7 CHAPTER II
REVIEW OF LITERATURE
2.1 Learners
According to Harmer (2001:37), learners are categorized into three levels based on the age of the learners themselves. In this case, the age itself, of course, differentiates the students’ needs and wants of English Language Teaching (ELT). He says,
“The age of our students is a major factor in our decisions about how and what to teach. People of different ages have different needs, competences, and cognitive skills; we might expect children of primary age to acquire much of a foreign language through play, for example, whereas for adults we can reasonably expect a greater use of abstract thought.”
Based on the age of learners, there are three levels of learners. Those are young children, adolescents, and adult learners. Due to my topic in this thesis, I will only give the explanation about the ‘adolescents’ since they are in accordance with the age of second-grade students in a high school.
Penny Ur (1996:286) in Harmer (2001:38) says, “Teenage students are in fact overall the best language learners.” However, Puchta and Schratz (1993:1) in Harmer (2001:38) wondered why teenagers seemed to be less lively and humorous than adult while designing material for teenagers in Austria.
Puchta and Schratz (1993:4) in Harmer (2001:39) say,
8 2.2 Attitude
Before going too far towards an attitude analysis, it is better to have an understanding whether an attitude has an impact towards the students’ desire to learn a foreign language or not. Gardner (1985) says that attitudes towards the second language may affect the learners’ motivation to learn. In this opinion, it is implicitly stated that a positive attitude will normally give a high motivation in learning a language. To make it clearer, a quite simple and common example is given as follows:
A second-grade student in a high school likes to study English as a subject for
foreign language in his school. His enthusiasm in learning the language is very high. He is always enthusiastic to study. He always does his homeworks. He follows every little thing his teacher asks him to do. Sometimes, he practices speaking English by mixing it with Indonesian language even though it does not frequently make sense. Here, it can be said that he has a positive attitude towards learning English because he has a high motivation to do so.
Normally, a student who has a positive attitude in learning a language can be
seen and proven by their activities while learning inside and even outside the classroom. However, it is not rare to find some students whose trait is plegmatic indicating that they are not interested in studying or integrating with the foreign language, for instance, English. Nevertheless, since they only behave like that at school but they sing English songs and watch English movies at home, they do have a positive attitude towards learning English too, indeed.
9 2.3 Factors Influencing Language Attitude
According to a book of Sociolinguistics: The Studies of Societies’ Languages, there are several factors that influence language attitude. Each of them is explained as follows:
2.3.1 The Prestige and Power of the Language
The prestige of a language influences students’ attitude in learning the language indeed. No wonder many people keen on learning English because the prestige is high enough. It has been regarded as a language connecting many people whose native languages are not same. Not only Asian people but also people from many countries throughout the world. However, even though English is a language with high power and prestige and many people are enthusiastic in learning and mastering the language, it does not mean that they have negative attitudes towards their national and cultural feelings. In this way, there is a research done on Japanese children studying English. It has been proved that even though they show great attraction towards the Western culture as well as the language being studied, they kept holding a strong Japanese identity and a language loyalty (Downes, 2001 in Ng Bee Chin and Gillian Wigglesworth, 2007).
2.3.2 Historical Background of Nations
10 because Western people were colonialists. This historical background of nation can make oneself have no willing to learn English at all.
2.3.3 The Social and Traditional Factors
The social and traditional factor also influence the students to learn a foreign language which is completely new for them. Of course, it is due to the variety of language they study. Normally, a language has varieties in being used by people. The higher variety of language is commonly regarded as the better and purer one.
2.3.4 The Language Internal System
This part refers to the difficulties of the language itself, such as the grammatical structures, pronounciations and vocabularies of the language studied, of course, this is what experts name as the internal sides of a language. Normally, people like to study a new language, in this case, a foreign language, because of its prestige and power among other languages. In addition, even though it has a high prestige and power, people would not like to study about it if the grammatical sturctures, pronounciations and vocabularies of the language are difficult to study. For instance, people certainly prefer English to Germany and French because English is rather easier than Germany and French in case of grammatical structures and specially the pronounciations. Even though English is not easy to study, at least it is easier to understand than other European languages.
2.4 Attitudes in Language Learning
11 in learning the target language will affect more positive results in the learning than those who do not. Based on the researches done in the context of language learning, there are two types of language attitude depicted as follow:
a) Integrative Language Attitude
This part refers to those who study a second language and integrate with the language. They do not only want to master the language but also integrate with the culture of the language itself.
b) Instrumental Language Attitude
This part refers to those who merely want to study the language because of their need in passing an examination and probably applying to some job. They do not truly want to understand it entirely and seriously.
2.5 Relevant Studies
12 An international journal done by Gajalakshmi entitled High School Students’ Attitude towards Learning English Language supports the writer the most to do and finish a thesis about an attitude analysis. Gajalakshmi’s finding is that students are completely different in their attitudes towards learning English based on the gender, locality of the school, type of the school, type of management, and also in father’s and mother’s occupation.
There is also another thesis, that is Colak’s entitled Attitudes, Motivation and Study Habits of English Language Learners: The Case of Baskent University Second-Year Students. In Colak’s thesis, it has been found that there is a correlation between students’ grades at school and their attitudes towards learning English as a foreign language. The students who have a positive attitude towards learning English create a better performance. Besides, this positive attitude usually creates successful language learner.
