Group 4

4. He wants to teach intercultural competence. He wants to apply Nation’s Four Strands

(2009) in order to teach intercultural. Using genre based, he will use texts about English
speaking people and their life for receptive skills. He then will ask student to produce
text about Indonesian people and their life of the same topic. He expects students to
learn to the English ways of expression and how the text is organized.
a. Do you agree with him concerning the texts? Give your reasons.

Yes, I agree with using authentic texts from English speaking country to teach
intercultural competence. Based on the Nation’s four strands (2007), we can integrate culture
in the teaching of texts. The meaning-focused input involves learning through listening and
reading which are the receptive skills. The students’ main focus and interest should be on
understanding and gaining knowledge from what they listen to and read. Furthermore, the
meaning-focused output strand involves learning through speaking and writing which are the
productive skills. Language-focused involves the deliberate learning of language features such
as pronunciation, spelling, vocabulary, grammar and discourse. The fluency development helps
students to make the best use of what they already know. The students’ aim is to receive and
convey messages. From that explanation, we can conclude that students can gain the structure
knowledge of the text through the meaning-focused input and language-focused input. Then,
students can produce text through the meaning-focused output and fluency development.

In line with Margana (2016), to select which culture serves as the embedded culture,
English teachers could rely on the nature of the macro-language skills, namely receptive
language skills (listening and reading) and productive language skills (speaking and writing).
When English teachers focus on the receptive language skills, they may take the target culture
in the sense that the students are driven to get a lot of input texts from target culture through
listening and reading practices. On the other hand, when English teachers focus on the
development of the productive skills, they may take the students’ home culture contexts in
order to facilitate them to construct spoken texts and written texts. In conclusion,

Margana. (2016). Voices of English Teachers and Students on Blended Culture as a Model of
English Language Teaching and Learning at Vocational High Schools in Yogyakarta.
Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, 7(3), 459 – 466.
Doi:10.5901/mjss.2016.v7n3p459
Nation, Paul. (2007). The Four Strands. Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching, 1(1),
2 – 13, DOI: 10.2167/illt039.0

b. What should be consider to ensure that the students learn from the input texts some
necessaries grammar and vocabulary before they produce the intended text?

This four strands only exists if certain conditions are present.

1. Most of what the learners are listening to or reading is already familiar to them.
2. The learners are interested in the input and want to understand it.
3. Only a small proportion of the language features are unknown to the learners. In terms
of vocabulary, 95-98% of the running words should be within the learners’ previous
knowledge, and so only 5 or preferably only 1 or 2 words per hundred should be
unknown to them (Hu & Nation, 2000).
4. The learners can gain some knowledge of the unknown language items through context
clues and background knowledge.
5. There are large quantities of input.

Nation, Paul. (2007). The Four Strands. Innovation in Language Learning and Teaching.
Vol. 1, No. 1, 3. DOI: 10.2167/illt039.0

The following principles should guide attention to vocabulary in intensive reading:

1. High frequency words (words from the first 2.000 and academic word list) deserve
suistained attention. The techniques are described below:
- Pre-teach a small amount of vocabulary from the passage before reading the
passage. Such teaching must involve a reasonable amount of time on each word,
focusing on several aspects of its form, meaning and use, such as its pronunciation,
its word parts, its meaning, different senses of the word, common collocations, its
grammar and any restrictions on its use, such as being technical, colloquial,
impolite, etc.
- Put the word in an exercise after the text. Such exercises can include completing
word family tables, matching words and meanings, classifying collocational
patterns, and working out core meanings.
- Spend time on a word during the reading looking at several aspects of its form,
meaning and use.
 - Make a glossary before the learners read the text. The glossary is there to help learn
the words.
2. Low frequency words are best ignored or dealt with quickly. The techniques are
described below:
- Ignore the word.
- Quickly give the meaning of the word by using a translation, picture, diagram,
demonstration, or L2 definition.
- Replace the word in the text with a more useful high frequency word before the
learners work on the text. Simplifying the text aims to reduce the density of
unknown words so that the text is more accessible for the learners.
- Make a glossary before the learners see the text so that the learners can see the
meanings of low frequency words, thus avoiding the need to spend valuable class
time on them. Here the glossary has the role of getting rid of the need to pay
attention to the word.
3. The vocabulary learning strategies of guessing from context, analysing words using
word oarts, and dictionary use deserve repeated attetion over a long period of time.
These strategies can be practised with both high frequency and low frequency words.
The strategies for high frequency and low frequency vocabulary are described as
follow:
- Help learners use context clues to guess the meaning of the word. The main goal
of this is to practise and refine the guessing from context strategy.
- Help learners break a word into parts and relate the meaning of its parts to the
meaning of the word. The main goal of this is to practise the word part strategy.
- Help learners use a dictionary to look up the meaning of a word and to gather extra
information about the word so as to make it stay in their memory.

The following principles should guide attention to grammar in intensive reading:

- High frequency grammar items deserve sustained attention. In general, such items
tend to be formally simple. That is, the shorter a grammatical feature, the more
frequent it is likely to be. Although frequency information about grammatical
features has been around for a long time (George, 1963), it is only recently that
grammar descriptions have included such information (Biber, Johansson, Leech,
Conrad and Finegan, 1999).
 - Low frequency grammatical features are best given attention as part of strategies
for dealing with complicated grammatical features such as subordinate clauses,
coordination, and complicated noun groups. All of the following activities in this
section on grammar are strategy based.
Nation, I.S.P. (2009). Teaching ESL/EFL Reading and Writing. New York: Routledge. 38-40.

c. Do you think the cultures of the English speaking people are reflected in English
they produce? Explain.

Yes, the culture of English speaking people can be seen through the English language
that they produce. Hamers & Blanc (2004) explained that language is a component of
culture along with values, beliefs, and norms. Language is a product of culture which
is passed from one generation to the next generation. Therefore, it can be concluded
that we can recognize the culture within the languages. For example:
In English speaking country, when we greet someone it is common for them to not
calling the name by using Mr. and Mrs. and only calling by name as it is belongs to
their culture.
Contoh bisa dikembangkan sesuai keyakinan masing masing 

d. The example of cultural points in English expression idiom and proverb.

The example of idiom is feeling blue. For Indonesian learners, that idiom can cause
misconception. They may define it literally merasa biru the true meaning is sedih. The
example of proverb is don’t judge the book by its cover. For Indonesian learners, they
may define it literally, but the true meaning is don’t judge someone or something by
appearance alone (Madya, 2013).
Teman2 bisa cari contohnya di buku merah Bu Suwarsih halaman 236-237

References:

Hamers, J. F. & Blanc, M. H. A. (2004). Bilinguality and bilingualism. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press

Madya, S. (2013). Metodologi pengajaran bahasa: dari era prametode sampai era
pascametode. Yogyakarta: UNY Press.