By: Drs. H. Junaidi
Mistar, M.Pd., Ph.D
A.
Introduction
So far, complaints
regarding English teaching in Indonesian schools and universities are quite
prevalent. The complaints mostly deal with the results, which seem to be far
from being satisfactory. The English skills of most senior high school
graduates are still so low that, despite having learned English for six years,
they are still incapable of using it for either active or passive communicative
purposes. They cannot read, listen, speak, and write (Mistar, 2006). The situation at the university level is
quite similar (Huda, 1999).
Who is to be blamed then? Teachers/lecturers? Teacher training
institutions? Or the students? It seems to me that it is unfair to blame anyone
of them as they are just parts of a number of factors influencing success in
second/foreign language (L2/FL) learning. Sadtono (1997) says that two factors
influence the success of learning a new language and these factors are
linguistic and non-linguistic in nature. The linguistic factors are factors
concerning the target language itself such as the phonology, morphology,
syntax, etc. The non-linguistic factors, on the other hand, are those external
to the nature of the language being learned such as learning facilities,
teacher, and student with his/her individual differences in such things as
personality, attitude, aptitude, and motivation.
While it is true that those factors to a certain degree influence the
learning success, only four seem to be the key conditions for the success.
These include language aptitude, motivation, opportunities, and strategies. The
present paper is then to explore the role of these key factors and then propose
several principles of how to encourage the students to learn English
successfully in the perspective of these conditions.
B. Four Conditions for
Successful L2/FL Learning
As mentioned in the introductory section of this paper, how successful a
learner is in learning an L2/FL to a large extent depends on four key factors,
including aptitude, motivation, opportunity, and strategies. As far as language
aptitude is concerned, it has long been suggested that learners differ in the
extent they possess a natural ability for learning an L2/FL. Research has also
provided strong evidence that learners with higher language aptitude typically
learn more rapidly and achieve higher levels of proficiency than those with
lower language aptitude do. This is so whether the measure of
proficiency is some kinds of formal language tests or a measure of more
communicative language use (Ellis, 1999). In fact, Skehan (1989) mentions
aptitude to be consistently the best predictor of
language learning success.
However, despite the common agreement of the significant role of
language aptitude, different opinions are present particularly concerning about
the indicators of language aptitude. In this issue, J.B. Carroll and S.M. Sapon
are the names associated most with studies of L2/FL learning aptitude. Their
idea about the components of language aptitude gains great popularity and,
thus, is mush used for research purposes. Their test called Modern Language
Aptitude Test (MLAT) (Carroll and Sapon, 1959), was developed based on four
components of language aptitude:
- Phonemic
coding ability, i.e. the ability to identify the sounds of a foreign
language and encode them in a way that they can be recalled later. This
would certainly seem to be a skill involved in successful L2/FL learning.
- Grammatical
sensitivity, i.e. the ability to recognize grammatical functions of words
in sentences. It does not measure an ability to identify or describe the
function, but rather the ability to discern whether or not words in
different sentences perform similar function. It also appears logical that
an ability to do this helps in learning another language.
- Inductive
learning ability, i.e. the ability to infer or induce patterns of rules
and relations between form and meaning. Learners proficient in this
ability are less reliant on well-presented rules or generalizations from a
teacher or teaching materials.
- Rote learning
ability, i.e. the ability to remember associations between words in a
native and L2/FL language. The ability to memorise this associations
clearly important in L2/FL vocabulary learning.
Motivation is the second prerequisite for success in L2/FL learning. A
common logic accepts a claim that individuals who are motivated will learn
another language faster than those who are not motivated will do. Such a claim
is of course not erroneous because several studies have provided evidence of
the role of motivation in L2/FL learning. Brown (1987) states “motivation is
probably the most frequently used catch-all term for explaining the success or
failure of virtually any complex task”.
Gardner (1985) clearly mentions that motivation carries attitudes
and affective states that influence the degree of effort learners devote to the
learning activities in order to achieve the learning goal. Put in an equation,
motivational construct is represented in the following formula,
Motivation = Goal + Effortful Behaviour +
Desire to achieve a goal + Attitudes
The attitudinal component in the equation above covers both attitudes
toward the native speakers of the target language and the target language
itself as well as the instruction including the teacher and the course.
Two kinds of motivation in L2/FL learning are identified: integrative
and instrumental motivation. Learners are called to be integratively motivated
when they are interested in the people and the culture represented by the
target language. As such, they want to understand the culture, participate in
it, and, ultimately, be part of it. Instrumental motivation, on the other hand,
has something to do with functional advantages learners have if they master the
language. Professional advancement and capacity to complete a job well are just
two examples of instrumental orientation in L2/FL learning.
