Theorizing Students’ Attributions on Their EFL Learning Process
Yustinus Calvin Gai Mali Universitas Kristen Satya Wacana E-mail: calvin.yustinus@yahoo.com
Abstract
This study explores students’ attributions for success and failure in their English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learning process at English Language Education Study Program, Satya Wacana Christian University (ED-SWCU). For data collection, a semi-structured interview was conducted with three ED-SWCU students. The results appear to prove that the students’ negative environment, time management, and negative habits are the attributions for their failure, while strategies and family support are the primary attributions for their success. In essence, the results would seem to indicate that external influences primarily take an essential role in the students’ failure and success in their learning process. The interconnections possibly state that classroom teachers cannot completely be the one who handles the particular outcomes of their students’ EFL learning. In light of the findings, this study proposes some pedagogical ideas for the development of EFL teaching and learning particularly in Indonesian Higher Education context.
Keywords: attributions, failure, success, EFL learning process
Introduction
Limiting our view of teaching and learning relationships primarily to the teacher’s perspective provides only a partial view of classroom life and thus limited understanding of teaching and learning processes in classroom. Attention must be given to student experience if we are to more fully understand these relationships and processes among teachers and students (Prentiss, 1995, p.27).
Teaching is not always a matter of transmitting knowledge to students (Harmer, 2007; Alwasilah, 2013) since they sometimes need to be listened and cared for (Smith, 2012).
Ideas to conduct this study are from the researcher’s experience as a teacher. He likes to come earlier to his classroom, spend some minutes to walk around the class, and talk to his students more specifically to discuss their study. In that case, he usually asks them about the progress of their study as well as whether they enjoy their learning process, have questions to ask or need to share their academic problems.
the researcher starts to think about exploring further students’ attributions, an affective factor in second language acquisition (Brown, 2007), on their English as a Foreign Language (EFL), “situations where students were learning English to use it with any other English speakers in the world” (Harmer, 2007, p.19), learning process.
Literature suggests some definitions of the term attribution. Dornyei (2001) defines it as “an explanation people offer about why they were successful or, more importantly, why they failed in the past” (p.118). It is also an explanation that learners provide for the progress of their second language learning (Ellis, 2008) and reasons that they attribute to their success or failure when they are in the process of learning a target language (Gonzales, 2011). Based on ideas mentioned above, the study regards the attribution as explanations and reasons that people provide for progress, achievement, and even failure towards something they have experienced, particularly in their language learning.
It is well noted that the attribution can influence students’ learning motivation and academic achievement. Weiner (1972) believes that the attribution process is an essential determinant of learning and performance in a classroom. Lei (2009) asserts that attribution made toward the success or failure in studying will result in changes in expectations and emotions, which possibly affect motivation that individuals have for learning and subsequently for their academic achievement. Weiner (1992) as cited in Dornyei (2001, p.10) claims, “the individual explanations of why past successes and failures have occurred have consequences on the person’s motivation to initiate future action.” The theory proposes a framework that can help teachers in interpreting their students’ claim such as“I cannot do this task.” After understanding its underlying factor, the teachers may start to change the negative attitude.
In the field of education, some international studies have been conducted to explore students’ attributions in the process of their English as a Second Language (ESL) and EFL learning. The studies involved students from different educational levels. Some of them are particularly secondary students (Williams, Burden, Poulet, & Maun, 2004; Farid & Iqbal, 2012) and higher education students (Tse, 2000; Gobel & Mori; 2007; Mori, Gobel, Thepsiri, & Pojanapunya, 2010; Zohri, 2011; Thang, Gobel, Mohd.Nor, & Suppiah, 2011; Yilmaz, 2012; Mali, 2015a).
Tse (2000) conducted a qualitative study involving 51 University students who learned a foreign language while they were studying in the United States. The study revealed that the students’ attributions for the success in their learning were related to external factors. They were their teachers and professors’ willingness to support their learning, language inputs from their family, and community interactions. On the other hand, most of the students believe that a low level of success in the study of their foreign language was because of themselves. They admitted that they did not have enough practice and not spend their time sufficiently to study the language.
In 2010, Mori, et al. sought to explore how EFL university students in Thailand and Japan judged their successes and failures towards some language learning tasks. The study would seem to indicate that the students regard their teacher’s influence and classroom atmosphere as primary factors for their success. Conversely, the students perceive a lack of ability and effort as the causes of their failures.
