Attitudes of Bilingual/Trilingual Indonesian-Speakers towards English Learning; indicating Socio-Linguistic Factors and the Affective Factors

Abstract

Indonesia is widely recognized as the most trilingual country alongside Israel and Spain. A research done by the SwiftKey group in 2016 shows that 17.1% of more than 250 million people living in Indonesia are able to speak in three languages from their childhood. Those languages include their ethnic languages, the national lingua franca; which is Bahasa Indonesia, and a foreign language, in which English is found as the most popular one. Besides, 53.2 % of Indonesians are born bilingual-which places Indonesia in the top 5 most bilingual countries in the world. This fact relates to some issues found in the learning of English-which is the most popular foreign language studied by Indonesian-speakers, but still Indonesian-speakers have certain attitudes towards English which lead to a situation where most of them are not proficient in English. This study aims to comprehend the issues that Indonesianspeakers might have regarding to the struggle of learning English, underlying sociolinguistic factors (mostly focusing on its bilingual status) and also through affectivefilter analysis. This study involves 60 Indonesian-speakers (half bilingual and half trilingual) and resulting in a conclusion that amongst the three variables of affective factors mentioned at the questionnaire (motivation, confidence and anxiety), motivation dominates the samples’ attitude towards English learning, 58% of them are highly motivated to learn English, even though we can still find 12% of them feel anxious when they use English. Then, the sample also reflects the notion that their bilingual/trilingual status does not extremely bother them to learn English but help them in understanding language patterns according to their previous experiences of language acquisition. In the end, the sample indicates that English has an important role in Indonesia as 85% selected the ‘very important’ option, 15% of them selected ‘important’ option and none of them selected the ‘not important’ option. Besides, some limitations are found in the study. The most recognizable one is the fact that the sample is not enough to reflect the entire idea of Indonesian people, and also the limited time to explore more about the relevant idea.