BARRIERS AND MOTIVATION FOR LEARNING ENGLISH: A CASE STUDY

EFL(English as a Foreign Language) learners tend to choose translation strategies in their English learning process. This study aims to examine the potential relationship between English language proficiency and EFL learners’ use of translation strategies, displaying the differences in the use of translation strategies between students at higher level of English language proficiency and those at lower level of English language proficiency. An ITLS questionnaire (The Inventory for Translation as a Learning Strategy) designed by Liao Posen (Liao, 2002：159-161)was distributed to 190 students in Southwest Jiaotong University who had taken the national English language proficiency assessment—CET-4(College English Test Band 4). Based on Independent Sample T-test, the results show that significant differences were found between the proficient EFL learners and the limited English proficient learners in some of the uses of translation strategies, and lower achievers were more likely to adopt translation strategies in English learning. According to Pearson Correlation Analysis and Multiple Regression Analysis, this research also found out that the use of translation to enhance English-language abilities was negatively correlated with English language proficiency and could best predict the negative performance of English language proficiency assessment. Implications for the role of translation strategies in EFL learning are discussed.

Lateral thinking is a unique form of thinking proposed by Edward De Bono. He believes that innovation is the ability to see the changes as an opportunity not as a threat. It results in the generation of new ideas and breaking out of the concept prisons of old ideas. This type of thinking decides the outcome of one's speaking and the job of lateral thinking is to enable the brain to find multiple possibilities or perceptions. The attitude of the present set of tertiary learners, lack of confidence and positive approach, their habits hinder their brain to intake, create and present the information in the demanding context. The major reasons for their inability are the cultural and psychological background of the learners. Developing lateral thinking skills of the tertiary level learners may pave the way to keep a constructive mind to acquire new language competencies. 'Think out of the box' is the crucial motto of the language teachers these days. De Bono's concept of Lateral thinking would enable the language teachers to break a new ground in inculcating speaking skills for the learners of English as a second language. The present study proposes Design , one of the lateral thinking techniques of Bono and its effectiveness as a tool that can be adapted by the language teachers to enrich the communicative competence of the tertiary level learners of English as a second language. The criteria for speaking activity are assessed based on stage III of Canadian Language Benchmark for assessing speaking skills.

At present time English has been a global language widely used in various areas one of them is education. In Indonesia, English is considered a foreign language, a language learned as a school subject. To learn English, learners need motivation since learners need to be driven to success. Therefore motivation plays a crucial role in teaching learning process. In previous reseraches, it turned out that instrumental or external motivation was the one driving learners to learn English in countries in which English is as a foreign language. This result implicates that in those countries, motivation dominating in English learning process was instrumental motivation suggesting that it was the basic motivation which encouraged learners to learn English due to the wish to pass tests, to get good scores, to get jobs, and to enhance career. While in countries in which English acts as a second language, as means of communication both in education and business, learners learning English are integratively motivated due to inner needs to develop their skills in English, while the exposure of external factors such as media, environment also play important role.

This study aims to explore the gender differences in the majors' of students who experienced English language learning anxiety at a University of Technology in Taiwan. The participants were 245 randomly selected students at this university in Taiwan. A questionnaire about English language learning anxiety was adopted as data collection. The results show that students attributed the cause of anxiety to the fear of speaking, the fear of exam consequences, a lack of both learning motivation and self-confidence, as well as the teacher's influence. Also, the finding of this study indicates that male students have stronger feelings of English learning anxiety than female students, and non-English majors have stronger feelings of English learning anxiety than English majors. The findings of this study suggest that EFL teachers in Taiwan should strive towards making classrooms more relaxing with a less formal atmosphere, and move away from the exam paradigm.

For a language beginner there are many methods of attaining the goal of learning a second or foreign language, one of the most useful ones of which is to make a comparison in sentence structure between one's own native tongue and a second or foreign language. A learner will find out that there are some differences and similarities between the two languages by means of comparison, through which he/she will feel learning a foreign language is not so difficult as he/she imagines and give birth to a strong desire to learn a foreign language. For a Chinese speaker who is learning English as a foreign language, she/he may make great strides in English through the comparison of sentence structure between the two languages. On the other hand, this way can help the English speakers not only better understand but feel more at ease in Chinese learning as well. The overall purpose of this study is to seek to compare Chinese to English in basic sentence structure, including inflections, problems in subject-verb agreement, etc., to guide both the English beginners to take interest in English and the English speakers feel an interest in Chinese, and to facilitate successfully acquiring their aim of learning a second or foreign language.

