The sudden shift of learning from traditional to online learning is worth noting once again. Stud... more The sudden shift of learning from traditional to online learning is worth noting once again. Students' learning engagement has always been a complicated thing to research but is worth mentioning and important for the educational department, especially in EFL countries. Students' learning engagement in online learning itself is an indicator in which students have in learning to achieve their goals. Empirically, there have been various studies of learning English listening and speaking and/or student engagement, however inadequate investigative attempts have concentrated on student engagement in academic listening and speaking skills, notably in the Indonesian higher education context and also in online learning. For this reason, the current study strives to delineate how students engage in the online learning of the Academic Listening and Speaking course. Besides, it also focuses on the factors affecting students' engagement in such an online course. With using thematic a...
Capturing moments through photos has now become a common phenomenon in various circles, including... more Capturing moments through photos has now become a common phenomenon in various circles, including academics. It aims to perpetuate every historical value in the life of an individual. In this article, the authors attempt to explore how an Indonesian student experienced her inaugural intercultural journey during a two-month short course program in Ireland, a pathway program to prepare prospective Ph.D students with academic and social skills, through photographs that she took amid the program. This perspective of intercultural travel is embedded in the personal and cultural identities of the participant. This article uses photovoice analysis to exemplify how the participant negotiated her natural identities, institutions, discourses, and affinities during intercultural interaction. The data used in this study are photographs taken by the participant and her voices on those photos guided by the SHOWeD model. The authors employed Pierce’s semiotic approach to scrutinize the symbols, ic...
Writing has been considered as a highly demanding skill and a complex recursive process involving... more Writing has been considered as a highly demanding skill and a complex recursive process involving multifaceted knowledge (e.g. grammar, genre, vocabulary and metacognitive competencies). Hence, it has been documented in miscellaneous studies in the past few decades. However, the issue of challenges and solutions to teaching English writing to junior high school students remains under-researched. Therefore, this study addressed this issue, notably in Indonesian EFL context. Three English teachers from a junior high school in Tasikmalaya, West Java, Indonesia were recruited as the participants. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews and analysed with Thematic Analysis (TA) (Braun & Clarke, 2006). On the one hand, the findings reported that there were seven challenges encountered by teachers when teaching English writing, namely (1) students’ poor English grammatical competence, (2) students’ incapability of developing ideas for English writing, (3) students’ inadeq...
The Covid-19 pandemic has influenced various dimensions of higher education systems globally, inc... more The Covid-19 pandemic has influenced various dimensions of higher education systems globally, including English language learning. To illustrate, the pedagogical practices should be altered from face-to-face to online modes. This move affects students' learning engagement, notably cognitive engagement. Although myriad studies have focused on probing students' cognitive engagement, little is known about how students engage cognitively during emergency remote teaching (ERT). To fill this void, this study investigated students' cognitive engagement in English language learning activities in an ERT environment. Sixty students from three Indonesian higher educational institutions were involved as participants. The data were collected through a semi-structured interview and analyzed with thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). The findings revealed that students, (1) deploying metacognitive language learning strategies, (2) possessing self-regulated learning, (3) designating...
The advancement of Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) has significantly affected Eng... more The advancement of Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) has significantly affected English language teaching, such as the utilization of miscellaneous applications, social media and other digital platforms facilitating the learners to invigorate their language skills, notably L2/FL writing context. However, insufficient attention has been addressed to the contributions of employing storybird to the learners’ narrative writing activities. To fill this void, this study aimed at delineating the contributions of employing storybird to the Indonesian EFL learners’ narrative writing activities. Three Indonesian junior high school learners participated as research participants. The data were gathered through semi-structured interview and analyzed with Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). The findings designated that storybird (1) generated ideas for writing a story (2) facilitated to construct generic structure of English narrative texts (3) considered lexicogrammatical fea...
Full Day School (hereafter FDS) has been a debatable issue after the Indonesian Education and Cul... more Full Day School (hereafter FDS) has been a debatable issue after the Indonesian Education and Culture minister raised such a policy to the public. It was assumed to generate controversies among people, such as anxiety in the community, inadequate fund, human resources, facilities and infrastructure and disrupting the existence of madrassa diniyyaa (primary Islamic schools). This study examined six newspaper articles reporting FDS policy in Indonesia retrieved from the Jakarta Post and Republika as the corpora. These newspapers were selected because of their large-scale circulation, intensity of reporting FDS issues and English language journalistic form. Further, this study applied linguistic concepts and tools proposed by Richardson (Richardson, 2007). To illustrate, such analytical tools encompass predication, transitivity, modality, presupposition, rhetorical tropes and narrative as the primary foci of analysis. Technically, they were utilized as the knives to unveil the discursi...
Mainstream children generally experience typical stages throughout the milestones of their langua... more Mainstream children generally experience typical stages throughout the milestones of their language development, from crying, cooing, babbling, until mature speech. Nevertheless, children with special condition usually have difficulties in getting through each phase of the development, such as those having expressive language disorder. These children usually encounter problems in communicating their needs and ideas verbally or non-verbally. This study attempts to present a story of the first five-year journey of Zaid‟s language development, a child with expressive language disorder. Through interview, observation, and documentation, the study informs that Zaid was a late talker and experience difficulties in structuring well-ordered sentences.
