The conjunction Bi’ in madurese bilingual children’s literature and elementary language education

Abstract

This study investigates the use of the conjunction bi’ in Madurese bilingual children’s story texts and its implications for Elementary Indonesian Language Education. The study is grounded in the importance of integrating local languages into primary education to support students’ linguistic competence, literacy development, and cultural understanding through bilingual children’s literature. Bilingual storybooks serve not only as learning resources but also as cultural media that facilitate the preservation of regional languages while strengthening students’ ability to understand linguistic structures across different language systems. This research employed a qualitative descriptive approach. The data source consisted of Madurese bilingual children’s storybooks. Data were collected using the simak method with tapping techniques and the Simak Bebas Libat Cakap (SBLC) technique supported by note-taking procedures. The data were analyzed using syntactic and semantic approaches through the Bagi Unsur Langsung (BUL) technique, combined with expansion, substitution, and deletion techniques. The findings reveal that the conjunction bi’ functions syntactically as a coordinating conjunction connecting words, phrases, and clauses in bilingual narrative discourse. Semantically, the conjunction conveys additive, evaluative, implicative, paraphrastic, and parallel meanings. These semantic functions contribute to the coherence and comprehensibility of bilingual narrative texts. Furthermore, the use of the conjunction bi’ in bilingual children’s literature contributes to students’ understanding of sentence structures, contextual meanings, and bilingual literacy practices in elementary Indonesian language learning. The study also highlights the role of bilingual literary texts in preserving regional languages, promoting cultural awareness, and supporting culturally responsive literacy instruction in primary education. The findings provide valuable insights into the integration of local linguistic resources within elementary language education.