Solutions boosting students foreign language learning capacity

Solutions Boosting Students’ Foreign Language Learning Capacity Conference on:”Activities and motivation techniques towards enhancing responsibilities and autonomy of students in learni

Solutions Boosting Students’ Foreign Language Learning Capacity

Conference on:”Activities and motivation techniques towards enhancing responsibilities and autonomy of students in learning foreign languages”

Nguyen Hoang Tien, PhD

Executive summary: This article will present some of theories and conditions for language acquisition, explaining how we, as human beings, acquire our first, native language Those selected theories could be useful in helping students, a relatively young generation in the society, to acquire second (foreign) language in quite a natural way

Tóm tắt: Bài viết này sẽ trình bày một số học thuyết và các điều kiện cần thiết đối

v ới việc nắm bắt một ngôn ngữ, đồng thời giải thích quá trình làm sao chúng ta có thể thông th ạo ngôn ngữ mẹ để của mình Các hoc thuyết chọn lọc này có thể rất hữu ích giúp sinh viên, th ế hệ tương đối trẻ trong xã hội ngày nay, thông thạo được ngôn ngữ thứ hai (ngo ại ngữ) một cách tự nhiên

1.Theories of language acquisition

There are many theories laying ground for interpreting and explaining the way children all over the world acquire the first language, usually as their first native one In order to make the presented hereafter theories useful we should unconditionally accept the following important hypothesis:

Innateness hypothesis: “Humans are genetically predisposed to acquire and use

language Language acquisition is an innate capacity and a child ’s brain contains special language-learning mechanisms at birth”

The main proponent of this thesis is Chomsky (Pinker, 1994) In this article we will profoundly analyze six theories that support the idea of natural language learning for young people, the students and that might propose methods and suggested solutions for boosting students’ (foreign) language learning capacity Those mentioned theories have constrained power of interpretation regarding the process of second language acquisition, nonetheless they are helpful and play important role when it comes to the natural or quasi-natural way of learning foreign language, especially the increasing widespread and popularity of the

English being considered as a second native language in most parts in the global stage of the fast integrating and changing world

The first, cognitive theory was developed by Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget

(1896-1980) and it focused on exploring the links between the stages of cognitive development (metal change in person’s mind) and language skills (Wilburg, 2010) The more a person is developed mentally (being at the higher stage of cognitive development, with better cognitive ability) the more he or she is prone and willing to acquire language skills The cognitive ability proportionally depends on the advancement of age, but only if when we are

young This theory interprets mostly the process of understanding and reading skills in

acquiring languages

The second, imitation theory assumes that acquiring a language is a process of

learning to imitate, by listening to the speech around and reproducing what have been heard Human being have an immense power to imitate and to learn by imitation, even

unconsciously, and it concerns not only linguistic sphere This theory stresses on listening

skills in acquiring languages

The third, reinforcement theory assumes that the ability to learn a certain language is

reinforced by praise, reward whenever it needs it The process of learning language, alike all other human activities should be motivated in order to gain a better performance Especially,

students/children should be encouraged in different ways to speak (speaking skills) The role

of the environment is as much vital as a reinforcing driver to push them to speak

The fourth, active construction of a grammar theory assumes that the ability to

develop language rules is simply innate Children are supposed to be capable to identify grammar patterns in the language from very young age This is important for them to enhance

writing skills at the later stage of development while trying to write grammatically correct terms and expressions

The fifth, connectionist theory assumes that children learn language by creating

neural connections in the brain They (the neural connections) are useful for them to remember the meanings of words and their associations, helping to enhance the ability to

understand the text and upgrade the reading skills

The final, sixth, social interaction theory assumes that children acquire language

skills through the process of social interaction, with older children and adults in particular Learning language is undoubtedly the process of social interaction Language environment

is much needed to actively learn a certain language Language should be used as frequently

as possible in order to be easily acquired In order to acquire it in a natural way children need

a natural environment to develop all of the language skills (listening, speaking, reading and

writing) For example, in order to acquire a French language one should be to France, to live and to study in France, or even to have emotional relationships with France and French people

