Nowadays, technology has enabled people around the world to communicate their ideas quickly. In addition, such an exchanging information activity becomes more plausible due to English. English mediates people from different cultural backgrounds to exchange ideas and messages. However, it is quite prevalent that communication barriers are unavoidable. For many reasons, it is because people might fail to use English in socially appropriate ways and to interpret both implicit and explicit meaning according to contexts. As a result, impressions such as abrupt or brusque in social interactions, or rude or uncaring are inevitable. Having awareness and sensitivity about how meanings are constructed through the context of language is vital. It is the role of Pragmatics that help people to able to perform effective communication such as showing understanding and strong emotional responses, giving support, indicating agreement, adding or correcting speaker information, or asking for more information, etc.
KLAUSA Vol 4 No 2 (2020) has some interesting articles on Pragmatics issues. Sinaga and Handayani have written an article entitled Flouting maxims in James Vand Erbilt’s White House Down. In their study, they found a variety of flouted maxims performed by several characters.
Furthermore, Siahaan and Mubarak have written “Word formation in Sharena Delon’s Instagram Posts”. They have mentioned that word formation processes are found in Sharena Delon’s Instagram such as derivation process, compounding process, conversion process, clipping process, blends process, backformation process, acronym process, onomatopoeia process, coinage process, and inflection process. Saragih studies types of maxims in John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars.
The last article in KLAUSA Vol 4 No 2 (2020) is written by Amiroh, Fortunasari, and Ginting. They have studied content and language integrated learning in Mathematics at the primary education level in Indonesia. They have found that CLIL needs to be carried out because of the consideration of the urgency of teaching mathematics in English, appropriate methods of teaching mathematics in English, the period of appropriate CLIL application, and the effects of CLIL on students. By implementing mathematics teaching in English using the CLIL method, Indonesian students will be more familiar with the concept of understanding story problems in English, be accustomed to using high-order thinking, and have a higher interest in mathematics and English.
Following the retraction of two earlier articles due to violation of ethical guidelines, we’re introducing two other articles in Chinese. The first article is by Anggrah Dyah Airlinda, who has written qualitative research that is aimed to compare between names used by Indonesians with names used by Chinese people. Airlinda mentions that it is usually possible to immediately know the beliefs or expectations from names. Chinese male names are closely related to words such as Wei (great), Zhuang (strong), Jing (bright), etc. Meanwhile, women's have close relationships with objects such as flowers, pearls, and so on.
The last article in this issue is by Dhatu Sitaresmi, who has examined Indonesian students’ listening skills in discerning ü, üe, ün, üan, and iong in monophonic words, word pronunciation, and sentence reading. She has found that when Indonesian students listen to Chinese vowels such as vowels ü, üe, ün, iong, they can comprehend them quite well. Siatersmi mentions that reasons that explain why Indonesian students make mistakes in Chinese vowels are the students often misinterpret Chinese with similar Indonesian words instead of verbs. Moreover, such a misinterpretation is also influenced by Hanyu Pinyin spellings.
