Final assignment: Summary of A Study on the Reading Skills of EFL University Students

The study conducted by Flora Debora Floris and Marsha Divina investigated kinds of reading skills that EFL University students have difficulty with. The respondents were ten students of batch 2003 studying at an English Department of a private university in Surabaya, Indonesia. They were selected because they had passed all levels of reading classes and had learnt all essential reading skills.

In doing the data collection, the writers used some steps. First step was to analyze the kinds of reading skills which were taught in Reading one, Reading Two, Reading Three, and Reading Four classes at the department. Here, the writer decided to focus on seventeen reading skills which were already taught. They were 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 text organization, recognizing presupposition underlying the text, recognizing implications and making inference, prediction, distinguishing between fact and opinion, paraphrasing, and summarizing.

Second step of the data collection was to develop two reading test. The writers used two kinds of reading text. They developed test items which covered those seventeen kinds of reading skills. The third step was piloting the two reading tests. The fourth step of the data collection was to distribute the reading test to the respondents. The final step was to check and count the results of both reading tests.

In this study, the most difficult reading skill for these students was recognizing text or organization (72.5%). The second most difficult reading skill was paraphrasing (65%). Vocabulary skill was the third most difficult reading skill (57.5%). Meanwhile reading skill which the respondents didn’t have much difficulty with was scanning skill. The other reading skills which had low difficulty level were improving reading speed (10%) and recognizing the author’s presupposition underlying the text (10%).

From the findings in this study, we can see that each reading skill had different level of difficulty for the respondents.

This study is very useful for teacher. These are some benefits for teachers in reading this study:

·     By understanding the types of reading skills, teacher will consider them in designing reading test.

·     It may be teacher’s consideration of creating reading test by understanding the level of difficulty of reading skills.

·     By knowing kinds of reading skill  which most the respondents have difficulty with, teacher may improve those kinds of reading skill to his/ her students.

·     It may create an idea for teacher to have study about the kinds of reading skills that his/ her students have difficulty with.

Assignment 7: Sex, Politeness and Stereotypes

The issue of ‘women’s language’ is one which illustrates the concepts of styles and register, the way language is used, and linguistic attitudes which will be examined here.

Women’s language and confidence

Robin Lakoff, an American linguist argued that women were using language which reinforced their subordinate status; they were ‘colluding in their own subordination by the way they spoke. Her research focused on gender differences to syntax, semantics and style. She identified a number of linguistic features which she claimed were used more often by women than by men, and which in her opinion expressed uncertaity and lack of confidence.

Features of ‘women’s language’

Lakoff had iidentified a number of language features which were unified by their function of expressing lack of confidence.

The internal coherence of the features Lakoff identified can be illustrated by dividing them into two groups. First, there are linguistic devices which may be used for hedging or reducing the force of an utterance. Secondly, there are features which may boost or intensify a proportion’s force.

Lakoff’s linguistic features as politeness devices

Taq question is a syntactic device listed by Lakoff which may express affective meaning. They may express uncertainty. Taq may also express affective meaning. They may function as facilitative or positive politeness devices, providing an addressee with an easy entree into a conversation. A taq may also soften a directive or a criticism. The taq functions not to express uncertainty, but rather to soften the negative comment. Taqs may also be used as confrontational and coercive devices.

It is clear that the women used more  taqs than the men. Women didn’t use them for the same purposes as men. Women put more emphasis than men into on the polite or affective functions of taqs, using them as facilitative positive politeness devices. Men used more taqs for the expressions of uncertainty.

Interaction

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

- Interruptions

In same-sex interactions, interruptions were pretty evenly distributed between speakers. In cross-sex interactions almost all the interruptions were from male. Women are evidently socialised from early childhood to expect to be interrupted.

- Feedback

Another aspect of the picture of women as cooperative conversationalists is the evidence that women provide more encouraging feedback to their conversational partners than men do. Men tend to be more competitive and less supportive of others.

- Explanations

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

Gossip

Gossip describes the kind of relaxed in-group talk that goes on between people in informal contexts. Women’s gossip focusses predominantly on personal experiences and personal relationships, on personal problems and feelings. In parallel situations the topics men discuss tend to focus on things and activities.

Sexist language

Sexist language is one example of the way a culture or society conveys its values from one group to another and from one generation to the next. Sexist language encodes stereotyped attitudes to women and men. The study of sexist language is concerned with the way language expresses both negative and positive stereotypes of both women and men. In practice, research in this area has concentrated on the ways in which language conveys negative  attitudes to women.

Can a language be sexist?

Sexism involves behaviour which maintains social inequalities between women and men. There are a number of ways in which it has been suggested that the English language discriminates against women. 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, regardless of their actual power or social status in a particular context.