An Analysis of the Second Year Students’ Perception Toward Teacher Talk in English Classroom in SMA PERTIWI 1 PADANG.

Abstrak

Teachers’ talk is variety of language that is sometimes used by teachers when they are in the process of teaching. Teacher talk is the language in the classroom that takes up the major portion of class time employed to give direction, explain activities and check the students’ understanding (Sinclair & Brazil, 1995 cited in Yanfen & Yuqin, 2010 : 77). Question and feedback are the aspects of Teacher Talk. Appropriate teacher talk can create harmonious atmosphere and at the same time promotes a more friendly relationship between teachers and students, and consequently creates more opportunities for interactions between teachers and students. Relating to this, the researcher conducted this research on purpose of describing the students’ perception toward teacher talk. This research was limited to the students’ perception toward teacher talk especially related to teacher’s question and feedback.

The population of this study was the second year students in SMA PERTIWI 1 PADANG consisting of 160 students. The researcher used the purposive sampling technique which was taken with the certain consideration. The number of the sample used as respondents in this research was 35 students which were all students of XI IPA 2.

The result of the data analysis revealed that second year science students’ perception toward teacher talk was good (80%). It could be seen from the result of questionnaire that students’ perception toward teacher’s question was in good category (72%). Kind of question that might be little bit hard to understand was expressive question and the easiest kind of question to understand is echoic question such as comprehension check. Whereas, science students’ perception toward teacher talk related to teacher’s feedback was in Very Good category (88%). Most of students were interested when their teacher gave positive feedback especially when the teacher gave praise or summarizing the correct answer from the students same as  if their teacher inform the correct answer, giving clue, or give motivation if their students answered a question incorrectly. But, the kind of feedback that not really agreed by students was critizing and ignoring.

Finally, based on the finding, it could be concluded that the second year science students in SMA PERTIWI 1 PADANG had good perception toward their teacher’s talk. The next researcher is suggested to conduct a study about the same topic at University level in order to see the comprehension of students’ perception toward teacher/ lecturers’ talk.

Keyword: Perception, Teacher Talk, Question and Feedback