“They Gotta Think about the Women First, You Know…?” Does

Speaking like a Native Matter?:

A Contrastive Analysis of Indonesian and Anglo-american Students’

Speaking

Risa Rumentha Simanjuntak

English Department, Faculty of Humanities, Bina Nusantara University, Jakarta, Indonesia 11480

Keywords: Contrastive Analysis, Speaking.

Abstract: Speaking well in English is both an important and coveted quality for university graduates. University students

in are often asked to pay close attention and even mimic the way naïve speakers use their English for

successful learning. This study contrasted the use of English for academic presentations between Indonesian

and American students. Indonesian students’ corpus of 6-hour presentations was compared to their Anglo

American corpus available in MICASE (Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English). Lexical elements,

such as choice of words, phrases and collocations, which identify how English was naturally spoken, were

investigated. Data were analyzed using (Anthony, 2018) and resulted in different realizations of English

speaking between Indonesian and American student presenters. The Anglo-American presenters were more

informal and conversational compared to the Indonesian presenters. Meanwhile, the American students used

more colloquial expressions compared to the Indonesian students. Implications on teaching and evaluating

speaking were further discussed following the ongoing debate of native and non-native dichotomy.

1 INTRODUCTION

In countries where English is taught as second or

foreign language such as Indonesia, learning English

has not only been seen to provide the abilities to

access the international academic communities

(Baumgarten, 2016), (Flowerdew, 2012). More to this

academic importance is the opportunities to gain

greater success as professionals after graduation

(Baumgarten, 2016), (Björkman, 2013). English

education has since become the barometer and

symbol for success (Björkman, 2013), (Smith, 2010).

One way to gain success is to gain ability to speak

English well (Björkman, 2013), (McNamara, T., &

Roever, 2006). In established exams, such as TOEFL,

speaking scoring rubrics incorporate a testee’s

responses to demonstrate “automatic” and “effective”

use of vocabulary, and “coherent expression of

relevant ideas” (Educational Testing Service, 2011).

In other words, learners of English have to be able to

perform as accurate as possible as situated by the

norm. To speak as the native speakers of English do

is much coveted (Baumgarten, 2016), (Björkman,

2013), (Smith, 2010).

Students in university level often need to give

presentations in English as a requirement to pass their

English courses and this has become one of the

problems for English learners (Björkman, 2013),

(Flowerdew, 2013), (Meunier, F., & Granger, 2008).

In particular learners often find pronouncing certain

vocabularies to be quite challenging (Nation I S P,

2001), (Nunan, 2013), (Nesselhauf, 2005). Further

problems would to decide be what correct words and

expressions to use in certain context of speaking.

Other aspects of pronunciation, including the tone,

intonation, and stress used, are also considered as

problematic for English learners (McCarten, 2007),

(Meunier, F., & Granger, 2008). Each of these areas

is a potential hindrance in mastering English speaking

(Nation I S P, 2001), (Simpson, R., & Mendis, 2003),

(Simpson-Vlach, R., & Ellis, 2010).

The act of mimicking the native speaker way has

been widely criticized (Adolphs, 2008), (Connor, U.,

Nagelhout, E., & Rozycki, 2008), (Educational

Testing Service, 2011), (Flowerdew, 2001). The

developments of English as lingua franca have

widened the boundaries of ownership of English

(Flowerdew, 2012). In reality, English is spoken

Simanjuntak, R.

“They Gotta Think about the Women First, You Know.. . ?” Does Speaking like a Native Matter?: A Contrastive Analysis of Indonesian and Anglo-american Students’ Speaking.

DOI: 10.5220/0010005400002917

In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Social Sciences, Laws, Arts and Humanities (BINUS-JIC 2018), pages 221-225

ISBN: 978-989-758-515-9

221

between non-native speakers, which entail speaking

like the native speakers as irrelevant (Kachru, 1985),

(Smith, 2010). English has become very dynamic

that it gains different features from speakers around

the world, including words coming from different

languages (e.g. boondocks from Tagalog and quite

recently pendopo, mendopo, or pendapa from

Javanese) (Oxford English Dictionary, no date).

English as lingua franca becomes a contextual

language, in which acceptability is decided by the

participants.

