Applied linguistics; Motivation,competence and performance

Applied linguistics; Motivation,competence and performance

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  Group No: 4 SubjectApplied linguistics Topics i. Motivation(Instrumental, Integrated) ii. Competence and performance Submitted to Ma`am Afia Khizer Group Members Roll no.18-Ummara Zulfiqar Roll no.23-Nazia Manzoor Roll no.25-Madiha Alamgir Roll no.33-H.Surriya Shoaib Roll no.47-Sumaira Manzoor Roll no.50-Saba Saleem BS(English) 5th semester Applied Linguistics What is Motivation? Motivation is a theoretical construct used to explain behavior. It represents the reasons for people's actions, desires, and needs. Motivation can also be defined as one's direction to behavior or what causes a person to want to repeat a behavior and vice versa. A motive is what prompts the person to act in a certain way or at least develop an inclination for specific behavior. For example, when someone eats food to satisfy the need of hunger, or when a student does his/her work in school because they want a good grade. Simply, motivation can be defined as: Internal and external factors that stimulate desire and energy in people to be continually interested and committed to a job, role or subject, or to make an effort to attain a goal. Motivation results from the interaction of both conscious and unconscious factors such as; (1) Intensity of desire or need (2) Incentive or reward value of the goal (3) Expectations of the individual and of his or her peers. These factors are the reasons one has for behaving a certain way. An example is a student that spends extra time studying for a test because he or she wants a better grade in the class. Six factors influence motivation in language learning: 1. attitudes 2. beliefs about self 3. goals 4. involvement
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  5. environmental support 6.Personal characteristics Roll No#18 Importance of Motivation: One of the most important individual differences shaping language learning outcomes is learner motivation. Given the considerable amount of time and effort needed to achieve advanced language proficiency in a second language, learners who are strongly motivated are much more likely to succeed. For these reasons, the issue of motivation has been a central one in language learning research. In Maslow opinion(1970), motivation has more emphasis on the individual’s “decisions, the choices people make as to what experiences or goals they will approach or avoid, and the degree of effort they will exert in that respect’’. Some cognitive psychologists see underlying needs or drives as the compelling force behind our decisions (Maslow, 1970). Roll No#50 KINDS OF MOTIVATION In the world, people have different reasons for studying a foreign language: some study a language and enter to learn language just for practical reasons, while others are interested in a particular language and its speakers and cultures as well. For many language learners, learning a language is only a means for an academic degree. Gardner and Lambert (1972) define two types of motivation. 1. Instrumental motivation 2. Integrative motivation Instrumental Motivation: Instrumental motivation refers to when we acquire a language just for instrumental goals or it means to learn a language with non-interpersonal purposes such as to pass an exam or just to have a career. As the researcher believes, Learners with an instrumental motivation want to learn a language because of a practical reason such as getting a jobs or getting into college. According to Spolsky (1989), an instrumental motivation is referred to a specific goal. If a goal is continuous, it seems possible that an instrumental motivation would also continue to be active. Learners with an instrumental motivation want to learn a language because of a practical reason such as getting a salary bonus or getting into college. Many college language learners have a clear instrumental motivation for language learning: They want to fulfill a college language requirement! Integratively motivated learners want to learn the language so that they can better understand and get to know the people who speak that language. In the North American context, integrative motivation has proven to be a strong impetus to successful language learning. R0ll No#47
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  Integrative motivation: Integrativeorientation is defined as “a sincere and personal interest in the people and culture represented by the other language group” (Lambert, 1974, p. 98). Integrative motivation is a key component in assisting the students to improve some level of proficiency in the language, when he/she becomes a resident in a new society that uses the target language in its social interaction. A learner can be one of the members of a community in which the target language is spoken by using integrative motivation. It is also theorized “integrative motivation typically underlies successful acquisition of a wide range of registers and a native like pronunciation” (Finegan, 1999, p.568). Falk (1978) believed that the successful students in the learning of a target language are those who had a desire to become familiar with the society in which the target language was used; this kind of motivation is known as integrative motivation. Learners who are integratively motivated want to learn the language because they want to get to know the people who speak that language. They are also interested in the culture associated with that language. Several studies have found that language learners who are integratively motivated are more successful than those who are instrumentally motivated; it is likely that integratively motivated language learners are more successful because their motivation is stronger than that of instrumentally motivated students especially in North America. Roll No#33 COMPETENCE and PERFORMANCE Chomsky, an American linguist, distinguished the underlying knowledge of language from the way language is actually used in practice. He first introduced the concept of “performance” and “competence” as part of the foundations for his Generative grammar. Competence: Linguistic competence is the system of linguistic knowledge possessed by native speakers of a language. Competence consists of the mental representation of linguistic rules which constitute the speaker-hearer’s internalized grammar. Competence is a person’s underlying (subconscious) linguistic ability to create and understand sentences, including sentences they have never heard before. It’s a person's acquaintance with a set of grammatical rules and is different from the actual linguistic activities. Linguistic competence includes components such as phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics and morphology. Competence enables native speaker to recognize ambiguous sentences or accept even apparently meaningless sentences as syntactically correct (and even making some sense). Roll No#25 Performance: Linguistic performance is the way the language system is used in communication. Performance is the real world linguistic output. It consists of the comprehension and production of language. It may accurately reflect competence, but it also may include speech errors. Performance may be
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  flawed because ofmemory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention and interest, and errors (random or characteristic) or other psychological factors. It represents only a small sample of possible utterances. The performance of a speaker may not be fault free, even though his competence is perfect. Competence versus performance Competence, being an ideal, is located as a psychological or mental property. This is in contrast to performance, which refers to an actual event. Chomsky argues that only under an idealized situation, whereby the speaker-hearer is unaffected by grammatically irrelevant conditions such as memory limitations and distractions, will performance be a direct reflection of competence. Roll No#23