Using LMS “Elsakti’ as an Effective Assessment Medium for English EFL Learning

This study was carried out to seek information on the roles of Elsakti as a medium of assessment in English EFL learning focusing on the opportunities and challenges perceived by EFL learners. It employed a case study research using the interview to obtain in-depth and detailed information from the participants. Six EFL learners of Universitas Pancasakti Tegal were involved in this study conducting telephone interviews. This result reveals that Elskti has been found to support digitalization where students as well lecturers have higher chances to optimally use digital tools to help them work with assignments and other work more effectively and efficiently. Its features also have essential roles as a medium of assessment in language teaching as they facilitated the creation of a fun learning environment, practicality, automated scoring, and direct feedback. The findings of this study also designate that Elsakti is powerful and potential to be utilized to implement formative assessment more often since it plays important roles in the EFL learning and teaching process, including formative assessment. Meanwhile, the challenges perceived by participating learners in this study were majorly related to the technical problems that the learners did not encounter often or at every meeting

Cohesive Device Errors in Indonesian EFL Students' Writing

AbstractThe study attempts to investigate the occurence of cohesive devices errors found in Indonesian students’ writing and find out possible causes that contribute to the errors. This study employs a corpus-based study approach, analyzing twenty argumentative essays. The error descriptions cover misuse, omission, and unnecessary addition. The results reveal that from 2380 cohesive devices, 750 of them perform error. The most frequent errors are on the use of reference and followed by conjunction. The study concludes that most of the errors are caused by intralingual transfer. Recomendations are also given as pedagogical implications of this study.Keywords: cohesive devices, error analysis, argumentative essaysAbstrakPenelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui jumlah kesilapan perangkat kohesif yang terdapat pada teks mahasiswa Indonesia serta mencari tahu kemungkinan yang menjadi penyebab eror. Penelitian ini menggunakan pendekatan korpus yang menganalisis 20 esai argumentatif. Penjabaran kesilapan meliputi penyalahgunaan, penghilangan, dan tambahan yang tidak diperlukan. Hasil penelitian ini menunjukkan bahwa dari 2380 perangkat kohesif, 175 diantaranya dinyatakan salah. Kesalahan yang paling banyak ditemukan adalah penggunaan referansi dan diikuti oleh konjungsi. Penelitian menyimpulkan bahwa penyebab kesalahan paling utama adalah peralihan intra-bahasa . Saran-saran juga disajikan sebagai implikasi pedagogis dari penelitian ini. Kata kunci: perangkat kohesif, analisis kesilapan, esai argumentati

Reading engagement of Indonesian secondary EFL teachers as literacy indicators perceived over reading resources and pleasure reading

Nurturing students to become engaged readers for literacy development may need teachers who can play roles as models of keen readers. This descriptive quantitative study aims to profile the reading engagement of Indonesian EFL teachers as perceived from reading resources and pleasure reading. A survey questionnaire was employed, requesting the respondents to reflect on their personal and school reading collection and their habits in reading for pleasure. Through a convenience sampling technique, voluntary responses were received from 183 secondary EFL teachers, mostly from East Java Province. The data were descriptively tabulated to result in frequencies and percentages. Research tool SPSS ver.24 was used to analyze the raw data for means, correlations, and compared means. Overall, this study found that reading engagement among secondary EFL teachers reflects moderately positive directions. The statistical analyses demonstrate that possessing personal reading resources may result in a slightly significant impact in assuring EFL teachers to read for pleasure yet better than having school reading resources. It has also been proven that both types of reading resources are weakly, yet significantly, correlated with reading for pleasure. This means that the more EFL teachers have access to reading resources, the more they will read and indirectly improve themselves. Future research may uncover the implications of having teachers engaged in reading on the design of more responsive reading instruction for the development of literacy culture at schools.Nurturing students to become engaged readers for literacy development may need teachers who can play roles as models of keen readers. This descriptive quantitative study aims to profile the reading engagement of Indonesian EFL teachers as perceived from reading resources and pleasure reading. A survey questionnaire was employed, requesting the respondents to reflect on their personal and school reading collection and their habits in reading for pleasure. Through a convenience sampling technique, voluntary responses were received from 183 secondary EFL teachers, mostly from East Java Province. The data were descriptively tabulated to result in frequencies and percentages. Research tool SPSS ver.24 was used to further analyze the raw data for means, correlations, and compared means. Overall, this study found that the reading engagement among secondary EFL teachers reflects moderately positive directions.The statistical analyses demonstrate that possessing personal reading resources may result in a slightly significant impact in assuring EFL teachers to read for pleasure yet better than having school reading resources. It has also been proven that both types of reading resources are weakly, yet significantly, [1] [2] correlated with reading for pleasure. This means that the more EFL teachers have access to reading resources, the more they will read and indirectly improve themselves. Future research may uncover the implications of having teachers engaged in reading on the design of more responsive reading instruction for the development of literacy culture at schools.Please clarify.The sentence is meant to state that the correlation between both types of reading resources and reading for pleasure is in fact weak, but statistically significant. It is expressed in a different way like this sentence in our abstract