Commencing his teaching career as a university students’ English teacher in a religious surroundi... more Commencing his teaching career as a university students’ English teacher in a religious surrounding, Harry, with his free-will and open-minded personality, has experienced a turbulent feeling. He was sometimes confused to situate himself in certain situations which turned him out to be a little bit more clunky. Within the framework of Hargreaver’s (2001) emotional geography, this present study explores the life of Harry amidst his two years teaching experience at one university in Tasikmalaya, West Java, Indonesia. This scrutiny was geared by employing in-depth interviews. Utilizing narrative inquiry as the research methodology, the researchers share the stories of Harry when updating into a novel teaching and cultural circumstance and delving into his emotional ups and downs. The findings of this study revealed five major issues, namely (1) Harry needs to be more careful when engaging with the students (2) teaching is the work of the soul, no matter what (3) exhaustion is very huma...
Ideally, pronunciation teaching materials should be developed based on the equal proportion of se... more Ideally, pronunciation teaching materials should be developed based on the equal proportion of segmental and suprasegmental features and the employment of innovative pronunciation learning task types (e.g. awareness-raising tasks, rhyme and verse, ear training, etc.) (Goodwin, 2013). Unfortunately, such a reasonable breakthrough apparently has not responded by the effective use of pronunciation teaching materials. For these reasons, this study was aimed at exploring the pronunciation teaching materials in Pronunciation Practice module and course syllabus at a university in Tasikmalaya, Indonesia. The data were analyzed with Tergujeff’s data-driven classification (2010) , namely phonetic training, reading aloud, listen and repeat, rhyme and verse, rules and instructions, awareness-raising activities, spelling and dictation and ear training. The findings revealed that the existing pronunciation teaching materials only accentuated on fostering the students’ segmental features. Besides,...
Extensive Reading (hereafter, ER) has been discussed and deployed as a prevalent approach to enha... more Extensive Reading (hereafter, ER) has been discussed and deployed as a prevalent approach to enhance EFL/ESL learners’ reading skills in language classroom for several decades. However, insufficient attention has been devoted to the students’ learning activities in Extensive Reading course, notably in Indonesia. For this reason, this study accentuated on profiling the learning activities in Extensive Reading course in such a country. The data were collected through semi-structured interview and analysed with thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). The findings designated that the students performed two main learning activities in Extensive Reading course, namely inside and outside classroom activities. Viewed from inside classroom activities, they conducted classroom presentations to develop not only reading skills but also speaking skills, self-confidence and self-responsibilities. On the other hand, they selected and read literary works based on their interests and abilities, co...
Portfolio-based Assessment (hereafter, PBA) plays an indispensable role in language assessment. P... more Portfolio-based Assessment (hereafter, PBA) plays an indispensable role in language assessment. PBA represents the development of the students’ learning process outcomes, trains autonomous learning, and stimulates metacognitive awareness. Conversely, a few investigative attempts, addressed the students’ perceptions of PBA in the Indonesian EFL Context. Therefore, this study aimed to decipher the perceptions of EFL students in Indonesia on PBA use in the English subject. Empirically speaking, two female students were involved as the participants in this study. The data were collected through a semi-structured interview and analyzed with Thematic Analysis (TA) (Braun & Clarke, 2006). The findings revealed that students articulated their perceptions in three major themes, namely developing self-monitoring from the students’ learning processes, generating discipline, responsible and autonomous language learning attitudes, and mitigating perceptual mismatches among teachers and students....
This present study reports 30 students' first learning experiences when using Skype in an Eng... more This present study reports 30 students' first learning experiences when using Skype in an English Language Teaching (ELT) webinar series. Since numbers of ELT webinars have been flourishing throughout the corona pandemic situation in 2020, the utilization of diverse online platforms to facilitate the events has also been growing. Skype, an online application released in 2003, was not widely used by the participants in this study as their synchronous virtual English Language Learning (ELL) platform. As a result, many of them were not familiar with this application. Underpinning Gibbs' reflective framework, this qualitative scrutiny documented the encountered shortcomings and advantages written in the participants' journal. This study's findings revealed that the Skype-based webinar provides opportunities to stimulate the students' learning motivation, broadens their insights, and offers enjoyable learning circumstances. Despite the opportunities, there were also s...
Journal of Approriate Technology for Community Services
The Covid-19 outbreak and the enactment of the "New Normal" era created a tentative sit... more The Covid-19 outbreak and the enactment of the "New Normal" era created a tentative situation, especially with limited food commodities for the needs of all people during times of food insecurity. Food products are limited in number and prices are increasingly soaring in the market, making people have a solution to resistance from the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and the "New Normal" era, by realizing a sustainable food home area (KRPL), the community of housewives can meet their food needs, in addition to It is also a breakthrough that can provide an injection to the family economy if it is developed comprehensively. The activity will take place with the Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) approach focusing on the Family Welfare Empowerment (PKK) group where each group will be limited to 20 people / group, besides that the implementation of education and counseling will apply health protocols according to the direction of the central government. It is ho...