Zohri (2011) undertook a more recent study investigating Moroccoan university students’ perceptions of failure. The study involved three hundred and thirty-three subjects who studied English. The findings indicated that teachers’ attitude, effort/hard work, interest, and pressure became the attributions for failure in their study.
outcomes. In a sense, this would be in harmony with ideas that people who are close to students would greatly influence their attitudes to their language learning (Harmer, 2007). Graham (1994) as cited in Dornyei (2001) also addresses ideas on typical attributions on students’ successes and failures. He regards ability, effort, task difficulty, and luck as the most common attributions in school environments. Other possible factors deal with mood, family background, and help or hindrance from others.
Nevertheless, to the best of the researcher’s knowledge, there have been a limited number of studies that sought to explore the issues possessed by undergraduates in the Indonesian context, where English is considered as a foreign language. Thus, this study aims to explore students’ attribution for their failure and successes in their EFL learning process at the Study Program. With these in minds, the researcher aims to answer the following research question: "What are students’ attributions for their failure and success on their EFL learning process at ED-SWCU?”
Although the purpose of the present study might sound similar to that conducted by the previous studies, the researcher still maintains that deeply exploring students’ real life experience can be expected to contribute towards wider discussions of the attribution studies. Besides, this study hopes to provide ED-SWCU teachers with insights related to possible reasons for their students’ successes and failures in their language learning, so they can develop a better understanding of helping their students avoid the failures, in teaching all their students, and in helping them to achieve their successes in their language learning.
Research Method
This research was designed qualitatively to explore students’ attributions for failure and success on their EFL learning process at ED-SWCU. In particular, the research employed a grounded theory approach. It aims to build a theory that faithfully reflects the evidence or, in other words, to build a theory constructed from and grounded in the data (Strauss & Corbin, 1990, as cited in Neuman, 2006). The approach also enables the researcher to understand the nature and meaning of an experience for a particular group of people in a particular setting (Glaser and Strauss, 1967, as cited in Moustakas, 1994, p.4).” Though Gobel and Mori (2007) believe that using qualitative methods would seem to follow the general trend in conducting an attribution research, the researcher has mixed feelings about it. He still maintains that the methods can open up silent ideas possessed by the research participants without being limited by one’s pre-understanding. The methods are expected to result in richer findings related to the attribution issues within the particular context.
Participants
Materials
For the data collection, the researcher conducted a semi-structured interview, in which an interviewer may ask a series of structured questions to his interviewees and explore more deeply with open-form questions to obtain further information from them (Gall, Gall, & Borg, 2007). In this research, the interviewees were asked to tell and reconstruct their stories dealing with the attributions. The researcher conducted the interview in Bahasa Indonesia to ensure that they could completely understand all questions in the interview and, therefore, provide clear and deep responses.
Data collection
The interview section was conducted on three different occasions. They were on October 31st, 2014 for interviewing the first participant, on November 7th, 2014 for interviewing the second participant, and finally on November 12th, 2014 for interviewing the third participant. The researcher started the interview by asking the participants to tell their brief personal information. Then, they were asked to tell their experience of failure and success in their learning process since the beginning of their study at ED-SWCU. In this research, the term failure was defined as a situation when the students either got a bad result or failed in a course. The term success, on the other hand, indicated that the students could learn from mistakes making them fail the course, enhance their performance, so they could successfully increase their GPA. The researcher recorded, transcribed, and analyzed all the information from the interview to identify common themes related to the issues. Within a week period after the interview session, the researcher met each participant to show the interview transcription, let him/her read it and add information towards his/her responses. It was done to ensure whether the participant still needed to clarify his/her responses.
Data analysis
In this research, the researcher followed an inductive data analysis as adapted from Hatch (2002); Ary et al. (2010). First, the researcher re-read repeatedly the interview transcription, so he could break the data into some analyzable parts/ units. In that case, he developed two general parts of analysis, namely attributions [1] for the students’ failure and [2] for the students’ success. Second, he started to develop a set of categories of meaning reflecting a cause-effect relation for each analyzable part. Third, he underlined some responses that were in line with the issues and supported the discussions of the emerging categories. That step was followed by reducing responses that were not salient and related to the issues discussed in this research. Last, he searched for relationships among the categories. These processes would eventually result in emerging themes about the students’ attributions for their failures and successes in their EFL learning process at ED-SWCU.
Findings and Discussion
sections clarify core themes extracted from the data presented in the first section. The themes would become the answer to the research question.
