Issues in Second Language Learning Essay

People at present confuse love in a global village mass correspond with for each one other from around the man regularly through the Internet, modern transportation enables a person to travel from Africa to Europe in a matter of hours, products be bought and sold with increasing slake from all everyplace the word, services atomic number 18 provided anytime, anyplace in the world, and real time coverage of study international crudes events is expressn for granted. Thus, it seems that eruditeness back up phrase is a requirement in todays highly globalised environment.However, back up row go surfaceing (SLL) is a long and difficult execute, and is a double t ingest for anyone. After all, evolvement a main(a)ly phrase is a solve that adopts much of a young childs day, and ESL students in universities must(prenominal) work even harder in order to learn and acquire a molybdenum row. The larn process privy be emotionally difficult for university students to take the step into a refreshed delivery and culture. mature learners, perhaps even more than children and adolescents, can be shy and embarrassed around others when trying out beginning voice communication skills.Learners acquire a cooperate words in many different ways. thither argon many similarities in how a second linguistic communication is learned, but there are in like manner differences based on individual student characteristics and address background. For event, outgoing students may begin to imitate phrases and expressions really early and try them without worrying about fall in mistakes. Conversely, other learners may not call their new run-in for some time. Usually, at the outset, learners may go cultural shock as they are exposed to a new diction, therefore, a whole new culture.This common go out, expositd as uprooting, is the abrupt diversity from a familiar cultural milieu to an unknown region one. In the beginning of every SLL program, many learners feature a so-called honeymoon period, during which students are please with the alien linguistic process without a neat sagacity of them. As time progresses, it is common for students to become or so hostile toward schooling new talking to. Second run-in learners often suffer greater rates of anguish, depression, and neurotic complaints.Furthermore, given the stresses SLL students face, a student struggling with speech issues may lack the physical, emotional, or financial resources to bleed to basic needs. After this stage, the learners are transitioned to so-called modify adjustment. In the last stage, the stage of bilingualism, the learners incorporate the norms of the language and culture that they stick out acquired and learned into their own life-style and their own value set. Cultural Issues Many students of SLL are struggling with accomplishment a new language.These struggles stanch above all from linguistic and cultural differences. Often, they exp erience the language shock phenomenon wherein learners confront anxiety when first entering a community in which they do not articulate, or are not undecomposed in, the dominant language. It is a common take placerence in teachs, where, despite their desire to speak the dominant language fluently, students must struggle for months or several eld before they catch everything that is being said. This feeling of anxiety is aggravated by the ignorance of others.Consider the following example reported by Li (1999) When a Chinese mother went to pick up her daughter from school, she began to ask her some questions about her day, but in Chinese. The girlfriend became upset with her mother and later explained that her classmates would laugh at her in those situations. Moreover, whenever the instructor in her school inquired as to who had made a particular mistake, one of her classmates would pip to her and say, The Chinese girl, when it was usually not so. In admittance to the lang uage shock that occurs on entering a new environment, many students experience another genial of struggle.Beca drill of the types of ordeal described above, second language learners assume negative associations with speaking their native language. Yet when they go home, that is the language in which their parents communicate. Moreover, their parents insist that they alike exercise the economic consumption of the native language as a connection to their homeland and heritage. But many second language learners, especially those who immigrated to face-speaking countries, associate growth and fluency in English with becoming American and so they want to give up their native language.These learners are caught in a battle tour at home, they are expected by their parents to speak their first language at school they are pressured to speak the second language. another(prenominal) main(prenominal) dispute that many second language learners face is intellect the curriculum and pedag ogy used in the classroom. western sandwich classrooms are largely Euro-centric and America-centric. Carger (1996) recounts the story of a Mexican American boy, who was a student in a predominantly Latino Catholic middle school in Chicago. tour the teachers and administrators never openly utter that they believed their students were inferior, they treated them as if they were. The boys homeroom teacher often used a de consequence nuance when she spoke to her students. She did not allow them to ask questions, nor did she move on them to think on their own. Most of her assignments included case to which her students could not relate. For example, one task that the students were asked to complete was to describe the experience of going to the dentist. However, many of the students had never been to a dentist.Pedagogical Issues A major problem confronting learners is the distress of the teachers to appreciate different discipline strategies and styles among SLL students. Increased absorb in student-centred learning approaches amongst language educators has led to many studies investigation individual language learning strategies and their family traffichip to acquisition in learning second/ impertinent languages. Studies have indicated support for appropriately applied language learning strategies on second/foreign language achievement (e. g. , Griffiths and Parr, 2001).The consensus of the query is that although all learners, regardless(prenominal) of achiever with language learning, consciously or unconsciously practice a variety of learning strategies successful language learners guide in more purposeful language learning and use more language-learning strategies than do less successful ones. Overall, findings indicate that both the frequency with which learners pass language learning strategies and the strategies they choose are distinguishing characteristics among more successful and less successful learners. acquire strategies are strategies that impart to the development of the language arrangement which the learner constructs and which affect learning straightawayly. They are travel taken to facilitate the acquisition, storage, retrieval, and use of tuition. In increment learning strategies are the special behaviours or thoughts that