Vision: Journal for Language and Foreign Language Learning
Recently, multimodality has attracted the attention of researchers, notably in the educational mi... more Recently, multimodality has attracted the attention of researchers, notably in the educational milieu. However, only a few studies reported on the way students perceived the use of Genre-Based Multimodal Texts Analysis (GBMTA) for teaching multimodality. After addressing the gap, this study focuses on students’ perceptions on the use of GBMTA in multimodality teaching in higher education. Sixty-nine students were involved in the study. Each of the students produced one journal through three meetings. The journals were then collected for document analysis and thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). The findings reveal that the students perceived GBMTA as facilitating them in the building of multimodal discourse analysis, challenges and solutions of comprehending multimodal teaching materials, planning better learning strategies in the future, engagement on multimodal learning issues, and multimodal text analysis practices. This study contributes to multimodality teaching or multimo...
Indonesian JELT: Indonesian Journal of English Language Teaching
This study focused on how teachers and students as the social actors in an Intercultural Communic... more This study focused on how teachers and students as the social actors in an Intercultural Communication (IC) classroom were represented discursively. A video recording transcript of IC classroom activities at a state University in Indonesia was selected as the data source. The data source was rigorously analysed through van Leeuwen’s Socio-semantic inventory of social actors framework (Van Leeuwen, 1996). The main findings show that social actors in IC classroom can be categorised into two main thematic representations, namely positive and negative ones. disclosed that Hamzah as the representative of classroom presenters was represented as victimised, oppressed, intimidated and minoritised actor. Hamzah’s Mathematics teacher was depicted as an intolerant, dehumanising, discriminatory and oppressing actor. Hamzah’s Social Sciences teacher was illustrated as a racial, stereotyping, dominant and provoking actor. The Intercultural Communication teacher was delineated as the actor endeavo...
English grammar has a pivotal position in language learning. It is also considered the basis of a... more English grammar has a pivotal position in language learning. It is also considered the basis of a series of language skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing). However, although previous studies focused on teaching English grammar either from a traditional or functional view, where English as L1 and L2 across various educational levels, scarce studies have emphasized teaching English Grammar in the Indonesian EFL context, particularly in Junior High School. Hence, this study aimed at filling such a void, namely teaching English grammar in an Indonesian junior high school. In an attempt for collecting the data, this study interviewed a participant in one of the junior high schools in Tasikmalaya, West Java, Indonesia. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis (Braun Clarke, 2006). The findings of this study revealed that the teacher use focus on forms and focus on form in teaching English grammar. Those focus on forms involve (1) Deductive English Teaching Grammar, (2) ...
Globalisation, advancement of information, communication and technology, and borderless nations h... more Globalisation, advancement of information, communication and technology, and borderless nations have altered people to enter interconnected society globally. Hence, individuals should be able to foster their Intercultural Communicative Competence (hereafter, ICC). Conversely, linguistic teaching (grammatical-based language teaching) still rules the majority of EFL classrooms, notably in Indonesia. Besides, the empirical scrutiny viewing ICC from the discursive lens remains scarce. Therefore, informed by Discourse Historical Approach (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001), this study emphasised on exploring the Indonesian EFL learners’ ICC discursively from their responding texts. The corpus of this study was 45 learners’ responding texts at an Indonesian state university. The findings divulged that the Indonesian EFL learners were able to (1) recognise key factors of misunderstanding, (2) establish intercultural awareness, (3) identify culture shocks, (4) reframe discursive positions of social actors within a text, and (5) demonstrate cultural adaptation. With this in mind, ICC affects the learners’ typical attitudes, knowledge and skills to advocate their linguistic, sociolinguistic and discourse competences. Allowing the learners to critically analyse their own cultures and other cultures enables them to shape their mutual understanding. This can lead English Language Teaching (ELT) practices to assist the learners to be ‘intercultural speakers’ or ‘mediators’ (e.g. being able to organise communication and interaction among people possessing diverse cultural identities and languages). For this reason, the roles of native speakers of English (NS) as a central reference for the EFL learners should be substituted by intercultural speakers (IS) in terms of performing foreign language teaching and learning activities (e.g. English language education). By doing so, the hegemony of native-speakerism could be gradually mitigated. Therefore, more technically, the tasks of the EFL teachers are not to devote holistic information or to carry foreign society to the classrooms for being observed and adopted by the learners but to relativize their own cultural values, beliefs, behaviours and otherness (Byram, Gribkova & Starkey, 2002). Pedagogically speaking, it enables both the teachers and the learners to reframe their worldviews, to possess open-minded thoughts, to avoid committing stereotypes and to amplify intercultural awareness.
Argumentative essay is a text type to convince the readers and drive them to perform an action as... more Argumentative essay is a text type to convince the readers and drive them to perform an action as framed by the writers. Constructing an argument within such an essay can determine how the writers persuade and the readers are persuaded (Rex, et. al. 2010). However, insufficient experience, unsupported prior knowledge and limited access to information may be a few problematic obstacles for the students to create reasonable and convincing arguments. For this reason, this study delineated how Digital Writing Tools (DWTs) were utilized to teach and learn argumentative essays. It involved five EFL learners of an English Education Department of a University in Tasikmalaya. Classroom observations were deployed as a primary technique to collect the data. The findings revealed that the teacher and the learners performed various classroom activities while teaching and learning argumentative essays with Digital Writing Tools such as (1) teacher's explanations of learning materials, (2) teacher's suggestions on the students' argumentative essays writing, (3) teacher's exemplification of learning materials, (4) students' arguments without using DWTs, (5) teacher's suggestions for using DWTs, (6) students' learning activities with DWTs, (7) teacher's modelling of text (s) and (8) students' arguments after using DWTs. This study suggests that DWTs could foster pedagogical practices in the digital writing classroom.
