know exactly appropriate words they will use
in the sentence in order to be natural-sounding English.
 Reforming the Students’ Writing Errors in Collocation by Applying Collocation Learning: Promoting Learners’ Writing Competency | 35

Since the researcher has provided the students with some knowledge of collocation. The researcher
expects both EFL/ESL students to be more careful of using words in a sentence. They may learn some
from this paper or from other resources concerning collocation learning.

REFERENCES
Kane S.T. 1988. Oxford, Essential to Writing. USA: The Barkley Publishing Group.
Ellis. R. 1985. Understanding Second Language Acquisition. New York: Oxford University Press.
Mcltosh, Francis, B. and Poole. R. 2009. Oxford Collocation Dictionary. New York: Oxford University
Press.
McCarthy, M. and O’Dell, F. 2008. English Collocation in Use: Advanced. United Kingdom:
Cambridge University Press.
McCarthy, M. and O’Dell, F. 2006. English Collocation in Use. United Kingdom: Cambridge
University Press
 READING ABILITY AND STRATEGIES OF STUDENTS IN COASTAL
AREA OF BENGKULU
Fernandita Gusweni Jayanti, Anggun Citra Sari Dewi
University of Bengkulu

fernandita.gusweni@gmail.com, anggunsaridewi@gmail.com

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to discuss students’ reading ability and the reading strategies they use when they read
English texts. This study employs a descriptive-qualitative approach. The data were gained by using two instruments; a
reading comprehension test and a questionnaire on reading strategy. The respondents of this research were 243 third year
students from four senior high schools located in coastal area in Bengkulu city. The results of students’ reading
comprehension test showed that the students’ reading ability is categorized as poor. This study also found that the
students use reading strategies in medium frequency. It means that the students do not make use of reading strategies
maximally. Furthermore, the analysis of the questionnaire also showed that the most frequently used strategies are
finding the main idea of the text, guessing the meaning of difficult words and using background knowledge while
reading, while the least frequently used strategies are looking at the text closely, finding specific information and
interpreting graph, diagram and table. It is predicted that the students’ low reading ability was influenced by the way the
students use reading strategy and the sociocultural factor of the students who live in coastal area.
Keywords: reading ability, reading comprehension, reading strategy, factors

I INTRODUCTION
Reading ability is crucial in today’s world. The ability to read is vital in the development of the
quality of human life, such as in communicating, educational process, adding knowledge, and building a
career. To be more specific, reading also has an important role in someone’s English learning process.
To learn the language, input is the most important factor. The very famous slogan of Nuttal (1982) says
that the best way to improve speech is to live in an environment that uses that language. The second way
is to read extensively the various readings that use the target language. This implies that in order to use a
foreign language well, language learners need inputs that use the target language. Therefore, good
reading ability becomes imperative.
Unfortunately, most of the research on students' reading ability in Bengkulu also shows that most
students in Bengkulu have difficulties in understanding English reading. There are several factors that
make it difficult for students to understand reading texts. Most of the studies assume that this is due to
the students’ low English skill. However, we may not neglect the fat that many factors can affect
someone’s reading ability.
Good readers can understand the meaning and the way author organizes his ideas. There are many
factors that can influence someone’s ability in building the meaning. Jung (2009) mentions orthography,
vocabulary, grammar; background knowledge and metacognitive strategies are the factors influencing
L2 reading. Likewise, Koda (2007) said that vocabulary knowledge, prior knowledge, metacognitive
information, and reading strategies are some variables that impact learners’ reading comprehension. In
the same regard, Yang (2016) points out reader’s background, classroom tasks and strategies he employs
are among the major factors that affect reading comprehension. Morevover, Trehearne and Doctorow
(2005) claim other factors that affect learners’ reading comprehension skill. These factors are learners’
reading attitudes, useful teaching on comprehension methods, versatility, text form and being aware of
various reading comprehension strategies. As shown above, reading strategy has a vital role in
someone’s reading comprehension.
Block (1986) states that reading strategies indicate how readers conceive a task, what textual cues
they attend to, how they make sense of what they read, and what they do when they do not understand
(quoted in Lui, 2010). In that matter, Cohen (1990 in Anderson, 2003) refers reading to those mental
processes that readers consciously choose to use in accomplishing reading tasks. In short, reading
strategies are deliberate, conscious active procedures or plans that a reader employs to make sense of
text. There are many reading strategies employed by successful readers such as being able to organize
information, use linguistic knowledge of their first language when they are learning their second

Lingual: Journal of Language & Culture (Volume 10, No.1, May 2018)
English Department, Faculty of Arts, Udayana University 36
 Reading Ability and Strategies of Students in Coastal Area of Bengkulu | 37

language, use contextual cues, and learn how to chunk language, etc (Karbalaei, 2010). Successful
language learners know how to use such reading strategies efficiently.
Reading researchers usually divide reading strategies differently. For example, as it is quoted in
Karbalaei (2010), Pressley and Afflerbach (1995) identify several key strategies that were evident in the
verbal protocols they reviewed, including: (a) overview before reading; (b) look for important
information and pay greater attention to it; (c) relate important points to one another; (d) activate and use
prior knowledge; (e) change strategies when understanding is not good; and (f) monitor understanding
and take action to correct inaccuracies in comprehension. McNamara, Ozuru, Best, and O´Reilly (2007)
suggest four categories for reading strategies. The first category includes strategies to prepare to read,
including setting the goals of reading. The second category regards strategies to interpret words,
sentences, and ideas in texts that help reader to develop a coherent text-based level of comprehension.
The third category includes strategies to go beyond the text by connecting the text content with reader’s
prior knowledge that help reader to develop a situation model of text. The fourth category comprises
strategies to organize, restructure, and synthesize the information to facilitate global processing. General
reading strategies include things such as predicting content, posing questions, recognizing text structure,
integrating information, reflecting, monitoring comprehension, utilizing general knowledge, and
reacting to the text (Yang, 2006).
There has been accumulated evidence that reading strategy is one of the factors affecting
someone’s success in reading. Earlier, Anderson (1991) reported that students who used more reading
strategies on both standardized test reading and textbook reading scored higher on reading
comprehension. Partially in agreement with Anderson’s findings, studies in second language reading
tend to show that high and low proficiency English learners use strategies differently and the variety of
strategy use correlates with reading performance (Koda, 2005). In addition, Hoang (2016) found that
higher-proficiency readers reported using more strategies than lower-proficiency readers, at higher
frequencies.
In the same regard, Ahmadi and Pourhossein (2012) found that reading strategy has significantly
affect students’ reading comprehension skill. This study also explained that through using reading
strategies, students can understand the major point of a paragraph, explain unfamiliar words or sentences
and abridge their reading. These strategies help readers solve their difficulties when reading texts.
Another study investigating the use of specific reading strategy was conducted by Dabarera,
Renandya and Zhang (2014). This study reported that students who were taught metacognitive strategies
had significantly higher reading comprehension score than those on control group (taught with a
traditional way; reading strategies are not explicitly taught). The result of this study supported the
finding of a study by Mehrdad, et.al. (2012). This study investigated the effects of teaching cognitive
and metacoginitive strategies on EFL reading comprehension across proficiency levels. This study
revealed that students who were taught cognitive and metacognitive strategies had improved reading
comprehension. This finding suggests that reading strategies are crucial in creating successful or less
successful readers.
Unfortunately, most of the research related to students 'reading ability is more focused on the
discovery and use of teaching techniques that can improve students' reading ability. Research that
identifies the influence of factors that can affect students' reading ability is still very limited. Therefore,
this study is intended to provide an overview of students' reading abilities as well as to explain what
reading strategies students use when they try to understand English reading texts. The results of this
study can help and direct teachers and policy makers to be able to prepare and arrange a reading class
that can accommodate students to read by using a good reading strategy.

