I. INTRODUCTION
Cambodian students are different from the Western students because we were raised up differently in term of culture, style of learning, and environment. Old style of teaching taught Cambodian students to listen to what the teachers say; such techniques are still taught nowadays. Even thought some new styles of teaching spread to our country; most teachers still perform the old teaching methodology, teacher centre, because it worked for them when they was students. It can be seen that Cambodian students seem more passive and quiet. It’s so confusing and we might find it hard to identify what the causes are that influence the characteristics and quality of the student toward studying English. From my point of view, the behavior of the students comes from their nurture rather than their nature.
From my points of view being active is important. Studying English, students have to require both productive and receptive skill. Normally the quiet or passive students are good in receptive skill, listening and reading, while active students are quite good in productive skill, speaking and writing. Actually, we can’t judge the students’ abilities base of their behavior or scores; we have to observe the activities that the students produced score. For instance, some students are really good in achieving good grades but are not good in speaking. Of course, some subject being active is not really important such as math, chemistry and so on. Studying English requires student’s participation.
II. PURPOSES OF STUDY
This research is as a result of my observations and questionnaire answers with the aim to study the impact, both positive and negative, of successive attempts to the passive and active behavior of the students. All students are not the same. So if some students are more active than other due to their natural abilities, this becomes obvious in variety of ways. But beside the nature, the environmental factors play a very important role as well. So, we are analyzing ways to help students becoming active rather than passive students.
First of all we segregate all who are active students. This will be achieved by picking students who are willing to participate in all the classroom activities. Due to the seeking of attention from the teachers and peers, they perform to their best and are appreciated for that. Participation in the competitions, discussions and other co-curricular activities, alert, quick, competitive, energetic, passionate, leader, creative and a performer are an indicator.
A passive student is one who loves to be on their own world. They don’t want to talk much and participate in the day to day activities of the classroom. They are not very social and hesitate to express his point of view in front of everyone. They can be introverted and need a channel to vent out his feelings and thoughts. They tend to want to take a backseat in any kind of discussion or activities. At times they can be stick out in the crowd as lonely and conscious beings. In extreme they can be very dull and unwilling to learn.
III. LITERATURE REVIEW
The daily realities for both teachers and students in the Cambodian education system are thus very challenging. Teachers face inadequate salaries and the need to charge students fees for services. Students face inadequate facilities, large classroom size; sometimes travel times to nearby villages or towns, and high costs for their families. At the upper levels these problems are compounded by the need to pay bribes to pass the upper secondary level exams and to secure admission to universities. The result from such situation leads student to be ignored by the teachers; the work-hard students only spend time individually for self-study.
The school system today has pre-school for children aged three to five (but only in some areas), Primary education in grades one to six, and Lower Secondary education from grades six to nine. After grade nine is an exam to pass to enter Upper Secondary school (grades ten to twelve). After grade twelve is an exam to graduate with a diploma (called bac dup). Previously there was then a separate entrance exam for the university level, but now the exams already sat are studied for highest scores in certain topical areas to decide which students will be allowed to continue to university. In addition, what we have to notice about is the behavior and the style of studying in the high school is quite different from the university level. For example, the high school students are taught to be dependent and spoon-fed, but the University students are more independent and self-study.
To apply learning activity-based after the student finishing high school, the students still continues their habit and contribute them to the University. The problem is that it needs sometimes to change their behavior; listening and no speaking have become to the student’s routine. The teachers might find it hard to deal with such situation; so the teachers have to be competence enough to teach them. Moreover, Cambodian students have no habit to read that lead them to be passive. I mean most students seem to depend on teacher/lecturer. Some people believe that cause is the result of culture practice and others believe on the nature and nurture of the people
While the system for education has improved, and dramatic changes are underway, a litany of problems remains. The overwhelming problems are still financial and the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport (MEYS) admits that there is little likelihood of providing the opportunity for every child to have nine years of education in the very near future. There are still enormous problems with education service delivery, including a large gap in education quality between urban and rural or remote schools (MEYS 1999). Teachers are paid as little as ten dollars per month. Since they cannot live on such wages, they must supplement their income with other jobs, which often cuts into class times. In addition, the teachers must also charge students fees to attend their classes, or offer additional for-fee classes outside the regular class times. This means that the poorest students are often locked out of classes where the real teaching occurs.
Mr. Brandon Davis stated that becoming an active student requires an understanding of the responsibilities of students, teachers, and parents. The younger the student, the more dependant that student is on external motivation, but as students age they must become independent. Older students must become self motivated and internally driven to success or they will be passive and prone to failure.
For younger students, those in pre-kindergarten through perhaps the middle elementary years, a large portion of responsibility rests on teachers and parents for motivation.
While all students are different, some more engaged in learning than others, teachers are by and large responsible in the classroom setting for student participation. Curricula must be challenging yet captivating for young students, for if their classroom lacks a certain fascination they will more than likely lose interest.
