Essay : The Causes of Students Failure in Learning English

 

Is English difficult to learn? Students are required to study English because it can be found anytime and anywhere, so it is important and very useful, especially in career opportunities, education and life. Many students are still not able to master English even though they have studied English in a school all over the years. In fact, students learn English in school just three or four hours a week in passively rather than actively. It will get hard to understand because English needs a lot of practice. English is often labelled as a subject that difficult to learn, whereas English is not as difficult as imagine. This difficulty occurs because it is caused by several factors such as personal factors, environmental factors, and others.

 

First of all, English in school is taught as a subject-based knowledge like another subject such as science, geography, social studies and others. It just focus on the theory of the materials rather than comprehend about how to use it communicatively. Further, English teacher keep using Indonesian language while they are teaching. Commonly, no oral test is held and the examination just takes by written test which based on syllabus that has been learned. That’s why English is hard to be mastered by the students.

 Second, most students have low motivation in learning English. Motivation has a big impact when do something and determine whether the goal will succes or fail to reach, include in learning. Harmer (2001:51) mentioned that motivation is some kind of encouragement from oneself  to do things in order to achieve a goal or something. They just learn English in order to fulfill the rules of school and to get score.There are two types of motivation which are extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, that are so necessarily to the students in improving their interest in learning english.

Furthermore, learn English is all about practice especially speaking and listening. Without practicing it is impossible to improve the ability of English language. Students in a school just get an explanation about the material but there is no practice. In addition, they do not have a partner to practice it outside of learning hours. They also often feel shy and not confident to express themselves in front of people. In briefly, students experience lack of practice in improve their abilities of English.

In conclusion, we can see that the students’ failure in learning English mostly affected by these several factors such as the way English is learned in school, low motivation by the students, and lack of practice. It is important to students to get an efforts to master their English, because study English in school is not enough to enhance their ability in English. They can do self-taught or join English course, but the most important is students should realize that they have practice often and  be serious in studying in order to master English.