A Study of topical strategies and topic shift markers in teaching english to children in friendships english course in Surabaya

Setiawati, Heny (2003) A Study of topical strategies and topic shift markers in teaching english to children in friendships english course in Surabaya. Bachelor thesis, Petra Christian University.

Abstract

In teaching, the teacher tends to talk about one topic and then shift and develop it into many new topics or subtopics and sometimes use markers to mark the shift. The writer is interested in analyzing topic shift and topic shift markers because she wanted to know what types of topical strategies and topic shift markers that are mostly used by the teacher in teaching English as a foreign language to the children. The writer chooses a teacher who is teaching the children because the writer consider that, as a teacher he or she should be aware in teaching the children while children need more time in acquiring the foreign language than the adult. This research might help people understand the use of topical strategies and topic shift markers in teaching the children in order to prevent misunderstanding or message misinterpretation. The writer employed descriptive approach in this study. The data were obtained through recording the subjects while the teachers were teaching the students for an hour in every meeting. In analyzing the data, the writer firstly transcribed the collected data into written form. Secondly, she identified the topical strategies and topic shift markers that are used by the teacher in teaching English to children. Then, she applied Stenstrom?s theory about topical strategies (1994) and Schiffrin?s theory about discourse markers (1991) in the analysis. After a thorough analysis, the writer found that in teaching English to the children, the teacher used all the topical strategies that are introduced by Stenstorm. Furthermore, not all topic shift markers that are introduced by Schiffrin were used by the teacher for example like "and, but, or", "well", "Y?know/I mean". The teacher tends to use other markers like "come on" and called the name of the students in order to give some order that the students have to do. In this analysis, the writer analyzed the number of occurrence of topical strategies and topic shift markers that mostly used by the teacher. From the analysis, it could be noticed that the teacher mostly used the topical strategy of introducing a topic and then followed by others like shifting, terminating, digressing, resuming, changing and drifting. The strategy of introducing a topic was mostly occurred in teaching the children, it happened because the teacher controlled over the class conditions so he or she had to introduce many topics to the students. Actually, the writer also found the occurrence numbers of topic shift markers that were used by the teachers in teaching the children. They were "question", "pause", "alright", "now", "eh", "oh", "oya", "come on", and "so". Question was mostly occurred in shifting the topic from one topic into another one. It usually happen when the teacher wanted to introduced a new topic to the children in the class of foreign language.

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