Demotivation Factors in Using English as Daily Communication in EFL School: Case Study of EFL Learners

This study aimed to describe the causes of students' demotivation in using English for daily communication and find its solutions. The present researcher used the descriptive qualitative method. It was conducted on EFL Learners. There were 15 students to be participants in this study. The data were collected by observing, interviewing, and giving questionnaires to participants about English usage in their Islamic boarding schools. The participants' answers and the video of their daily communication were analyzed by interpreting the handy camera and checking the result of interpretation to the result of questioner and interview. Second, the present researcher compared the result of the handy camera, questioner, and interview to the existing theory to determine the causes of students' demotivation in using English as daily communication and its solution. The result analysis showed that the cause of students' demotivation is their lack of ability to use English, especially in mastering vocabulary and its pronunciation. Other factors were learning contents and materials, teachers, and failure experience. In addition, they prefer to use Arabic because Arabic has been rooted as daily communication in that Islamic boarding school. In comparison, the solution for that problem is that the teachers should pay considerable attention to the students' English ability, especially mastering and pronouncing vocabulary. Also, the teachers are suggested to pay more attention to teaching methods and their behavior to increase students' motivation and interest in second language learning. In addition, the teachers should explicitly make a regulation to divide a period for the student to speak English and Arabic.

ESP: A NEEDS ANALYSIS OF MARITIME ENGLISH AT POLIMARIN

As an archipelagic country, Indonesia has long been known for its marine potential. This potential comes with new challenges, one of them being language problem. In this regard, English shows its prominent role as the international language to bridge communications. This research provided a needs analysis to identify the “necessities”, “lacks”, and “wants” in relation with English usage in maritime sector, specifically for those conducting internship at international ships. A qualitative approach and a descriptive design were applied in this research. The respondents consisted of 19 students of Polimarin who had completed internship at international ships, selected through total sampling technique. Their responses were collected by a questionnaire, complemented by interview. The collected data were then processed through a model consisting of four stages; data collection, data reduction, data display, and conclusion drawing. The “necessities” analysis revealed speaking and vocabulary as the most needed language skill and component. The “lacks” analysis showed that the syllabus used pays attention to English language skills and components evenly and that some respondents were underprepared before doing internship. The “wants” analysis came up with the simple present tense and the simple past tense as the most wanted tenses to master, pronouns as the most wanted grammatical feature and passive voice as the least wanted, all language functions evenly wanted, and group discussion as the most preferred learning activity. In conclusion, syllabus revision is due to improve the quality of English learning by accommodating the students’ “necessities”, “lacks”, and “wants”. Key words:ESP, Maritime English, Needs Analysis

The Emergence of an “Intersecting Circle” in Kachru’s Three Concentric Circles of World Englishes: A Case of Ethno-linguistic Neutrality in Central Nigeria

There is evidence that contemporary Nigeria is drifting towards a society of monolingual English users a component of which could be defined as lacking in ethno-linguistic identity. This trend is found among a generation of young Nigerian urban dwellers (between the age bracket of (12 and 25) who can neither communicate in their parents’ native language(s) nor indeed in any other Nigerian indigenous language; their only medium of communication is English. Although based on their childhood exposure to the English language and their relative competence in it, English can be described as their ‘‘mother tongue’’ but the fact that they are not native speakers given the socio-geographical circumstances of their birth excludes them from Kachru’s (1988) Inner Circle classification of native speakers. Consequently, these Nigerians are left without a clearly defined ethno-linguistic affiliation. This paper interrogates this emerging sociolinguistic phenomenon in especially Central Nigeria, with the aim of stimulating scholarly consciousness on the ethno-linguistic identity of this category of Nigerians, and its implications for English usage among them. The submission of the paper is that another circle, “the intersecting circle”, be created for them since they bestride both the inner circle in having English as their “mother tongue” and yet they are not native speakers of the language

Revisiting Effects of Native Speakerism on Thai Teachers and Students in the Age of English as a Lingua Franca

Currently, the role of English language has changed from being a language used among native English speakers (NESs) to being a language spoken by people of various backgrounds or known as English as a lingua franca (ELF). This phenomenon has affected different aspects of global English usage and users across the world. However, in Thailand, this issue does not seem to be taken into account with regard to English language teaching (ELT) and learning practices as different ELT stakeholders continue to conform to traditional teaching methods related to NESs. This action is reflected in an English language ideology called ‘native speakerism’ which has long been entrenched in Thai society. It has repeatedly caused different problems for both Thai teachers and students of English language until the present day. This review article aims to demonstrate the impacts of the native speakerism ideology on Thai teachers and students of English language in the period of English as a global lingua franca. The article begins with an explanation of how the changes of role and status of English challenge traditional perspectives of English language and how the ELT industry around the world, including in Thailand, should adapt to such changes. Then, the article gives brief conceptualizations of native speakerism and its effects on English teachers and students. Finally, it moves on to discuss the native speakerism ideology in Thailand and reports different negative effects of native speakerism on Thai teachers and students of English language.

