This study aimed to find out the percentage of local culture integration and target culture integration in the English textbooks for senior high school in Palembang. This research design was a content analysis with 4058 paragraphs and 2587 pictures as the study data. The procedure of analyzing the data started by classifying the data into local or target culture division, then it was analyzed based on Byram's cultural content checklist (1993) while the pictures were simply classified into local culture or target culture. The result of the analysis was made in the form of percentage. The results show that for analysis of the paragraph, from nine books series with different publisher analyzed in this study, five of the books have higher percentage of Local Culture which presented through reading passage, Mean while, under pictures analysis, six of them promote more salient in Target Culture.

Politeness principles are universally utilized by the speakers of any language when realizing various speech acts. However, the speakers of particular languages relatively apply politeness due to the cultural norms embedded. The present study attempts to delineate how the Indonesian learners of English (ILE) apply the politeness principles in request realizations. Specifically it devotes to the types of politeness strategies applied and resemblance of the indirectness in politeness strategies in requesting acts. The FTAs and indirectness are the theoretical bases used to trace the typologies of both politeness and request strategies. The data werere collected by means of certain elicitation techniques, i.e. DCTs and Role-plays. The analyses werere done through three stages; determining request strategies, politeness strategies, and resemblance of indirectness in politeness. The results show that the indirectness generally is parallel to politeness. Besides, some pragmatic transfers are found in terms of applying native-culture norms in realizing target speech acts.

This research aims at determining the similarities, dissimilarities, and possible learning difficulties faced by the students learning English and Indonesian copulative verbs, as well as the recommendations to TEFL. The descriptive research design was used. The documentation technique was applied to collect the data. To analyze the data, the researchers used a descriptive analysis. The results showed that there were two similarities between English and Indonesian copulative verbs in meanings and dynamic verb. The three dissimilarities were in grammatical structure, tense on subject-verb agreement and certain verbs. The possible learning difficulties faced by the students learning English and Indonesian copulative verbs was tense and subject-verb agreement. The recommendations of this research was as a fundamental teaching guidance in helping English teachers design a better teaching Grammar on copulative verbs, in terms of nonverbal copulative nominal, stative copulative nominal and dynamic copulative nominal.

The traditional assessments which only covered lower-order thinking skills are still commonly used by teachers in Palembang. Yet the 21st-Century education demands the empowerment of higher-order thinking skills (HOTS).The objective of this study was to find out the validity, practicality, and effectiveness of interactive questions in measuring students' HOTS. The research and development applied was 4-D model which included four stages (define, design, develop and disseminate). The study was conducted on the tenth graders of SMAN (Sekolah Menengah Atas Negeri-State Senior High School) 4 Palembang, SMAN 9 Palembang, and SMAN 19 Palembang in the even semester of academic year 2018/2019. The instruments of data collection were validation sheets and interactive questions. The data analysis techniques used were Microsoft Excel 2010 and WINSTEPS version 3.73.0. In conclusion, the study showed that: 1) the expert validation results were very high category; 2) the instrument was considered as good by teacher and student responses; and 3) the interactive questions were effective in measuring students’ HOTS.

This study investigates the pragmatic transfer in English request realizations made by EFL learners, i.e. the proficient learners. The subjects were students of an English Study Program who obtained TOEFL-like scores of at least 450. The data were collected by means of DCT-questionnaires and Role-plays. The results show that the subjects realize requests in the form of external modifications more frequently. Most of them embed their requests with supportive moves dominantly. They enfold the acts with the moves before, after or in both positions. Of the three positions, they mostly insert the moves initial position, i.e.,through inductive patterns. This is due to pragmatic transfer.