2.Students’ language learning capacity

The six above mentioned theories have laid solid ground for explaining the process (individual or collective) of acquiring each or all of four language skills: listening skill, speaking skill, reading skill and writing skill respectively In this paragraph, we are trying to identify the factors (conditions that favor or disfavor) that might potentially impact the process of language acquisition There are many factors responsible for the process of language acquisition and language enhancement That’s why it is better to classify them into groups Hereafter, we have four groups of factors The first three groups are related with external environment and claim that learning language need strong social interaction to be really effective The last group is related with “internal powers” of the learners (children or students) We will examine those four groups’ factors and their potential impacts on acquiring the four main above mentioned language skills

Construction

Interaction Connection

Impact factors (conditions of language acquisition)

Language capacity (skills)

2.1.European students’ and Asian students’ English learning capacity

Language is related or even interrelated with the cultural environment If we take English as an leading example, the related cultural environment that gives a background for English development is the Western culture with Anglo-Saxon culture as a hardcore These are many countries in the world where English is the official language (USA, UK, Australia, Canada) The second group is the European countries where English is not the official language but people there share the same cultural and living values with the people in the countries of the hard core group So, the first hardcore group is the closest in terms of cultural distance, the second group is a step farther The next group, to my opinion, is all countries

of Latin America region with Spanish as the most popularly spoken and official language (except Brazil where Portuguese is widely spoken there) The Latin culture is close to culture

of the South European nations, especially the Iberian culture (the Spanish and the Portuguese) However, the European culture, due to geographical spread, is also a little bit diversified from the North to the South, from the East to the West In this regard, Asian culture is too diversified within and so it is distanced very far from Anglo-Saxon and European culture

Cultural distance: close/far Language similarity: unity/disunity Social & economic development: high/low Attitude & personality: positive/negative

I

Listening

III

Reading

II

Speaking

IV

Writing

In terms of language’s unity or disunity, many languages of the largest (French, German, Spain, Italian, Polish) and smaller European nations (Czech, Dutch, Slovenian, Finnish, Swedish…) is of Latin origin with Latin alphabet (abc ) as a principle and share partly the same vocabulary or even similar grammatical rules or/and pronunciation For example, in English, French and German we have the same word “information” with slightly different pronunciation, in Polish the counterpart is “informacja” So, it is not so difficult to observe a quite big unity in terms of similarity of the language structure and performance (the way to speak and how to write) among European countries’ languages Asian languages are too diversified, from Chinese and Japanese through South East Asia (Thai, Laos, and Myanmar) to diverse versions of Indian language There are some exceptions that the languages of some countries in the ASEAN region have a Latin alphabet such as Indonesia and Vietnam, but it doesn’t bring any change in terms of the view of Asian languages’ disunity To recapitulate, there is too much disunities in Asian languages which make people from this region hard to acquire English adequately and correctly in terms of four basic listening, speaking, reading and writing skills in comparison to their European counterparts

Social and economic development is also an important group of factors impacting people’s learning language capacity European countries are at higher level of social and economic development and integration than Asian countries Not only that, in this respect, the European economies and societies are equalized thanks to EU (European Union) membership, concretely EU’s social program of balanced development EU countries share the similar standard of infrastructures investment and development, including the soft infrastructures As a result of the process of progressing economic, social and political integration, English is preferred, due to obvious reason, as an official language in European parliament, beside French language in a bid to promote internal diversity In smaller and wealthier Northern European nations the English is obligatory and the English proficiency among children, students and younger generation as a whole is absolutely unrivaled not only across the European old continent but also all over the world The Asian nations are widespread in terms of social and economic development from smallest and richest nations such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan to developing giants such as China, India, Indonesia… with no common, unified standards of development Some Asian countries had adopted English as their official language, of course with different levels of success, from Singapore and Hong Kong through Philippines and Malaysia to Bangladesh and India

Attitude and personality is the only group of internal factors that impact the process

of effective acquiring languages Of course, the factors within this group are subjects of

impact caused by factors belonging to the first three mentioned groups Again, in this case, the advantages are rather on the side of European students than Asian students European students seem to have right attitudes towards not only English learning but also toward other European languages acquisition and they seem to have a much higher motivation and determination to do so While for Asian students, the English is treated as the most important language which is inevitably a vital determinant of their future career development and professional success For most of the European students, beside English, most often, they have to or are willing to learn a second foreign language (in most case but not only limited

to European languages), as an obligatory one, at the schools and at works European students seem to treat foreign languages as instruments to get acquainted, to be familiar with the unknown or less known culture of other countries in order to enhance and enrich their life experience

