BIL3083

Sociolinguistic for ESL teachers

STUDY
To find out what are the styles and varieties
of English language used among the
students of UPSI.
The best way to determine their styles and
variety in using the English language is by
doing an interview to encourage them to
talk in English.
We will look at utterances that goes under
styles and as for variety, will look at the
word choice, pronunciation, and sentences.

Methodology
This research was conducted in order
to carry out a mini library research as a
support to our groups observation
among students of Universiti
Pendidikan Sultan Idris (UPSI) focusing
on the styles and varieties of English
language used.
The students that we interviewed came
from different regions in Malaysia and
some of the respondents are
international students from United
State of America (USA), Finland,

GENDER AND DATA

Gender of Respondents
Female
Male

40%
60%

Percentage of the Gender

Respondents

STYLE AND VARIETY

Two major categories that we focused
on which are formal and informal
respond while in variety we focused on
regional dialect and social dialect
of respondents
In style, there is only one category that
we chose which is utterances.
In variety, we chose 3 categories which
are word choice, pronunciation and
sentence.

STYLES

STYLES
18

17

16
14

13

12
10

Number of respondents

8
6
4
2
0

STYLES

Types of formalities
Formal

Informal

Style used by 30 Respondents

VARIETY

Variety used by 30 Respondents

20
18

18

16
14

12

12

Number of respondents

10
8
6
4
2
0

Variety

Types of variety
Regional DialectSocial Dialect

Low Variety

Variety used by 30
respondents

Style and variety for 30

respondents
Categor Utteran
ies
ces

Total
number
of
respond
ents

205

Word
choice

Pronun
ciation

Senten
ce

63

30

Simple
21
Complex
-9

Examples of the
transcriptions
Interviewer: please describe someone that you
like?
Interviewee: *laughs I like someone, its tall,
and then very good looking
Transcription for respondent no. 9

Interviewer: What is your hobby and could you

please explain to use why do you love it?
Interviewee: My hobby is sleeping because with
sleeping I think I can get some rest after I had a
hmm I had throw the hectic day.

Transcription for respondent

no. 11

Interviewer: Can you explain why did you choose your

course for your degree?
Interviewee: So my course is pisik in education. Actually I
choose it because I lef to study that we can see
everywhere just like pisik you can when you drive the car
you can know what the reason why the car is .. apa
bergerak .. moving ..

Transcription for respondent no. 13

Interviewer: Last question. Please describe someone that

you like. It can be your friend, female or male.
Interviewee: I like my future wife cause she give me
motivation, she give me more experience for life, how to
aaa to be better person and surbas more life aaa
surbas surbas aaa for life.. yes, in your life my life
and I think she is the good person to me for now because
she very kind also beautiful and I think she aaa she can
make mother for my kid one day.

Transcription for respondent

no. 26

Discussion
We found that the respond of all the
respondents is highly affected by their
background such as gender, age, race and
region.
This is because they did not receive the
same amount of knowledge in English.
They tend to make a mistake in their
speech.
People who live in big cities tend to have a
wide range vocabulary compared to those
who live in the rural areas.
This is proved when some respondents used
code-mixing in their speech.

 Those respondents who are not native

speakers of English preferred to use
simple sentences more because they
are not well equipped with the English
language.
It can be said that some students tend
to use different codes when they are
talking since it is known that talking is
an unconscious process of continuing a
conversation.
For further investigation, researchers
can conduct an observation regarding
the variety and codes of English

Conclusion
The students especially the local ones prefer to
use more informal style and regional dialect
when delivering their speech which means the
students talk more in a casual way when they
are speaking and tend to shift style often.
They do not really pay attention to the
sentence structure and use code-mixing to
achieve the information they want to deliver to
the audience.
In addition, students have different
pronunciation due to their lexical choice and
their background that affect the way they
pronounce the word.