II MATERIALS AND METHOD

This study was conducted in order to answer the following questions:
1. How is the reading ability of the students in senior high schools in coastal area of Bengkulu?
2. How is the use of reading strategies by those students?
The samples of this study were 243 students in the second year at senior high schools (SMAN) in
coastal area of Bengkulu city; SMAN 8, SMAN 6, SMAN 1 and SMAN 7. The samples were chosen
through purposive sampling in which the researcher deliberately chose those samples. The second year
students were chosen as the samples because they have learned almost all of the text types. Two classes
from each school were assigned as the samples (one social science class and one natural science class).
 38 | Fernandita Gusweni Jayanti, Anggun Citra Sari Dewi Lingual (Vol. 10, No.1, 2018)

The schools selected to discuss in this research are schools located in the coastal area of Bengkulu
City. This is based on the author's observation of reading interest and students' reading ability in coastal
areas. These students are living in coastal areas and spend very little time or even never read reading
other than school time. This is caused by a culture of reading that is rarely found in families in coastal
areas. This resulted in students not being able to read them using a good reading strategy. Therefore, this
study can be used as a basis for consideration to embrace students reading with a good strategy.
The data of this study was yielded by employing two instruments, a Reading Comprehension Test
(RCT) and a questionnaire on reading strategies. The students were asked to complete the RCT to
measure their reading ability. The test was an objective test consisting of 40 items. In this test, students
were asked to read some passages and answer some following questions based on the information given
in the text they have read. The passages in the test are in form of descriptive, narrative, expository,
report and procedure text. According to the curriculum of English lesson in Senior High School, those
types of text must have been learned by the students. From the reliability analysis, this test is considered
highly reliable for its coefficient alpha 0.81.
Students’ reading ability score was calculated by using the following formula:

The second instrument was a questionnaire which consisted of 16 statements about the use of
reading strategies. Students were asked to give response to the statements by ticking in one of the given
options; N (Never), R (Rarely), S (Sometimes), O (often) and A (Always). Before the questionnaire was
spread to the students, the questionnaire was examined by two experts. It was then tried out and
analysed for its reliability. It was found that the reliability of the questionnaire was high with coefficient
alpha 0.79.
For data processing, response N, R, S, O and A was scored 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 accordingly. The
frequency of the usage of each strategy was seen from the Mean score of all the responses of the
respondents. Furthermore, to perceive the general use of reading strategies of the students, the following
formula was used:

M= mean
X= score
N= number of respondents
Then, the result of the mean score calculation was categorized using the following category:
Table 1 Table of Categories for Reading Strategy Frequency
CATEGORY INTERVAL

High 64.01-80

Medium 48.01-64

Low 32.01-48

Very Low 16-32

III RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

3.1 RESULT OF READING COMPREHENSION TEST
From the results of reading comprehension test, the students’ reading ability was displayed in the
following table:
 Reading Ability and Strategies of Students in Coastal Area of Bengkulu | 39

Table 2. Students’ Score of Reading Comprehension Test

CATEGORY SCORE FREQUENCY PERCENTAGE
INTERVAL

Excellent 90-100 0 0.00 %

Very good 80-89 1 0.41 %

Good 70-79 13 5.35 %

Fair 60-69 39 16.05 %

Poor <60 190 78.19%

3.2 RESULT OF QUESTIONNAIRE ON READING STRATEGY USE

The data yielded from the questionnaire showed that generally, the reading strategy use of the
students is categorized in medium frequency, with mean score 53.03. The result for each statement of
the questionnaire is shown in Table 3.
Table 3. Table of Result of Questionnaire on Reading Strategy Use
NO. STATEMENTS MEAN CATEGORY

1. I find information by previewing index or table of content of a book. 3.14 Medium

2. I can find specific information in the text quickly. 3.08 Medium

3. During reading, I guess the meaning of unfamiliar words by using cues in the text. 3.71 Medium

4. I try to remember any relevant experience or background knowledge related to the text Medium
3.49
I read.

5. I draw conclusion from implied statements of the author. 3.41 Medium

6. I predict what I am going to read (what will appear in the text) next. 3.17 Medium

7. I read closely to find details in the text. 2.95 Medium

8. I read a long text quickly to get the main idea of the text. 3.09 Medium

9. I use my background knowledge to comprehend a text. 3.66 Medium

10. I can answer questions in English. 3.14 Medium

11 I can read and interpret graph, chart, diagram and table. 3.08 Medium

12. I can analyze long sentences. 3.12 Medium

13. I learn the structure of the text. 3.53 Medium

14. I can follow the movement of writer’s ideas or thoughts. 3.09 Medium

15. I can determine the title of a text. 3.62 Medium

16. I can find the mind idea of a text. 3.72 Medium

 40 | Fernandita Gusweni Jayanti, Anggun Citra Sari Dewi Lingual (Vol. 10, No.1, 2018)

3.3 DISCUSSION
Based on the result of the data analysis on reading comprehension test, it can be said that students’
ability in comprehending English text was categorized as low (poor). It is shown by the fact that most of
the students (78.19%) got scores lower than 6-. Then, 16.5% of the students got scores 60-69 (Fair).
There were only 13 students (5.35%) who had good reading ability (scores ranging from 70 to 79) and 1
student got an excellent score.
Regarding the analysis of the data gathered from the questionnaire, it can be seen that the students’
use of reading strategy was categorized in medium frequency (53.03). It means that the students
sometimes use the reading strategies and sometimes do not. This inconsistent use of reading strategies
made the students incapable of using the reading strategies automatically during reading. It is predicted
as one of the factors that caused the students’ low reading ability.
This suspicion is supported by many previous findings that suggested positive relationship
between the use of strategies and readers’ reading ability or proficiency. A study by Zare (2013) found
that the use of reading strategies had a strong positive correlation (r = 0.92) with reading comprehension
achievement. In his study on eighty Iranian EFL learners, Zare (2013) revealed that those language
learners who have employed reading strategies more frequently got better results in reading
comprehension test. In another study conducted in Malaysian ESL setting, Zare and Othman (2013)
also found that the use of reading strategies had a strong positive correlation with reading
comprehension ability (0.89).
Moreover, many studies also revealed the positive effects of the use of reading strategies on
reading comprehension achievement. Akkakoson and Setobol (2009) conducted an experimental study
on 207 undergraduate students in Thailand and revealed positive effects of strategies-based instruction
on learners‟ reading proficiency. Then, in 2011, Wichadee (2011) conducted a study to investigate the
effectiveness of explicit instruction of metacognitive strategies on 40 Thai EFL learners. Consistent with
the previous finding, his finding indicated that metacognitive strategies instruction might have been an
effective means to improve students’ reading comprehension and strategy use. Later on, Aghaie and
Zhang (2012) carried out a quasi-experimental design to test the effects of explicit teaching of cognitive
and metacognitive reading strategies on students’ reading performance and strategy transfer. After four
months of strategy instruction, the experimental group achieved significantly better results than the
control group.
The above findings highlight the importance of reading strategy use on someone’s reading ability.
Therefore, reading strategy use can be a predictor of someone’s success or failure in comprehending a
text.
Furthermore, the data yielded from the questionnaire also showed that among other strategies,
finding main ideas (M = 3.72), guessing difficult words and using experience and background
knowledge (3.71) were the strategies with highest frequency of use. While looking at the text closely
(2.95), finding specific information quickly (3.08) and reading and interpreting graph, chart, diagram
and table were the least frequent strategy they used (3.08). From this result, it can be said that the
students have tried to get the big picture of the text. However, they could not comprehend the text
deeper.
In relation with the result of students’ reading comprehension achievement, another factor that
may influence students’ reading ability is the socioeconomic factor. Some studies indicate the influence
of family socioeconomic conditions on the development of student literacy, especially the ability to read.
Rizardo & Tabuno, (1998) in Marquez (2008) in his study of fourth-year students 'reading
comprehension at a high school in Iligan concluded that one of the factors affecting students' reading
ability is parent's monthly income and parental education. Parents with sufficient monthly income are
able to provide reading books for their children. It can increase students' motivation to read. Later,
students who have parents with adequate educational background are shown to have better reading skills
than students whose parents are uneducated or have low education. Parents who have a high education
can create a supportive atmosphere and provide experiences important to the development of interest
and ability to read his son.
Unfortunately, the socioeconomic condition of families on the coastline area has not supported the
development of literacy, especially the development of students' learning ability. As we all know, most
of the families living on the coastline belong to weak economic families. This situation does not allow
students to have access to books in their home environment. In addition, the level of education of their
parents also tends not to be high. They have no knowledge of the importance of developing reading
skills so they cannot motivate their children to read.
 Reading Ability and Strategies of Students in Coastal Area of Bengkulu | 41

This fact supports the statement that the home environment affects children’s literacy. In this
matter, Wallner-Paschon (2009) pointed out the role of ‘reading socialization’. Family, together with
school and peer-group are important fields of socialization which in turn affect the student’s
motivational characteristics, such as reading attitude and reading self-concept, as well as reading
achievement. In addition, a study by Martin, Mullis and Gonzalez (2004) reported that for every country
participating in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) 2001, there was found a
strong relationship between Grade 4 reading achievement and parents’ reports of levels of engagement
in literacy activities before their children started school.