Learning English speaking from the perspective

of EFL learners has been proposed by an approach

called Contrastive Rhetoric (henceforth CR) (Collins

Cobuild Dictionary, no date), (Connor, 1996),

(Connor, 2008), (Connor, U., Nagelhout, E., &

Rozycki, 2008). CR was initially adopted in

investigating the learning of language writing, by

comparing learners and advances writers (or novice

and published authors respectively). By contrasting

both corpora, researchers and teachers could identify

students’ problems or difficulties in writing. This

approach has grown into a versatile approach and it

has been applied to spoken language as well (Connor,

2008), (Connor, U., Nagelhout, E., & Rozycki, 2008),

(MICASE, no date), which also incorporate real use

of English (Flowerdew, 2013). This new approach

called DDL (data-driven learning) (Boulton, 2007)

required teachers of English to look for problems in

learning but more importantly to use the data from

real language use. Contrastive approach becomes an

important aspect to orient learners at the center of

language acquisition (Flowerdew, 2013), (Nunan,

2013). It is further argued that only by doing so

comprehensive knowledge on English acquisition can

be gained (Flowerdew, 2013), (Kachru, 1985).

Previous studies have been done in investigating

English speaking learning and teaching (Adolphs,

2008), (Baumgarten, 2016), (Connor, 2008),

(Connor, U., Nagelhout, E., & Rozycki, 2008),

(McCarten, 2007), (Meunier, F., & Granger, 2008),

(O’Keeffe, A., McCarthy, M., & Carter, 2007),

(Reppen, 2010), (Simpson-Vlach, R., & Ellis, 2010),

which pinpoint the importance of exposure to the

natural use of English and not by submerging learners

in memorizing words, expressions, and collocations

exclusively. More recent studies (Baumgarten, 2016),

(Flowerdew, 2013) also challenged the conventional

beliefs that English teaching, including the teaching

of speaking, should use native speakers as the norm,

considering that English has become a lingua franca

(Björkman, 2013), (Smith, 2010) and there are

speaking variations of English which should also be

considered as appropriate and accurate (Biber, D., &

Barbieri, 2007).

2 METHOD

This study applied a contrastive analysis approach,

especially on the language realizations in

presentations, namely the lexical options,

expressions, and collocations (Sinclair, 1991). Data

or corpora used for this study are two sets of

transcripts of students’ classroom presentations.

Indonesian corpus is the transcript of 69 Indonesian

students’ presentations totalling of 6 hours of

presentations from three topics (“About Me”, “My

Innovation”, and “How English can Help Me with My

Future”). Whereas the native corpus was the

transcripts of Anglo-American students’

presentations as appeared in MICASE (Michigan

Corpus of Academic Spoken English) (MICASE, no

date). Both student groups were from first academic

year and the Indonesian students were considered to

be at high-intermediate level of English. Analysis was

conducted using a freeware corpus analysis tool

developed by Professor Laurence Anthony from

Waseda University, Japan. The AntConc 3.5.7

version (2018) (Anthony, 2006), (Anthony, 2018) or

the newest version was used. The analysis followed

these procedures: files must be in .txt format. Using

AntConc, data was generated to see the most frequent

use of (using WordList feature). In order to contrast

the use of each word, concordance lines from

Indonesian students’ corpus were contrasted with

those from MICASE. Similar procedure was

conducted to see the use of collocations from both

Indonesian and American students. Lastly, analysis

on the use of academic words was conducted using

Coxhead’s AWL (Academic Word List) as

KeywordList.

2.1 Research Aims and Questions

This study aims at finding the gap for learning using

contrasting analysis on the use of spoken English in

Indonesian and American students as the native

speakers, by way of answering these questions:

1. What features of spoken language do

Indonesian students use?

2. How different are these features in contrast

to the American students?

3. What learning needs arise from these gaps

and what other implications are resulted from the

contrastive analysis?

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3 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

For the mutual benefit and protection of Authors and

Publishers, it is necessary that Authors provide

formal written Consent to Publish and Transfer of

Consent ensures that the publisher has the Author’s

authorization to publish the Contribution.

Results will be presented in three sections. First,

spoken features of Indonesian students will be

presented. Second, contrastive features between

Indonesian and American students will be displayed

and analysed. Third, further analyses on learning

needs as well as other findings will be presented.