English as an International Language has contradicted to another paradigm (the Old Native-Speaker... more English as an International Language has contradicted to another paradigm (the Old Native-Speaker Dominated Framework) (Llurda, 2014) adoring the native English language teachers as demigods in EFL contexts currently. However, such problems remain fossilized because of the insufficient awareness of the EFL teachers on their roles as the non-native ones. Hence, Project-Based Learning was implemented to invigorate their linguistic competences and performances to be relatively comparable to the native English language teachers. This study involved 98 EFL students of a state university in Tasikmalaya, West Java. The data were collected through field notes and document analysis. They were analyzed based on the steps of conducting PBL. The findings revealed that PBL facilitated the students to invigorate their cognition, work ethics and interpersonal skills, provoked their serious thinking processes, attained their linguistic competences and performances and maintained their identities as NNSTs.
Even though the current issues of pronunciation teaching have shifted significantly from the nati... more Even though the current issues of pronunciation teaching have shifted significantly from the nativeness principle to the intelligibility principle and from the traditional phonemic-based view to the discourse-based view, the paradigm of pronunciation teaching at the English Education Department of Siliwangi University might still adhere the old-fashioned one. This study was aimed at scrutinizing how the teaching of English pronunciation at the English Education Department of Siliwangi University is. The participants of this study were two English Education Department teachers, namely the Pronunciation Practice 3 and Speaking 3 teachers. The data were collected through the classroom observations, notably focused observations (Hopkins, 2008). The data were analyzed based on the types of pronunciation teaching techniques categorized by Tergujeff (2013). On the one hand, the findings revealed that there were eleven pronunciation teaching techniques commonly used by the Pronunciation Practice 3 teacher during teaching in the classroom, namely imitation and drilling, corrective feedback, reading aloud, awareness-raising tasks, phonetic training, minimal pair drills, contextualized minimal pairs, the use of technology (e.g. LCD projector), the use of tools (e.g. Whiteboard), the use of materials (e.g. Pronunciation Practice 3 module) and ear training. On the other hand, the Speaking 3 teacher tended to employ awareness-raising tasks, imitation and drilling, the use of technology and reading aloud when teaching English pronunciation. These indicate that the teaching of English pronunciation at the English Education Department of Siliwangi University may still hold the traditional pronunciation teaching paradigm, teacher-centered instruction and nativeness principle. For these reasons, promoting intelligibility principle, learner-centered approach, research-based approach and optimal use of technology would be a valuable breakthrough in attaining a more achievable goal in pronunciation teaching and learning, namely intelligibility. Briefly stated, this study suggests that the teaching of English pronunciation at the English Education Department of Siliwangi University should be led to the integration of accuracy-oriented exercises with fluency-building activities as a new direction of pronunciation teaching currently (Celce-Murcia, et. al., 1996).
The sudden shift of learning from traditional to online learning is worth noting once again. Stud... more The sudden shift of learning from traditional to online learning is worth noting once again. Students' learning engagement has always been a complicated thing to research but is worth mentioning and important for the educational department, especially in EFL countries. Students' learning engagement in online learning itself is an indicator in which students have in learning to achieve their goals. Empirically, there have been various studies of learning English listening and speaking and/or student engagement, however inadequate investigative attempts have concentrated on student engagement in academic listening and speaking skills, notably in the Indonesian higher education context and also in online learning. For this reason, the current study strives to delineate how students engage in the online learning of the Academic Listening and Speaking course. Besides, it also focuses on the factors affecting students' engagement in such an online course. With using thematic a...
Capturing moments through photos has now become a common phenomenon in various circles, including... more Capturing moments through photos has now become a common phenomenon in various circles, including academics. It aims to perpetuate every historical value in the life of an individual. In this article, the authors attempt to explore how an Indonesian student experienced her inaugural intercultural journey during a two-month short course program in Ireland, a pathway program to prepare prospective Ph.D students with academic and social skills, through photographs that she took amid the program. This perspective of intercultural travel is embedded in the personal and cultural identities of the participant. This article uses photovoice analysis to exemplify how the participant negotiated her natural identities, institutions, discourses, and affinities during intercultural interaction. The data used in this study are photographs taken by the participant and her voices on those photos guided by the SHOWeD model. The authors employed Pierce’s semiotic approach to scrutinize the symbols, ic...