High language aptitude and strong motivation will not function optimally
unless the learners are provided with ample opportunities to learn, which then
make up the third condition for successful language learning. The importance of
opportunities is related to the availability of input, which the learners are
exposed to. If there is no input available, nothing is to be processed and
acquired; thus, learning does not take place. This input may be in the form exposure
to natural settings as in the case of L2 acquisition or formal classroom
settings as in FL learning. Logic and evidence from research support the hypothesis that the more the learners listen to or read a target language, the more competent they are likely
to be (Chandrasegaran, 1981).
The last condition for successful language learning is the use of
effective learning strategies. O’Malley and Chamot (1990) define learning
strategies as special ways of processing information that enhance
comprehension, learning, or retention of the information. Oxford (1990),
moreover, defines them as specific actions taken by the learner to make
learning easier, faster, more enjoyable, more self-directed, more effective,
and more transferable to new situations. These two definitions imply that
learning strategies cover both covert and overt behaviours. The first category
may be in the form of memorizing, imagining, or controlling emotions, whereas
the second category can be in the form of underlining, paraphrasing,
note-taking and the like.
In short, language aptitude, motivation, opportunities, and learning
strategies are central issues in predicting success of L2/FL learning. While
language aptitude seems to be unmodifiable, the other three are modifiable.
Thus, learners with relatively low language aptitude should not be pessimistic
in learning a new language. They can still be successful if they keep
themselves highly motivated, maximize their
exposure to the target language, and employ effective learning strategies. The schematic relationship of the four
key factors of successful F2/FL learning is depicted in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Schematic relationship of the four key factors of successful L2/FL learning
C. Strategies to
Encourage Students to Learn English Successfully
Since language aptitude is unmodifiable, strategies to encourage
students to learn English successfully should be developed from the perspective
of the other three key factors of language learning success. Some of them are
adapted from Brown (2001). The principles and strategies are as follows.
1. Principles Related to Motivation
Principle 1: The Anticipation of Reward
The principle of reward anticipation is based on behaviourism in
psychology with its operant conditioning paradigm. This principle says that
human beings are universally driven to act or behave by the anticipation of
some sort of reward – tangible or intangible, short-term or long-term – that
will ensue as a result of the behaviour. Virtually what one does is inspired by
a sense of purpose or goal.
The classroom implications of this principle is that in order to encourage
students to learn English better, the teacher should:
- Provide an
optimal degree of immediate verbal praise to the students as a form of
short-term reward. Don’t hesitate to say “good” or “excellent” when a student
works well on a certain learning project.
- Help the
students aware of the long term rewards in learning English by pointing out
such things as the academic benefits of knowing English, the prestige in being
able to speak English, jobs that require English, and so on.
Principle 2: Intrinsic Motivation
The principle of Reward Anticipation as outlined above emphasises the
role of extrinsic motivation. The role of intrinsic motivation, moreover, is
even more significant in determining learning success. The principle says that
the most powerful rewards are those that are intrinsically motivated within the
learner. Because the behaviour stems from needs, wants, or desires within
oneself, the behaviour itself is self-rewarding; therefore, externally
administered rewards are just secondarily helpful.
This principle requires that the teacher develop students’
personal need and want of English by design the instructional activities in
such a way that they are fun, interesting, useful, and challenging for the
students. In so doing, the following strategies are well considered.
- Centre the
teaching activities on the students, as learner-centred teaching is
intrinsically motivating. Therefore, give the students opportunities to make
choices in activities, topics for discussion, etc. Sometimes a simple
“either/or” choice (for instance, “Okay class, for the next 30 minutes we can
have either a free speaking activity or a free writing activity. Which one do
you prefer?”) helps the students to develop their intrinsic motives.
- Do not let
learners become dependent on the teachers’ daily verbal praise and any other
feedback. Help students to recognise their own satisfaction in having done
something well.
Principle 3: Self-Confidence
Self-confidence is related to the extent to which the students think
that they are capable of learning a new language. The principle says that
learners’ belief that they are indeed fully capable of accomplishing the task
of learning a new language is a factor in their eventual success in attaining
the task. Self-confidence will emerge when the students develop a sense of
success in their learning.
The teacher should sustain self-confidence on the part of the students
if it already exists and to build it if it does not exist. To do so, the
following pedagogical practices may be done.
