Language learners ' attitude has been considered one of the important variables which influence second and foreign language acquisition. Ellis (1994), for example, identifies it as one of the personal variables which could have a positive or negative influence on the process of language acquisition. Krashen (1982), further argues that negative attitude could contribute to raising the learners ' affective filter, hence slowing down the language acquisition process. Attitude, hence, is a multidimensional factor that has affective, cognitive and conative constructs (Ghazali, 2008). It incorporates humans ' beliefs and feelings about an issue in addition to the way they deal with it (McGroarty, 1996). It has been argued that students who have positive attitudes invest more effort in language learning and implement several learning strategies such as providing information as well as asking and answering questions (Baker, 1993). Fortunately, attitudes are not static in nature, i.e, they could undergo change if sources of negative attitude are analyzed and amended (Ghazali, 2008). …show more content…
Other studies investigated the effect that negative or positive attitude has on the language learning task at hand (Ghazali, 2008). Few studies, however, have investigated language learners ' attitude towards English literature and literary materials especially when those materials and texts are used alongside regular communicative texts and tasks in the EFL classroom (Ghazali,
“Younger learners show fewer problems with language anxiety (Johnstone, 2009), higher levels of motivation and positive attitudes towards language learning (Bӧrner, Engel, & Groot-Wilken, 2013; Graham, Courtney, Tonkyn, & Marinis, 2016; Mihaljević Djigunović & Lopriore, 2011), and potentially better employability in the future” (Jaekel 632-2,
Learning a second language has become really important as the years pass because of the necessity of being communicated, and Chilean people are aware of this. Some years ago, the Education minister Joaquin Lavin announced that the new Chile’s goal is to be a bilingual country within the next 20 years. Since that declaration, many projects have started in order to develop Chilean student’s English skills, which are listening, writing, reading and speaking. The last skill mentioned is the one in which our problem is focused on. In Chile, many students have problems when they talk in English since the mother tongue interferes in the target language.
If English is a language that is easy and practical to learn, learners may at least be driven extrinsically motivated if not intrinsically motivated. However, the environment of learning the language itself is not very conducive, such as less support from family members, irrelevant judgments by peers and less supportive society, especially in rural area. The fact that Malaysian learners and education system focuses on number of As in the examination result slip, and believing in As as assurance of getting good job and promising salary proved the reality that the Malaysian learners are dependent to be extrinsically motivated, in ESL learning
In fact, attitude is the general feeling of people about the desirability or undesirability of a particular issue or behavior (Ajzen,
Learning a foreign language is often a requirement in schools across the country, but many students struggle with learning a new language. It can be difficult and time consuming to learn a new language but there are also many benefits associated with studying foreign languages. Knowing multiple languages can make students more likely to get better jobs and have a better understanding of the world. Despite this, it is still argued whether students should be required to learn another language in order to graduate. Many students struggle with learning a language for various reasons.
9), are Macgillivray (1995) benefiting second-language learners and English-as-a-foreign-language learners (Dupuy, 1997). They have revealed that literature circles are effective for not only students whose mother tongue is English but also for who are learning it as a second or foreign language. Literature circles promote EFL students’ acquisition and practice of both receptive (i.e., listening and reading) and productive (i.e., speaking and writing) skills. According to the transactional theory (Rosenblatt, 1988), readers approach a text from efferent stance and/or aesthetic stance. As Brown (2009) explains, the efferent stance is searching for information in the text by using the 5 W's: Who, What, Where, When, and Why.
I know Armenian, Russian and I have to learn the third main language which will help me to communicate with the people around me. Most motivation theories have addressed the issue of how much positive or negative affect is associated with a particular event. A central assumption of affect theories is that people approach things to experience positive affect and avoid things to guard against experiencing negative affect (Chapter 1, pg.
With more than half of the world being bilingual nowadays, from which around 50 million are only in the United States, bilingualism is not at all as rare as one may think upon first hearing the word. One of the many interesting things about this phenomenon, about which bilingual people can provide a new and different perspective, is the crucial effect it can have on the way we express ourselves and our emotions. As the author of the article puts it, it can shape the way we communicate and convey our feelings. First of all, corresponding to the vision the paper provides, a person’s first acquired language often has a greater emotional strength than any of the others they may learn later in life. It is the language that they have heard in
In this study, quantitative (questionnaire) and qualitative (interviews) methods were used to gather data. The findings of this study showed that English book is structure- based and it cannot meet the curriculum goals and students' needs. In the same fashion, the present study attempts to find out whether "Cutting Edge" meets course objectives and learners' needs or not. As Zohrabi and Sabouri adopted questionnaire and interview methods to gather data from the learners, the same methodology is adopted in this study as well.
Moreover, in language learning classes, many researches have been done in the matter of how to increase the motivation of students and encourage them to acquire a new language.
Most population of the world is bilingual or multilingual with monolingual speakers in the minority. I begin saying that the two languages of a bilingual person differ not only in their lexical and grammatical repertories for expressing and describing emotions but also in the sets of emotional scripts regulating emotional talk. Language is not just a tool or an instrument for expressing someone s feelings that could be equally well expressed in other language. The degree of proficiency that bilingual speakers achieve in their two languages depends largely on the opportunities they have to use each of them.
It is almost incomprehensible to think of a psychological world without the influence of attitudes. The processes of developing opinions and establishing a preference for what we like and dislike about things around us are part of our daily tasks as human (Hogg & Cooper, 2007). Also, individuals will execute their daily tasks without consideration of the positive or negative ramification of the behavior. Hence, the attitude concept is crucial in the field of social psychology in understanding the reason we feel, think and do the things we do (Hogg & Cooper, 2007). Further, various research findings indicate that individuals with positive attitudes are active and productive in life endeavors and often improve the mood of those around them (Shteynberg,
In the English learning literature, the development of a positive attitude towards learning could be attributed to Integrativeness, or the genuine desire to learn a new language so that one can communicate with the members of the community who use the language as their medium of communication (Dörnyei, 1998). However, as the world has become more borderless as exemplified by the EU and the ASEAN, other attitudinal factors were conceptually included. The additions were attributed to the changing of concept from ‘English is a second language to learn’ to ‘English as an international language’(Dörnyei & Ushioda, 2009). This resulted to the addition of other attitudinal factors that include Direct contact with English speakers (attitude towards actually meeting English speakers and travelling to their countries) ; Cultural interest (appreciation of cultural products from English speaking countries conveyed by the media); Miliu (the general perception of the importance of English in the learners’ friends and family) (Dörnyei & Ushioda, 2009). From the aforementioned attitudinal factors, the following hypotheses were
As a teacher, I am taking this opportunity to evaluate and make sense of what the articles are proposing - relating it to the real situations. When it is said that students’ attitude is one of the major factors that determine their success in language learning, I believe that it is true. There have been numerous researches that have been conducted on investigating the role of attitude in second language acquisition, spurred by the knowledge that all these negative attitudes can be changed. Factors like better teaching strategies, classroom and social environment can actually help in reducing negative attitude. Based on the understanding, there are two reasons why we have the attitudes of learning second language – all of these are interrelated.
Emotional intelligence (EI) has a lot to do with being aware of your emotions. It refers to the ability to distinguish your emotions and other people's emotions. It is one of the most recently defined types of intelligence in the field of psychology that appeared at the beginning of the 1990s by developing the concept of intelligence. Based on EI people have the mental abilities and emotional skills to solve their problems and influence other people (Pfeiffer, 2001). Mayer and Salovey (1997) stated that knowing what two components of emotional intelligence help us to understand its concept.