IV CONCLUSION
The students’ ability in comprehending English text is poor. The students’ reading ability may b e
affected by several factors. One of the factors is the students’ ineffective use of reading strategy as they
just used reading strategy in medium frequency. However, reading strategy is essential to help students
understand the text better. Therefore, an explicit instruction on strategy use is required. Teachers need to
tell and train the students to deliberately use reading strategies in the reading class. Teachers should
design a lesson which asks the students to actively use reading strategies.
Further, considering the socioeconomic of the students and the family, schools should take a
greater role. Schools should be able to motivate the students to read and to support the development of
reading habit. Schools can provide more reading sources for the students. Even more, schools can
organize extensive reading program in which the students are given access to find pleasure in reading by
reading non-academic books. It will increase students’ reading motivation and their responsibility on
their own reading progress. By being a strategic reader with high motivation reading, their reading
ability will improve.

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8333.101997010-i1
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McNamara, D., Ozuru, Y., Best, R., & O’Reilly, T. (2007). The 4-pronged comprehension strategy
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 THE CAPABILITY OF PRONOUNCING FRENCH PHONEMES BY
STUDENTS OF ENGLISH DEPARTMENT, UDAYANA UNIVERSITY
Ni Luh Ketut Mas Indrawati, A.A.Istri Aryani, Putu Weddha Savitri
English Department, Faculty of Arts, Udayana University

mas_indrawati@unud.ac.id, istri_aryani@unud.ac.id, weddha_savitri@unud.ac.id

Abstract

This study aims at investigating the ability of the pronunciation of French phonemes by students of English Department,
Faculty of Culturale Studies, Udayana University. It also intends to analyse the way they articulated the phonemes and
identified factors affecting their pronunctiation. This research is very interesting to do considering that the correct
pronunciation of a phoneme or sound of a Foreign Language is one of the important points that must be mastered by the
learners. The French sound system which is different from that of Indonesian and English certainly becomes one of the
obstacles for students besides their lack of knowledge about the French phonemes. It is important to know which
phonemes they have been able to pronounce and which are still difficult for them, so that inovations in teaching French
can be made, especially in enhancing students' ability in pronouncing sounds which are considered difficult in French.
Forty students of English Department who chose French as their elective subject were taken as the population of this
study. The data were taken by applying observation method using questionnaires, recording, and note taking techniqes.
The data were descriptive-qualitatively analysed by applying the theory of phonology.
Keywords: capability, pronunciation, phonemes, French

I INTRODUCTION
The ability to communicate in foreign languages is very important in the digital era and
globalization since this can facilitate communications and interactions of modern people in the world.
Language difference is one of the obstacles to communicate effectively in international communication;
therefore, nowadays people are competing in mastering foreign languages for various reasons or needs,
such as economy, job, cultural exchange, travel, and even to increase the self-prestige in the society.
English as an international language is the first foreign language that must be mastered to be able
to communicate with people from other nations. But now, having other foreign language skills would be
better to be able to further the insight and self-esteem in the job competition in the world. Therefore,
English Department, Faculty of Culturale Studies, Udayana University offers Elective Courses on
foreign languages, one of which is French. French can be regarded as one of the international languages
because it is used by more than 200 million people in different parts of the world. This course is given
early for 2 semesters (2 credits/semester) and most students have never had French before so it is not
easy for them to understand and master it in such a short time.
There are several aspects and skills that must be learned by students in French Language Courses,
such as the ability to read, write, listen and speak. In the context of the ability to speak, students are
taught about the sound system in French. Pronunciation is one of the most difficult things for students
because French sound system is much different that of from Indonesian and English. Sound system is
something that is universal, but each language has its own uniqueness that distinguishes it from other
languages. When studying a foreign language, the sound system possessed by the language becomes one
of the most important points that must be mastered to speak the language well and correctly. The ability
to pronounce words correctly is a person's ability to understand sound system of which impact is on the
accuracy of meaning. In the context of French, the correct pronunciation of sounds composed in the
word will greatly affect the comprehension of the listener, because the difference in sound can cause
different meaning.
On the other hand, language skills do not only involve writing, reading, and listening but also
speaking. A relative short time and a large number of students seem to be the obstacles in mastering the
French sound system well, especially in the pronunciation of vowels, consonants, diphthongs, stressing,
etc. However, good pronunciation will support speaker’s performance, and conversely inappropriate
pronunciation will be a benchmark that a person is not able to learn the language entirely, it is the
indicator that there must be a solution to minimise problems.

Lingual: Journal of Language & Culture (Volume 10, No.1, May 2018)
English Department, Faculty of Arts, Udayana University 43
 44 | Ni Luh Ketut Mas Indrawati, A.A.Istri Aryani, Putu Weddha Savitri Lingual (Vol. 10, No.1, 2018)

In this research there were three problems that could be raised, they were: 1) how was the student's
ability in pronuncing French phonemes, 2) How were the realizations of sounds produced by students,
and 3) What factors might affect the student's ability in mastering phonemes in French?

II MATERIALS AND METHOD

This study was classified as a field research and the population was 40 students taking French in
the English Department, Faculty of Culturale Studies, Udayana University. The data were collected by
distributing topics to the students and asked them to speak and while speaking the recording was done.
Recording is also done by asking students to say a particular vocabulary containing all the phonemes in
French.
The data on the factors affecting the students’ abalities were collected by distributing
questionnaires to the students. The data were then classified based on the problems raised. The data were
analysed in a descriptive qualitative way based on the theory of phonology.

III RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

3.1 PHONOLOGY
Phonology is the study of sound system in a language. Collins and Mees (2003: 1) state that the
study of the selection and patterns of sounds in a single language is reffered to as phonology. They
mention that in getting a full idea of the way the sounds of a language work, it is required to study not
only the phonetics of the language concerned but also its phonological system. Both phonetics and
phonology are important components of linguistics which is the science that deals with the general study
of language. They also claim that the study of both phonetics (the science of speech sound) and
phonology (how sounds combine and function in a given language) will assist learners to learn more
about a language.
Kelly (2000: 9) claims that the study of pronunciation consists of two fields, they are phonetics
and phonology. Phonetics refers to the study of speech sounds, it is a wide-ranging field, while
phonology is primarily concerned with how we interpret and systematize sounds so it deals with the
system and pattern of the sounds which exist within particular languages. Kelly (2000: 1) also shows the
features of pronunciation which cover phonemes consisting of consonants and vowels, and
suprasegmental features including intonation and stress. She states that the different sounds within a
language are referred to as phonemes. When considering meaning, we notice how using one sound
rather than another can change the meaning of the word. This is the principle in identifying the number
of phonemes in a particular language.
3.2 PHONEMES IN FRENCH
Phoneme is defined as the smallest unit of sound which can contrast the meanings of two words,
for example in English /f/ and /v/ are of different phonemes this can be shown by the minimal pairs:
ferry /feri/ and very /veri/, the two words are only different in one sound that is; /f/ and /v/ then they
have different meanings. In linguistics phoneme symbols are written in between slanting lines: /…/.
According to Valsman (1993) French has 37 phonems that is; 18 consonants and 19 vowels, this
can be illustrated using phonemic symbols as follows;
Table 1. Consonant phonemes in Standard French

