Rima Andriana

The purpose of this essay is to explain about two parts of ‘Language Comprehension’, those are ‘Comprehension of Sounds’ and ‘Comprehension of Words’. In the beginning of this essay we’d like to introduce about the meaning of comprehension itself that we need to learn in understanding the language. Then, the explanation of Comprehension of sounds that consist of Phoneme Restoration Effect which help people in recognize the first letter of the word that they can’t hear properly, and there is VOT(Voice onset Timing) that help people in distinguish the ‘stop consonants’ words. Moreover, there is the explanation of the Comprehension of Words that also include the Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) which help people to understand in spoken and written language, and it has two kinds of phenomenon; those are the ‘tip-of-the-tongue’ that happened when we try to retrieve a word that we think we know but we can’t recall the word at that moment, and ‘Bathtub Effect’ when we just able to remember the first or the last syllable of the words. From this essay, we will able to understand more about the Language Comprehension and it parts.

This study presents an analysis of symbols in songs found in selected junior high school student books. The objectives of this study are: (1) to find out the symbols and it types in songs from selected Junior High School Student books; (2) to reveal the meaning of the symbols found in selected Junior High School Student books.
The analyses were based on the combination of Perrine’s theory (1974: 214, in Fadaee, 2011) to recognize a symbol and Gill’s theory (1995) to determine the types of symbols. The types were divided into traditional symbol is the common symbols and people can find it in daily life, and new symbols is the symbol that created by the poet or the writer, usually the meaning can be different from the general agreement. Moreover, this study used three dictionaries; Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English by Hornby (1995) to explain the literal meaning, A Dictionary of Symbols by Cirlot (1971) and Symbolism: a comprehensive dictionary by Olderr (2012) to interpret the intended meaning of traditional symbols. This study was designed in the form of a content analysis of qualitative design. The source of data were the books being used by English teachers of grade VII, VIII, and IX of SMP Negeri 038 Samarinda. There were two student books that had songs, When English Rings a Bell for grade VII and English on Sky for grade IX.
The results for the first research question showed there were fifty-one symbols had found. The first book consisted of nineteen symbols divided into twelve traditional and seven new. The second book consisted of thirty-two symbols, divided into eighteen traditional and fourteen new. This study found that mostly symbols were found in students books were traditional symbols. Thus, using the dictionaries of symbols could help in interpreting the meaning of the symbol. The results for the second research question showed that symbols in those songs often implied about friendships, love, trust, hope, and keep dreaming. Those symbols could be related with the student’s life and contribute in building their characters. It could be great topics in teaching and learning English using a song in Junior High School. Thus, it is important for the students and teacher to understand the meaning of the symbols in learning with using songs.

Keywords: student book, symbols, symbolism, song, meaning.