Background of the Study

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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

The study is focused on teacher talk and student talk in young learners’ classroom interaction at Ananda Mentari Kindergarten School. It aims at exploring the patterns of interaction and how the interactions happened in kindergarten level. This chapter contains several sections: the background of the study, problem identification, problem limitations, and statement of research questions, research goals and research benefits.

1.1 Background of the Study

In a foreign language situation, the learner depend almost entirely on the school for the language input. The situation is related to the classroom as a crucial place for students to practice the target language. Further, Cameron 2008 said that foreign language learner, a classroom is the basic part for the students to use and to experience the target language. In the classroom, a communication between the teacher and the students is designed to create compressible classroom interaction. The interaction in young learner classroom has different pattern in term of teacher talk and student talk. Teachers who teach foreign language for young learner usually will talk more frequently in the class, by comparing to teachers who teach adult learners. The reason mostly is because the students’ ages of are considered as young learner. Which are around four until five years old. The students are not able to read and write yet to support their understanding. As a consequence, the teachers of PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI kindergarten school have certain rules as the facilitators model to introduce them into the new language and also motivate them to be able to speak up in English. The kindergarten teachers not only deliver the English course, but also builds enough motivation for young learner to be ready and confident to learn English in the next education levels. Later, students are able to use the target language to support their daily needs such as reading the English book, understanding the tea chers’ explanation and interacting in English both with their teachers and friends or peers. In this case, they are motivated to use English in their daily communication naturally. Ananda Mentari Kindergarten School Yogjakarta is the setting of this research. The researcher has at least two reasons in choosing this school. First, the purpose of this study is to investigate the interaction pattern of active classroom interaction in using English. The researcher has already done a pre-observation. The result shows that students talk is more than the teacher 51 is for student’s talk and 49 is teacher ’s talk. It means that students are active because the teacher successfully gives enough comprehension input and lead the interaction. Second, the unique concept of this school in is term of the teacher-student relationship. The philosophy of being second mother. It makes a curiosity how did the interaction happen. In this school, English is not only as a courses but also as the instruction language teaching for the communication during the school time interaction. In the typical classroom, there is a teacher and 15 students. The teacher spends a good deal of her time in explaining things to the children, talking to them, showing pictures, videos and objects, and going through the demonstrations simulation. The teacher assesses the student’s understanding by asking questions, assigning tasks and PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI supervising the accomplishment of the assigned tasks. The students alternately listen, answer questions and perform the assigned tasks, in order to demonstrate or improve their understanding about the certain topic. The rule of the children is to understand and produce the target language is clearly presenting. This oversimplified the way of talking about what it can be seen in classroom interaction in Ananda Kindergarten School is substantially active. In the classroom, such elements include the perceived purpose of the interaction both locally lesson teacher, institutionally school regulation and the students ’ background Lyster, 2007. All of the children that participated in the class have been learnt English since they were young which was around 2-3 years old. According to Lyster 2007 when children come to school at the age of 3, they are still developing the four skills, they have little knowledge of the world. It means that children approach additional language in a natural manner. In this case, a natural interaction in the class when the teacher is delivering the lesson. As the background of the children, they live with their family which is considered as Indonesia native. They are potentially acquire more than one language. Since, some of the students come from bilingual family, their families have communicated to them in more than one language, although all children speak English in school. According to the school principal, some of students are required to speak Indonesian or even Javanese language when they are at home. The students’ parent had a middle-high level of literacy. There are ‘special’ rule that student’s mother have to work with stable occupation instead of become a housewife. The students are provided by their parents such story books, the kids’ PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI magazines and a direct satellite television. As the result, the children are used to communicate in English. The reason is mostly because they get many language inputs from those media. After that, they are able to produce meaningful output, during the process teaching and learning interaction both with teachers and their friends. Teaching English for the kindergarten school student is very different from teaching English in higher level adult learner. A young learner needs certain technique or method to achieve the target language. Teacher talk is the most common technique to teach a foreign language to young learners rapidly. Walsh 2002, consideres how a teacher through their choice of language, constructs or obstructs the learner participation in face to the face classroom interaction. From his research, it is developed a number of ways in which teachers can improve their teacher talk to facilitate and optimize the learner s’ contribution. This study is the classroom-centered research which concentrates on a classroom interaction. The purpose is to gain the awareness and increase the understanding about the young learner is classroom learning. It aims to identify the occurrences that promote learning in the classroom. In this study the researcher uses the Flanders Interaction Analysis System FIAS to analyze the teacher ’s talk and the student’s talk during the interaction. Flanders 1970 originally developed a research tool, called as Flanders Interaction Analysis System FIAS. This systems was developed to categories the types and the quantity of verbal interaction in TEYL Teaching English to young learner to plot information on a matrix and it can help to analyze and to complete the interpretation in chapter 4. Based on the description above, there is a relation between young learners’ classroom interaction and the teacher talk. The teacher delivers their talk during teaching learning activity. To support their teaching performance, motivate student to speak up and do interaction in target language English. A kindergarten teacher has special or different pattern to interact with kindergarten students. It becomes the basic consideration of the researcher to do the research with the title “A Study of Classroom Interaction in TEYL Teaching English to Young Learner classroom using Flanders Interaction Analysis System ”.

1.2 Problem Identification