YUSNITA SYLVIA NINGRUM , 2201503032 (2007) REALIZATION OF SPEECH FUNCTIONS BY PRIMARY SCHOOL LEARNERS OF ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE. Masters thesis, Universitas Negeri Semarang.

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Abstract

In Indonesia, children have the opportunities to deal with many languages, including English. As it is considered as a foreign language, English learning share the same central characteristics of foreign language learning which lies in the amount and type of exposure to the language: there will be very little experience of the language outside the classroom, and encounters with the language will be through several hours of teaching in a school week. Fortunately, English in Indonesia is considered as the first and major foreign language. Therefore English learning gets more attention than any foreign language learning. In addition, children learning English at school are believed to have acquired better language compared to those learning without guidance. The main concern of this study is the realization of speech functions by primary school learners of English as a foreign language. It describes the way the young learners negotiate meanings through their choices of speech functions and the realization of those speech functions through the choices of mood after they are being treated at school. The corpus of the data of this research is a stretch of approximately sixty-minutes dialogue between 5 primary school children and their teacher. The children were on the second year when the data were taken. They were given a project by the teacher and the conversation among them were recorded. This qualitative research is conducted and the speech functions are categorized based on the Speech Function Network developed by Eggins and Slade (1997). The data are interpretively analyzed within the systemic functional linguistic tradition. The unit of analysis is move. The results of this research show (1) in a classroom spoken interaction, children have almost equal opportunity to take floor, even though if it is seen individually there are quite significant differences in taking the floor from one child to another child. The teacher takes less floor than the children and plays her role as a supportive partner in the interaction, (2) the classroom interaction is one of information negotiation rather than goods and services negotiation which is signed by the dominance production of declaratives both by the children and the teacher, (3) the children prefer to give reaction to others either by responding or rejoinding than starting or continuing the moves. However, to start an exchange, children are fond of giving statement rather than asking question, (4) all children favor of continuing their speech by elaboration, extension and enhancement. Only a few of them like to get the floor back after other speakers take the turn, (5) the children show egocentricity in the interaction from their I subject and subjective modalizations. (6) in taking the floor, children tend to convey their messages in long utterances signed by full declaratives they produce. In addition, they use less minor clause than the major ones. The practical suggestions that might be given include suggesting the teacher to produce speech function that may trigger the children to speak more in the classroom interaction. Avoid prolonging speech functions which will force the teacher make longer clauses in her turn. If it happens, the teacher will be seen as the dominant speaker in the interaction. In addition, teacher should create an English atmosphere in the classroom, because it is proven to be effective to impose the children to talk in English. The suggestion for further research is given to other researchers to analyze the same data using either the same approach or a different one, to use larger data, and to explore other aspects of speech function realization by children.

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