Writing has been considered as a highly demanding skill and a complex recursive process involving... more Writing has been considered as a highly demanding skill and a complex recursive process involving multifaceted knowledge (e.g. grammar, genre, vocabulary and metacognitive competencies). Hence, it has been documented in miscellaneous studies in the past few decades. However, the issue of challenges and solutions to teaching English writing to junior high school students remains under-researched. Therefore, this study addressed this issue, notably in Indonesian EFL context. Three English teachers from a junior high school in Tasikmalaya, West Java, Indonesia were recruited as the participants. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews and analysed with Thematic Analysis (TA) (Braun & Clarke, 2006). On the one hand, the findings reported that there were seven challenges encountered by teachers when teaching English writing, namely (1) students’ poor English grammatical competence, (2) students’ incapability of developing ideas for English writing, (3) students’ inadeq...
The Covid-19 pandemic has influenced various dimensions of higher education systems globally, inc... more The Covid-19 pandemic has influenced various dimensions of higher education systems globally, including English language learning. To illustrate, the pedagogical practices should be altered from face-to-face to online modes. This move affects students' learning engagement, notably cognitive engagement. Although myriad studies have focused on probing students' cognitive engagement, little is known about how students engage cognitively during emergency remote teaching (ERT). To fill this void, this study investigated students' cognitive engagement in English language learning activities in an ERT environment. Sixty students from three Indonesian higher educational institutions were involved as participants. The data were collected through a semi-structured interview and analyzed with thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). The findings revealed that students, (1) deploying metacognitive language learning strategies, (2) possessing self-regulated learning, (3) designating...
The advancement of Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) has significantly affected Eng... more The advancement of Information, Communication and Technology (ICT) has significantly affected English language teaching, such as the utilization of miscellaneous applications, social media and other digital platforms facilitating the learners to invigorate their language skills, notably L2/FL writing context. However, insufficient attention has been addressed to the contributions of employing storybird to the learners’ narrative writing activities. To fill this void, this study aimed at delineating the contributions of employing storybird to the Indonesian EFL learners’ narrative writing activities. Three Indonesian junior high school learners participated as research participants. The data were gathered through semi-structured interview and analyzed with Thematic Analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). The findings designated that storybird (1) generated ideas for writing a story (2) facilitated to construct generic structure of English narrative texts (3) considered lexicogrammatical fea...
Full Day School (hereafter FDS) has been a debatable issue after the Indonesian Education and Cul... more Full Day School (hereafter FDS) has been a debatable issue after the Indonesian Education and Culture minister raised such a policy to the public. It was assumed to generate controversies among people, such as anxiety in the community, inadequate fund, human resources, facilities and infrastructure and disrupting the existence of madrassa diniyyaa (primary Islamic schools). This study examined six newspaper articles reporting FDS policy in Indonesia retrieved from the Jakarta Post and Republika as the corpora. These newspapers were selected because of their large-scale circulation, intensity of reporting FDS issues and English language journalistic form. Further, this study applied linguistic concepts and tools proposed by Richardson (Richardson, 2007). To illustrate, such analytical tools encompass predication, transitivity, modality, presupposition, rhetorical tropes and narrative as the primary foci of analysis. Technically, they were utilized as the knives to unveil the discursi...
Mainstream children generally experience typical stages throughout the milestones of their langua... more Mainstream children generally experience typical stages throughout the milestones of their language development, from crying, cooing, babbling, until mature speech. Nevertheless, children with special condition usually have difficulties in getting through each phase of the development, such as those having expressive language disorder. These children usually encounter problems in communicating their needs and ideas verbally or non-verbally. This study attempts to present a story of the first five-year journey of Zaid‟s language development, a child with expressive language disorder. Through interview, observation, and documentation, the study informs that Zaid was a late talker and experience difficulties in structuring well-ordered sentences.
Commencing his teaching career as a university students’ English teacher in a religious surroundi... more Commencing his teaching career as a university students’ English teacher in a religious surrounding, Harry, with his free-will and open-minded personality, has experienced a turbulent feeling. He was sometimes confused to situate himself in certain situations which turned him out to be a little bit more clunky. Within the framework of Hargreaver’s (2001) emotional geography, this present study explores the life of Harry amidst his two years teaching experience at one university in Tasikmalaya, West Java, Indonesia. This scrutiny was geared by employing in-depth interviews. Utilizing narrative inquiry as the research methodology, the researchers share the stories of Harry when updating into a novel teaching and cultural circumstance and delving into his emotional ups and downs. The findings of this study revealed five major issues, namely (1) Harry needs to be more careful when engaging with the students (2) teaching is the work of the soul, no matter what (3) exhaustion is very huma...
Ideally, pronunciation teaching materials should be developed based on the equal proportion of se... more Ideally, pronunciation teaching materials should be developed based on the equal proportion of segmental and suprasegmental features and the employment of innovative pronunciation learning task types (e.g. awareness-raising tasks, rhyme and verse, ear training, etc.) (Goodwin, 2013). Unfortunately, such a reasonable breakthrough apparently has not responded by the effective use of pronunciation teaching materials. For these reasons, this study was aimed at exploring the pronunciation teaching materials in Pronunciation Practice module and course syllabus at a university in Tasikmalaya, Indonesia. The data were analyzed with Tergujeff’s data-driven classification (2010) , namely phonetic training, reading aloud, listen and repeat, rhyme and verse, rules and instructions, awareness-raising activities, spelling and dictation and ear training. The findings revealed that the existing pronunciation teaching materials only accentuated on fostering the students’ segmental features. Besides,...
