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Library's collection Library's IT development CancelIn 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.