- Give ample
verbal assurances that the students are competent learners of English. Showing
the fact that every one can speak his/her first language and telling them that
learning a new language takes time and that practice makes perfect will develop
students’ self-confidence in learning English.
-
Sequence the materials from
easier to more difficult ones. As language proficiency develops in
stages, it is suggested that teachers of English consider the students’ prior
mastery of English so that they can select proper instructional materials that
are neither too difficult nor too easy. The theory of Comprehensible Input
Hypothesis (Krashen and Terrell, 1983) is good to consider. The theory says
that if an acquirer is at stage or level i, the input that he/she will
comprehend best contains i + 1. It means that the language that the
students are exposed to should be just far enough beyond their current competence
that they can understand most of it but still find progress challenging. As
such, a pretest – a test administered prior to an instruction – is necessary to
measure students’ current level..
Principle 5: Low Anxiety
One feeling that can stop learning from being motivated to learn is
anxiety. The principle says that anxiety harms learners’ performance both
directly through worry and self-doubt and indirectly by reducing participation
and creating overt avoidance of the language. This is so since such an
apprehension or a fear can cause motivation to plummet and attitude to drift
toward negative.
That is why anxiety has to be eliminated and relaxed situation should be
created. Scarcella and Oxford (1992) suggests several strategies to lower
students’ learning anxiety as follows.
- Create a
positive learning climate by not disparaging students in front of the others,
by avoiding overcorrection, by avoiding sarcasm and intimidation, and by
testing fairly what the students know and able to do.
- Help the
students to help themselves through positive self-talk. For instance, if we
hear a student saying, “I’m sure I am going to fail this test” or “I can’t
speak English”, we can help them reframe these negative ideas into “If I study
hard, I know I can pass this test” or “I will be able to speak English if I
practice it a lot”.
- Create language
learning support groups for students outside the class. These can serve as
places to share learning strategies, practice the language together, prepare
for tests, and provide motional support.
2. Principles Related to Learning Opportunity
Principle 4: Meaningful Learning
The term meaningful learning is opposed to rote learning, in which the
instructional activities centre on systematic analyses of the language forms
and rules so that exercises are directed at the mastery of the language rules.
The meaningful learning, on the other hand, emphasises language use more than
language usage. The principle says that meaningful learning will lead toward
better long-term retention than rote learning. Thus, students should be exposed
to meaningful learning activities.
To encourage the students to learn English better, the following
strategis are worth considering.
- Develop
instructional goals that accord with the students’ interest, academic goals,
and career goals. Students will find their learning activities important when
the activities are meaningful for their academic and career goals.
- Do not give too
much grammar explanation. The teaching of formal aspects of the language should
not be too much as it may block pathways to fluency acquisition. As such, make
sure that a large portion of the lessons is focused on the use of language for
communicative purposes. Students will gain more communicative competence in the
long run if the functional purposes of language are the focal point.
Principle 6: Target Language Use
The target language use principle is derived from the assumption that
the more the students are exposed to the target language and that the more they
practice the language they are learning, the sooner they will become competent
speakers of the target language. That is why, the use of English should be made
optimal both in the classroom and outside the classroom. Using English
as a medium of instruction, requiring the students to do all assignments in
English and delivering questions as well as asking them to answer in English
are just a few examples of ways to create English speaking opportunities in the
classroom. Furthermore, requiring the students to use English when they speak
to the teacher outside the classroom, suggesting them to communicate in English
when they interact with friends, and asking them to expose themselves to
English conversations as found in radio and television programs as well as in
films are ways to create opportunities of English use outside the classroom.
Creating the opportunities to use English
should be the task of not only the teacher but also the students. Students can
create opportunities by setting up conversation clubs either in a formal sense
or in an informal sense. In this regard, I suggest that the members of the
group should be of equally competent students to guarantee that each member is
dare enough to speak without being afraid of being overcorrected. If there is
one member who is much more highly competent than the others, he/she tends to
dominate the conversation. As such, the good student improves better, while the
less good students become more frustrated.
Principle 7: Risk-Taking
The risk-taking principle says that successful language learners must be
willing to become ‘gamblers’ in the game of language, to attempt to produce and
to interpret language that is a bit beyond their current level. This principle
is derived from a characteristic of a good language learner as reported by
Rubin (1975). In her research with successful language learners in California
and Hawaii, she found that one of the characteristics of the good language
learners is that they are not inhibited to produce target language utterances.
They are willing take the risk of producing possible mistakes in communicating
and appearing foolish when the situation demands them to be so.