Exploring Strategies of Teaching Speaking among Indonesian and Malaysian Secondary English Teachers

The current study aims at exploring strategies of teaching speaking among EFL/ESL teachers in Indonesian and Malaysian secondary schools. The data were obtained from 55 Indonesian teachers and 9 teachers from Malaysia, who were asked to voluntarily fill out an open-ended questionnaire consisting of 11 items. The questions ranged from teaching strategies to challenges in teaching speaking and the use of IT in the classroom setting. The findings of the descriptive analysis showed that teachers in both countries used relatively similar strategies, except for the aspect regarding the proportion of English use in the classroom. In this case, Malaysian teachers used English most of the time in their speaking class, compared to their Indonesia counterparts who admitted using L1 in various proportions and/or situations. It can be safely assumed that the status of English in Indonesia and Malaysia (EFL vs. ESL) is responsible for this difference, with Malaysian teachers and students being more comfortable with the use of English in their daily encounters

ENGLISH TEACHERS’ CONCEPTUALIZATION OF FOREIGN LANGUAGE LITERACY IN RELATION TO INDONESIA’S GERAKAN LITERASI SEKOLAH (SCHOOL LITERACY INITIATIVE)

This study aims to explore how, in relation to Indonesia’s Gerakan Literasi Sekolah (GLS – School Literacy Initiative), Indonesian English teachers of secondary schools conceptualize L2 literacy in terms of linguistic and other sign systems, cognitive, sociocultural, and developmental dimensions, a model of literacy beliefs profile by Kucer (2014). The data were collected through a survey questionnaire adapted from Kucer’s model, comprising 37 closed-ended items on conceptual understandings of foreign language literacy, presented in values of 1 to 5 Likert-scale indicating statements from strongly disagree (SD), disagree (D), neutral (N), agree (A), to strongly agree (SA). After being moderated for validity and clarity, the questionnaire was distributed to various groups and forums of English teachers through Google-form. With this convenience sampling procedure, 157 English teachers, mostly from East Java Province, Indonesia, responded to our questionnaire. The results of descriptive analyses in the forms of mean percentages portray how English teachers in our study successfully frame L2 language literacy as reflected in Kucer’s dimensions, which potentially equip them with knowledge about taking part in the success of GLS implementation. They seem to understand that the core of literacy lies in the cognitive dimension, suggesting the use of literacy to express meanings, and that the expressions of meaning require linguistic literacy dimension as the vehicle. These cognitive and linguistic literacy dimensions are affected by the sociocultural literacy dimension, and the employment of the three dimensions tends to continually exist as we are experiencing new and novel events from day to day. Future research might focus on exploring how these understandings about literacy are finally realized in the classroom