In regard to the homework of a younger student, parental coaching is important for motivation. In this way parents must be incredibly involved in their child’s education. Unfortunately, this is not always as accessible as desired: parents are busy; but it must be a priority for parents, because young children are motivated to play, not to work. The motivation to perform duties must be passed from parent to child.
Older students, by which Brandon Davis means any student from the upper elementary grade level through high school and beyond, have within them a capacity for self motivation. This self motivation, however, is often dedicated on things much different than education. As stated earlier, the motivation behind responsibility must be taught, preferably by parents to their children, but should also be exemplified by teachers and others within society.
Classes for older students must, as with younger students, be engaging, interesting, yet cannot become too easy. Teachers are responsible for taking the most boring subject matter and getting their students interested in it. Parents are responsible for keeping their children accountable in both classroom behavior and homework completion.
Now, as to becoming more active, it is imperative for students to desire learning. Knowledge truly is power, and therefore a thirst for knowledge should easily be seen as wise. Society is becoming increasingly dependant on the well educated. Appreciated jobs require higher education while the undesirable jobs are left to the unlearned. This fact alone should be a motivating factor in active learning.
Asking questions is a key to active learning. In the classroom, students should take good notes, not only capturing main thoughts and facts, but also drawing connections. Students should not fear talking with teachers before and after classes. Technology makes this even easier, for most teachers are accessible through email.
For high school and college students, forming study groups and discussion groups can be a great help to active learning. The opinions, observations, and conclusions of peers often provide insight into subject matter a single student would never catch. Students should also discuss their learning with their parents, because parents often have insights on the practical application of learned information. Parents should be interested in their children’s education, and should ask them often about what they are learning.
Extracurricular study of classroom topics will also transform the passive student into an active one. Bringing extra information to class can provide a broadened discussion, an increased understanding of the classroom subject, and can help give students a big-picture idea of their studies.
Passive students are in perpetual danger of failure, for they either tend to care little or not at all for learning. Becoming an active student requires an awareness of the importance of learning in the modern era, as well as an understanding of some ways to become more active. Ask questions. Discuss school and class work with peers and parents. Study outside of class. Becoming active in learning is not as difficult as it may seem, but the motivation must come from within.
In this research is intended not only to present how both behaviors correlate with each other, but also to shed light on how best to interpret the correlation data in earning score context. Active versus Passive English learners/ students, who achieves the highest grade? Or Characteristics and qualities that make the best highest scoring English students. From these sentences, you will be doubtful why I raised such sentences. Imagine, in the student-centre system the outstanding ones must be very active. In fact, Cambodian students who are very passive can reach to the top score comparing to the active ones. So, we have to search that if they are good enough through learning passively, should we change their behavior?
IV. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
In order to study the characteristic and qualities of the students learning English, I have design a questionnaire which is related to both active and passive students. The first question is about what the students think about active students toward studying. I have raised such a question because I want to know the tendency of students. Most students in Cambodia tend to be passive, so I think it’s important to know about the characteristic that they think they are whether it works for their study or not. And the second question is mainly about the students’ opinion of the factors which influence students’ behavior. I have included several choices and space for other choice not stated in the questionnaire. Students will understand quite well because they have several choices to guides them. The two other questions are very important; they are about participation and their score percentages. Through these questions, we might be able to analyze the correlation between active students and passive student. In addition, the last question also outlines clearly about the idea of the student who was taught in the student-center and activity base way and to what level they support the idea of changing the behavior of the student by turning the passive student active.
The method of data collection that I chose to study of this topic is by questionnaire. I decided to choose this method because some information of my research is hard to collect because it relates to the personal achievement of individuals. For example, if we ask them about how many times per session they raise an idea or participate actively in the class, or what score that you reached in the previous semester on average. Some students might feel reluctant to answer such questions. And if we consider the type of study population, even if they do not want to answer verbally; there is no barriers at all because all interviewees are able to write their answers on a piece of paper.
This research was conducted at IFL in four classes E4.4, E4.5, E5.6, and E4.8. Five students were selected randomly in each class, so twenty students had been given the questionnaire. However, only eighteen questionnaires were collected back. I believe that information is accuracy enough due to the cooperation of those students.
V. RESULTS
From the result of question 1 in the questionnaire which supports the idea of being active toward studying; we can see that 3 out of 18 students strongly agree which equal 17%; 14 out of 18,77%, agree while only one of them, 6%, that disagree with the idea. (See Figure I)
And question 2 is targeted to find the factors that influence students’ behavior. We found that the percentage of the students who are influenced by nurture and nature is equal, 17%. Moreover, the students who support both nature and nurture reach to 38%, while the factor of Culture/Gender was only 22%. However, there was a new factor identified by an interviewee; it’s the environment. The search shows that 6% of the students among the four classes are influenced by the environment. (See Figure II).