Extensive Reading (hereafter, ER) has been discussed and deployed as a prevalent approach to enha... more Extensive Reading (hereafter, ER) has been discussed and deployed as a prevalent approach to enhance EFL/ESL learners’ reading skills in language classroom for several decades. However, insufficient attention has been devoted to the students’ learning activities in Extensive Reading course, notably in Indonesia. For this reason, this study accentuated on profiling the learning activities in Extensive Reading course in such a country. The data were collected through semi-structured interview and analysed with thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). The findings designated that the students performed two main learning activities in Extensive Reading course, namely inside and outside classroom activities. Viewed from inside classroom activities, they conducted classroom presentations to develop not only reading skills but also speaking skills, self-confidence and self-responsibilities. On the other hand, they selected and read literary works based on their interests and abilities, co...
Portfolio-based Assessment (hereafter, PBA) plays an indispensable role in language assessment. P... more Portfolio-based Assessment (hereafter, PBA) plays an indispensable role in language assessment. PBA represents the development of the students’ learning process outcomes, trains autonomous learning, and stimulates metacognitive awareness. Conversely, a few investigative attempts, addressed the students’ perceptions of PBA in the Indonesian EFL Context. Therefore, this study aimed to decipher the perceptions of EFL students in Indonesia on PBA use in the English subject. Empirically speaking, two female students were involved as the participants in this study. The data were collected through a semi-structured interview and analyzed with Thematic Analysis (TA) (Braun & Clarke, 2006). The findings revealed that students articulated their perceptions in three major themes, namely developing self-monitoring from the students’ learning processes, generating discipline, responsible and autonomous language learning attitudes, and mitigating perceptual mismatches among teachers and students....
This present study reports 30 students' first learning experiences when using Skype in an Eng... more This present study reports 30 students' first learning experiences when using Skype in an English Language Teaching (ELT) webinar series. Since numbers of ELT webinars have been flourishing throughout the corona pandemic situation in 2020, the utilization of diverse online platforms to facilitate the events has also been growing. Skype, an online application released in 2003, was not widely used by the participants in this study as their synchronous virtual English Language Learning (ELL) platform. As a result, many of them were not familiar with this application. Underpinning Gibbs' reflective framework, this qualitative scrutiny documented the encountered shortcomings and advantages written in the participants' journal. This study's findings revealed that the Skype-based webinar provides opportunities to stimulate the students' learning motivation, broadens their insights, and offers enjoyable learning circumstances. Despite the opportunities, there were also s...
Journal of Approriate Technology for Community Services
The Covid-19 outbreak and the enactment of the "New Normal" era created a tentative sit... more The Covid-19 outbreak and the enactment of the "New Normal" era created a tentative situation, especially with limited food commodities for the needs of all people during times of food insecurity. Food products are limited in number and prices are increasingly soaring in the market, making people have a solution to resistance from the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and the "New Normal" era, by realizing a sustainable food home area (KRPL), the community of housewives can meet their food needs, in addition to It is also a breakthrough that can provide an injection to the family economy if it is developed comprehensively. The activity will take place with the Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) approach focusing on the Family Welfare Empowerment (PKK) group where each group will be limited to 20 people / group, besides that the implementation of education and counseling will apply health protocols according to the direction of the central government. It is ho...
Vision: Journal for Language and Foreign Language Learning
Recently, multimodality has attracted the attention of researchers, notably in the educational mi... more Recently, multimodality has attracted the attention of researchers, notably in the educational milieu. However, only a few studies reported on the way students perceived the use of Genre-Based Multimodal Texts Analysis (GBMTA) for teaching multimodality. After addressing the gap, this study focuses on students’ perceptions on the use of GBMTA in multimodality teaching in higher education. Sixty-nine students were involved in the study. Each of the students produced one journal through three meetings. The journals were then collected for document analysis and thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006). The findings reveal that the students perceived GBMTA as facilitating them in the building of multimodal discourse analysis, challenges and solutions of comprehending multimodal teaching materials, planning better learning strategies in the future, engagement on multimodal learning issues, and multimodal text analysis practices. This study contributes to multimodality teaching or multimo...
Indonesian JELT: Indonesian Journal of English Language Teaching
This study focused on how teachers and students as the social actors in an Intercultural Communic... more This study focused on how teachers and students as the social actors in an Intercultural Communication (IC) classroom were represented discursively. A video recording transcript of IC classroom activities at a state University in Indonesia was selected as the data source. The data source was rigorously analysed through van Leeuwen’s Socio-semantic inventory of social actors framework (Van Leeuwen, 1996). The main findings show that social actors in IC classroom can be categorised into two main thematic representations, namely positive and negative ones. disclosed that Hamzah as the representative of classroom presenters was represented as victimised, oppressed, intimidated and minoritised actor. Hamzah’s Mathematics teacher was depicted as an intolerant, dehumanising, discriminatory and oppressing actor. Hamzah’s Social Sciences teacher was illustrated as a racial, stereotyping, dominant and provoking actor. The Intercultural Communication teacher was delineated as the actor endeavo...
