Exploring International Student Orientation and Attitude towards Learning English in Malaysia

The Malaysian government is rigorously drawing up strategies to increase the already existing 60,000 foreign students currently studying in the country (The Star, 2009). With the influx of more foreign students and with English as the medium of instruction in local higher aspects that drive and/or deter them in learning English would be beneficial. The sample for this study (N=115) comprised of international students from China, Iran, Kazakhstan, Indonesia, Korea, Vietnam, Maldives and the Middle East undertaking an Intensive English course at a local private college. Data collection was done via questionnaire which was designed based on a review of existing instruments in the field. Results show that orientation towards learning English does not vary according to nationality and gender; however, students from China and Korea tend to be more inclined towards instrumental orientation, while students from Kazakhstan and Iran are more inclined towards integrative orientation. Based on the findings, this paper also proffers recommendations for local higher education institutions to enhance ELT practices for incoming international students. Introduction intake of international students is steadily growing with renewed and increased efforts towards opening new gateways to attract more foreign students into private and public op Malaysia into an educational hub by the year 2020. According to the National Census 2007 of the Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE), there are 47,928 foreign students currently studying in the country. Many of these students are not fluent in the English language which is the doi:10.7575/aiac.alls.v.2n.2p.219


Introduction
intake of international students is steadily growing with renewed and increased efforts towards opening new gateways to attract more foreign students into private and public op Malaysia into an educational hub by the year 2020.According to the National Census 2007 of the Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE), there are 47,928 foreign students currently studying in the country.Many of these students are not fluent in the English language which is the medium of instruction in most public and private institutions of higher learning (IHL), and therefore have to undergo English courses prior to entering the desired programmes.
This study aims to investigate the orientation and attitude of these students towards the English language in private IHLs in Malaysia, and outline the reasons behind why students are interested in studying the English language.It is to determine the major aspects that drive them towards learning the language and to identify the factors that play a part in motivating may be either integrative or instrumental.The integrative motivated student is one who is driven to learn the English language through identification and association to the culture and people of the target language, whereas the instrumentally motivated learner is one who is driven to learn the target language for the sole purpose of enhancing oneself for job opportunities and monetary means.
The purpose of this study is to enable the private IHLs to better understand the need for will also enable the lecturers of these local institutions to improve their abilities and broaden Orientation and attitude towards second language learning language and the attitude adopted in the learning process while learning takes place.According to Krashen (1981), orientation is one of the components of the passive cognitive filter that screens the incoming language based on motives, needs, attitudes and emotional states.Orientation and attitude of a student towards the learning of a subject could be based on many different aspects.A curiosity of the culture and tradition of the target language.The love of knowing a new language and habits of the people could be a major source of motivation for the student to movies and assimilate themselves with the Western culture that has a major influence on to understand a new trend and gain identity in the wider language community.According to Orientation successfully obtaining the target language.Integrative orientation is one form of motivation that stimulates the student towards acquiring the English language, especially if they have become a resident in a community that is very much well-versed in the language, in order to socially interact and immerse themselves as one of the members of society."Integrative motivation typically underlies successful acquisition of a wide range of registers and a nativelike pronunciation" (Finegan, 1999, p.568 cited in Norris-Halt, 2009, p.2).
oriented student is one who is motivated to learn the second language, has openness to identification with the other language community and has favourable attitude towards the (Masgoret & Gardner, 2003cited in Vaezi, 2008, p. 54).
Another form of student orientation is through having external elements that motivate a student to pursue the English language.These may include monetary means, better job opportunities, exam results, business deals, etc.According to Gardner (1985), this is the second type of orientation know as Instrumental Orientation learner has more pragmatic considerations in his/her mind regarding L2 learning, such as (Vaezi, 2008, p. 54).Students adopt a better attitude towards learning English when they know that there are rewards attached to the learning.
They tend to concentrate more on learning the language if it will be substantially beneficial to them.This is usually if the student needs to pass the English exam in order to get good marks or if the learning of the language enables them to be eligible for promotions or higher job positions.However, once the instrumental element is obtained, the interest in learning the language may slowly deteriorate.As cited in Norris-Halt (2009), a study was conducted by Berwick and Ross (1989), where 90 first year Japanese students were found to be instrumentally oriented to study English due to the exam requirements for the university.
Upon entering university, the interest towards learning English slowly diminished.

