The Problems of Language (English) Usage for Academic Purposes

There are at least three categories of students who experience difficulties of using English for academic purposes. Firstly, these are the students who can not translate words or terms into their own vernacular, perhaps because their English language vocabulary or their skill capacity of using the language is scanty (Oey, 1980: 89c; Kelly, 1990: 4). The students may actually have the concepts involved in what they are studying but can not connect these with the new terms spoken or written in English. For example, an Indonesian student who has already known the psychological concept ‘self-esteem’ may not comprehend the text related to this term, since in Bahasa Indonesia it is always called ‘harga diri’.

Secondly, it is likely that there are a group of students who can translate words or terms into their native language but can not see the relevance of these terms, because they do not related concepts which enable them to construct elaborate meanings. For example, a student studying mathematics may know the meaning of “generally” in daily conversation as “true in some circumstances” but can not perceive it as a mathematical term that means “true in all circumstances” (Hodgkin, 1980: 64)  With respect to this, it is obvious that the student’s ability of translating or finding meanings will not guarantee understanding a paragraph (Oey, 1980: 89b) if  their command of background knowledge of the topic which is written in that paragraph is scanty ( Kelly, 1990:4)

Thirdly, there are likely to be some students who have appropriate discrete conceptual knowledge but who are not able to form appropriate connections between concepts. The student may really have desirable conceptual knowledge pertinent to the topic being learnt but in the form of distinct or separate parts. Unfortunately, the students are not sufficiently capable of associating the concept owing to very limitted command of academic language processing and capabilities in other reasoning. In other words, they are not able to paraphrase, analyze, summarize, and draw inferences to build a new critical and logical synthesis. For example, a student who has enough conceptual parts of knowledge and knows how to construct sentences might only be able to produce an essay that consists of a long saga with many direct quotations. In other words, the student is unlikely to be able to establish effective relationships between concepts. Such a student, according to Ballard (1980: 128),  is not capable of developing coherent judgment and shaping his or her own ideas independently.