EXPLORING LANGUAGE EXPOSURE
TO ENHANCE THE CRITICAL THINKING AND LANGUAGE ACCURACY
IN ACADEMIC WRITING OF INDONESIAN SECONDARY STUDENTS
IN AN INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL CONTEXT
This study investigates the daily out-of-school language exposure received by the students, which is assumed to play a critical role in enhancing the performance of critical thinking and language accuracy in the students’ academic writing. The application of language learning strategies managed by meta-strategies, assisting the students in turning the language input into the intake, is scrutinized. The student’s critical thinking and language accuracy in academic writing are examined after encountering out-of-school language exposure in a natural setting of one research term.
A one-term case study design was carried out involving a volunteer of fifteen grade 9 Indonesian secondary students studying in one of the international schools in Surabaya. The selection of the participants was based on the student's performance during the classroom observation, whose critical thinking and academic writing performance surpassed their peers and whose English and Global Perspectives scores were reported above ninety. The teacher and the participants’ parents were invited to join the research for triangulation and a more comprehensive investigation. This study was aimed not at generalization but at investigating the phenomenon in specific contexts.
Several data were collected: students’ linguistics background (questionnaires), daily online logs, students’ research reports, interviews, field notes, and classroom Zoom recordings. The data were analyzed qualitatively through emerging thematic coding, flexibly following the findings' development.
The finding revealed that not all participants had interactive language exposure, but one hundred percent of the participants consistently reported encountering non-interactive language exposure through means such as reading, watching, or using English language settings on their electronic devices. Despite the onset of language exposure, the frequency of exposure was more important. The participants had different onset of language exposure, varying from before the preschool, preschool, and elementary years. However, the frequency of receiving daily out-of-school language exposure of the participants with later onset was higher, resulting in similar performance in their critical thinking and language accuracy in their research reports. One hundred percent of participants applied varied daily meta-cognitive, meta-affective, meta-social, and meta-motivational strategies, confirming that advanced learners used more strategies. The presentation of critical thinking in their research reports existed. Although the quality of necessity and adequacy were lacking, which required the completion of reasoning and pieces of evidence that supported claims, the quality of relevancy was present, showing the connection between the claims and premises. Grammatical errors were minimal, with an average of one to five percent in tense, plural, and singular errors, coordination, fragments, and infinitive/gerund errors. The highest frequency of the errors was in semantic errors of clarity or conciseness and the mechanics punctuation errors with an average of twenty to twenty-nine percent.
The findings support the second language acquisition theory, highlighting the importance of language exposure and language learning strategies orchestrated by meta-strategies, presenting evidence of developing students’ critical thinking and language accuracy in academic writing performance. It confirms the essential role of the teacher’s instruction to increase student intake inside, especially the encounter of language exposure beyond the classroom walls, and of the parents to enhance students’ language learning for optimal results.