English language teaching in Malaysia
Malaysia is a multi-cultural nation.Many different languages exist within the society.With the existence of vernacular schools and local government schools in the country, many private higher educational institutions have adopted the English stream as their main medium -economic background and the availability of studies in the English language, many foreign students have opted Malaysia as a choice to further their education.Since many of them are not fully versed in the English language, they have chosen to study English in many of the private sectors in the country.
The Malaysian government has also opened doors to facilitate more foreign students to continue their studies in the country.
This study focuses on a private IHL in which most of the international students come from a variety of countries such as China, Iran, Kazakhstan, Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Middle East and Africa.Due to such diverse learning backgrounds, it is a challenge for the lecturers to accommodate all their different learning abilities depending on each individual attitude towards learning English is usually reflected on the type of educational background that they have undergone and their socio-economic expectations.Students from Kazakhstan and Iran are usually more enthusiastic to participate in classroom activities and are not shy to dive into discussions and activities.Students from China on the other hand, are more reserved towards learning English and prefer to absorb the language passively.This could be due to the deductive education that they have undergon phenomenon that is occurring throughout China.It is where students learn English passively using the Chinese language and compete with each other for high grades and top scores.This phenomenon takes places when learners have limited access to the culture of the target language as well as foreign language settings.This is the reason why students from China may be more instrumentally motivated as compared to the others.Students from Japan, Korea, Indonesia and the Middle East are more eclectic in their learning approach.This could be because of their more adaptive learning background that allows them to be both integrative orientation towards studying English and identify which nationalities are more inclined towards instrumental orientation and integrative orientation.

Research questions
1. Is there a significant difference in the orientation towards learning English?
2. Is there a significant difference in the orientation towards learning English between nationalities?
3. Which nationalities are more inclined towards integrative orientation when studying English?
4. Which nationalities are more inclined towards instrumental orientation when studying English? 5.
orientation towards learning English?
6.Is there a significant difference in orientation between males and females?

Participants
The population included the international students currently studying at a private IHL in Malaysia.A sample of 115 students, 63 male and 52 female, undergoing an intensive English course ranging from pre-intermediate to upper-intermediate levels were randomly selected for the study.Data was collected through questionnaire distribution which was designed based on a review of existing instruments in the field.

Instrument
Each participant was given a questionnaire to complete in class which consisted of 37 items based on a 5-point Likert Scale, and an opentowards learning English.Items 1-12 tested their integrative orientation towards the target language, while items 13-25 measured their instrumental orientation towards learning English.Open-ended questions were also included for students to detect changes in motivation after entering the institution and if so, why.An item rating from very bad to very good was also added for respondents to rate their own level of English proficiency.A studies.

Data analysis procedures
The data was analyzed using the SPSS programme and analyses included mean, frequency and standard deviation.The paired sample T-Test was used to find the level of differences between integrative and instrumental motivation among the students of different nationalities as differences in orientation among nationalities, and comparison of means was used to differentiate nationalities that were more integrative or instrumentally oriented.Data collected through the open-ended questions were categorized into different groups and analyzed further.

