The purpose of this study is to describe, evaluate, and analyze the students' ability in making requests at the UPN Computer Science Faculty, Jakarta. Making good and appropriate requests is important for the students to express their speech acts. Learners whose native language is not English are often confronted with the difficulties in speaking English and the aspects related to status, hierarchy, politeness, and setting.
To investigate their ability in making appropriate requests, this study was conducted through a library and field research. The research questions were put forward to direct the investigations as follows:
1. How often do the learners encounter the pragmalinguistic failures when they make requests
2. What are their causes, pragmalinguistic and grammatical errors
3. Is there a scores correlation in term of sex, joining or not joining English private courses, and correlation of students' tokens of requests the scores of English final examination
The direct measurement is obtained through the student questionnaire, and the results of interview with some English teachers. This study is descriptive in the sense that it is aimed at describing the respondents' tokens of the requests in which Thomas' analysis and Shoshana Blum Kulka's request strategy were used in analyzing the data. The kinds of data are correlated by using the Chi-Square test, and the Pearson Coefficient Correlation.
The respondents of this study are fifty eight sample students selected from 300 students second-semester Computer students who attended the English lessons in the UPN Faculty of Computer Science, Veteran, Jakarta. The data consists of 166 tokens of requests obtained from five questions with different situations and settings.
The results of the respondents' tokens of requests vary. The percentage of the respondents who made the tokens of requests are as follows: 84.3 % made internal modification, 1.2% made syntactic down graders, and 14.5% made adjuncts to the Head act. Mostly the respondents made requests on internal modification especially on the preparatory conditions, 109 requests among 166. The results of analysis show that the respondents encounter pragmalinguistic failures and grammatical errors caused by induced errors, students' misconception, failures as the results of drilling, and vocabulary failures.
In answering to the third research question, the analysis shows that the correlation between the respondents who joined the English courses and those who did not has a positive and significant correlation. It is also shown between the respondents' scores in their final examination and their tokens of requests' results. On the other hand, there is no significant correlation between the scores of female and male requests. For these reasons, the improvement of teaching should be intensified.
The findings reveal that the respondents' problems are related to the results of field of research. The problem of limited time allocated in speaking practice, and the material which is given in SMU should be analyzed to overcome the respondents' difficulties. Besides, the method of teaching directives is suggested and the intensive of teaching and learning English are recommended to the curriculum designers and the educators who are involved. |