Motivation is defined as the learner's orientation with regard to the goal of learning a second language. It influences how and why people learn as well as how they perform (Pintrich, Smith, 1996). Attitude is a complex theoretical construct. According to Dorynei (1994), it is used to explain the direction and persistence of human behavior and defined as ”an evaluative reaction to some referent or attitude object, inferred on the basis of the individual's beliefs or opinions about the referent”. Integrative motivation is characterized by the learner's positive attitudes towards the target language group and the desire to integrate into the target language community. Instrumental motivation underlies the goal to gain some social or economic reward through L2 achievement; therefore, it refers to a more functional reason for language learning. Herdrickson (1997) indicates that motivation and attitude were the best predictors of students' grade point average. Green (1993) points that it is important that learner preferences and opinions for EFL classroom material are investigated, and teachers do not rely solely on intuition and experience when selecting materials. This study aims to explore the existence and influence of the instrumental motivation and integrative motivation for students at Cheng-Shiu University. Besides, the students' attitudes toward their learning material are also studied. The results of the survey provide a variety of strategies and methods that teachers can employ in EFL class to motivate their students in EFL classroom.

The current research investigated the impact of cooperative language learning (CLL) approach on English language proficiency of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. The participants were 150 intermediate female EFL learners who were randomly selected from various private English language institutes of Tehran, Iran. First, FCE (First Certificate in English) test was administered to all 150 participants as a means of homogenization which brought down the number of the students to 135. Then, the homogenized participants were taught English through CLL approach for 20 sessions, each for 90 minutes. A pre-test/post-test quasi-experimental design was employed to investigate the impact of CLL approach on English language proficiency of the EFL learners. The results were analysed through a one-way ANOVA and paired-samples t-test statistics. The outcomes revealed that CLL has a significant positive effect on English language proficiency of EFL learners. Article visualizations:

Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) is an educational approach in which the target language is used as the medium to learn and teach both content and language. The widespread interest in CLIL can be seen in the increasing popularity of adopting it as a viable approach to promoting both content and language learning in Europe (Garcia, 2017; Ioannou Georgiou, 2012) and many English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) countries, for instance- Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam (Lee & Chang, 2008).In this paper, we show how informational picture books are quality CLIL materials. The engaging narrative writing and meaningful illustrations in such books convey accessible factual and content knowledge, an important feature in line with CLIL-related goals. The powerful text-illustration synergy in picture books provides a supportive platform upon which to develop learners' language skills as well as to expand subject knowledge. Next, informed by CLIL theories and practices, a CLIL pedagogical framework is proposed to provide a simplified representation of the complexity and scope of the CLIL instructional sequences and content. The framework strives to achieve a balance between the content and language components in CLIL lessons. Based on the framework, a sample CLIL lesson is provided with instructional examples of how teachers could incorporate an informational picture book into their lessons to scaffold students' development of language, content knowledge, and learning skills. It is hoped that the framework and activities presented will encourage primary subject and language teachers in Taiwan and serve as a springboard for them to incorporate informational picture books in their CLIL lessons.

Teaching English to non-native speakers needs to incorporate up-to-date techniques and strategies that are frequently updated to match the ever-changing needs of modern society. In order for students to start acquiring English skills effectively inside the classroom, they need to be more active in their learning and be ready to take the initiative. For this to happen, lecturers need to adopt techniques that facilitate “active learning” with the suitable environment for students to make better use of their innate abilities and become active learners. In a classroom environment where active learning is prominent, students take responsibility of their learning of English as a second language with the lecturer acting as facilitator whose role is limited to providing instructions and supervising the process. Students will have more self-confidence to express their opinions and actively participate in topic discussions. This paper discusses methods of active learning that can be applied in teaching English at Cihan University.