Dental/
Labial Palatal Velar Uvular
Alveolar

Nasal m n ɲ (ŋ)

voiceless p t k
Plosive
voiced b d ɡ

Fricative voiceless f s ʃ (x)

 The Capability of Pronouncing French Phonemes by Students of English Department, Udayana University | 45

voiced v z ʒ
ʁ
Plain l j
Approximant
rounded ɥ w

(/IPA SYMBOL/ – French Examples)

/p/ – plage, public
/b/ – bon, bêtise, bateau
/t/ – terre, sottise, thé
/d/ – dîner, dimanche
/k/ – cou, carreau, que
/g/ – gare, gants, gallois
/f/ – flic, pharmacie, fossé
/v/ – vous, avion
/l/ – le, lait, mille
/s/ – sac, soixante, cerise
/z/ – zoo, visage, guise
/ʃ/ – chat, chinois, short
/ʒ/ – japonais, je, génial
/m/ – mêler, magasin
/n/ – nous, nez
/ɲ/ – agneau, poignet (found in French only)
/ŋ/ – camping, smoking (americanized phoneme)
/R/ – rue, rouge (modified in French)
French has 13 oral vowels, 4 nasalised vowels, and 3 semivowels as shown in the following table.
Table 2. Vowel phonemes in Standard French
Front
Central Back
unrounded Rounded

Close i y u

Close-mid oral e ø o
ə
ɛ (ɛː) œ ɔ
Open-mid
ɛ (œ) ɔ
nasal

Open
oral a ( )

Table 3. Example words

Vowel Example

IPA Orthography Gloss

Oral vowels

/i/ /si/ si 'if'

 46 | Ni Luh Ketut Mas Indrawati, A.A.Istri Aryani, Putu Weddha Savitri Lingual (Vol. 10, No.1, 2018)

/e/ /fe/ fée 'fairy'

/ɛ/ /fɛ/ fait 'does'

/ɛː/ /fɛːt/ fête 'party'

/ə/ /sə/ ce 'this'/'that'

/œ/ /sœʁ/ sœur 'sister'

/ø/ /sø/ ceux 'those'

/y/ /sy/ su 'known'

/u/ /su/ sous 'under'

/o/ /so/ sot 'silly'

/ɔ/ /sɔʁ/ sort 'fate'

/a/ /sa/ sa 'his'/'her',

/ / /p t/ pâte 'dough'

Nasal vowels

/ / /s / sans 'without'

/ɔ/ /sɔ/ son 'his'

/œ/ /bʁœ/ brun 'brown'

/ɛ/[20] /bʁɛ/ brin 'sprig'

Semi-vowels

/j/ /jɛʁ/ hier 'yesterday'

/ɥ/ /plɥi/ pluie 'rain'

/w/ /wi/ oui 'yes'

Vowels are speech sounds which are produced without any obstructions. For beginners it is hard
for them to distinguish phonemes /y/ vs /u/ and phonemes /œ/ vs /ø/. Symbol (~) is assigned above the
vowels for nasalized vowels while semivowels are produced by moving up the tongue quickly.
3.3 THE ABILITY OF PRONUNCING FRENCH PHONEMES BY STUDENTS
This section described the phonemes that have been and have not been mastered by the students
and presented how they realize the sounds. There are 37 phonems in French, they are; 18 consonants
and 19 vowels. Consonant phonemes are classified into Voiceless Consonants (6 phonemes) and Voiced
 The Capability of Pronouncing French Phonemes by Students of English Department, Udayana University | 47

Consonans (12 phonemes), meanwhile vowel phonemes are classified into Oral Vowels (12 phonemes),
Nasal Vowels (4 phonemes), dan Semi Vowels (3 phonemes).
Based on the data obtained through direct observation or audio recording, it was found that some
students had been able to produce some phonemes well, but some still have problems in pronouncing
certain phonemes. This can be illustrated in the following table:
Table 4. Voiceless Consonants
phonemes Example words Number of students making Percentage
mistakes

/p/ Pou /pu/ - 0 %

/t/ Tout /tu/ - 0 %

/k/ Cou /ku/ - 0 %

/f/ Fou /fu/ 2 5 %

/s/ Sous /su/ - 0 %

/ʃ/ Chou /ʃu/ 5 12,5 %

Table 5. Voiceless Consonants

phonemes Example words Number of students making Percentage
mistakes

/p/ Pou /pu/ - 0 %

/t/ Tout /tu/ - 0 %

/k/ Cou /ku/ - 0 %

/f/ Fou /fu/ 2 5 %

/s/ Sous /su/ - 0 %

/ʃ/ Chou /ʃu/ 5 12,5 %

The table above shows that students mostly have problems in pronouncing voiceless consonants,
the error occurs mostly in the pronunciation of phoneme /ʃ/ that is 5 students, and only 2 students made
mistakes in pronouncing /f/ that is 2 students. What happens to the pronunciation of phoneme / ʃ / is that
most students produced this phoneme like phoneme /s/, / ʃ / should be pronounced in the palatal
position, not dental/alveolar. While the error in the phoneme / f / which is a voiceless labio-dental
fricative consonant can be said to be small because only one student pronounced this phoneme with the
sound / v / which is a voiced labio-dental fricative consonant. While other consonants included in this
group such as / p /, / t /, / k /, and / s / can be pronounced easily by students. This is due to the existance
of these phonemes in the mother tongue of the students.
Table 6. Voiced consonants
phonemes Example words Number of students Percentage
making mistakes

/b/ Boue /b/ - 0 %

/d/ Doux /d/ - 0 %

/g/ Gout /g/ - 0 %

/v/ Vous /v/ 10 25 %

 48 | Ni Luh Ketut Mas Indrawati, A.A.Istri Aryani, Putu Weddha Savitri Lingual (Vol. 10, No.1, 2018)

/z/ Zoo /z/ 4 10 %

/Ʒ/ Joue /Ʒ/ 14 35 %

/n/ Nous /nu/ - 0 %

/m/ Mou /mu/ - 0 %

/l/ Loup /lu/ - 0 %

/ɲ/ Champagne /ʃampaɲ/ 8 20 %

/ŋ/ Camping /kampiŋ/ - 0 %

/ʀ/ Roue /ʁu/ 19 47,5%

The ability of students in pronouncing this voiced consonant group can be seen in the above table.
The phoneme / ʀ / becomes the most difficult phoneme because it has a in compared to phoneme / r / in
Indonesian. Both phonemes are equally voiced consonants that are sounds that occur with the vibration
of the active articulation region. But they are different in the way of voicing. Phoneme / ʀ / is a vibration
of the throbbing (vibration of the tongue behind and the throb) while the phoneme / r / Indonesian is the
vibration of the front tongue and the ceiling. Because of this similarity, as many as 19 students are not
yet accustomed to producing sounds / ʀ / which exists in French sound system, and it was articulated
like phoneme / r / in Indonesian.
The other phoneme which is also quite difficult for the students is phoneme / Ʒ / errors in the
pronunciation of this phoneme were done by 14 students. / Ʒ / is a voiced consonant, it is realized by
forcing air out through a narrow channel formed by pressing together the blade of the tongue and the
hard palate. The production of phoneme / Ʒ / is very close to that of phoneme / z / because they both are
equally voiced and belong to fricative consonants, however in terms of place of articulator they are
different, / Ʒ / belongs to palatal consonant. / z / is a voiced alveolar fricative consonant, only 4 students
had problems in pronouncing it. This is due to the occurance of this phoneme in their mother tongue,
however in Indonesian [z] and [s] are often used as variants of phoneme /z/. This influenced the
pronunciation of /z/ in French.
Phoneme / v / was also problems for 10 students, based on direct and indirect observation, these
students produce it like / f /. This is because both of these phonemes are both labiodental fricative
consonants (consonants produced by bringing the upper teeth and lower lip), but they are different in
voicing in that /v/ is voiced while /f/ is voiceless.
Phoneme / ɲ / is produced with an articulated nasal by using the center of the tongue with a soft
palate. In Indonesian sound system, it is somewhat similar to phoneme [ny] but they are different in
quality. In this case, 8 students made mistakes because they produced it like phoneme /ny/ in
Indonesian.
Based on the above analysis it could be stated that students still had problems in pronouncing
French consonants. They most had problems in producing phoneme / ʀ /, and 5 other phonemes that is; /
v /, / z /, and / ɲ /.
Table 7. Oral Vowels
phonemes Example words Number of students Percentage
making mistakes