From General Language Understanding to Noisy Text Comprehension

Obtaining meaning-rich representations of social media inputs, such as Tweets (unstructured and noisy text), from general-purpose pre-trained language models has become challenging, as these inputs typically deviate from mainstream English usage. The proposed research establishes effective methods for improving the comprehension of noisy texts. For this, we propose a new generic methodology to derive a diverse set of sentence vectors combining and extracting various linguistic characteristics from latent representations of multi-layer, pre-trained language models. Further, we clearly establish how BERT, a state-of-the-art pre-trained language model, comprehends the linguistic attributes of Tweets to identify appropriate sentence representations. Five new probing tasks are developed for Tweets, which can serve as benchmark probing tasks to study noisy text comprehension. Experiments are carried out for classification accuracy by deriving the sentence vectors from GloVe-based pre-trained models and Sentence-BERT, and by using different hidden layers from the BERT model. We show that the initial and middle layers of BERT have better capability for capturing the key linguistic characteristics of noisy texts than its latter layers. With complex predictive models, we further show that the sentence vector length has lesser importance to capture linguistic information, and the proposed sentence vectors for noisy texts perform better than the existing state-of-the-art sentence vectors.

Efficient English Usage While Drafting Research Paper

Abba, K. A. (2018) et al proposes the challenge for instructors is to ascertain whether students’ metaknowledge about effective writing is accurate and support students as they transfer effective writing metaknowledge to their written work, while developing their use of writing to reflect upon and assimilate their learning.Odena, O., & Burgess, H (2017) given the qualitative approach of this investigation, the results and discussion are presented combined in one section.

ATTITUDINAL PSEUDO-CLAUSES IN DISCOURSE

This paper addresses the challenges of downtoning the speaker’s probability in discourse and revealing its means of expression. A study of objective statements in various discourse registers using the linguistic category of modality has potency of investigating the correlation of hedging and the type of modality which is considered to be an aspect of interpersonal metafunction in language competence (Aumuller, 2014). The term "modality" shares a range of concepts within the fields ofphilosophy, morphology, syntax, semantics, and discourse-analysis. Studies on modality as an interpersonal metafunction in Systemic Functional Linguistics have in the literature, mainly focused on variants of genres and/or discourse namely; conservative, legal, media, literary, academic, political and medical discourse as well as the contemporary English usage (Jespersen, 1924). The present paper continues the author’s] series on hedging in discourse (Mykhaylenko, 2017). The discourse strategy of hedging/downtoning seems to play a paramount role in discourse: the speaker gives the hearer a possibility to objectively interpret his/her intentional meaning, on the other hand, the hearer expects a definite deontic constituent on the part of the speaker. Based on quantitative and qualitative methods, the article argues that the use of modal expressions can be better explained as reflecting the strategies of hedging used by writers for dealing with the social conditions. Within critical discourse analysis, modality is understood as encompassing much more than simply the occurrence of overt modal auxiliaries such as may, might, can, could, will, would, shall, should, must, and ought (Fowler, 1985). Rather, modality concerns the speaker's attitude toward and/or confidence in the proposition being presented.

Understanding the Dynamics of English in the Linguistic Landscapes of Guangzhou

Linguistic landscape is a study field covering all linguistic objects in public spaces. It provides an important perspective for investigating the dynamics of social life and language change in given territories. Guangzhou, a significant commercial center in southern China, is renowned for its globalized development. With the growth of globalization, the increasing intrusion of English and the emerging English varieties have occurred in the urban linguistic landscapes of Guangzhou City. Therefore, this descriptive qualitative study collected English usage in the public sphere by taking pictures of private signs in two commercial centers. Monolingual and bilingual public signage displayed in public spaces shows that English has been an important foreign language widely used in Guangzhou's cityscape. Meanwhile, the use of English in Guangzhou is somewhat affected by local languages, a phenomenon called glocalization. The misuse of English, code-mixing between Chinese and English, and emerging English varieties are the product of glocalization. This study can shed light on the present linguistic situation of English in Guangzhou. Additionally, it provides evidence for the development process of glocalized English and translanguaging practice in southern Chinese communities.