Monday 20 December 2010

Motivation in Learning English

Learning something will be boring if there is no motivation that walks with it. The reason is that the motivation which comes from outside either inside the students will bring positive effect for the result of the study. As Gardner (1985) explained about what the motivation is:
The motivation consists of the main factor encourage students on English learning. Motivation for language learning can not only bring the goal orientation but the combination of effort, desire to achieve the goal of learning the language and favorable attitude in learning language.
Based on Gardner’s explanation about what the motivation is, we can know how important it is. In this case, according to the theory of Harmer (1983) there are some types of motivation which are categorized into two major types; extrinsic and intrinsic motivation that can be used in learning English.
As we all know, one of the motivation types based on the theory of Harmer is extrinsic motivation. This type of motivation uses the factors outside the classroom to influence the students. Like what Admin said in his Article titled “Motivation in Learning English as Foreign Language” on Sunday, 15 November 2009, that the extrinsic motivation is mostly related to doing something to get rewards from the outside such as getting good job, passing exams, or getting respect from parents. In this type of motivation, students learn and get something from the outside of the activity. It commonly happens in childhood period in Indonesia that the parents promise their children to give a gift if they could get good results or good ranks in the classroom. The children are motivated to get good results because they will get something they like. For instance, the students of Malang State University have to get score at least B for Paragraph Writing course to take Essay Writing course. In the other words, we can say that extrinsic motivation gives big impact in learning English.
Let us go to the following type of motivation called intrinsic motivation. This type of motivation pays attention to the factor inside the classroom. The reason is that what happens at class will be very important to develop students’ motivation. Based on the theory of Dornyei (1994), the language learners will get reward internally. Besides that, based on the theory of William and Burden (1997) the students will have great enthusiasm in learning English by themselves because they will get the satisfaction of him/herself such as interest and enjoyment. The pleasure that they get obtain the targets of learning English. For instance, the students get good marks in the English written test. After getting good scores, they will be motivated to get the much better scores for the next tests. On the other side, it will be different if the students are not interested in English, because their willingness to join a class influences their motivation to study. In this term, we can say that this motivation includes that situation around the student at class such as how fun the teacher make up the situation in the class will influence whether the students enjoy the lesson or not.
Intrinsic and extrinsic motivations are the types of motivation that cannot be separated because both of them influence students to learn English. Besides that, different students will have different levels of motivation; it may be low level of intrinsic motivation, and extrinsic motivation as higher level of motivation. For example, children need more extrinsic motivation than intrinsic motivation to encourage learning English. Then, William and Burden (1997) said that intrinsic and extrinsic motivations support each other. In short, we can say that motivation is needed to learn whatever the subject matter is. Moreover, we have two types of motivation that can be used to learn English, the using of which are linked together. In creating conducive situation in learning process, we need to combine two types of motivation. Let us motivate our students in order to support them in learning English.

Written by
Risky Ayu
Trisna A.

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