The most important questions for this research were question numbers 3 and 4 which related to the level of participation from the students, and the score achieved by the students. We can see the graph in Figure III which combines the number of students participating and their score, to see the correlation between both of them. If we looked at the graph of the Figure III, we see that the number of the students that have no participation at all in the class passive students is 50% in all interviewees. 44% were identified as active and 6% very active. Surprisingly the score showed a different pattern for student’s participation. Only 28% of them achieved the higher score, 50% average score and 22% low scores. Moreover, comparing passive student results, the research shows that very few of them can reach the highest score, more than half of them are in the average score, and less than 40% of those passive are achieved poor grades. Fewer students who are fairly active, 3 out of 8 students in the average score and 50% of those students achieved the highest score.
In addition, I found that that there’s still a number of IFL student still have ideas in which didn’t tent to turn the passive students to be active. And as the result, 94% of the students agreed to change the student from passive to active while 6% did not.
DISCUSSION
The findings in the research may hold some important implication on how students behave toward learning English. In the writing part of the questionnaire, some students state the some supported idea of activeness while others still believe that human personality and behavior can not be changed and that passivity is not bad in term of critical thinking skill. The analysis and conclusion are drawn from these finding.
The findings are linked to students’ ideas and the factors that influence student’s behavior. We are aware that the culture of Cambodian students is to be passive; due to the way they are taught and brought up. Some students feel more comfortable on this way of learning; for example, self study and reading book at home. Of course, this style of learning might be work in Mathematic, Physic or Chemistry is not suitable for English Language; so if we want to change the student’s behavior, at first we must change the students’ ideas. The finding shows that most students prefer to be active but this is limited because a number of active students tend to dominate the class and disturb others. However, there are a small number of the students who strongly agree with activeness because they believe that the active students can accelerate their learning and make the classes interesting.
A striking finding was the overwhelming dominance for analytical thinking toward the correlation between the participation and grades score. The research discovered that unusual distributions of students who achieve the highest grades score are passive and the fairly active students, while the very active ones achieve only average grades. From this discovery we can assume that active students are the ones who raise-up ideas and share with other students; they are good speaker, but because they spend time thinking about what they want to share, they may not be good listener. Therefore, the knowledge they may retain is less than other student; they might miss out of key elements of the classes. Passive students are good listeners. They obtain ideas from other students and lecturer, but they don’t necessarily share what they have learnt. This research is no implying that all passive students never want to share their knowledge; it’s because of their nature, nurture and other factor that have been mentioned in the previous points. Some passive students are not always good listener as they are lower achievers in the class. Only a few are good in self-study and pay more attention during the class. The most impressive result seen in the fairly-active students who’re not over active but participate to a degree. These are the students who are good in sharing ideas or knowledge and also are good listeners who are open-minded and improve their ideas which are critiqued and absorbed by other students. In such behavior, the students’ knowledge will be improved because they’re good in absorbing new knowledge and new ideas.
The majority of the students support the idea of turning the passive students to active. A small number of them are still against this idea because those students are the passive hard working ones and advocate the value of passive learning. They value only critical thinking rather than class-based activities. Moreover, some students put little value on being active because they see the very active students who disturb and dominate the class. Therefore, the problem that we encounter is active students might be neglected by the lecturers. Active students also need your help in polishing their talents. They should never be demotivated and suppressed with what they do. Their psychology also needs to be understood and worked upon accordingly.
This research was conducted only four classes at the evening class; so this research is not precisely accurate. So the students’ behavior that I’ve studied might reflect to the situation of only evening class because students in those classes mostly are working that different from the morning and afternoon class. From my point of view, the study design that I’ve chose is not best but the results from that are no different from what I’ve observed. It’s difficult to analyze the fluctuation of the number of passive student toward score achieving. And as I observed, I saw that not all of the evening class students are working, some non working students they have more time to study; that’s why even most of them are passive in the class, they still doing well in making score grade. Moreover, there are many more factors that influence the student behavior such as family crisis and busy-working student.
In conclusion, learning English is more effective when the main active concerns the research was to look at the ways of making a passive student active. After this research we will see the steps to be taken for the betterment of the active students. The first important Task is to understand the psychology of the passive learner. Generally he/she seems to be passive physically but his mind is very active. We need to know the thought process going on in his/her mind and then find out the reasons. There can be many reasons for passiveness which depend upon the age-group and the priorities of the students. Sometimes the family environment or some incident might have an impact upon the child’s mind and be proving a hindrance to his activeness. The research also found that being too active is not good due to the lack of concentration in classes. It found that becoming an active student is more beneficial than a passive student. Especially the student life should be filled with a lot of enthusiasm and fun. There should be no worries at all and students should enjoy learning and be active in whatever they do.
References:
