To
fulfill assessment of offline computer
Arranged
by:
LarasSekarWedaringtyas
20140810075
English Education
Department
Language Education
Faculty
UniversitasMuhammadiyah
Yogyakarta
TABLE OF CONTENT
TABLE OF CONTENT
Title page............................................................................................................................... i
Table of content..................................................................................................................... ii
PART I: INTRODUCTION............................................................................................... 1
PART II: DISCUSSION..................................................................................................... 2
2.1 Aptitude........................................................................................................................... 2
2.2 Modern
Language Aptitude Test
(MLAT)...................................................................... 3
2.3 Aptitude and teaching..................................................................................................... 5
2.4 Cognitive style................................................................................................................. 6
PART III: CLOSING........................................................................................................... 7
3.1 Conclusion....................................................................................................................... 7
References............................................................................................................................. 8
PART 1: INTRODUCTION
English is a language
which is spoken and understood by many people in most countries of the world.
It is mainly through the English language that we gain access the various
sources of knowledge. English helps to spread knowledge and progress. We can
say that science and mathematics are very important subject and other language
such as German and Russian but it is English that plays the most important role
in spreading scientific knowledge. The original writings of great scientist,
economist, philosophers, psychologists and others who did not speak and write
the English language have all been translated into English. It means the
English is needed in the most activity of people in the world.
At this time there are still many
people who cannot develop their speech well. Most of them still do not
understand yet how to achieve high level in language learning. Aptitude as an
important role is more necessary to encourage the student’s achievement in
getting problem solving of academic second language learning. The students
learn through formal way in aptitude, it differs with attitude which is for
informal situations. Krashen (1981a) suggest aptitude is important for “formal”
situations such as classroom, and attitude is important for “informal”
real-world. While aptitude tests are needed more or less purpose-designed for
classroom learners, this still leaves open the existence of general knack for
learning languages in street settings(Krashen, 1981).
Horwitz (1987) anticipated that a test aptitude of cognitive level would go
with communicative competence and a test of aptitude with linguistic
competence. She found however, a strong link between the two tests. Aptitude
has almost invariably been applied to students in classrooms. It does not refer
to the knack that some people have for learning in real-life situations, but to
the ability to learn from teaching.(Horwitz, 1987)
English can be a second language for ones to
overcome his or her difficulties when she or he wants to go abroad. As for
example, there is a man from Indonesian travels in French. Then he can use
English as their second language in order to he has no feeling afraid to start
conversation with Frenchman. Their anxiety might be reduced through this way to
speak up. When we adapt in public environment, surely we get many problems in
speaking and writing especially using English as our second language. So we actually
need aptitude to establish our ability in learning English.
DISCUSSION
2.1 Aptitude
Aptitude
usually means the ability to learn the second language in ana academic classroom. The
students learn through formal way in aptitude, it differs with attitude which
is for informal situations.“Aptitude is important for ‘formal’ situations such
as classrooms, and attitude is important for ‘informal’ real-world situations.
While aptitude tests are indeed more or less purpose-designed for classroom
learners, this still leaves open the existence of a general knack for learning
languages in streetsettings”(Krashen, 1981).
Nowadays, some people have not a knack in using English
in rhe most their activity. Those may be not study inside the classroom.
Aptitude appears in student’s ability in an academic classroom. This factor is
an important thing for student in L2 learning especially English. Some immigrants who have been in a countryfor twenty
years are very fluent. Others from the same background and livingin the same
circumstances for the same amount of time speak the languagerather poorly.
Given that their ages, motivations, and so on, are the same, why are there such
differences? As always, the popular view has to be qualified to some extent.
Descriptions of societies where each individual uses several languages daily,
such as central Africa or Pakistan, seldom mention people who cannot copewith
the demands of a multilingual existence, other than those with academicstudy
problems. Differences in L2 learning ability are apparently only felt in
societieswhere L2 learning is treated as a problem rather than accepted as an
everyday fact of life.
So far,
the broad term ‘knack’ for learning languages has been used. The moreusual
term, however, is ‘aptitude’; some people have more aptitude for learning
second languages than others. Aptitude has almost invariably been applied to
students in classrooms. It does not refer to the knack that some people have
for learning in real-life situations, but to the ability to learn from teaching.
In the 1950s and 1960s, considerable effort went into establishing what successful
students had in common.
2.2 Modern Language Aptitude Test (MLAT)
Modern Languages Aptitude Test (MLAT) requires the
student to carry out L2 learning on a small scale. It incorporates four main factors
that predict a student’s success in the classroom (Carroll, 1981). These are:
·
Phonemic
coding ability: how well the
student can use phonetic script to distinguish phonemes in the language.
·
Grammatical
sensitivity: whether the
student can pick out grammatical functions
in the sentence.
·
Inductive
language learning ability: whether the student
can generalize patterns
from one sentence
to another.
·
Rote learning: whether the student can remember vocabulary lists of
foreign
words paired with
translations.(Carroll, 1981)
Such tests are not neutral
about what happens in a classroom, nor about the goals of language teaching.
They assume that learning words by heart is an important part of L2 learning
ability, that the spoken language is crucial, and that grammar consists of
structural patterns. In short, MLAT predicts how well a student will do in a
course that is predominantly audio-lingual in methodology rather than in a
course taught by other methods.
Wesche (1981) divided Canadian
students according to MLAT and other tests into those who were best suited to
an ‘analytical’ approach and those who were best suited to an ‘audio-visual’ approach.
Half she put in the right type of class, half in the wrong (whether this is
acceptable behaviour by a teacher is another question). The students in the right
class ‘achieved superior scores’. It is not just aptitude in general that
counts, but the right kind of aptitude for the particular learning situation.
Predictions about success need to take into account the kind of classroom that
is involved, rather than being biased towards one kind or assuming there is a
single factor of aptitude which applies regardless of situation.(Wesche, 1981)
Peter Skehan (1986, 1998) developed a slightly different
set of factors out ofMLAT, namely:
1.
Phonemic
coding ability. This allows the
learner to process input more readily and thus to get to more complex areas of
processing more easily – supposing that phonemes are in fact relevant to
processing, a possibility that was queried in Chapter 2.
2.
Language
analytic ability. This allows the
learner to work out the ‘rules’ of thelanguage and build up the core processes
for handling language.
3.
Memory. This permits the learner to store and retrieve aspects
of language rapidly.(Skehan, 1989)(Skehan, A Cognitive Approach to Language Learning, 1998)
These three factors reflect progressively deeper processing
of language and hence may change according to the learner’s stage.. It is
unclear,for example, which model of memory might fit this scheme and how
analytic ability relates to parsing. The lack of this ‘knack’ is sometimes
related to other problems that L2 learners have.
There
are three types of learner in Modern Language Aptitude Test (MLAT):
1. Memory-based
learners: these rely on their memory rather than grammatical sensitivity
2. Analytic
learners: these rely on grammatical sensitivity rather than memory
3. Even
learners: these rely on both grammatical sensitivity and memory
Richard Sparks and his
colleagues (1989) have observed students whose general problems with language
have gone unnoticed until they did badly on a foreign language course. They
lacked a linguistic coding ability in their first language aswell as their second,
particularly phonological, and, like dyslexia, apparently unrelated to their
intelligence.(Sparks, Richard;Ganschow, L. and Pohlman, J, 1989). Recent work
reviewed by Peter Robinson (2005) has tended to split aptitude into separate
components, that is, whether people are better at specific aspects of learning rather
than overall learning. A particular sensitivity to language may help with FonF
activities, for instance. (Robinson, 2005)
Second language learning in
formal conditions may depend in particular on superior cognitive processing
ability. Obviously this sees no relationship between second language
acquisition in a classroom and first language acquisition, since none of these
attributes matters to the native child.
2.3 Aptitude
and teaching
Aptitude and
teaching are related to each other. It means that the teacher should have a
knack or better ability to know how the aptitude of student in an academic
second language learning. It is useful for teacher because teacher can overcome
and develop their student’s aptitude. So the skill and ability of students can
increase as well. Besides, they can change low scores to high scores in Modern
Language Aptitude Test (MLAT).
The problem for language teachers
is what to do once the students have been tested for academic language learning
aptitude. There are at least four possibilities:
1.
Select
students who are likely to succeed in the classroom and bar those who are likely to fail. This would,
however, be unthinkable in most settings with open access to education.
2.
Stream
students into different classes for levels of aptitude, say high-flyers, averageand below-average. The Graded
Objectives Movement in England, for instance,set the same overall goals for all
students at each stage, but allowed them differentperiods of time for getting
there (Harding et al., 1981).
3.
Provide different
teaching for different types of aptitude with different teaching methods and final examinations. This might lead to
varied exercises within the class, say, for those with and without phonemic
coding ability, to parallel classes, or to self-directed learning. In most
educational establishments this would be a luxury in terms of staffing and
accommodation, however desirable.
4.
Excuse
students with low aptitude from compulsory foreign language requirements. In some educational systems the students may be required
to pass a foreign language which is unrelated to the rest of their course, as I
had to take French and Latin to order to read English at university. An
extremely low aptitude for L2learning may be grounds for exemption from this
requirement if their other work passes.(Harding, A; Rowell, S)
The overall lesson is to see
students in particular contexts. The student whose performance is dismal in one
class may be gifted in another. Any class teaching is a compromise to suit the greatest
number of students. Only in individualized orself-directed learning perhaps can
this be overcome.
2.4 Cognitive
style
The
term ‘cognitive style’ refers to a technical psychological distinction between typical
ways of thinking. Imagine standing in a room that is slowly leaning to one side
without the people inside it knowing. Horwitz (1987) anticipated that a test of cognitive level would go withcommunicative
competence, and a test of aptitude with linguistic competence. She found,
however, a strong link between the two tests.Some people attempt to
stand upright, others lean so that they are parallel to the walls.(Horwitz, 1987). Those who lean have
a fielddependent (FD) cognitive style; that is, their thinking relates to their
surroundings. Those who stand upright have a field-independent (FI) style; they
think independently of their surroundings. The usual test for cognitive style
is less dramatic, relying on distinguishing shapes in pictures and is thus
called the embeddedfigures test. Those who can pick out shapes despite
confusing backgrounds are field-independent, those who cannot are field-dependent.
My
own informal check is whether a person adjusts pictures that are hanging
crookedly or does not. These are tendencies rather than absolutes; any
individual is somewhere on the continuum between the poles of FI and FD. A
difference in cognitive style might well make a difference to success in L2
learning – another aspect of aptitude. Most researchers have found that a tendency
towards FI (field independence) helps the student with conventional classroom learning(Alptekin, C; Atakan, S, 1990). This seems obvious
in a sense, in that formal education in the West successively pushes students
up the rungs of a ladder of abstraction, away from the concrete (Donaldson, 1978). Hansen and
Stansfield (1981) used three tests with L2 learners: those that measured the
ability to communicate, those that measured linguistic knowledge, and those
that measured both together. FI learners had slight advantages for communicative
tasks, greater advantages for academic tasks, and the greatest advantages for the
combined tasks (Hansen, J;
Stansfield, C)
However, (Bacon, 1987)
later found no differences between FD and FI students in terms of how much they
spoke and how well they spoke. This illustrates again the interaction between
student and teaching method; not all methods suit all students. Cognitive style
varies to some extent from one culture to another. There are variations between
learners on different islands in the Pacific and between differentsexes, though
field independence tends to go with good scores on a cloze test (Hansen, 1984). Indeed, there are
massive cross-cultural differences in these measures.
PART III: CLOSING
3.1
Conclusion
Most aptitude tests
predict success in L2 academic classrooms. Aptitude breaks down into different
factors, such as phonemic coding, ability and memory. We learn English as
second language effectively in formal situation, such as classroom. Then the
way to thinking to understand what we have read and what we have heard also as
an important role in second language learning. People’s personalities vary
between those who relate to object outside themselves (extroverts) and those
who relate to the contents of their own minds (introverts). Students without
aptitude can be excluded (if allowable on other grounds). Besides, different
teaching can be provided for learners with different types of aptitude, even
streaming into fast and slow streams. So, we have to increase our aptitude in learning English until getting the highest
score. We can expand our knowledge about learning this kind of second language
by getting many input from coursebook or anything in an academic classroom.
References
Alptekin, C; Atakan, S. (1990).
Field-dependence-independence and hemispherity as variables in L2
achievements. In Second Language Research (pp. 139-49)
Bacon, S. (1987). Differentiated
cognitive style and oral performance. In B. VanPatten, & T. L. Dvorak
(Eds.), Foreign Language Learning (M. A. Rowley, Trans.). Newburry
House.
Carroll, J. B. (1981).
Twenty-five years of research on foreifn language aptitude. In K. Diller
(Ed.), Individual Differences and Universals in Language Learning (R.
MA, Trans., pp. 127-43). Newburry House.
Donaldson, M. (1978). Children's
Minds. London: Fontana.
Grriffiths, Roger; Sheen, R.
(1992). Disembedded figures in the landscape: a reappraisal of L2 research on
field dependence/independence. In Applied Linguistic (pp. 133-47).
Hansen, J; Stansfield, C. (n.d.).
The realtionship of field dependent-independent cognitive styles to foreign
language achievement. In Language Learning (pp. 349-67).
Hansen, L. (1984). Field
dependence-independence and language testing: evidence from six Pacific
island cultures. In TESOL Quarterly (pp. 311-42).
Harding, A; Rowell, S. (n.d.).
Graded Objectives in Modern Languages. London: CILTR (Centre for information
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Horwitz, E. (1987). Surveying
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Krashen, S. (1981). Second
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Nisbett, R. E. (2003). The
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Robinson, P. (2005). Aptitude and
second language acquisition. In Annual Review of Applied Linguistic
(pp. 46-73).
Skehan, P. (1989). Individual
Differences in Second-Lannguage Learnin. London: Edwar Arnold.
Skehan, P. (1998). A Cognitive
Approach to Language Learning. Oxford: University Press.
Sparks, Richard;Ganschow, L. and
Pohlman, J. (1989). Linguistic coding deficits in foreign language learners.
In Annals of Dyslexia (pp. 179-95).
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