/i/ Si /si/ - 0 %

/e/ Fée /fe/ 5 12,5 %

/ɛ/ Fait /fɛ/ 16 40 %

/ə/ Ce /sə/ 14 35 %

/œ/ Sœur /sœʀ/ 32 80 %

 The Capability of Pronouncing French Phonemes by Students of English Department, Udayana University | 49

/ø/ Ceux /sø/ 30 75 %

/y/ Su /sy/ 28 70 %

/u/ Sous /su/ - 0 %

/o/ Sot /so/ 10 25 %

/ɔ/ Sort /sɔʀ/ 14 35 %

/a/ Sa /sa/ 6 15 %

/ / Pate /p t/ 8 20 %

The table above shows that students had problems in pronouncing, it can be seen that for the
pronunciation or production of oral vowels, students encountered difficulties in producing almost all
phonemes in this group. Vowel is distinguished in terms of tongue position, parts of the tongue
involved, and shape of the lips when pronouncing it. For this oral vowel group, only two phonemes
could be well pronounced by the student ie phoneme / i / and / u / whereas the other phonemes have a
certain degree of difficulty so that many of the students make mistakes in producing them.
- Phoneme /e/, /ɛ/, and /ə/ are also quite difficult to be pronounced because their differences are
determined by the position of the tongue while the lip formed an unrounded shape for all those phonemes.
Phoneme /e/ is produced by raising the front tongue 2/3 higher than open vowel (semi-closed), phoneme
/ɛ/ is produced with the position of front tongue raised 1/3 higher than open vowel (semi-open), and
phoneme /ə/ produced by raising the mid tongue 1/3 below closed vowel. The same case with previous
explanation, the students have not been able to place their tongue in the right position so that the sound
produced was not clear enough to show the difference. The most sound heard is [e] because this sound is
frequently and easily pronounced by Indonesian students.
- Vowel phonemes with high difficulty level are phoneme / œ /, / ø /, and / y /. These phonemes are
equally articulated by forming the lips round, but the structure or state of positional relationships between
the tongue and the ceiling is different. Sounds [œ] are the most difficult vocal sounds for students to
produce where as many as 32 people could not pronounce it correctly, followed by the sounds [ø] and [y].
- In terms of the shape of the lips, the phonem / œ / is produced by the position of the tongue raised in the
height of two-thirds below the closed vocals or one third above the open (semi-open) vocals, phoneme / ø
/ generated by the position of the raised tongue two-thirds above the open vocal (semi closed), while the
phoneme / y / is produced by lifting the tongue as high as possible close to the ceiling (closed vowels).
Because the position of the tongue is only slightly different for each of these phonemes then the students
have difficulty in placing the tongue in accordance with its position so that for these three phonemes it is
very difficult for students to produce. Students inclined to produce them in a similar way so it is not clear
which phonemes they produced.
- Phoneme / o / and / ɔ / can be considered to have a low degree of difficulty due to the equally rounded
lip position but part of the tongue involved is different that is; /o/ is produced by involving the middle
tongue, while /ɔ/ by involving the back of the tongue. Students have problem in producing them due to
lack of knowledge of which words containing phoneme [o] and vice versa.
- Phonemes / a / and / / are not too difficult to pronounce with the number of students making mistakes
in pronunciation of these two phonemes are low. Both belong to open vowels however; they are different
in terms of part of the tongue involved in producing them. /a/ is produced by involving middle part of the
tongue while / / by moving the back part of the tongue.
 50 | Ni Luh Ketut Mas Indrawati, A.A.Istri Aryani, Putu Weddha Savitri Lingual (Vol. 10, No.1, 2018)

Table 8. Nasal vowels

phonemes Example words Number of students making Percentage
mistakes

/ / Sans /s / 8 20 %

/ɔ/ Son /sɔ/ 8 20 %

/œ/ Lundi /lœdi/ 24 60 %

/ɛ/ Cinq /sɛk/ 10 25 %

The above table shows that the students' ability in pronouncing nasal vowel phonemes indicates
that these phonemes are difficult for them, since nearly 60% of students had problems in pronouncing
these phonemes correctly. While the other nasal phonemes, / /, /ɔ/, /ɛ/, could be quite well articulated (it
was only only about 20% -25% of students were still unable to produce them well) The nasal sounds
that accompany nasal vowels are not really a problem in the realization, but what was still difficult to be
articulated was the sound [œ] itself.The same is true of other nasal vocal phonemes, that is, students
have not yet mastered the pronunciation of phonemes; [ ], [ɔ], [œ], and [ ] correctly.
Semi Vowels
Fonem Example words The numbers of students making Percentage
mistakes in pronouncing)

/j/ Fille /fij/ 18 45 %

/ɥ/ Nuit /nɥi/ 10 25 %

/w/ oui /wi/ - 0 %

Semi vowels are sounds that have both vocal and consonant features, the slight shift and do not
form the syllable core, for example in French [j] in accordance with [i]; [w] for [u]; [ɥ] for [y]
(https://kbbi.web.id/semivokal). Semivowel qualities are determined not only by the place of articulation
but also by the shape of the mouth involved in producing them. For the group of semivowel sounds,
students still make articulation errors on the phoneme / j / and / ɥ /, while phoneme / w /, had been
mastered by all students. The sounds produced by the students for each semivowel phoneme are as
follows:
- phoneme / j / was often articulated as sound [i]. Sound [i] is the highest sound in the vowel group, The
sound resulting from the structure of the mouth like this is the phoneme / j /.
- phoneme / ɥ / was also articulated like / u /. Phoneme / ɥ / is produced by involving the middle of the
tongue with a round-mouth shape.
- phoneme / w / was also said to be semi-vowels because it is produced by round lips and it is bilabial
vowel. For this phoneme, students could pronounce it correctly and had no difficulty in articulating it.
Based on the above analysis, the students' ability in pronuncing French phonemes could be
considered low because out of 37 existing phonemes, 24 phonemes are still problems for them. But the
students' ability for each phoneme varied, there were some phonemes of which error rate is very high are
phonemes / ʀ /, / ø /, / œ /, / y /, and / œ /, where almost 65% of the population can not pronounce it
correctly. As for phonemes / v /, / ɲ /, / ɛ /, / ə /, / o /, / ɔ /, / /, / /, / ɔ /, / j / and / ɥ / at a moderate
level with 35% of the student population making mistakes in pronunciation.
Phonemes with very low pronunciation rates are phoneme / f /, / z /, / ɛ /, / e / and / a / which was
only 12% of the student population were still less than perfect in pronuncing them. There are also
phonemes that were highly controlled by the pronunciation of the students ie.; phoneme / p /, / t /, / k /, /
s /, / b /, / d /, / g /, / n /, / m /, / l /, / i /, / u /, and / w/.
3.4 FACTORS AFFECTING THE MASTERY OF FRENCH PHONEME PRONUNCIATION
In the pronunciation of French phonemes, students still made repeated mistakes both in the same
phoneme as well as in other phonemes. For this reason, it is important to search for the causes that affect
 The Capability of Pronouncing French Phonemes by Students of English Department, Udayana University | 51

the students in mastering the pronunciation of these phonemes. Based on the results of questionnaires
and interviews, here are some factors that affected students in mastering the pronunciation of French
phonemes:
a. Some French phonemes do not exist in the students’ mother tongue, in this case Indonesian and Balinese,
nor in the foreign language that has been studied ie; English. This of course caused difficulties for students
because they did not get used to producing the sounds. They also found it difficult to find the equivalent
sounds therefore most of them replaced the phonemes by the closest sounds they were familiar with, such as
phoneme / Ʒ / will be pronounced like / z /, phoneme / ʁ / pronounced as / r /, and others.
b. According to the students pronunciation of phonemes in French is quite difficult. They had never been
heard or articulated these phonemes in conversations, such as phoneme / ø /, / œ /, / ʃ /, / Ʒ /, / /, / ɔ /, / ɥ /,
and others. They did not understand well how to articulate the phonemes correctly.
c. Lack of exercising. In order to produce the correct sound, it is necessary to practice frequently and
repeatedly in pronunciation of French words. Besides speaking exercises, students also needed to listen to
more audio such as video conversations, songs, movies, and others that could help them hear and then
imitated what was heard and articulated.
By acknowledging the French phonemic pronunciation ability of the students of English
Department and the factors that influenced it, it would be easier for the teacher to be more focused or
more intense in giving the knowledge or skill in articulating the French phonemes properly and correctly
especially on the phonemes that were hard to pronounce.