2.2 Vietnamese students’ English learning capacity

Vietnamese students are ranked highly in the world in many general competitions and classifications concerning mathematical and other natural science’s ability But in the field of foreign languages, especially when it comes to English, Vietnamese students and Vietnamese people in general fall far behind most of the countries in the world and in the region The situation is gradually improving but things are progressed at a very slow pace

A breakthrough must be in place in order to guarantee Vietnamese students a relative edge

in this respect in the world stage Assessing the above mentioned groups of impact factors: cultural distance, language similarity, social and economic development, attitude and personality; Vietnamese students are on the underdog side comparing even to the directly neighboring countries in the region such as Thailand and Indonesia A wide culture gap in terms of perceived values and living philosophy does not encourage ordinary Vietnamese students and people to penetrate Western culture and take an advantage of the innovative flows of ideas Beside the common Latin alphabet as a background, Vietnamese language has nothing in common with English and other European languages Vietnam’s social and economic conditions are at low level, but improving dramatically last time But still, there is

a wide internal gap between locations on favor of the biggest metropolises Far-off areas of the countries are still lagging behind the largest cities in terms of access to education in general and foreign language acquisition in particular The final group of internal impact factors is also in disfavor for Vietnamese people and Vietnamese students as results derived from the influence of the three above mentioned groups of external impact factors have

shown As many researches have pointed out that among the four language skills: skill of listening, skill speaking, skill of reading and skill of writing as a sequential steps towards a language proficiency; ironically and paradoxically Vietnamese students are placed in the world quite highly regarding the reading and writing skills (regarded in general as advanced skills) but very poorly regarding the listening and speaking skills (regarded in general as basic skills) The conclusion of this discussion could only be the one that Vietnamese students have invested a lot of efforts, spent a lot of time to uplift their English proficiency but with poor effect The possible and viable solutions are predicted to be in a strict relation with the language’s acquiring methodology side of the problems which will be a next subject

of discussion

3.Solutions boosting English learning capacity

As the final paragraph of this article, the author would like to contribute some of his proposals and suggestions that hopefully will help to improve Vietnamese students’ English acquiring capacity to be paralleled with students in the region and in other parts of the world

As pointed out above, we have four groups of impact factors that determine conditions of foreign (English) acquiring process The first two of them embrace the cultural and language disunity on which we have no or little impact Our culture is as such is not prone to change overnight The same or even more truthful is the disunity of our Vietnamese in relation to English What else we can do is to try impact on the final two of groups of impact factors that are:

a) General social and economic development

b) Attitude and personality

In relation to the general social and economic development we have been observing

so far an immense progress of our economy and society toward a market economy and information society where education is fundamental for all round development, including promoting foreign language acquisition, with English in particular The more our economy and out society are opened to the world the more we need to be equipped with common language as a means of communication to receive and share our ideas, to trade and make investments with other nations So, economic and social development should be carried out

in a way that go in parallel with English proficiency of all members of the whole society

On the contrary, at the micro level, the level of individual attitude and personality, the awareness of the importance of English and other world major languages should be

raised, concerning all ordinary and extraordinary people regardless their levels of income, occupations, levels of education, places of living The English acquisition will certainly enhance our life and professional opportunity, boosting the chance to make our labor market more open and integrated with the world, while creating international environment for Vietnamese and non-Vietnamese to feel free to use English to communicate, to express their ideas to others, taking example of Hong Kong and Singapore Hereby, the principles of theory of social interaction come up with help, which states that natural English speaking environment is needed to boost the language interaction if we want to improve our skills’ proficiency in this field

Reference:

1.Pinker, S ( 1994) The language Instinct England: Clays Ltd

2.Wilburg, V.(2010).Cognitive learning theory Retrieved from

http://www.slideshare.net/Kholokha/cognitivelearning-theory-5953309