KUALITAS KETERAMPILAN BERBAHASA JAWA PENUTURBELIA DI SURAKARTA: SEBUAH FENOMENA PEMEROLEHAN BAHASA

Abstract

This paper discusses the quality of Javanese language skills mastered by children speakers in a Javanese speech community in Surakarta. Data were obtained from narrative texts produced by fifteen children of 9 to 10 years old or those who are in year 4 and 5 of elementary school in such a community. They were assigned to tell a story based on a wordless story book entitled frog, where are you? in two languagese— Javanese as the children mother tongue and Indonesian as their second language. The analysis was conducted to see the text structure and texture as the representation of their skill quality. The results show that most of the children performed well in arranging the text structure of their stories in both languages, while they have different skills in exploiting such languages for the texture. they showed better performance in using Indonesian than Javanese in telling the stories. Simply, even though they were borned and have been growing up in a Javanese speech community, most of the children feel more convenient in using Indonesian than Javanese. The findings are expected to be beneficial for language policy makers, teachers, curriculum developer, and also parents in monitoring and controlling their children language development.