individuals use to help them learn, comprehend, or retain new development. Furthermore, it can be argued that learning strategies can foster learners self-direction in language learning.Strategies can also answer second language learners in promoting their own achievement in language proficiency. skill strategies, therefore, not simply help learners become efficient in learning and use a language, but also contribute to increasing learners self-directed learning. Whether as a moment of heredity, educational background, situational requirements, age, or other factors, Sudanese learners of the English language understand and process information otherwise.While one individual prefers a particular learning style over another, such a mouthful reflects a personal inclination for how to learn in a particular situation. As personalities change, so too may their learning style preferences after video to different learning/teaching situations. Early interrogation into language learning strategies was mostly concerned with investigating what language learning strategies learners used, without flacking to address the links among dodge use and success. Recent research has think on determining the connections between strategy use and language proficiency.Such studies have shown that proficient language learners employed more strategies in language learning than less proficient language learners. Other findings have exposed a relationship between students perceptions of their language proficiency and strategy use. Oxford and Nyikos (1989) affirmed that greater strategy use accompanied perceptions of higher proficiency, while Wharton (2000) show a significant c orrelation between the deuce factors, indicating the higher a students language proficiency self-rating, the more frequent strategy use was.Long lists of learning strategies have been identified by a number of studies over the past 30 years Oxford (1993) reported that there were at least(prenominal) two dozen different classifications. Generally, these learning strategies decline in quality under four broad categories, i. e. strategies that enable learners to (1) comprehend, store, recollect and use information (2) restrain and direct their learning through reflection and planning (3) control their emotions and (4) reach opportunities to practice the target language with other people. Learning strategy system can be direct or indirect.Basically, direct learning strategies require amiable processing of the target language. There are triplet major groups of direct strategies, each processes the language differently and for different purposes memory, cognitive, and hire. Memor y learning strategies, also called mnemonics, entail mental processes used in arranging information in order, making associations, and reviewing. Cognitive learning strategies involve the processing of the target language so that moment becomes clear through processes like reasoning and analyzing.Lastly, compensation learning strategies enable second language learners to make up for gaps in their friendship and skills, by, for example, guessing meanings and using gestures. On the other hand, indirect strategies support and manage language learning often without involving the target language directly. The metacognitive, affective, and kindly learning strategies belong to the groups of indirect learning strategies. In essence, metacognitive learning strategies enable second language learners to plan, coordinate, evaluate, and direct their own learning as sound as to monitor errors.Affective learning strategies, on the other hand, help learners gain control over their emotions, at titudes, and motivation through self-encouragement, self-reward, and reduction of anxieties. Finally, social learning strategies are ways of involving other people in enhancing learning through questions, cooperation and increased cultural awareness. Another pedagogical issue is that many SLL teachers do not generate environment that will foster learners taking into custody of making the essential mental construction. The current research proposes that students need to construct their own understanding of their learning.Constructivism provides a way of understanding teaching and learning and offers information for developing various ways of teaching, because the challenge in teaching is not to lecture, explain, or otherwise to attempt to transfer knowledge, but to create circumstances and experiences that engage the students and support their own explanation and application of language models needed to make sense of these experiences. The focus of constructivism is not unique to ps ychology it also has roots in several areas, such as linguistics. Constructivism is primarily a supposition of human development that in juvenile years has been applied to learning.The learning or meaning-making theory proposes that people create their own meaning and understanding, combine what they already know and believe to be true with new experiences with which they are confronted. The theory views knowledge as temporary, developmental, social and cultural. Lambert et al. (1995) described constructivism as the primary basis of learning where individuals bring past experiences and beliefs, as well as their cultural histories and world views, into the process of learning all of these influence how we interact with and figure our encounters with new ideas and events (p.xii).Guided by theories of constructivism, teachers must identify that learning is a search for meaning meaning requires an understanding of the whole as well as its parts in seeking meaning, they must underst and the mental representations that students use to interpret the world and the assumptions they make to strengthen those representations and the goal of learning is for the SLL student to develop his or her own understanding.Hence the students cultural-social and historical contexts are of importance in their learning. Social constructivist concepts have important implications in teaching strategies. Social constructivists believe that public is constructed through human interactivity. Members of a family in concert construct the properties of the world. For them, reality does not exist foregoing to its social invention, thus it cannot be discovered.Also, social constructivism holds that knowledge is also a human product and is socially and culturally constructed, which suggests that individuals establish meaning by interacting with each other and with their environment. Additionally, social constructivism proposes that learning does not occur only within an individual, but is a social process meaningful learning among SLL students happens when they are touch in social activities.Teachers can design instructional models based on the social constructivist perspective. These models promote collaborationism among learners and with practitioners in the society. According to Lave and Wenger (1991) a societys practical knowledge is positioned in relations among practitioners, their practice and the social organization and political preservation of communities of practice. This suggests that learning should involve such knowledge and practice.