Motivation: The Key Factor to Second Language Acquisition

 

 

Bambang Marsono

 

 

In Indonesia learners of foreign language often demand high qualification of teachers who can speak like native speakers. They often differentiate the pronunciation and intonation spoken by their teachers with presenters of BBC radio, VOA or ABC as well as films. The order recommended by audio-linguists for the learning of foreign language skills is sometimes justified by the argument that it is the order in which the child learns his native language. The situation of the child learning his native language and that of a high school students learning a foreign language are, however, quite dissimilar.

 

There ere two approaches to foreign-language learning about how the native language is learned in the first place. The first is the behaviourist theory of stimulus-response learning, particularly as developed in his operand conditioning model of Skinner (1957) which considers all learning to be the establishment of habits as the result of reinforcement or reward. According to his theory the infant begins to make sound by mumbling and with repeated reinforcement a habits is established. The reinforcement is made by continuing to imitate sounds around him with more combinations.

 

This theory has been rejected by a number of theorists, notably Chomsky (1966) and Lennberg (1964). Chomsky (1966) says that there are certain aspects of native-language learning which make impossible to accept the habit-formation-by-reinforcement theory.Meanwhile Lennberg draws attention to the fact that all children with certain physical disabilities learn a language to similar degree of mastery of basic structures, despite great differences in cultural environment and amount of parental attention. He believes that all children learn the language of their community at about the same age, irrespective of the degree of structural complexity, and all children pass though the same stages of development in acquiring it. He points out that child language learning does appear to be a process of pure imitation but seems to involve active selection. Combining of words in meaningful sequence seems to develop at stage when the infant realized that sounds and object or situations have some relationship. He considers that “speech is a species specific ability which peculiar to man. Both Chomsky and Lennberg maintain that man has innate propensities for acquiring a language, and for acquiring a language with complicated grammar. Lennberg draws attention to the fact that children and endings to nonsense words in away which they have never heard around them, and as children master various aspects of syntax they produce utterances they have certainly never heard before.

 

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Marsono, B. (2005, March). Motivation: The key factor to second language acquisition. Paper presented at LIA International Conference, Jakarta.

 

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