The Students’ Learning Process
Doni’s story
His name is Doni. He was born in Salatiga twenty-six years ago. He has started to learn English since he was in the first grade of Junior High School, meaning that he has been studying English for more-less six years before entering ED-SWCU. The motivation to study at the Study Program is the fact that he wants to become an English teacher. He enjoyed his process studying English in his initial semesters. It was the first time for him to be in classrooms whose communication during teaching and learning processes was done in English. It was a new challenge for him. He was also happy because he could meet new friends in his campus and practice his listening skills in a language laboratory, the one he had not experienced in his schools.
Nevertheless, the situation was very different when he entered his fifth semester. He admitted that he had socialized with his “wrong” friends. They were nice but, unfortunately, liked to do negative things, which influenced his decision to join an activity (Doni-FL-ITD-FRN). At first, he did not do the activity regularly until he, on one occasion, gained many temporal benefits that soon made him do anything to keep him involving in the activity.
The activity also made him stay awake at all night. With his sleepless nights, he simply decided to join morning classes held at seven o’clock. As a result, he did not feel fresh being in the classroom, so he could not follow the classroom discussions and understand the points explained by his teacher (Doni-FL-ITD-PSC). Staying awake all the night made him feel lazy to go to the campus. In that case, he did not deny that most of his E scores, causing his failures, were because of his frequent absences in his classroom. Besides, the bad score was due to his usual decision not to continue a course when he knew that he obtained a bad result in his first progress test (Doni-FL-ITD-HBT). The similar things had happened for five semesters. He could not control them.
Knowing the condition, Doni’s mother decided to visit him in Salatiga, finished all his problems, and helped him to have a better life. She met the Chairperson of the Study Program to discuss whether he could continue his study. He thought that it was all his mother’s work that made him be a better person than what he was in the past (Doni-SC-ITD-FMY). The presence of his mother also significantly makes him stop doing the activity. Moreover, he has started to consider his present age that is getting older and to think that if his GPA remains low, it will be difficult for him to obtain a job (Doni-SC-ITD-SLR).
Dono’s story
In his first semester, he felt so nervous specifically when he entered the Integrated Course (IC) class consisting of eight credits. All students were expected to pass the class and were only given a chance to repeat the class once. Being failed in the class twice means that they would be recommended to quit their study from ED-SWCU. Nevertheless, he could pass the class in his C score, regarded as a very minimum score for the class. In that case, he mentioned that he frequently read IC books and asked his brother questions about how he learned the materials, how to improve his grammatical accuracy, and what to prepare for the test (Dono-SC-ITD-STR).
Though he passed the course, his overall score from his first semester to the fifth semester got worse and was out of his expectation. For instance, he told that his GPA in the fourth semester was only one. He admitted that such failure was because he liked to postpone doing assignments that he did not like and to be absent in some of his classes, such as Academic Writing and Academic Reading classes (Dono-FL-ITD-HBT). The fourth and fifth semesters were obviously the worst semesters in his study.
His failure in the semesters meant a lot to him. It became a turning point for him to enhance his performance in his upper semesters. He started to think that doing the same things continuously would make him fail to finish his study. It would also disappoint his parents who have worked very hard for his study. Therefore, he always comes to his classes and does all his assignments with his very best efforts.
Further, he always remembers what his mother did to him when he experienced such failure in the semesters. He was amazed at his mother who was not angry after she knew the situation faced by her son. She always encourages and reminds him to study harder and more diligently (Dono-SC-ITD-FMY). That makes him ask himself why his mother can be so patient with him. He has promised to himself that he has to do his very best in his study and be able to graduate in year two thousand and sixteen.
Dini’s story
Her name is Dini. She is a twenty-year-old student coming from Salatiga, Central Java. She has been learning English since she was in her fourth grade of Elementary School. She is interested in studying at ED-SWCU because she wants to continue what she learned in her language class in Senior High School.
She felt anxious entering her classroom at the beginning of her study. She remembered her experience in her Extensive Reading class, which was held at seven o’clock in the morning and taught by a native speaker teacher who could not speak Bahasa Indonesia at all. She was nervous whenever the teacher asked her questions in English as she could not respond it using the same language. She was also afraid of making mistakes. Therefore, she frequently kept silent during the class. Besides feeling anxious, she admitted that the result of her study in the first semester was out of her expectation. She could not manage her time well, so she did not have enough time to study. She told that she had to teach her private students and use the money she obtained to pay her first semester’s fee (Dini-FL-ITD-ATY).