The lack of informed knowledge about listening subskills and their relationships has hindered the development of the diagnostic English language track assessment (DELTA) in three participating Hong Kong universities. This study investigates English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' listening proficiency development in understanding different spoken genres in the Hong Kong Chinese tertiary contexts. It aims to: i) identify the subskills and/or cognitive processes that underlie student performance on the DELTA listening component; ii) examine the difficulty levels of the DELTA listening subskills, and, consequentially, their hierarchical order; iii) investigate the impact of text type on difficulty level and the hierarchical order of the subskills; and iv) infer principles underlying the development of listening proficiency in the Hong Kong tertiary education contexts. A multi-method approach was employed for data collection and analysis. The primary quantitative data were derived from the DELTA listening component items answered by 2830 Chinese ELF learners who studied in their first or second year in the DELTA participating universities in the 2013-14 academic year. The item pool included 207 multiple-choice questions (MCQ) from 33 texts of three text types – conversation, interview and lecture. Each MCQ is intended to measure a particular listening subskill, including: 1) identifying specific information (SSK1); 2) understanding main idea and supporting ideas (SSK2); 3) understanding information and making an inference (SSK3); 4) interpreting a word or phrase as used by the speaker (SSK4); 5) inferring the attitude or intention of the speaker (SSK5); and 6) inferring the speaker's reasoning (SSK6). By adopting inter-related Rasch analyses using Winsteps and Facets, all test items were calibrated and analysed to determine their difficulty measures and their respective difficulties across the three text types. Qualitative Stimulated Recall Protocol (SRP) discussions were then conducted with 62 examinees of varying estimated listening abilities one month later, in a simulated test situation, where the test-taking process was video-recorded and the participants were asked to recall and to verbalise their thought processes and strategies they used to answer each question. The SRP results reveal an array of both cognitive processes and test-taking strategies in the listening comprehension and test-answering process. Firstly, various combinations of cognitive processes were utilised by both the high and low ability examinees to answer questions targeting the same listening sub-skill; however, the dominant cognitive process that was reported to have been used to answer each question corresponded with the particular listening subskill intended by DELTA item writers. Secondly, an array of test-taking strategies best identified as elimination, and guessing, were reported as used by examinees during the test. While this finding might not be surprising given the exam-oriented atmosphere prevailing in Hong Kong secondary school education, it alerted the researcher to scrutinise the validity of the DELTA listening component. The most striking observation from the listening test analysis is that, the DELTA listening subskills are measurably separable from each other, and a hierarchical pattern is established. In terms of their interaction with text type, the results showed that SSK1 and SSK6 were, respectively, the easiest and the most difficult subskills, whereas the hierarchical orders of the other four subskills varied across the three text types. More generally, these findings provide empirical evidence for the proposition that EFL listening comprehension is composed of multiple listening subskills, which operate interactively and interdependently in the listening process. The results regarding the difficulty level and the hierarchy of listening subskills corroborate the findings of prior research that low-level processing, such as identifying specific information, poses less challenge than high-level processing, such as summarising and inferencing. Because of the complexity in the interaction between text type and listening subskills, it is difficult to identify an overarching hierarchical order of the six listening subskills across the three text types. A general pattern, however, is that the difficulty increased from SSK1, SSK2 to SSK6 irrespective of the text type, and this corresponds to the general subskill hierarchy. The study will benefit teachers and students with diagnostic profiling and bridge the gap in diagnostic test design with targeted items of appropriate difficulty for predicting learners' listening development. It will extend second language acquisition theory with a hierarchical trajectory of listening proficiency growth. Limitations and future research recommendations are discussed.

