Causes of Children Laziness in Studying English

Study English is fun for some people, but it is boring for the other. Study English is compulsory in many countries that have no English in their native language and it becomes a government project. Nowadays, study English start from earlier level of school. It means that children are required to learn English as soon as possible starting from elementary school even from kindergarten. But, studying English not always easy and fun for them, some of children are feel that English are boring lesson and they are also lazy to study that. The children laziness in study English is caused by the following factors: differences in writing and pronunciation, misconception in teaching, and children misconception about English.

The first cause which is immediate is the differences writing and pronunciation in English. As we know, Bahasa Indonesia has the phonetic writing system wherein the writings clearly reflect consistently the sounds, different to English that words in English are written differently as opposed to the way they pronounced. Children learning English would find English writing system confusing considering the fact that there is no direct one-to-one correspondence between the pronunciation of a word and its spelling. For example, the word “apple” is pronounced 'æpl, it is different to Indonesian pronounce. So the children could be confused and become lazy to study English because of the problem in writing and pronunciation.

Second cause is the teacher misconception in teaching. Children in elementary school who is about 6-11 years old are have limited ability in absorbing the material in English lesson. They need a right method to optimize their ability, to absorb maximum material of the lesson in class. But in reality, teachers have been wrongly assumed the children as being “a miniature of adults”, in which the way they learn English exactly the same as the way adults do. They tend to approach the teaching-learning process in the same way as they would teach adults. In class such like that the children tend to be bored because of uninteresting lesson, and also lazy to attend to next English class.

The third cause is the children misconception about the English. As we know in Indonesia, as an implication of positioning English as a foreign language, English is just learned in classrooms, not widely used as a means of communication by people across the regions. This lack of exposure makes children difficult to see English learning as being functional and useful for them. For example, children who learn English in their school but never use it in their everyday life will think that English is not useful and only a lesson in class. So, they have no motivation to study English in class and think that English is useless.

As you can see the causes of children laziness in study English are differences in writing and pronunciation, misconception in teaching, and children misconception about English. If children feel lazy to study English, it could hamper their own skill in English and also the government project.

 Biyantiko Galih