She could enhance her performance in the second semester. She met her mentor, whom she had more time to practice her English with (Dini-SC-ITD-MNR). Besides, the mentor was her source of inspiration advising that she should positively consider her failure as her encouragement to do better in her future. Her decision to live in a rented house also helped her to enhance her performance. There, she could meet students, coming from outside Java, with whom she could share her academic problems and encourage one another (Dini-SC-ITD-FRN).
learn more about grammar when she teaches it to other people (Dini-SC-ITD-STR). It is not when she learns it from her teacher or listens to the teacher’s explanation in the classroom.
In her fifth semester, she had to a join an activity, assigned by her scholarship sponsor. The activity assigned her to hold an event working and involving many people coming from different universities and faculties in Indonesia. The event was even bigger that the annual drama performance held by the Study Program (Dini-SC-ITD-ATY). As a result, she found it difficult to handle all the things and her academic matters at the same time. She just felt that she only had limited time to study and finish all her classrooms’ assignments, so she could not do her best to finish them.
The Students’ Attributions for the Failure
Dealing with the attributions to the students’ failure, the study extracts some possible themes from the text description. The first theme is a negative environment. Making a relation with friends who have negative behavior causes problems to Doni’s study. They successfully involve him in the activity that makes him have his sleepless days. As a result, he cannot attend his morning classes and finish all his assignments. Such condition is the reason for his frequent classroom absences that make him fail in a class. This experience appears to become corroboration towards the view that people who are close to students would greatly influence their attitudes to their language learning (Harmer, 2007). It also might be a clarification that hindrance from others was as typical attributions on students’ failure (Graham, 1994, as cited in Dornyei, 2001). Time management and negative habits are other themes extracted from the text. It shows that the students find it difficult to manage their time when they specifically have to deal with their overloaded activities. They do not have a sufficient time to finish their classroom assignments.
The Students’ Attributions for the Success
Williams, et al. (2004) state that to differentiate between effort and strategy is not easy to do. Therefore, this study regards the term strategy operationally as a directed effort. Interestingly, teaching learning materials to other people is revealed as a strategy that can help Dini to enhance her grammar. In other words, she can learn grammar better when she teaches it to other people. Spending time to read books and asking questions to one’s brother and mentor are other helpful strategies that help Dono and Dini during their learning process. In a sense, this would endorse Tse’s (2000) findings that language input from students’ family and community interactions became their attributions for the success in their learning. The findings conceivably prove that inputs that students obtain outside their classrooms help them to learn the language.
It is also obvious that students need to keep developing a proper learning strategy for their EFL learning. Within a classroom, teachers can invite students to share their experience of learning strategies that they usually do in enhancing their English skills. It is also possible for teachers to share their experience of their failure and success when they were still students and practical ways to be successful language learners.
to students would greatly influence their attitudes to their language learning. Besides, the findings can reinforce an essential role that parents have in motivating students to learn (Mali, 2015b).
In light of the findings, building regular communication with students’ parents is essential during a student’s learning process. In that case, teachers can tell the parents about the learning problems possessed by their sons or daughters, and work together with them to solve the problems. Building such communication can conceivably involve the parents to participate and communicate actively in encouraging their sons, or daughters, to do their best during their learning process.
Conclusion
To sum up, negative environment, time management, and negative habits are the students’ attributions for the failure in their EFL learning process. Conversely, strategies and family support are the students’ primary attributions for the success in their learning process. These results may be a demonstration that in the Indonesian context, external influences can primarily affect the students’ failure and success in their EFL learning. These interconnections also appear to prove that classroom teachers cannot completely be the one who handles the particular outcomes of their students’ EFL learning. It is essential to have a constructive collaboration among teachers, students, parents, and people outside the classrooms during the students EFL learning process. This collaboration is expected to provide students with more opportunities to receive more inputs for their EFL learning. As the constructive collaboration, the study would suggest teachers to build a good rapport with their students. Possibly, it is done by always providing students with positive encouragement that they can finish their study successfully. Besides, teachers can regularly ask their students to tell the progress of their study and their learning problems. Then, they can start to encourage their students to meet and to consult different people who can help them and provide more inputs to solve the problems. It can be done, for instance, by joining a certain academic community in which they can share their learning problems and obtain solutions from members of the community. The students can also meet people, who can be other teachers, professionals with their expertise, to whom they can share the problems that they are encountering. By doing so, teachers are expected to take a part in monitoring their students’ learning process, to have a better understanding of possible factors causing the failures in the students’ learning, and to take a role in minimizing the factors. Eventually, it is hoped that the teachers can help their students to achieve their goal in their EFL learning.
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