IV CONCLUSION
Based on the analysis that had been done, it could be concluded that the students' ability in
pronuncing French phoneme were still incorrect because there were still some phonemes which could
not be well articulated.
Phonemes that had been and had not been mastered by students of English Department are as
follows:
The phonemes that had been mastered by the students were: phonemes; / p /, / t /, / k /, / s /, / b /, / d /, / g
/, / n /, / m /, / l /, / i /, / u /, and / w /, where 100% of students could pronounce them well.
Phonemes / ʀ /, / ø /, / œ /, / y /, and / œ / were phonemes with a very high pronunciation error rate that
were 60% of students made mistakes in pronuncing these phonemes.
Phonemes / v /, / ɲ /, / ɛ /, / ə /, / /, / ɔ /, / j / and / ɥ / were the phonemes with the rate of error 35% of the
populations.
Phonemes / f /, / z /, / ɛ /, / e / and / a / were phonemes with a low difficulty level because only 12% of
students were not perfect in pronuncing them.
While the factor that influenced the mastery of French phoneme pronunciation by students was
that because some French phonemes did not exist in their mother tongue that is Indonesian or the local
language sound systems. The articulations of those phonemes were hard and the lack of audio
pronunciation and listening exercises in which they could practise articulating the phonemes well.

REFERENCES
Collins, Baverley, and Inger M. Mees.2003. Practical Phonetics and Phonology. New York: Routledge
Helen Fraser, Teaching Pronunciation: A Handbook for Teachers and Trainers. New South Wales:
Department of Education Training and Youth Affairs DETYA, 2001.
Kelly, Gerald. 2000. How to Teach Pronunciation. England: Pearson Education Limited.
Mahsun. 2007. Metode Penelitian Bahasa (Edisi Revisi). Jakarta: PT. Rajagrafindo Persada
Masduki. 2004. “Studi Kemampuan Berbahasa Inggris Mahasiswa Non-English Department” Melalui
Kegiatan Intensive Course Model B’
Thomas, Jacqueline M.C. 1976. Initiation à La Phonétique. Presse L’Universitaire de France
Valdman, A. (1993). Bien Entendu! Introduction à la prononciation française. Upper Saddle River, NJ:
Prentice Hall.
http://kbbi.web.id/fonem
 SNOWBALL THROWING IN TEACHING GRAMMAR
Yanuarti Apsari
IKIP Siliwangi, Cimahi

yanuar.apsari1@gmail.com

Abstract

The aims of this study are to describe the implementation of snowball throwing in teaching grammar and to investigate
the benefits of applying snowball throwing. The research was conducted at STKIP Siliwangi Bandung. This study
applied qualitative research involving one class consisting of second semester students in English Department who were
taking the subject of foundation of English Grammar. The data were obtained from classroom observation and students’
interview. The findings showed that there are seven stages in implementing snowball throwing in teaching grammar. The
stages consist of preparing teaching material, forming group, re-explaining the material to the member of the group,
formulating question, tossing the ball, answering questions and evaluating teaching and learning process. In addition, the
findings also revealed that there are some benefits from applying snowball throwing in teaching grammar such as
improving students’ comprehension in learning grammar, creating enjoyable learning atmosphere, increasing students’
vocabulary, developing students’ speaking skill, developing students’ cooperation skill and increasing students’
participation in the class.
Keywords: Snowball throwing; benefits; grammar

I INTRODUCTION
Grammar is the system of structural devices by which a language organizes meaning. Concerning
with the structure, it is the basic knowledge and skill for understanding the language naturally
constructed and used. It involves the combination and arrangement of the phrases, clauses or sentences.
In our daily speaking and writing we can not deny that structure leads us to construct sentences which
are grammatically correct to convey our message, ideas, and information. A student must know for
certain that he speaks correct and good English or to know whether or not the sentence pattern is correct,
he must know the rules of English or its grammar because English grammar is the key to proficiency. It
indicates that grammar plays a significant role in communication since it shows how language is used
(Ismail, 2010).Therefore, grammar should be mastered by the learners that they can use English
language in appropriate way.
Mastering English structure well will make us easier in learning English and we can transfer what
we think or feel effectively. Without knowing the structure of the language, we may get a lot of
difficulties. This means that teaching grammar has always been a central aspect of foreign language
teaching because grammatical competence is crucial for communication to take place.
However, most students of Indonesia have difficulties in learning grammar. As stated by Onesty
and Fitrawati (2013), gammar is central to the teaching and learning of languages yet it also one of the
most difficult aspects of language that is not easy to be taught. According to Richard and Reppen
(2014), language learners may have spent many times for practicing the rules of correct sentence
formation yet they still lack the ability of using grammar as a resource in communication.
There are many things that we can learn in structure, one of them is tense. Its difficulty might due
to English has a different system from Indonesian. Their native language influences them in constructing
English sentences. In Indonesia, there are no changes of the verb caused by time.
Based on the problem above, the teacher needs appropriate ways that can be used in order to make
the students easily in learning tenses. Using game in teaching grammar it seems works for students since
it can make an enjoyable atmosphere in the class. Games are used to make the children easier to
understand and remember about grammar in some topics. By using games, the children do not feel that
they learn something through that activity.
There is a lot of kinds of game that can be applied in the class, one of that is snowball throwing.
Darusmin, Delfi, and Masyhur (2012) defined snowball throwing method as one modification of an
interesting game that is mutually throwing snowballs which contains questions to fellow friends which
focuses on the ability to formulate question. Using this technique will make all students be more active
and it will force them to master the material since they have to answer the question anytime and
surprisingly.

Lingual: Journal of Language & Culture (Volume 10, No.1, May 2018)
English Department, Faculty of Arts, Udayana University 52
 Snowball Throwing in Teaching Grammar | 53

Therefore, based on the descriprion above, this study aims to describe the implementation of
snowball throwing in teaching grammar and to the benefits of applying snowball throwing.

