Constructivism The Theory of Language Learning

one culture child learn to account by help of computer, another perhaps learn to count by using fingers or using breads. 46 Santrock further explained that based on Vygotsky’s view, “knowledge is distributed among people and environment, which include objects, artifacts, tools, books, and the communities in which people live. This suggests that knowing can best be advanced through interaction with others in cooperative activities. 47 According to Santrock, Both Piaget and Vygotsky emphasized on children actively construct knowledge and understanding rather than being passive receptacle. But Vygotsky is social constructivist approach which emphasizes the social context of learning and that knowledge is mutually build and constructed. 48 It can be said that for Vygotsky knowledge is constructed through interaction with others. He introduced the concept of the zone of proximal development ZPD. It is the set of tasks that children can master by other’s help. The zone of proximal development ZPD is the term for the range of tasks that are too difficult for children to master alone but can be learned with guidance and assistance from adults or more skilled children. Thus, the lower limit of ZPD is a level of a problem solving reached by the child working independently. The upper limit is the level of additional responsibility the child can accept with the assistence of an able instructor. 49 Beside ZPD, Vygotsky also introduced scaffolding. It is a technique of changing the level of support. It means the technique of how teacher or instructor adjusts to the learner needs and abilities. When the task is new, the instructor adjusts the amount of guidance to fit student’s current performance level, as the students performance increase, the guidance is decrease. The important of scaffolding in ZPD is based on Vygotsky’s view as children having rich but unsystematic, disorganized, and spontaneous concepts. Thus, children’s needs other who skilled in order the children’s concepts become more systematic, logical, and rational. 50 46 Ibid, p. 51. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid., p. 54. 49 Ibid., p. 51. 50 Ibid., p. 52. In relation to the language and thought, Vygotsky believed that young children use language to plan, guide, and monitor their behavior in a self- regulatory fashion beside for social communication. Self-regulation refers to inner speech or private speech which is important tools of thought during the early childhood years. For Vygotsky language and thought initially develop independently for each other and then merge. He said that language even in the earliest forms is socially based. He believed that children who use private speech have well socially competent because private speech represents an early transition to become social communicative. According to him, when children talk to themselves, they are using language to govern their behavior and guide themselves. 51 In addition, Bartlett and Burton stated that in communication, the development is not just forming the language to formulate the sentence since the process of combining the words to shape the sentences also shaping the thought itself. Thus, Vygotsky’s view emphasized the importance of talk as a learning tool. 52 According to Santrock , “Vygotsky’s view about of the importance of sociocultural influences on children’s development fits with the current belief that it is important to evaluate the contextual factors in learning”. 53 Santrock compared Piaget and Vygotsky point of view, such as Vygotsky emphasizes on the importance of inner speech in development, but for Piaget it is immature. For Piaget children construct knowledge by transforming, organizing, and reorganizing previous knowledge. For Vygotsky, children construct knowledge through social interaction with others. The implication of Piaget theory provides support for teaching strategies that encourage children to explore their world and discover knowledge. The main implication for Vygotsky’s theory for teaching is that we should establish many opportunities for students to learn with the teacher and more skilled peers. In both Piaget and Vygotsky theories, teacher serves as facilitators and guides rather than directors and models of learning. 54 51 Ibid., pp. 52-53. 52 Bartlett, op. cit., p. 125. 53 Santrock, op. cit., p. 54. 54 Ibid., pp. 54-55. According to Kozulin as quoted by Bartlett and Burton, that Piaget and Vygotsky theories, explaining their common dominators as a child centered approach, an emphasized on action in the formation of thought, and a systematic understanding of psychological functioning and their biggest different as their understanding of psychological activity Konzulin, 1998:34. Bartlett and Burton further explained for Vygotsky, psychological activity has social-cultural characteristics from the very beginning of development. Theoretical concepts are generative from a range of different stimuli, implying a problem solving approach for the learner and facilitator role for the teacher. Whereas Piaget 1959 considered language was a tool of thought in child’s developing mind, for Vygotsky, language was generated from the need to communicate and was central to the development of thinking. Vygotsky emphasized the functional value of egocentric speech to verbal reasoning and self-regulation, and the importance of socio-cultural factors in its development. In inner speech the sense attached by the individual predominates over meaning but speech forms originating in external dialogues have to be internalized and internal thoughts translated into a form of speech comprehensible for others. Vygotsky likened this to there being two coauthors, where one accommodates their thoughts to the pre-existent system of meanings and the other immediately turns them into idiosyncratic senses, in simultaneous outbound and inbound conversations. 55 Jerome Bruner also had contributed to educational psychology with emphasized on structure invention within communicative learning models. The same view with Vygotsky that learning as an active social process. According to him learning involves the active constructing of knowledge through experiences with environment. The learner selects and transforms information, constructs hypotheses and makes decisions, relying on an internal and developing cognitive structure to do so. In other word learners construct new ideas or concepts based upon their existing knowledge. Social contact with others, the teacher, in many formal learning contexts is a key element of the process of learning. 55 Bartlett, loc. cit. ...learning is an active, social process in which learners construct new ideas or concepts based upon their current and pre-existing knowledge. The learners select and transform information, construct hypotheses and make decisions with reference to and reliance upon an internal cognitive structure. This cognitive structure which he refers to is the network of schemas which provide meaning and structure to experience and allow the individual to build on what is already known in order to go further. 56 Social interactionists viewed language as a means of communicative behavior that develops through interaction with other human beings. Bruner 1985 offered the term LASS Language Acquisition Socialization System as an alternative to chomsky’s LAD. According to them, children acquire the language in part through the mediation and help of others, rather than purely through their own mental activity in processing adult language. Social interactionists point that the way adult talking to young children affects the different kind of input on children’s developing language. Thus children acquired language through social interaction which difference input results difference languages. 57 Based on the explanation above, the writer looked that constructivism emphasized on the students actively construct their knowledge. Piaget, one of the constructivism theorists believed that children have schema to process any information and construct the knowledge through assimilation and accommodation. He suggested learning by doing and learning naturally based on their readiness. Other theorists such as Vygotsky believed that students constructed their knowledge trough social interaction. Learning will be best by help of others. He introduced ZPD and scaffolding as the technique to help students in maximizing their potentials. Regarding of the difference views of language learning above, the writer concludes that learning is a fundamental process of life engages much of individuals’ activities and affects human behavior which innate and environment are involved. Skills, knowledge, attitudes, personalities, etc. are developed and can be over changing through learning process. All human activities and achievements represent the result of learning. 56 Pritchard, op. cit., p. 15. 57 Gleason, op. cit., p. 386.