Section 1.01 Indonesian students’ features of spoken

English

Data generated by AntConc shows a total of

11,731 words are spoken by students. Amongst the

1,407 word types, 106 words are Nouns, 54 Verbs,

and 50 Adjectives. Because of the limitation of space

only fifteen most frequent words in each word class

will be presented. The results are as follows:

Table 1: Lexical options of Indonesian students (Nouns).

The most frequent Noun to appear in students’

presentation is “I” (376 times). The second most

frequent Noun students used is “presentation”

(appears 290 times). It can be seen from the next

Nouns to appear (audience, people, eye-contact,

gesture, time, class) that these words are all

associated with the presentation task itself. Students

often talk about these at the opening of their

presentations, such as: “Good Morning. My name is

Stelli. I know you are really excited about this.”

(Student A); “Good morning ladies and gentleman,

first we are going to introduce our self*.”(Student B);

“Uhm, this time I want to tell you about E-Floor”

(Student C). A pronunciation error was made by

student B because it was very clear that the word

“self” was pronounced instead of “selves” resulting in

inaccurate pronunciation of the plural form of the

word “ourselves”.

Table 2: Lexical options of Indonesian students (Verbs).

The students were not using Verbs as frequent as

they used Nouns. The most frequent Verb used by the

students (“make”) appeared in similar arrangement as

this one: “Today we are going to make you see the

importance of Travel Blenders” (Student G). This

construction was used following an assignment to

present innovations or business ideas. The next most

frequent Verb used by students was “hope” with the

example as following: “I hope I can give good

presentation today.” (Student M). This expression

was frequently used by students and it sounded

familiar to the Indonesian audience as part of the

opening move in a presentation or a talk.

Table 3: 15 Lexical options of Indonesian students

(Adjectives).

The Adjectives are the least frequent category

used by students. It is interesting that the most

frequent Adjective to appear deals with the feelings

of the presenters (“nervous”). The statement, “Thank

you for paying attention to me, the presentator*, err

I’m too nervous and feeling bad,” or the variations of

it often blurred out in the middle of presentations. In

this example the erroneous word “presentator”

appeared, which is supposed to mean “presenter”.

Interestingly, the word “presentator” appeared in the

corpus 10 times by 4 speakers. One possible

explanation for this is the overgeneralization of

creating an actor from the Noun “presentation” which

is much more familiar to the students (appears 290

times in the corpus). Other lexical variations used by

students are “presentate”,” gonna”, and “guys”. The

word “presentate” appears 5 times by 2 students, the

word “gonna” appears 3 times by 3 students, and the

word “guys” 3 times by 3 students. In total these

variations are used by six students, in which all of

them are male. The word “presentate” although

considered as uncommon has been seen as neologism,

and it is explained as “a derivation of the verb

present” by The Rice University Neologisms

Database; and is defined as “a new word or

expression in a language, or a new meaning for an

existing word or expression” (Collins Cobuild

Dictionary, no date). The arrival of this new word is

explained as the student effort to create a verb by

adding the –ate suffix, as a common system in

English language. Although it makes no rational

sense this principle has been easily and confidently

used by students. The use of “gonna” is an example

Frequency Words Frequency Words Frequency Words

561 I 54 gentleman 23 English

290 presentation 46 attention 22 contact

114 morning 31 time 12 time

64 hope 28 expectation 11 product

54 ladies 24 point 10 class

Frequency Words Frequency Words Frequency Words

43 make 33 need 24 presenting

41 hope 30 improve 22 expect

41 think 29 give 22 know

36 like 26 speak 21 say

36 want 25 get 19 help

Frequency Words Frequency Words Frequency Words

47 nervous 14 improving 8 fast

41 good 13 interested 8 hard

24 better 12 bad 8 missing

18 confident 11 quickly 7 clear

15 enough 9 big 5 best

“They Gotta Think about the Women First, You Know. . .?” Does Speaking like a Native Matter?: A Contrastive Analysis of Indonesian and

Anglo-american Students’ Speaking

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of informal form of “going to”, whereas “guys” is

used by students to address their audience.

Section 1.02 Contrasting features of Indonesian and

American presenters

The first contrasting realizations are in the use of

“gonna”. MICASE produced a total of 46 cases in 4

transcripts.

Figure 1: Concordance lines of “gonna” in MICASE.