The study was motivated by my own experiences as a speaker of English as a second language (ESL) who has studied and taught high school courses produced in the UK, which Kachru (1988) classifies as the ‘inner’ circle, to students in the ‘outer’ circle in Swaziland. The central focus in this study is students’ academic writing in English in an open distance Master of Business Administration (MBA) programme provided by the Open University (OU) UK, in different parts of the world to students from diverse cultural, geographical, linguistic and educational backgrounds. The main focus of this study is students’ academic writing in the medium of English in the contexts of Ethiopia, Russia and the United Kingdom. In order to explore students’ writing and their experiences of engaging in such writing, I draw on recent studies which view reading, writing, and other aspects of communication as fundamentally social activities. In order to explore their writing in its social context, I draw on a range of data sources: students’ written assignments, interviews with students and tutors, pro-formas, and course materials. The central argument in this thesis is that speakers of English as a foreign language (EFL) and speakers of English as a second language (ESL) studying an open distance course in their diverse local contexts may be disadvantaged in a number of ways; in terms of their resources for writing, their understanding and experience of English, their background knowledge and the inapplicability of course concepts in their contexts. The study also highlights tensions surrounding the provision of UK based courses to students in different parts of the world and acknowledges the difficulties of developing courses which are accessible and relevant to diverse groups.

Learning and teaching languages in technology-mediated environments : why modes and meaning making matter

: There are many methods applied by educators in teaching languages in the world. Some of them believe that traditional classroom method is considered the best, while others prefer to implement new way of teaching, using computers to assist students in learning a language. This new method is known as Computer-Assisted Language Learning (CALL). However, not all students who are good in using computers succeed to do self-study. Such students failed to enjoy Life on the Screen , it is not about computer, it is about people and the relationships into which they enter with machines and, first of all, with themselves through computer-mediation (Debski ,1997, p. 29). To review and consolidate ideas and conditions that can be the obstacles and drawbacks to the CALL application; Debski and Gruba did a project-oriented computer assisted language learning (PrOCALL) at the University of Melbourne in two second semesters (12 weeks each) over the years 1998 –1999, involving many languages (Chinese, German, Indonesian, Japanese, Russian, and English as Second Language (ESL)). The result of their ProCALL project is that CALL is proven to be beneficial to tertiary education at the University of Melbourne, this success takes place both within the group of students who have both advanced and low computer skill. Australia, for example, starts to insert CALL in the curriculum, although it is limited to year 12 students only. It is a good start. Australia’s policy proofs that CALL is beneficial in schools, it means that CALL is not only beneficial for tertiary education at the University of Melbourne, but also in Victoria. This paper will also discuss about crucial matters like integrating this sophisticated technology to suit the curriculum and the importance to attract the interest of big softwares companies to invest money in CALL projects. Key words : CALL, ProCALL, Australia, The University of Melbourne

Este artigo trata do ensino da ILA no contexto da educação básica e pública brasileira por meio de uma prática pedagógica desenvolvida com base na utilização de textos literários, no caso o conto The Happy Prince (1888) de Oscar Wilde. O objetivo deste trabalho é oferecer um relato dessa prática pedagógica, bem como reflexões acerca do benefício da utilização da literatura no ensino da ILA. A justificativa é pautada sobre a descrença dos professores quanto à utilização de textos literários frente ao ensino da ILA. Importantes teóricos na área da linguagem e ensino, como Violetta-Irene (2015), Corchs (2006), Brumfit & Carter (1996), Festino (2011), entre outros, subsidiaram os apontamentos teóricos dessa pesquisa. Os resultados evidenciam que é possível um ensino de língua por meio do texto literário, já que este oferece um ensino mais contextualizado, reflexivo, crítico, motivador, e que desenvolve as aptidões linguísticas dos alunos ao mesmo tempo em que enriquece seu conhecimento social, histórico e cultural.

This work undertakes a study of Hausa Interference on English Language Teaching: The Case of Some Selected Schools in Bauchi State. For many years, there have been expressed concerns about the problems faced by most of Hausa native students in learning English as a second language. The problems of teaching English language are not recent issues but, have existed since the introduction of the subject in the school curriculum. However, Hausa affects the usage of English in terms of phonology, which has to do with sound (e.g. /p, v/ which is replaced by /f/ & /b/ in Hausa) morphology, is the word formation process, grammar, semantics and syntax. Therefore, the focus of this study is to investigate how the use of prepositions in Hausa and how they affect the use of English. A preposition is a word that expresses the relationship of one word with another. But people tend to misuse the use of these prepositions. This is because of the influence of mother tongue interference (Hausa) when speaking English as a second language. This study investigated the errors committed by Hausa native students on the use of prepositions, by use of questionnaire and test in some selected Bauchi State secondary schools, Nigeria.