final assignment: STUDY ON THE READING SKILLS OF EFL UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

                Study on the reading skills of EFL university students is a research administered by Flora Debora Floris and Marsha Divina from Petra Christian University, Indonesia. This study investigates kinds of reading skills that EFL students have difficulty with, and the most difficult type of reading skill for the EFL students. To answer those questions, the researcher did the research in some steps. The first is analyzing kinds of reading skills which were taught in previous Reading classes. There are 17 which were already taught:

·         Scanning

·         Skimming

·         Improving reading speed

·         Structural clues: morphology (word part)

·         Structural clues: morphology (compound word)

·         Inference from context

·         Using a dictionary

·         Interpreting pro-forms

·         Interpreting elliptical expression

·         Interpreting lexical cohesion

·         Recognizing presupposition underlying text

·         Recognizing implication and making inference prediction

·         Distinguishing between fact and opinion

·         Paraphrasing

·         Summarizing

The second step was develop two reading test. Each reading test adopted from two texts which consists of 34 items as the representatives of 17 reading skills. More than one reading test could give more information about the students’ abilities. The third step was piloting the two reading test to three students who had passed all reading test, and they were chosen randomly. It aimed to see if the test has clear and good instruction and item. The next step was distributing the two tests to ten students in different time. And the final step was to check and count the result of both reading tests.

The first step in data analysis was to analyze the result of each reading tests and put it in two different tables. The next step was to list seventeen kinds of reading skills which were tested in the reading tests. Then the percentage of incorrect answer was calculated. The higher percentage meant the more difficult reading skill.

From the findings, we know that the most difficult skill for these students was recognizing text organization (72,5%).  It might because many Indonesian students were not trained to activate recognizing text organization after reading a passage. The second was paraphrasing (65%) because they had not fully understood the ideas of the original passage or sentence. It may also because they were unable to restate the idea in their own word although they understood the idea. And it related to the vocabulary skill which became the third most difficult (57.5%). Inference from context was also the important skill that was needed by respondents. It was found that the percentage was 57.5%.

Besides that, we could also notice which skill that considered to be easy for the respondents. The first was scanning (7.5%). It could be assumed that they had already trained to use this skill. The other reading skill which had low difficulty level were improving reading speed (10%) and recognizing presupposition underlying text (10%). It indicated that they were good reader. And the conclusion, although it was a small scale research, it showed that each reading skill had different difficulty level for the respondents. Further research could be conducted in the larger scale.

This research is useful for teachers, especially in designing reading teaching and test. From this research teacher know what they should and shouldn’t do. They know the difficulty commonly experienced by students, so that they may find a way to overcome that problem by improving the reading skills that considered being difficult for the students. Teachers may also change the lesson plan so that later, the students will not encounter such difficulty in certain reading skill. Teachers can also design a lesson by considering the reading skill that needs to be improved more, not only concentrate in some certain skill. For example, from the research we know that the students have difficulty with recognizing text organization, but they have no difficulty in scanning. From that, teacher can know that they should train recognizing text organization skill more, than just concentrate in scanning that have been mastered well by the students. But it doesn’t mean that teachers should force students to master all of the skills in a short time or just in one level. teachers may design lesson plan contained plan about which skill have to be mastered first, and what level need to master this skill. How is the method? What are the activities? How are the reading test that may elicit answer to show their mastery in particular reading skill? So it may begin from the easiest skill for the lowest level, and the more difficult skill will be trained in the higher level.

Sex, Politeness and Stereotypes

The issue of women’s language may illustrate the concept of register and style, the use of language, and linguistic attitudes.

Women’s language and confidence

Robin Lakoff, an American linguist argues from an example that women were using language which reinforced their subordinate status. Then, in the 2nd example that is a conversation between a lawyer, a female witness, and male witness, she focus on syntax, semantics and style rather than on differences between women’s and men’s speech in the areas of pronunciation and morphology, with some attention to syntactic construction. She identified many linguistic feature of women used to express uncertainty and lack of confidence.

• Features of ‘women’s language’ 

Lakoff suggested that women speech was characterized by some linguistic features that simply divided into two; the first is linguistic devices used for hedging or reducing the force of an utterance. The second is the device that may boost or intensify a proportion’s force. So, she claimed women use hedging devices to express uncertainty, and they use intensifying devices to persuade their addressee to take them seriously. 

•  Lakoff’s linguistic features as politeness devices 

In example 5 about the use of question tags, we know that they not only express uncertainty as claimed by Lakoff, but also express affective meaning. They may function as positive politeness device. Tags also used by someone who responsible for the success of interaction to make the addressee participate like what we found in example 7. A tag may also soften a directive and negative comment as in example 8. Tag may also be used as confrontational devices. In example 9 there is an example of a tag used to force feedback. From the example we can conclude that tag can also be classified in boosting devices. We can also summarize that in using tag, women tend to emphasize in polite function of tag, and men used more tags for the expression of uncertainty.

The examples above are example form western culture that might be different in other cultures. For instance in Malagasy, it is the men rather than women who qualify and modify their utterances, and who tend to use indirect language that considered the more polite speakers.

Interaction

There are many features of interaction that differentiate the talk of women and men.

• Interruption

From the conversation in example 11, we can see that in same sex interactions, interruptions were pretty evenly distributed between speakers. In cross sex interactions almost all the interruptions were from males. And the study of pre-schoolers found that boys learn to dominate the talk at very early age.

•  Feedback 

Women illustrated as cooperative conversationalist. This is the evidence that women provide more encouraging feedback to their conversational partners than the men do. In the other hand, men tend to be more competitive and less supportive of others.

•  Explanations 

The difference between women and men in ways of interacting may be the result of different socialization and acculturation patterns.

Gossip

Women’s gossip focuses on personal experiences and relationships, personal problems and feelings, and may include indirectly criticism. But men, they mainly discuss things and activities rather than personal experiences and feelings.

Sexist language

Sexist language is one example of the way a culture or society conveys it values to one group to another and from one generation to the next. In practice, research in this area has concentrated on the ways in which language conveys negative attitudes to women.

•  Can a language be sexist? 

Feminist have claimed that English is a sexist language that involves inequality between women and men. For example, in semantic area, the English metaphor tends to describe women using derogatory images compared to those used to describe men. For example, in animal imagery, women describe as negative and weak animal like bitch, and chicken, whereas men symbolized with such a strong and positive animal like wolf. In food imagery, women are also described as equally insulting as above.

It also suggests that suffixes –ess and –ette diminish women for its meaning that represents connotation of lack of seriousness. English also renders women invisible, when it uses he and men as generic forms of human.

The relative status of the sexes in a society may be reflected not only in the ways in which men and women use language, but also in the language used about women and men. The linguistic data also supports the view that women are assigned and treated linguistically subordinate.