Predicting the Meaning of English Words From Context

One of the techniques of teaching English vocabulary to Indonesian learners is by predicting the meaning of the English words from context. But the effectiveness of this technique is very rarely studied. This study aims at finding out the degree of effectiveness of prediction from context. On the basis of a proposed theory that when learners have not had a very large size of references in the long-term memory prediction may fail, it is hypothesized that prediction from context has a low degree of effectiveness. The study makes use of the survey method. It involves 51 subjects. They are the second semester students of the English Department, Faculty of Teacher Training and Education, Widya Mandala Catholic University Surabaya who are randomly sampled from the population that is the second semester students of the English Department. Subjects predict the meaning of 36 English words which are found in 15 reading passages. A criterion of mean score is set to determine the degree of effectiveness of the techniques. The mean score obtained by the subjects is 12. The finding is that the prediction technique has a low degree of effectiveness. The finding supports the proposed theory that when learners, have not had a very large size of references in the long-term memory, prediction may fai

A System Approach To Bahasa Indonesia

In the last few decades, there have been a lot of undesirable changes in Bahasa Indonesia. The undesirable changes occur through coining new words, borrowing words from other languages, especially English, blending Bahasa Indonesia words and acronymizing words. Bahasa Indonesia users seem to exercise their complete freedom in using language. There is no control in coining words, borrowing words, blending words, and acronymizing words. The loss of control that leads to free will and right to use Bahasa Indonesia has caused Bahasa Indonesia chaos. If the free will and free right are not curbed, there will certainly be greater chaos. System approach teaches that Bahasa Indonesia serves the function as an official language and a national language. This function has to be maintained and preserved. If individuals belonging to Bangsa Indonesia continue to exercise their free will and free right in using Bahasa Indonesia, it can be predicted that Bahasa Indonesia will change from Indonesian Identity to British Identit

English Morphology

There is a popular understanding among English learners that meaning lies in words. This is only partially true. In English monomorphemic words meaning lies in the single morphemes which are also the words. However, there are a lot of bimorphemic or polymorphemic words in English. The meaning of these words is determined by the units of meaning that combine into words. These units of meaning are called morphemes. Meaning lies in morphemes. In English the meaning of words lies in free morphemes, bound stems, prefixes, suffixes, and superfixe

In Defence of Context-sensitive Semantics and Context-sensitive Linguistics in Pragmatics

Kinneavy (1971:23) states that “since pragmatics is viewed as the study of complete discourse, it does not include semantics as such or syntactic as such. These two constitute linguistics, and linguistic analysis is not discourse analysis, though, of course, it can contribute to the understanding of discourse, consequently, syntactic and semantics are beyond the borders of discourse study”. Cook (1990:12) also separates linguistics from discourse analysis. Linguistics is said to be without context or context-free. He further says that semantics is context-free. This paper is to argue that both sentence linguistics and semantics are context sensitive. From the point of view of language acquisition, the syntactic structures word meaning, sentence meaning and knowledge of the world that an informant later uses to produce language, are all based on context and are derived from context. Accordingly, sentence linguistics and semantics are context-sensitive. Key Words: pragmatics, linguistics semantics, context-sensitiv