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CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION
In this chapter, the writer discusses six major parts, namely, the background of the study, problem limitation, problem formulation, research
objectives, research benefits, and definition of terms.
A. Background of the Study
Many people nowadays are aware of the importance of English. Now English is introduced to children much earlier compared to several years ago. In
2000, the writer had the first English lesson in the 4
th
grade of elementary school, but today, English has already been introduced to kindergarten students because
many parents want to educate their children in English. This is the fact that many sides are aware of English. In this study, Mrs. X, a housewife living in Semarang,
is a graduate of an English department. She has a three-year-and-four-month-old daughter, Rose. Since she has an English background, is able to communicate in
English actively, and is concerned with the importance of English, she decided to introduce English to her daughter since early time. She began to use English to
talk to her baby girl, Rose, since she was newborn. As a result, Rose was already able to produce English simple sentences correctly at the age of two and a half.
On the ot her hand, Rose’s father cannot speak English well. For that matter, he
often uses Bahasa Indonesia to talk to Rose. This phenomenon then creates a bilingual situation in the family. Rose speaks English to her mother and mainly
2 speaks Indonesian to her father. The situation of the family can be considered as a
bilingual situation since Nababan 1984 defines bilingualism as “Kebiasaan
menggunakan dua bahasa dalam interaksi dengan orang lain.” Fishman 1965
also supports this definition by stating that bilingualism is an individuals ability to use more than one language as cited by Cantone, 2007, p. 2.
Children begin with learning words before they are able to produce a single sentence. In other words, after they are able to produce words, they will
start to put the words together and produce a sentence. In this case, Rose knows two different languages at the same time. Thus, when she is able to produce
words, she will also be able to produce simple sentences. However, her knowledge consists of English and Bahasa Indonesia. As a result, she mixes both
languages within a single sentence. Mixing languages is known as code-mixing. According to Muysken
2000, code- mixing is “all cases where lexical items and grammatical features
from two languages appear in one sentence.” He also believes that an ideal
bilingual does not switch languages within a single sentence p. 1. In other words, the phenomenon where Rose mixes English and Bahasa Indonesia within
a sentence can be considered as an inappropriate language use because mixing languages is not the appropriate way to speak Muysken, 2000, p. 1. Therefore,
not only classifying Roses code-mixed utterances, this study is also intended to discover the possible reasons for her code-mixing.
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B. Problem Limitation