Topic Mastery and Flow of Thought of Indonesian Students Learning Psycholingustics

Abstract

This study focuses on evaluating students’ topic mastery and flow of thought in their Psycholinguistics project paper. Assessing these two aspects means a lot since it will be helpful as a planning tool to approach future better instruction. It was conducted with Indonesian students taking Psycholinguistics course at Humanities Faculty of UIN Maulana Malik Ibrahim Malang. The instrument used is scoring rubric of two sets to evaluate the two aspects; topic mastery and flow of thought. The finding shows that the students do not make the most of their writing skill to perform their topic mastery as they were lacking in using proper citation and rephrasing strategies. They need more practices to increase the quality of the project paper to perform a better critical thinking and originality. The flow of thought presented by the students in their project paper is influenced by the use of ineffective transition and lacking in applying writing format. However, presenting sufficient information details is not a problem to most of the students as the papers show the completeness of the information which can facilitate reader’s understanding. On language use, most students have fair competence in using correct grammar and appropriate vocabulary.

Keywords: topic mastery, flow of thought, psycholinguistics