The Analysis of Students' Responses to Teacher's Reinforcements During Teaching-Learning Process at Junior High School

Abstract

This research was qualitative observation research that focused on students' responses to teacher's reinforcement during the teaching-learning process at SMPN 2 Purwoharjo. The participants of this study were the students of grade VII of SMPN 2 Purwoharjo in the 2020/2021 academic year. They were chosen because they are in the transition period from elementary school to junior high school, where English in junior high school is more complicated than in elementary school. From six classes, the participant was chosen randomly by using a purposive sampling method. As a result, class 7F was selected as the research participants. Based on the teacher assessment, the students’ of 7F class is the most active students and have the highest English score than the other class. Those were the reasons for choosing them as the participants for this research. The data for this research was obtained from three observations, documentation, and a semi-structured interview. From the observation and documentation, it was known that the teacher uses verbal and non-verbal reinforcement to increase the students' motivation and enthusiasm during the teaching-learning process, mostly he used verbal reinforcement in the form of praise. A response that had been analyzed during observations was in the form of facial expressions, body gestures, and oral expressions. it is found that mostly the students showed their responses by facial expressions like smile, neutral, grinning, furrowed forehead, and sometimes by body gestures like lowering their head. The researcher used the consideration from Patel (2014) and Noaimi (2019) as the basic reference in analyzing every student’s response. From the interview, it was found that some of the responses that the students showed have the same meaning as what is presented in the reference books and some of them were not. It is because every human’s response would mean different based on the situation that happens. The fact that each country has a different culture is possible that it affects the meaning of every human's response. In this case, the researcher researches in Indonesia and it involves Indonesian culture in the process of analyzing the data. Despite all of that, during the interview the students said that reinforcement from the teacher makes them feel appreciated, motivated and happy during the teaching-learning process.