Learners Attitude REVIEW OF LITERATURE

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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, “Problems with teenagers as resulting, in part, from ‘...the teacher’s failure to build bridges between what they want and have to teach and their students’ worlds of thought and experience. Students must be encouraged to respond to texts and situations with their own thoughts and experience, rather than just by answering questions and doing abstract learning activities.” 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. Labov 1972 said, “Such positions, perceptions, actions have been defined as language attitudes.” It means that what they think refers to their attitudes in learning. 9

2.3 Factors Influencing Language Attitude