THE ACQUISITION OF QUESTIONS BY INDONESIAN ADULT LEARNERS OF ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Questions, as a sentence form that functions to elicit information, areimportant to examine both semantically and syntactically. Semantically, asingle question form may have different functions in communication whichmay create problems if the question is not appropriately used. Syntactically,problems can arise in forming questions, not only for a second languagelearner but also for a child learning its first language. The development oflearner's questions can be identified from the types of errors made informing questions,.This study investigated the development of questions by Indonesian adultlearners English as a foreign language (EFL). The linguistic problems theyfaced and their relation to teachers' responses and teaching strategies inthe classroom were examined. This study was a process-product researchstudy: the 'process' of interaction between learners and their classroom-environment was observed, and the 'product' of the utterances that thelearners actually produced was analysed. This allowed the identification ofthe conditions that enable learners to acquire language and the stages oftheir question development. -Two groups of adult learners were observed. In each group, eight learnerswere randomly selected and their language development was observedover one semester. Data from classroom interaction were collected by amulti-person multi-method procedure, that is by gaining information of theprocess of classroom interaction from both teachers and learners, andobserving, audio recording, interviewing, and administering questionnaires.A cross-sectional study and a longitudinal study were undertaken byobserving the process of learning of the 16 learners and assessing boththeir oral and written question forms to ascertain their question formationdevelopment.By analysing the quantitative data from the questionnaires, and thequalitative data from the interviews and observations, it was found thatteachers in Group 1 created more activities that enabled learners to speakfreely in class. That is why more questions were asked by the learners ofthis group in classroom interaction compared to Group 2. It was also foundthat meaningful communicative activities in small group work and pair workencouraged learn~rs to ask and answer questions spontaneously in theirown words, so that the process of language acquisition functioned well inthese activities.From this investigation of the linguistic problems the learners faced informing questions, it was found that most of the errors made by the learnerswere developmental errors. The dominant errors made were in fronting.Interlingual errors occurred in using question words, non-verb sentences,and yes-no questions in wh-question forms. The decrease in generatingnon-grammatical questions and the increase in producing grammaticalquestions indicated that the learners showed a developm_ental progress intheir formation of questions in English. Some learners improved from stage3 (fronting) of question development to stage 4 (Inversion in yes-noquestions) and 5 (inversion in wh-questions), while two learners remainedin stage 3 (fronting) of their question development.These findings suggest that meaningful communicative activities in Englishas a foreign language classroom interaction encourage learners tocommunicate in the language being learned without having pressure, forinstance being afraid of making mistakes. The investigation of linguistic-problems revealed that errors in the higher stage of question developmentreflected the types of errors made in the previous stages.For further research, it is suggested that the nature of the relationshipbetween teaching strategies used by teachers and the development ofquestions by EFL learners be more fully established by correlational orexperimental studies. Similarly, it would be useful to study the relationshipbetween teaching strategies and EFL learner development of Englishquestion forms by controlling age ranges of students studied and byreplicating the study with beginner and advanced EFL l~arners as well asintermediate learners.