Background of the Study

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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. 3

B. Problem Limitation