Perception of ‘English’ and Motivation in Learning English

Abstract

This study aims to present high school students" perception of "English" through the impressions and images and the effect of these perceptions on their motivation in learning English. This qualitative study is based on the data about students" metaphors and the focus group interview to determine their effect on the students" motivation. The research group for metaphors consists of 128 high school students from four different grades. 79 metaphors were collected and grouped under 12 categories. In addition, two different focus group interviews are held with 7 students having negative and positive perspectives to determine the effect of these perceptions on students" motivation in learning English. According to the analysis of the data from focus group interviews, students mostly perceive "English" as a target language to learn rather than a foreign language, spoken by a definite society or belonging to a culture. The results of metaphor study also indicate that the students regarding "English" positively tend to have a higher participation and motivation in comparison to the students having negative perceptions.Keywords: culture, English, learning, metaphor, perception Introduction Culture and LanguageWhen "culture of a society" is considered, one of the first concepts that comes to mind is "language". Since language can be accepted to be the common instrument to convey meaning through communication, it is an inseparable part of culture. In addition, all human history, there existed lots of languages and cultures, conveyed beneath or via these languages. According to Bennett (1993:9) learning a language without its culture is a recipe for becoming "a fluent fool and a fluent fool is someone who speaks a foreign language well, but does not understand the social or philosophical content of that language. When the interrelation in between these two inseparable concepts is taken into consideration, it can be said that culture is embedded in language. Hence, great importance should be placed on the teaching of culture in the language classroom. Politzer (1959:99) argues that when a language is taught as a separate entity from its culture, it turns out to be a mere group of meaningless symbols which are too complicated for the learners to elicit any meaning from. Therefore, while teaching a language without any cultural references or meaning, one may know the language but he/she may not be successful in learning and using the target language due to lack of cultural knowledge or background. Brown (1994:165) describes the relation between language and culture and states that a language is a part of a culture and a culture is a part of a language; the two are intricately interwoven so that one cannot separate the two without losing the significance of either language or culture. The Significance and Purpose of the StudyThe effect of perceptions on the motivation in learning English is regarded as an important problem. For this, what metaphors language about the concept of "English" and why they think like that ...

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