English grammar has a pivotal position in language learning. It is also considered the basis of a... more English grammar has a pivotal position in language learning. It is also considered the basis of a series of language skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing). However, although previous studies focused on teaching English grammar either from a traditional or functional view, where English as L1 and L2 across various educational levels, scarce studies have emphasized teaching English Grammar in the Indonesian EFL context, particularly in Junior High School. Hence, this study aimed at filling such a void, namely teaching English grammar in an Indonesian junior high school. In an attempt for collecting the data, this study interviewed a participant in one of the junior high schools in Tasikmalaya, West Java, Indonesia. The data were analyzed using thematic analysis (Braun Clarke, 2006). The findings of this study revealed that the teacher use focus on forms and focus on form in teaching English grammar. Those focus on forms involve (1) Deductive English Teaching Grammar, (2) ...
Globalisation, advancement of information, communication and technology, and borderless nations h... more Globalisation, advancement of information, communication and technology, and borderless nations have altered people to enter interconnected society globally. Hence, individuals should be able to foster their Intercultural Communicative Competence (hereafter, ICC). Conversely, linguistic teaching (grammatical-based language teaching) still rules the majority of EFL classrooms, notably in Indonesia. Besides, the empirical scrutiny viewing ICC from the discursive lens remains scarce. Therefore, informed by Discourse Historical Approach (Reisigl & Wodak, 2001), this study emphasised on exploring the Indonesian EFL learners’ ICC discursively from their responding texts. The corpus of this study was 45 learners’ responding texts at an Indonesian state university. The findings divulged that the Indonesian EFL learners were able to (1) recognise key factors of misunderstanding, (2) establish intercultural awareness, (3) identify culture shocks, (4) reframe discursive positions of social actors within a text, and (5) demonstrate cultural adaptation. With this in mind, ICC affects the learners’ typical attitudes, knowledge and skills to advocate their linguistic, sociolinguistic and discourse competences. Allowing the learners to critically analyse their own cultures and other cultures enables them to shape their mutual understanding. This can lead English Language Teaching (ELT) practices to assist the learners to be ‘intercultural speakers’ or ‘mediators’ (e.g. being able to organise communication and interaction among people possessing diverse cultural identities and languages). For this reason, the roles of native speakers of English (NS) as a central reference for the EFL learners should be substituted by intercultural speakers (IS) in terms of performing foreign language teaching and learning activities (e.g. English language education). By doing so, the hegemony of native-speakerism could be gradually mitigated. Therefore, more technically, the tasks of the EFL teachers are not to devote holistic information or to carry foreign society to the classrooms for being observed and adopted by the learners but to relativize their own cultural values, beliefs, behaviours and otherness (Byram, Gribkova & Starkey, 2002). Pedagogically speaking, it enables both the teachers and the learners to reframe their worldviews, to possess open-minded thoughts, to avoid committing stereotypes and to amplify intercultural awareness.
Argumentative essay is a text type to convince the readers and drive them to perform an action as... more Argumentative essay is a text type to convince the readers and drive them to perform an action as framed by the writers. Constructing an argument within such an essay can determine how the writers persuade and the readers are persuaded (Rex, et. al. 2010). However, insufficient experience, unsupported prior knowledge and limited access to information may be a few problematic obstacles for the students to create reasonable and convincing arguments. For this reason, this study delineated how Digital Writing Tools (DWTs) were utilized to teach and learn argumentative essays. It involved five EFL learners of an English Education Department of a University in Tasikmalaya. Classroom observations were deployed as a primary technique to collect the data. The findings revealed that the teacher and the learners performed various classroom activities while teaching and learning argumentative essays with Digital Writing Tools such as (1) teacher's explanations of learning materials, (2) teacher's suggestions on the students' argumentative essays writing, (3) teacher's exemplification of learning materials, (4) students' arguments without using DWTs, (5) teacher's suggestions for using DWTs, (6) students' learning activities with DWTs, (7) teacher's modelling of text (s) and (8) students' arguments after using DWTs. This study suggests that DWTs could foster pedagogical practices in the digital writing classroom.
English as an International Language has contradicted to another paradigm (the Old Native-Speaker... more English as an International Language has contradicted to another paradigm (the Old Native-Speaker Dominated Framework) (Llurda, 2014) adoring the native English language teachers as demigods in EFL contexts currently. However, such problems remain fossilized because of the insufficient awareness of the EFL teachers on their roles as the non-native ones. Hence, Project-Based Learning was implemented to invigorate their linguistic competences and performances to be relatively comparable to the native English language teachers. This study involved 98 EFL students of a state university in Tasikmalaya, West Java. The data were collected through field notes and document analysis. They were analyzed based on the steps of conducting PBL. The findings revealed that PBL facilitated the students to invigorate their cognition, work ethics and interpersonal skills, provoked their serious thinking processes, attained their linguistic competences and performances and maintained their identities as NNSTs.