C. Achievement

1. The Meaning of Achievement

Algarabel and Dasi on their article mentioned some definition of achievement based on different perspective. According to them, basically achievement is the competence a person has in an area of content; it also refers to acquisition, and learning knowledge representation. Further they defined achievement from the cognitive point of view, refers to the different stage of knowledge acquisition. The knowledge refers to highly structured set mental models built after long sessions of practice. They also quoted from Niemi, 1999 that educationally, achievement may be defined as the mastering of major concepts and principles, important pacts and propositions, skills, strategic knowledge and integration knowledge. 58 From the explanation above, it can be concluded that in general, achievement means all the things that people obtain or done successfully from his or her effort. Academically, achievement is the result students obtain after following a teaching learning process in certain period of times. It is important thing to measure how far understanding and skill students have and to know whether the goals have been reached successfully or no. Students’ achievement reflects their understanding as a result of learning. The students of English Department are prepared to be professional English teachers that they are required to understand English and how to teach it. However, different student has different ability and language level. Some students are better in learning language than others. Some of them are progress to the language materials, but some others are not or perhaps slow. That why there are achievement gaps among those students. Students of the same age are not necessary at the same stage of readiness to learn. Some students are able to understand the materials faster than others. Some of them need more exercise than others, and so on. The differences of students’ 58 Salvador Algarabel and Carmen Dasi, The Definition of Achievement and the Construction of Tests for Measurement: A Review of the Main Trends, Psicologica, 22, 2001 pp. 44-46. ability are effect of some factors . As found on the book More Than a Native Speaker students are individuals who differ in significant ways. First students differ in their language knowledge and skills, second student may differ in learning styles and strengths; finally students differ in their level of motivation, their attitudes toward study in general, and their feelings toward English study in particular. 59 Other factor such as previous learning experiences also influences students’ achievement. As a research found on the book What Works in schools shows that background knowledge has strong relationship to students’ achievement: The strong correlation between crystallized intelligence and academic achievement helps to explain the strong relationship between background knowledge or “prior knowledge” in some studies and achievement. Filip Dochy, Mien Segers, and Michele Buehl 1999 conducted one of the most extensive investigations of the relationship between background knowledge and academic achievement. In their analysis of 183 studies, they found 91.5 percent of the studies demonstrated positive effect of background knowledge on learning... ...Enhancing a students’ background knowledge is akin to enhancing his crystallized intellegence, which is one of the strongest determiner of academic achievement. 60 Even though it is not the only factor in determining students’ achievement, but student who had learned much about English will be easy to learned English than student who learned little about English. The English knowledge background will influence their learning process and automatically will influence their achievement. In accordance with the statement above, educators such as Ausubel believed that “learning must be meaningful and permanent. For material to be meaningful, it must be clearly relatable to existing knowledge that the learner already possesses. Furthermore, this existing knowledge base must be organized in such a way that the new information is easily assimilated or attached to the learner 59 Garshich, op. cit., p. 4 60 Robert J. Marzano, What Works in Schools: Translating Research into Action, Danvers: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development ASCD, 2003, pp. 134-136. cognitive structure”. 61 Hadley concluded that “when the input provided to language learners is organized and easily relatable to what they already known, the burden of comprehension and learning is eased considerably ”. 62 From the statement above, the writer saw that the background knowledge is no less important in learning process. Student who has background knowledge about the material he is going to learn will be easy to understand about the lesson and must be ready to learn further about the lesson. In other hand, student who has lack background knowledge will find difficulties to understand, and they unready to learn higher level. The difference of background knowledge is not only because of student’s ability itself, but also it is influences by the external factors such as school where they had studied. Some educator experts agree that a circumstance such as school circumstance influences learning process. As stated on the book Teacher Education in Language Teaching, …learning to teach is a complex process, a process that has been called “mysterious and sometimes unpredictable” Bullough Baughman, 1993, p. 93. This is because the learning does not only take place during the first years alone; other influences have an impact on how the first year teachers are socialize into the profession and many of these factors started long before the preservice teacher entered the teacher education programme, such as the influence o f their previous schooling… 63 All factors may influence to a greater or lesser degree of individ ual’s ability to achieve successfully on any learning level includes students’ educational background. It has an effect to student learning process, and it influenced their achievement 61 Alice Omaggio Hadley, Teaching Language in Context ,Third Edition, Boston: Heinle, Cengage Learning, 2001, p. 144. 62 Ibid., p. 161. 63 Poedjosoedarmo ed., op.cit., p. 2.

2. The Students’ Educational Background Influence Their

Achievement