The classroom pedagogical implications of this principle is that in
order to encourage the students to learn English better, the teacher should:
- Create an
atmosphere in the classroom that the students are not afraid of trying out
language. Overcorrection and negative feedbacks should be avoided as such
strategies may discourage the students to try out the language.
- Make the
students aware that they can learn from the mistakes that they make or that
their peers make. Thus, tell them not to be afraid of making mistakes.
-
Tell the students that many of their errors or mistakes will clear up in the
process of language development. If, for example, the mistakes are a result of
transferring the forms of Bahasa Indonesia over to English, such mistakes will
mostly decrease as the students become more proficient in English. If the
mistakes are a result of making false generalizations on the rules of English,
such mistakes will also clear up as the students have more exposures to the
variety of forms in English and to exceptions of the rules.
3. Principles Related to Strategies
Principle 8: Effective Learning Strategies
As the role of individual differences are
getting more and more attention in the area of L2/FL research, learners’
learning strategies are also reported to be as important as – even more
important than – the teacher’s teaching strategies. This leads to the principle
of the necessity of effective learning strategy use. The principle says that
successful mastery of the second language will be due to a large extent to the
learner’s personal strategies in comprehending and producing language. Thus,
students should be made aware of the availability of a number of possible
strategies that they may choose to use in learning English. Then, to help them
able to use the strategies, training programs on how to use a learning strategy
as well as to measure its effectiveness may be conducted as an integral part of
the instructional process. Technical guidelines of how to train learners to use
those strategies effectively may be found in Dickinson (1987), Oxford (1990),
and Harris (1997).
Principle 9: Effective Communication Strategies
Canale and Swain (1980) state that
communicative competence consists of four components, including grammatical
competence, sociolinguistic competence, strategic competence, and discourse
competence. Strategic competence consists of two aspects: 1) the overall skill
of a foreign language learner to successfully covey information to a listener,
and 2) the ability to use communication strategies when problems are
encountered in the process of conveying information. Thus, communication
strategies are actions that a speaker uses when there is a communication
breakdown.
The principle of communication strategies
is derived from findings of research of the characteristics of good language
learners. Rubin (1975) reported that good language learners have a strong drive
to communicate and learn from a communication. They always search for
techniques to get their message across when facing difficulties in
communicating. Thus, the principle can be formulated as that successful
language learners make use of strategies when communicating with others.
Approximation and circumlocution are two
examples of communication strategies that are commonly used. Tarone (1984) provides a sample of teaching
activities to train learners how to apply circumlocution and approximation
strategies to develop speaking skill. Circumlocution is a strategy of
overcoming problems of vocabulary by describing the properties of the object
being described in terms of material, colour, size, shape, texture, and
function). Approximation is a strategy of overcoming problems of vocabulary by,
for example, using a superordinate term (“It’s a type of ____”) or an analogy
(“It’s like a bowl, but it’s not a bowl”). In this research a student is shown
a picture or a photo of an object that he does not know the name. He has to
describe the object so clearly that the listeners, who cannot see the object being
described, can either pick out the correct photograph of the object from a
group of photos of similar objects or draw the object. She found the activity
was effective to develop students’ circumlocution and approximation strategies.
Principle 10: Meaningful Routines
The principle says that successful
language learners memorise
routines and use them in their communication. Routines are expressions that are
commonly used in a particular conversational situation. Examples of routines
are Excuse me for attracting attention, Good by, See you later when
departing, Can you do me a favor?, Can you give me a hand?, Can you help me,
please? when requesting a help, What do you think of…?, What is your
opinion about …? when asking for someone’s opinion, I am sorry, I
don’t know, I have no idea I’m afraid when not being able to provide
information that someone asks, and so on. Such routines need to be presented to
the students, then watch how the students can use them in real communicative
activities.
D. Conclusion
The paper has explored the four conditions for successful language
learning. Learners are expected to gain optimal success when they have high
language aptitude, strong learning motivation, have ample opportunities to
learn, and use effective learning strategies. Since language aptitude is
naturally inherited from birth and it is unmodifiable, ten principles of
successful language teaching are developed based the other three factors.
Principles of reward anticipation, intrinsic motivation, self-confidence,
and low-anxiety are related to motivation. Principles of meaningful learning,
target language use, and risk taking, moreover, are related to opportunity.
Meanwhile, principles of learning strategies, communication strategies, and
routines use are related to strategic investment. Based on each of these
principles, technical strategies of how to encourage students to learn English
effectively are recommended.
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