II MATERIALS AND METHODS

2.1 GAME
There were many studies conducted in investigating the effects of games in language learning.
According to Cheng & Su (2012), game-based learning can make learners become the center of learning,
make the learning process easier, more interesting and effective. In a similar vein, Uberman (1998)
argues that after learning and practicing new vocabulary through games, students have the opportunity
to use language in a non-stressful way. Thus, since the students have a chance to use the target language
that they improve their communicative skills (Sorayaie-Azar, 2012).
In addition, according to Mahmoud & Tanni (2014), game is used for giving intense and
passionate involvement in communication to the students so that they can feel enjoyment and pleasure in
learning. Aslanabadi and Rasouli (2013) revealed that a game does not only bring fun for learners to the
class, but they also motivate learners and improve their confidence. Furthermore, Donmus (2010)
indicates that games can develop individuals’ physical and mental capacities, and also can hold the
attention of participants all the time and puts them in a race with themselves and also with others in
order to obtain certain objectives.
Moreover, games increase learner’s proficiency in practicing grammar. According to Deesri (2000:
3), with the help of grammar games, students can develop their ability in using language as they are
given a chance to use language in the situations which have a purpose. In short, games provide learners
with an opportunity to drill and practice grammatical rules and form by presenting them in
communicative way.
In applying a game, McCallum (1980, pp. x-xi) recommends that the teacher should organize the
game before the instruction. Rinvolucri (1990: 3) proposes that in using games in teaching and learning
process, there are three stages which using them as a part of grammar instruction:
(2-1) Before presenting a given structure, especially to find out diagnostically how much knowledge is
already known by the learners;
(2-2) After a grammar presentation to see how much the group have grasped;
(2-3) As a revision of a grammar area.
2.2 SNOWBALL THROWING
There are lots of kinds of game that can be applied in the class, one of that is snowball throwing.
Darusmin, Delfi, and Masyhur (2012) defined snowball throwing method as one modification of an
interesting game that is mutually throwing snowballs which contains questions to fellow friends which
focuses on the ability to formulate question. Using this technique will make all students be more active
and it will force them to master the material since they have to answer the question anytime and
surprisingly.
Snowball throwing is a technique in cooperative learning. Considering the importance of
cooperative learning, Richards and Lokhart (1994) claim that cooperative learning gives a number of
advantages. First, it reduces the dominance of the teacher over the class. Second, it increases the amount
of students’ participation in the class. Third, it increases the opportunities for individual students to
practice and use new features of the target language. Fourth, it promotes collaboration among learners. It
also enables the teacher to work more as a facilitator and a consultant. The last, it can give learners a
more active role in learning.
Snowball throwing method is a modification of the technique of asking the focuses on the ability
to formulate questions that are packed in an interesting game that is mutually throwing snowballs
(snowball-throwing) which contains questions to fellow friends. Method packed in a game requires
capability that is simple that can be done by almost every student in the proposed question according to
the material learned. Method is usually carried out by several groups consisting of five to eight people
who have the ability to formulate questions written in a paper resembles a ball.
Then, the paper thrown to the other groups responded by answering the questions thrown at them.
In a simple method of snowball-throwing can be described as follows. Students formulate the questions
writing on paper based on the material described by the teacher. Then the paper is folded in such a way
and then thrown to other groups. After opening the paper, another group answered questions and throw
back to the group write the question.
 54 | Yanuarti Apsari Lingual (Vol. 10, No.1, 2018)

Social life is the importance of individual life. From the points above we can conclude that
cooperative learning for snowball throwing is a learning system that prioritizes the opportunities for the
active participation of learners in learning and interactive dialogue. Because in the snowball throwing
students get the opportunity to give and answer questions from others, then the students are required to
participate actively in class. This has demonstrated the existence of an interactive dialogue between
learners. One of the accentuation models of cooperative learning is group interaction.
Some steps of implementing STT in the classroom are as follows (Istarani, 2012; Suprijono, 2013):
(2-1) Teacher extends the material.
(2-2) Teacher forms the students into groups, and calls each leader of the groups to give explanation
about the material.
(2-3) Each group leader comes back to their group and explains the material to their group.
(2-4) Every student is given one worksheet for writing one question about the material explained by the
group leader.
(2-5) For each group there are three questions; the paper is rolled into a ball and thrown from one
student in a group to the other student in the other group for approximately 2 minutes.
(2-6) After the student gets one ball (one question), he or she is given chance to answer the question
written on the paper.
(2-7) Every group has their turn to answer the question; the group that gave wrong or incorrect answers
and gets the lowest score is given a penalty.
(2-8) Conclusion.
(2-9) Evaluation.
Moreover, Istarani (2012:93) lists the advantages of the STT as follows:
(2-1) It improves leadership skills amongst students because there is a group leader whose responsibility
is to convey messages to her friends as members of her group.
(2-2) It trains students to be independent because each student is given the assignment to create a
question to be delivered to another student. Besides that, each student also has a responsibility to
answer a question from one of her friends.
(2-3) It develops creativity of the students who have to create questions and form their paper into a ball.
(2-4) It creates a lively classroom atmosphere because all the students must work in order to complete
their tasks.
This study applied descriptive qualitative research. This study was conducted in STKIP Siliwangi
since one of the researchers is the English lecturer in the faculty. Thus, the researcher got easy access to
conduct the research that it could gain the feasibility of the study. The participants of the study were the
students of English Department of first semester of the university. The data of the study were obtained
from classroom observation and interview. The observation was used to get the information regarding
the implementation of snowball throwing in teaching grammar. The classroom observation was
conducted from October 6th until December 22nd, 2017.
Moreover, interview was used to obtain the specific information concerning the peple’s feelings or
opinion which is not accessible through observation. The interview was conducted individually by using
semi-stuctured interview since the researchers are able to extent the questions. The interview involved
nine students represented the low, average and higher achiever students. Then, in order to gain valid
data, the triangulation data was employed by combining different finding from observation and
interview.
Moreover, the data from observation was analyzed by several steps. First, all of the notes regarding
teaching simple past tense by using snowball throwing were transcribed. Second, the transcribed data
was categorized based on the research question. Third, the categorized data were interpreted to answer
the question.

III RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

3.1 THE IMPLEMENTATION OF SNOWBALL THROWING IN TEACHING GRAMMAR
This study was conducted in the class of foundation of English grammar. The implementation of
snowball throwing in teaching grammar consists of seven stages as proposed by Istarani (2012) and
Suprijono (2013). However, there were some modifications in terms of the focus of the study and
materials in the classroom. In this study, the researcher applied snowball throwing through seven stages.
 Snowball Throwing in Teaching Grammar | 55

3.1.1 STAGE 1: PREPARING TEACHING MATERIAL

First, the lecturer prepared the teaching material. It covers eight topics including part of speech,
present simple and progressive, past simple and progressive, future, modals, and passive voice.
Then, in the first meeting, the lecturer explained the topic of the teaching and introduced the
teaching program. But, before explaining the rules to the class, the lecturer was required to understand
how the game is played. Then, she explained its rules to the students in a simple way. In addition,
demonstrations were given that the students can understand the rules clearly and easily. Then, she gave
the illustration of applying snowball throwing by posing several questions written in a piece of paper
and rolled it into a ball. Then, she threw it to a student and the students had to answer the question
written on the paper.
3.1.2 STAGE 2: FORMING GROUP
Furthermore, the teacher formed the students into groups. There were eight groups and each group
had to select the group leader. Then, the lecturer invited each leader of the groups and she explained the
materials to them. The teaching material related to the simple past tense such as the rule of simple past
tense, reguler and irreguler verbs, and some examples of sentences using simple past tense.
3.1.3 STAGE 3: REEXPLAINING THE MATERIAL TO THE MEMBER OF THE GROUP
Then, after the lecturer had finished explaining the teaching material, each group leader was asked
to come back to their groups and explain the material to their group.This indicates that a leader has the
responsibility to convey the teaching material to the member of the groups. This indicates that snowball
throwing technique improves leadership skills amongst students (Istarani, 2012:93).
3.1.4 STAGE 4: FORMULATING QUESTIONS
After the group leaders re-explained their members with what the teacher has told them, each
student in the group was required to write a question related to the materials on a piece of paper. Since
the member of the group consisted of four students, there were four questions for each group.
Then, the paper was rolled into a ball and thrown from one student in a group to the other student
in the other group for approximately 30 minutes. The student who got the ball (one question), he or she
had to answer the question written on the paper.
The observation data revealed that when the students created a question, they looked very serious.
Some of them attempted to create the challenging questions that are difficult to be answered. This
showed that the activity makes students become concentrating in learning and try to formulate the
questions themselves as good as the can (Gani, Yusuf and Erwina, 2017).
3.1.5 STAGE 5: TOSSING THE BALL
The observation data showed that the activities of tossing the ball made the atmosphere of the class
became enjoyable. The students had different reaction when they got the ball. Most of them were very
surprised and confused. And some of them looked anthusiasm in reading the question after they got the
ball. This activity brings the enjoyable atmosphere in the class.
3.1.6 STAGE 6: ANSWERING THE QUESTIONS
After the student got the ball (one question), he or she was given chance to answer the question
written on the paper. The data from observation revealed that when the students got the chance to
answer the questions, most of the students were able to answer the question related to part of speech,
simple present and past tense properly and correctly. This means that this activity helped students used
an appropriate grammar. It is supported with the data from interview; it was found that snowball
throwing increased students’ proficiency in practicing grammar communicatively. It can be seen in the
following excerpt:
While learning simple past tense by using snowball throwing, I comprehend it better, because I had to
answer the questions related simple past tense directly. Although we did not know the answer, we had to
try to answer it. Thus, we tried hard to review what have been learned before.
(S2) (Interview, translated version)
The above excerpt showed that snowball throwing can help students mastering simple past tense as
argued by Deesri (2000: 3) that with the help of grammar games, students can develop their ability in
using language as they are given a chance to use language in the situation which have a purpose.
 56 | Yanuarti Apsari Lingual (Vol. 10, No.1, 2018)

