COGNITIVE PROCESS IN COMPREHENSION OF SENTENCE PROPOSITIONS AMONG THE UNDERGRADUATE EFL STUDENTS

Abstract

English acquired by EFL learners is categorized as interlanguage, which means that  their English is developing towards native like competence. In Indonesian context, the EFL learners’ vocabulary and sentence structure mastery is insufficient. Comprehending main propositions or sentence meanings require cognitive process of both semantic and structural construction. Within such insufficient mastery of English, the researchers intend to uncover the cognitive process EFL learners applied to comprehend main propositions of complex sentences. For this purpose of the study, the researches obtained the main propositions that the learners comprehended from three complex sentences assigned to them to read. Soon after completing the comprehension, the learners were assigned to write their retrospective introspection (mental process they were experiencing during the comprehension). The two types of data were analyzed qualitatively. The research findings show that 65.24% of the EFL learners applied semantic construction, 25.24% used discourse analysis, and 9.52% applied syntactical construction. This indicated that in comprehending sentence meaning, 90.48% EFL learners relied more on words and discourse meanings rather than on sentence structure or on their combination.