In all 46 occurrences the most frequent

combinations are “I’m gonna” (13 occurrences) and

“it’s gonna” (18 occurrences), followed by “you’re

gonna” (8 occurrences) and “there’s gonna” (7

occurences). Contrasting Indonesian students’ use of

“gonna”, there are two occurrences of “it’s gonna be”

and one occurrence of “I’m gonna presentate*” and

no occurrences of other combinations used by

American students. From the data, informal

expressions using the word “gonna” as oppose to

more formal use “going to” in academic presentations

are clearly used more often by American students.

American students also use “gotta” and it appears

twice in the corpus: “you gotta show that’, and “they

gotta think about the women first you know” and

none in the Indonesian students’ corpus. According to

Collins Cobuild Dictionary, “gotta” is the informal

form of “got to”. Synonyms are “have to” or “must”,

which Indonesian students opt to use in “information

that I must deliver”.

Other contrasting occurrences are in the use of

Noun, Verb, and Adjectives. In the use of Noun, the

collocations of “presentation” include “my

presentation”, “give presentation”, “do the

presentation”, and “memorize the presentation”.

However, in MICASE there are no matches found for

collocations of “presentation” or “present” or

“presentate” or other derivations. In the use of

“make” the collocations used by Indonesian students

are using the structure of “make+Noun Phrase (NP)”

(e.g. comment, me, noise, a point, a contribution) and

also the inflections of “make”, which are “making”

and “made” with the similar construction. MICASE

shows similar occurrences, e.g. “making a

difference”, “make it clear”, “make that situation up“,

“make it legal”, “made up”, “made cheaper”, “made

a diagram”. However, American students use

“make+Adjective Phrase (AP)”, which is not used by

Indonesian students. These students also never use

the Adjective “nervous” but they use “good” in

“good+NP” structure. The collocation “real good” is

also used by American students but not by Indonesian

students. Interestingly, both American and

Indonesian students use “make/made it clear”

collocations but American students use “clear up”

collocation whereas Indonesian students do not use

such colloquial expression. In the use of “bad”,

American students use the expression “too bad”,

whereas Indonesian students prefer to use “very bad”.

By this point, it appeared that American students are

more informal than their Indonesian counterparts.

Section 1.03 Learning needs and other implications

resulted from the gaps

Results from contrasting features of spoken

English between American and Indonesian students

inform the gaps Indonesian students might have.

Identifying these gaps will help teachers focus on the

needed skills for improving their speaking. From the

previous data, the comparative aspects are:

Table 4: Comparative aspects in American and Indonesian

corpora.

Aspects

American

students’

resentation

Indonesian

students’

resentations

Lexical option more less variations

Collocations more less variations

Formality informal formal

American students use more varied options of

words compared to Indonesian students. The way

American students inflected the words and make

combinations of words are more varied and

elaborated than Indonesian students. Meanwhile,

most interesting aspect found in this study is the

degree of formality. It is shown from the data that

American students are using informal style in their

presentations compared to Indonesian students. One

possible explanation for these findings is the different

cultures projected by the students through their

presentations. Indonesian students projected

formality by their selections of words and word

combinations. Meanwhile, American students use

more informal tone of language by using colloquial

expressions and conversational style. Some

Indonesian students use a more informal style to cope

with the peculiar feelings (as indicated from the

frequent confessions of being nervous) of delivering

presentations in English. As can be seen from the

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data, Indonesian students are having rudimentary

errors in pronunciation and overgeneralization.

4 CONCLUSIONS

This study has shown contrasting differences in

Indonesian and American students speaking.

Differences appear in the use of word combinations,

which show more vocabulary repository American

students have. In terms of style American students as

native speakers of English turn out to be more

informal and conversational in delivering academic

presentations. It can be implied that English speaking

needs to be seen as the result of cultural and social

interactions. This means, the teaching of English

speaking needs to acknowledge and incorporate these

cultural and social aspects. In terms of evaluating

students’ speaking performance, lecturers or

instructors also need to include the informal contexts

in mind for more comprehensive evaluation and to

better encourage students to use English. Indonesian

students will gain more benefit when conversing with

other non-native speakers of English by receiving

more contexts of speaking.

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“They Gotta Think about the Women First, You Know. . .?” Does Speaking like a Native Matter?: A Contrastive Analysis of Indonesian and

Anglo-american Students’ Speaking

225