Even though the current issues of pronunciation teaching have shifted significantly from the nati... more Even though the current issues of pronunciation teaching have shifted significantly from the nativeness principle to the intelligibility principle and from the traditional phonemic-based view to the discourse-based view, the paradigm of pronunciation teaching at the English Education Department of Siliwangi University might still adhere the old-fashioned one. This study was aimed at scrutinizing how the teaching of English pronunciation at the English Education Department of Siliwangi University is. The participants of this study were two English Education Department teachers, namely the Pronunciation Practice 3 and Speaking 3 teachers. The data were collected through the classroom observations, notably focused observations (Hopkins, 2008). The data were analyzed based on the types of pronunciation teaching techniques categorized by Tergujeff (2013). On the one hand, the findings revealed that there were eleven pronunciation teaching techniques commonly used by the Pronunciation Practice 3 teacher during teaching in the classroom, namely imitation and drilling, corrective feedback, reading aloud, awareness-raising tasks, phonetic training, minimal pair drills, contextualized minimal pairs, the use of technology (e.g. LCD projector), the use of tools (e.g. Whiteboard), the use of materials (e.g. Pronunciation Practice 3 module) and ear training. On the other hand, the Speaking 3 teacher tended to employ awareness-raising tasks, imitation and drilling, the use of technology and reading aloud when teaching English pronunciation. These indicate that the teaching of English pronunciation at the English Education Department of Siliwangi University may still hold the traditional pronunciation teaching paradigm, teacher-centered instruction and nativeness principle. For these reasons, promoting intelligibility principle, learner-centered approach, research-based approach and optimal use of technology would be a valuable breakthrough in attaining a more achievable goal in pronunciation teaching and learning, namely intelligibility. Briefly stated, this study suggests that the teaching of English pronunciation at the English Education Department of Siliwangi University should be led to the integration of accuracy-oriented exercises with fluency-building activities as a new direction of pronunciation teaching currently (Celce-Murcia, et. al., 1996).
Critical thinking (CT) has become an essential competency in this current era because it can lead... more Critical thinking (CT) has become an essential competency in this current era because it can lead students to construct knowledge and understandings and social change. The development of students’ CT competency changes students’ emotional, motivational and metacognitive factors. However, Indonesian students tend to be reluctant to think critically, negotiate their ideas and engage in non-traditional classroom contexts. This study utilised discursive-oriented activities based on pedagogical intervention for shaping the students’ CT skills. Theoretically, this study was framed with Discourse Historical Approach (Reisigl, 2017). The corpora of this study were 98 students’ final project reports on Introduction to Linguistics course collected through document analysis. Such corpora were analysed with Wodak’s discursive strategies (2009), namely nomination, predication, argumentation, perspectivization and intensification and mitigation. The findings revealed that the students can shape their critical thinking competency through such activities, notably (1) recognizing the applied linguistic research, (2) conceptualizing ideas, (3) collecting relevant linguistic data and other needed information, (4) sharing ideas and providing feedback, (5) creating research reports, (6) consulting and evaluating the initial research reports and (7) presenting the research reports. By deploying CDA in English language teaching and learning practices, the teachers can go beyond text analysis and prepare the students to use CT in their lifelong learning. More importantly, these activities do not only foster CT but also critical literacy (CL) and critical pedagogy (CP) required by them to be an ideal English language teacher.
Full Day School (hereafter FDS) has been a debatable issue after the Indonesian Education and Cul... more Full Day School (hereafter FDS) has been a debatable issue after the Indonesian Education and Culture minister raised such a policy to the public. It was assumed to generate controversies among people, such as anxiety in the community, inadequate fund, human resources, facilities and infrastructure and disrupting the existence of madrassa diniyyaa (primary Islamic schools). This study examined six newspaper articles reporting FDS policy in Indonesia retrieved from the Jakarta Post and Republika as the corpora. These newspapers were selected because of their large-scale circulation, intensity of reporting FDS issues and English language journalistic form. Further, this study applied linguistic concepts and tools proposed by Richardson (Richardson, 2007). To illustrate, such analytical tools encompass predication, transitivity, modality, presupposition, rhetorical tropes and narrative as the primary foci of analysis. Technically, they were utilized as the knives to unveil the discursive practices embodied in such newspaper articles. Two layers of finding were identified, namely 1) the representation of FDS and people’s reactions documented in both newspaper articles and 2) the pattern of discursive practices constructed by the text producers. The findings signified that those newspaper articles represented FDS as a disadvantageous policy, social injustice and unsympathetic governmental regulation in relation to its implementation in Indonesian educational system. In this case, it was presumed to trigger a huge number of protests, particularly from one of the largest Indonesian Islamic organizations and the teachers of madrassa diniyyaa. Discursively speaking, the audiences (readers) were positioned as the consumers and commodity of the marketized news due to the news producers performed their roles as the thought-provoking actors leading the audiences to possess a similar perception and judgment towards FDS as the elicited issue. In addition, both the Jakarta Post and Republika implied their ideology within their reports. This reinforced Richardson’s postulate claiming that no media which neutrally provide information to the public (Richardson, 2007). With this in mind, people should be able to critically filter and analytically select the information broadcasted by the mass media to obtain the valuable information without being trapped on the mass media ideological construction. Keywords: Full Day School, representation, discursive practices, Indonesian newspapers
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Papers by Fuad Abdullah
Keywords: Intercultural Communicative Competence, Indonesian EFL learners, learners’ responding texts, Discourse Historical Approach
Keywords: Intercultural Communicative Competence, Indonesian EFL learners, learners’ responding texts, Discourse Historical Approach
Keywords: Full Day School, representation, discursive practices, Indonesian newspapers