Siti Azariah Linggayani Soentoro Dewi, 0204510074 (2016) THE COMPLEXITY OF THE LANGUAGE LEVEL AND THE MULTIMODALITY USED IN SINGAPOREAN AND INDONESIAN SCIENCE TEXTBOOKS WRITTEN IN ENGLISH FOR PRIMARY THREE AND FOUR. Masters thesis, Universitas Negeri Semarang.

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Abstract

The use of English language as communication media (spoken and written) in International schools, RSBI/SBI (International – Standardized Schools), and Immersion programs in several national schools have been widely accepted based on the Constitution of National Educational System (Undang-Undang Sistem Pendidikan Nasional) number 20, year 2003. Therefore, this condition leads to the use of textbooks in English and other sources of materials as the supporting elements of the school programs. This condition also gives both national and foreign publishers chance to publish bilingual books. The use of bilingual textbooks for teaching subjects, such as Science has been triggering questions that bring us into long discussions of the effectiveness of the textbooks to the students and the teachers. In brief, there are several elements that are needed in composing textbooks. Multimodality: the representatives of various modes, namely, images, layout, design, color, and all visual representations to support the texts (semiotic approach) and the language level to provide an analysis based on the lexical approach are the elements that are going to be explored in the research. This study is carried out to find out the complexity of the language used in the Singaporean and Indonesian science textbooks in terms of lexical density and to reveal the differences of language complexity both textbooks, the writer took data from text books with the same materials. In this chase the writer chose topics on matters. Besides it also sees the multimodality and the suitability of the texts for the students. The result of the study can be summarized as follows: First, the bilingual texts are not appropriate for grade three and four. The texts are more complexed compared to the monolingual text which consists of less number of words. Second, all the texts have lower lexical density as the percentage of the unique words and hard words is less than 60%. Third, although the three texts have lower lexical density, the most appropriate text for grade three and four is the monolingual text. It has less number of words but the students may improve their vocabulary with more unique words and hard words with three syllables. Fourth, the monolingual textbook is more suitable for young students as it has more suitable multimodalities that supported the content of the subject

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