22 student‟s meant. So, she wanted to know whether her student‟s utterance was same with hers. It
showed when the teacher said “yang tanda petik?” then she continued with saying “yang ini?”
and at the same time she pointed a sentence in quotation mark on the whiteboard and the student agreed.
Repeating the students‟ utterance in the first language meant that teacher tried to make the
students feel at an easy thought. The teacher used the students‟ language and made herself at the
same level as the students and tried to clarify the material Moskowitz, 1971. In this study, the teacher was trying to make students feel more comfortable and had an easy thought because the
teacher clarified the material by using simple and easy language.
5. Giving Information
Giving information is one function of explanation, although the purpose of giving information is just to inform about something in a not-too-detail manner like in giving
explanation. Giving information can be in English, in Indonesian or both in English and Indonesian. In my study, the teacher used Indonesian to give information to the students. I
found that in the observation with Teacher 1. Excerpt 13 taken from the observation with Teacher 1
T1 : “Tejo said to Nita, I hate you, can you change it? Cuma dirubah ke bentuk tak
langsung, jangan lupa satu langkah kebelakang . Itu simple kok.”
S: Come in front to do the task T1
: “Is it correct?” S: “Correct.”
T1 : “Okay, good”
On the excerpt 13 above, teacher informed the students how to do task on the whiteboard. She used English to make the student understood her explanation. She gave an outline to the
student on how to do the task, but she did not give detail explanation because she had already explained them in the previous section.
In order to make the information clearer and to avoid ambiguity, the teacher used Indonesian. It was very helpful for the students because the student might get the meaning clearly
23 and right away. To avoid ambiguity and confusion among students about the information, the
teacher can use the first language here Spratt, 1988.
C. Teachers’ Reason of Using Indonesian in Teaching English
The use of Indonesian in teaching English classroom sometimes raises a confrontation among people. On one side, there is a theory that English teacher should avoid
using the first language in an English classroom because it will make the second language learning goes slowly Hammer: 1989 Boey: 1975. On the other hand, Long 1984,
Charles 1987, and Spratt 1988 believe that the use of Indonesian can help the learners acquire English faster because they can refer it to their first language that might be very
helpful for them. Besides that, there are several reasons for whether we can use first language or not.
In this study, based on the interviews, I got several reasons from the teachers on why they used first language in teaching English. According to Nation 2003, there are some
reasons of using L1, because L1 gives more benefits in teaching L2. Such as, first it is more natural to use the L1 with others who have the same L1. Second, it is easier and more
communicatively effective to use the L1. Third, using the L2 can be a source of embarrassment particularly for shy learners and those who feel they are not very proficient in
the L2. The following statements will explain about their reasons. The first teacher who taught English for three years at SMA 3 said that
Indonesian was very helpful in teaching. “Indonesian helped me a lot in teaching. When students got difficulties in
learning English, we can use Indonesian as a helpful recourse to make the students understand my explanation faster and easier.” She also said, “It could not be denied that
Indonesian was very helpful in teaching, moreover Indonesian was daily language that we used.”