Moreover, when the students made mistake in answering the questions, the lecturer only took notes
of errors and discuss them when the game was over. In other words, the lecturer did not interupt them
when they made the mistake. The lecturer only waited until the game is over to discuss and correct the
mistakes of the students. This resulted in the improvement of students’ speaking ability as admitted by
student one:
Snowball throwing activity can improve my ability in speaking. Since the activity forces the students to
be ready to answer the question, then the passive one had to speak through answering the questions,
giving the opinion and sharing the idea in the group related to the topic. And the most important thing is
the students can express their ideas freely without being afraid of making mistakes.
(S2) (Interview, translated version)
The finding indicated that snowball throwing can improve students’ communicative skills and they
have a chance to use the target language (Sorayaie-Azar, 2012). This might due to students have the
opportunity to use the language in a non-stressful way (Uberman, 1998).
3.1.7 STAGE 7: EVALUATING TEACHING AND LEARNING PROCESS
The last stage in applying snowball throwing is evaluating the learning process and provided
feedback to the students about the activities that they have just done. In this stage, the lecturer explained
the students’ strength and weaknesses during the implementation of snowball throwing. The data
showed that snowball throwing does not only help the students to master the material itself but also it
increases students’ vocabulary mastery.
Moreover, the lecturer noted that after applying snowball throwing most of the students became
more confident in expressing their ideas and opinions. This was due to the students were given the
opportunity to express their opinion and ideas freely in answering the questions.
3.2 THE BENEFITS OF USING SNOWBALL THROWING
The data from interview revealed that there are several benefits of using snowball throwing. They
are improvement of students comprehension in learning grammar, enjoyable learning atmosphere,
improvement of students vocabulary, the development of students’ speaking skill, and the development
of students cooperation skill and the increase of students’ participation in the class.
3.2.1 IMPROVING STUDENTS COMPREHENSION IN LEARNING GRAMMAR
Almost all respondents stressed the importance of snowball throwing in teaching grammar as
perceived by student six in the excerpt below.
Through snowball throwing I learned more about grammatical rules while discussing with my friends to
do the task from the lecturer. My understanding in grammar also developed since it forced me to open
dictionary regularly and asked questions to my friends when I did not understand about teaching material
especially how to change verb one to verb two.
(S6) (Interview, translated version)
The findings above also showed that snowball throwing is another way to help students to learn
various grammar structures.
3.2.2 CREATING ENJOYABLE LEARNING’S ATMOSPHERE
All respondents expressed their supporting opinions that the snowball throwing is enjoyable. It can
be seen from the statement of student one below:
I enjoyed learning grammar by using snowball throwing. It is due to the interesting of learning
atmosphere. Thus, I want to improve my English.
(S1) (Interview, translated version)
The excerpt above gives a proof that the implementation of snowball throwing in teaching
grammar can create an enjoyable atmosphere during teaching and learning process (Shoimin, 2014).
3.2.3 INCREASING STUDENTS VOCABULARY
All respondents agreed that snowball throwing helped them in increasing their vocabulary mastery.
It is supported by interview result of student two below.
After learning grammar through snowball throwing, my vocabulary mastery was increased. I required a
lot of new vocabularies through the activity. Because when we learn by using conventional method we
 Snowball Throwing in Teaching Grammar | 57

got difficulty in memorizing vocabularies. But it is different when we learned through snowball throwing,
we can remember many vocabularies easily.
(S2) (Interview, translated version)
This finding indicates that snowball throwing made the students to remember vocabulary more
easily. It is in line with Wirawan, Rita, and Waris (2013). They stated that snowball throwing technique
is one option for teaching vocabulary which is efficient and much more useful in increasing students
vocabulary.
3.2.4 DEVELOPING STUDENTS SPEAKING SKILL
Through the use of the snowball throwing, regardless of passive or active students, both of them
have a chance to train their speaking skill. It can be seen in the excerpt below.
Learning grammar by using snowball throwing made me confident to give opinion or ideas. Because
when we got the question we need to answer it directly. It made me think hard to review what I learned
before with my friends in the group.
(S6) (Interview, translated version)
The data of interview above showed that snowball throwing can be an alternative way to overcome
students difficulties in learning how to speak English. As stated by Crookal (1990, p. 112) that games
reduces anxiety and improve self-confidence. It is also supported by the research finding of Aslanabadi
and Rasouli (2013) that games do not only bring fun for learners, but they also motivate learners and
improve their confidence.
3.2.5 DEVELOPING STUDENTS COOPERATION SKILL
The data of observation showed that the students in the similar group helped each other in
composing the questions. This indicates that this activitiy can promote collaboration among learners as
stated by Richards and Lokhart (1994) as one of the advantages of cooperative learning. The finding is
supported by interview result of student five below:
The use of snowball throwing can develop teamwork because through discussion in group we can solve
the problem or answer the questions from the leacturer.
(S5) (Interview, translated version)
The data of interview above showed that snowball throwing is emphasized to encourage students
solidarity in teamwork since they have to solve the problem that teacher has given to them. As stated by
Susanty (2016) that snowball throwing related to “the teaching technique for cooperative learning which
allows students to work together in groups, pay full attention to each other, and allow each other to
speak and to share information in groups”.
3.2.6 INCREASING STUDENTS PARTICIPATION
The observation data also showed that all respondents were involved actively in the teaching and
learning process. They were more active in learning process because snowball throwing model gave
much more opportunity to speak and discuss with friends and presented their understanding to the class.
Students had to answer the question from the paper ball whenever they got the paper ball from other
students. They had to give their opinion in response to the question. Then, they threw the ball to another
student. The student who got the ball also did the same. And the lecturer played a role as observer and
evaluator. This indicates that snowball throwing gives the learners opportunities for the active
participation in learning process. As stated by student five in the following excerpt:
Learning grammar through snowball throwing forces the students to be active because the students here
did not only get the teaching material from the lecturer but also need to discuss with the group to
comprehend the teaching material. Also they need to answer the question directly. It means that they need
to be active to comprehend teaching material so that they can answer the questions correctly.
(S5) (Interview, translated version)
In addition, another interview from student one stated the similar view on the implementation of
snowball throwing. It was quoted as follows:
The use of snowball throwing in learning grammar made us more active because the questions were given
randomly. So, the passive one becomes active and the active one becomes more active.
(S1) (Interview, translated version)
 58 | Yanuarti Apsari Lingual (Vol. 10, No.1, 2018)

From both of excerpts above, it can be concluded that the use of snowball throwing encourages the
students to be more active involved in the classroom since this method covers a rich communication
where students must be active (Darusmin, Delfi and Masyhur, 2012).

IV CONCLUSION
Snowball throwing is a technique that focuses on the ability to formulate questions that are packed
in an interesting game that is mutually throwing snowballs (snowball-throwing) which contains
questions to fellow friends. This is used to train students to be more responsive to receive messages
from other students in the form of snowball made of paper, and to convey message to friends in their
group (Suprijono, 2013: 128). This study has described the implementation of snowball throwing in
teaching grammar in STKIP Siliwangi Bandung. The implementation of snowball throwing covers
seven stages: (1) Preparing teaching material; (2) Forming group; (3) Reexplaining the material; (4)
Formulating questions; (5) Tossing the ball; (6) Answering the Questions (7) Evaluating. Those stages
of snowball throwing result in better student learning especially in learning simple past tense.
The data revealed that snoowball throwing was very helpful in providing the students with more
enjoyable activities which made the students actively involved in teaching and learning process. In
addition, through the activity the students can improve not only their speaking skill but also social skills.
The activity can also increase students vocabulary mastery. It was also proven that snowball throwing
helped students to improve their confidence in expressing their ideas and opions.

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