Bangladeshi EFL Learners’ Approach towards Learning English

Abstract

Bangladesh is a poverty stricken country with a huge population ‘unemployed’ in respect of the definition of Economics including both male and female.  Government is striving hard to make the people well-equipped with necessary skills and learning in order that they can prove themselves fit for the upcoming challenges of the global economy and newer learning. Accordingly, Government emphasizes learning the English language and parents along with the learners are growing conscious but frequently, fall victim to problems in learning this foreign language. Despite being the inhabitants of a developing country, students dare not speak this language for fear of committing some mistakes rather to marshal it.  Here, teachers, students and the teaching-process should co-operate actively with one another  in order to attain the accomplished success

Language is a part of national identity, though not static. It acts like a wire through which a human expression can reach another human mind. The proverb goes that “No man is an island”, that is, every individual is bound to come into contact with other people. Bengali is our mother tongue by which any  of us can reach only the Bengali speaking people. However, no country or no nation can live alone. Then, there emerges the necessity of having some means or languages to play a bridging  role . In this world among the millions of languages only few languages have got the status of an international language. Again, among them, English language is the most dominating and influential one. Therefore, in most of the countries it is necessitated to be learned as the second language or the foreign language to run international business or to have higher education.

According to Noam Chomsky, there is a universal core grammar which denotes the embedded similarity among the languages in the world and every human child is born with a heavenly acquisition power to understand or learn any language in which he is exposed to including their mother tongue, i.e. first language (L1)  “ …for Chomsky, was that the human infant must be endowed with a highly sophisticated innate ability to learn language ” Diane Larsen and Freeman and Michael II Long.(P-114). “He claimed that the child’s knowledge of his mother tongue was derived from a Universal Grammar which specified  the essential form that  any natural language could take”.[Rod Ellis  :Understanding Second Language Acquisition (P-43 ) ] They can learn any language (L2) whichever they want unlike any other species in the world (except some talking birds, but their ability is not equal to the acquisition power of a human child). Even though, we are to admit that L2 learners specially, adults encounter lots of  hazards due to psychological, environmental or Linguistic differences . For example, Bengali learners suffer from such an inferiority complex that, they would be laughed at if they commit some mistakes in grammar or in pronunciation. This, very truly precedes another problem for the L2 learners, that is, they fail to get an English speaking environment, whereas, English speaking people or people from other languages do not have such kind of reaction while learning or speaking Bengali as an L2 learner. Even it surpasses other causes by hampering the confidence level of the students.  “Trying to get students to be like a native speaker is ineffective; their minds and their knowledge of language will inevitably be different” and “students can become successful L2 users rather than forever ‘failing’ native speaker target” (Cook 1999).[ page 78: Factors affecting the language learning process among Saudi students]

Bangladeshi people are proud of the fact that, Bengali language (the mother tongue) has also got the status of an international language. Since the independence, Bangladeshi people are striving and struggling with their poverty, unemployment, ill- equipped infrastructural system and industrialization. To be out of this vicious circle, the need to come into contact with international community has no alternative. Therefore, educationists, policy makers and intelligentsia and govt. feel the importance of learning English language. B. Shabbir and M. Qasim, note that – “ It is generally believed that English is a medium to obtain, not only the power and the prestige but pragmatic aims in which they ( the people ) could maximize their ability to be one of the multilingual and multi-structural societies. Some people regard it as a bridge to many advantages related to business, commerce, industry, and economic progress” (P-75-76 ). In line with B. Shabbir and M. Qasim  Nesa  (2004)   also  states- English is the Lingua franca of business, commerce, science arts , literature of the whole(P-8)  [Critical Literacy: Theories and Practices, 6.2.2012]

However, we have endeavored to study some genuine difficulties that every Bengali student has to undergo. The native speakers of these two languages certainly belong to two different geographical, social or cultural environments. At the first approach, a Bengali learner will find the English words to be Greek one so also, it will happen with an Englishman. Some examples are showed below-