The Bilingual/Multilingual
Levels of the Students of
English Education Department
in
Rahmi D. Andayani
Erna Andriyanti
This article is based on a sociolinguistic research, of which the implementation is a means of knowing the English Department of UNY students’ knowledge. This academic atmosphere needs to be improved as a bridge to shorten the students’ length of study and of writing their theses (TAS), and to increase their Grade Point Average (GPA) so that they become competitive in the job market. The aims of this research are 1) to describe shorts of languages spoken by them, 2) to describe language domains in which they use their languages, 3) to reveal the level of their bilingualism/multilingualism, and 4) to describe the contribution of their level of bilingualism/ multilingualism to their professionalism.
This study used a descriptive method. The key instruments to analyze the qualitative data are the researches, while that to get the quantitative ones is a test set with parameters of bilingualism/multilingualism. These parameters refer to those of Lambert and Mackey (1970), Swanson and Macnamara (in Romaine, 1989), and Beardsmore (1982). This research involved 140 English students as the object since they belong to the ethno-multicultural society. They consisted of the first, the third, the fifth and the seventh semester students. The data are lingual units in the forms of words, phrases, sentences, dialogues and discourses, and the results of language tests in translation, reading comprehension and cross-word puzzle. The data were collected through observation, interview, and questionnaire. The linguistics domain and level of bilingualism/ multilingualism analyses are applied in the research.
The result shows that 1) the sorts of languages used by the students of English Education department are Bahasa Indonesia, their mother tongues consisting of their local languages, mixed languages (of Bahasa Indonesia and their mother tongues or of Bahasa Indonesia, their mother tongues and foreign languages), and foreign languages, such as English and German; 2) the language domains found are those of family, education, job, shopping, friendship, religion, culture, neighboring, and media; 3) based on the result of the tests, the average score for translation is 70.25, for puzzle is 73.88 and for reading comprehension is 427.25. Each of the scores shows that the students bilingualism/multilingualism belongs to category B or compound bilingualism, meaning that the students can carry on simple communication using their languages with styles, variations, and dialects, but to face globalization their bilingualism/multilingualism shows that it can support their professionalism especially to teach English and to work in fields where English is much needed. Nevertheless the higher they have level of bilingualism/ multilingualism, the better the professionalism is.
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Andayani, D. A., &
Andriyanti, E. (2005, December). The
bilingual/multilingual levels of the students of English education department of Yogyakarta State University. Paper presented at the 53rd TEFLIN
International conference,
Website: www.geocities.com/eltindonesia
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