Results
A total of 115 students were randomly selected as a sample, of which 63 (54.8%) were male and 52 (45.2%) female.Majority of the respondents ranged between the age group of 20-24 (49.6%) and the age group of 15-19 (39.1%).As seen in Table 1 below, 61.7% of respondents were from China, Indonesia (10.4%),Kazakhstan (7.8%), Iran (7.8%), Korea (5.2%), Vietnam (1.7%),Japan (1.7%), Libya (0.9%), Sudan (0.9%) and Maldives (0.9%).The numbers of languages the participants were able to speak and the number of languages they were able to write were also analyzed.Table 3 summarizes these findings.Majority of the students are bilingual in both the spoken and written aspect, with the Chinese students having the highest frequency of 67, being able to speak and write more than one language.students being bilingual may affect their attitude towards language learning and may find it easier to acquire the English language.
Further analysis was done in order to answer the first research question on whether there is a significant difference in orientation when learning English.Paired sample t-test was applied to determine this difference.The total mean of the integrative orientation items (M=4.12) and the total mean of the instrumental items (M=4.2442) were statistically calculated and it was found that there was no significant difference in orientation when studying English, where t= -1.87 and p= 0.06, as seen in Table 4 below.where orientation depends on the goal of learning a language (Crookes & Schmidt, 1991).
The ANOVA test was used to determine whether there is a significant difference in orientation between nationalities.Table 5 below shows that there is no significant difference in integrative and instrumental orientation between nationalities.There is no significant difference in both modes of orientation among the students, where p=0.99 for the integrative items and p=0.88 for the instrumental items.Hence, orientation does not differ much between nationalities.However, the total means were compared in order to identify which nationalities would be more inclined towards integrative orientation, and which would be more inclined towards instrumental orientation.The results are shown in It can be seen from Table 7 that students from China have the highest number of graduate parents, followed by Kazakhstan with a high majority of both parents being graduates, Iran and Korea.Indonesian students, on the other hand, have a majority of parents who are not a major effect on student orientation towards learning English.
An independent sample t-test was also conducted to identify any differences in orientation among males and females.It was found that there is no significant difference in orientation among males and females, where p=0.33 for integrative orientation, and p=0.08 for instrumental orientation.Therefore, it can be concluded that gender does not play a role in affecting student orientation towards learning English.This does not comply with the theory motivational functioning and self- Item number 26 of the questionnaire required the participants to rate their English proficiency.As seen in the data below (Table 9), more than half rated their English proficiency to be average with a percentage of 67.8%, followed by a percentage of 19.1% who rated good.9.6% of the participants rated their English proficiency to be bad while 3.5% rated their English to be very good.None of the participants rated their English proficiency as very bad.An open-ended section was also included in the questionnaire, where respondents were asked whether they were motivated to study English in High School.Participants were asked to give reasons as to why they had high or low orientation towards learning English.The percentage of orientation is as follows: Majority of the students agreed that they had high orientation to study English with a percentage of 62.6%.The reason interested t did not provide any answers for this item.
The last item of the instrument questioned the students on whether they were more or less motivated to learn English after entering a private college in the country.This question is to institution has effected student orientation to study English.The results are as follows: A majority of students agreed that they are more motivated to learn English in the college However, 43% stated that they were less 18.3% did not provide any answers for this item.

Discussion
This study was conducted to investigate the orientation and attitude of foreign students who are currently studying the English language.It was found that orientation among foreign students do not vary according to nationality and gender.However, majority of the students are more inclined to be instrumentally motivated with more nationality groups agreeing with instrumental orientation.Students from China, Korea, Japan, Indonesia and Sudan tend to be more instrumentally oriented.1983, p. 288).
In general, students are highly motivated to study English, regardless whether they are integrative or instrumentally driven.This could be due to the fact that majority of the respondents are multilingual, being able to speak and write more than one language, and therefore not afraid to approach the English language.Respondents have had the experience of acquiring other languages other than their own, therefore not finding it too difficult to pursue yet another language.For example, students from Kazakhstan are mostly bilingual knowing both Kazakh and Russian.Most Kazakhs have to undergo a schooling system which is conducted in Russian, while also acquiring their own mother tongue.Chinese students also come from a multilingual society which has numerous dialects and languages.Therefore learning another language to them is not foreign, and hence, enabling them to approach the English language positively.
It is also evident that student orientation to learn English does not matter whether or not their perceive things to be.Students may be studies oriented and prefer self advancement for professional gain, hence adopting a more instrumental approach, while others may be more people or culture oriented and interested in social advancement, hence adopting a more successfully acquires a second language will depend upon ethnocentric tendencies, attitude (Moiinvaziri,7007).

Recommendations for institutions and educators
Lecturers and institutions need to make studying English a more motivating experience for the students.This can be done by engaging students in a more interactive and interesting approach towards language learning.Short term obtainable goals should also be set for students to achieve in order to give them a sense of accomplishment and give them the desire to want to continue with the learning.Institutions can also promote integrative orientation by organizing exchange programmes and interaction with other universities to increase language proficiency.Instrumental orientation can also be given by exposing students to the wide spectrum of opportunities that are open to them upon acquiring the language.

Recommendations for future research
As this study focuses on orientation of international students, it would be recommended that further research be done on orientation of working foreigners towards learning English.Other fields of study could include orientation of Malaysian students towards learning English, and the orientation of Malaysian students who are studying abroad in English speaking countries.
Researchers could also measure aspects such as aptitude and academic success that result from learning the language.

Conclusion
Regardless whether students are inclined towards integrative orientation or instrumental orientation, institutions and lecturers need to keep students engrossed in learning the language and inculcate the passion for studying English.Institutions should give students reason to want to pursue English and instill importance in the language.Students should be able to understand the purpose of their learning and see concrete results.Each individual student may be motivated in many ways, therefore lecturers need to understand their orientation and cater to their needs.Students should feel a sense of accomplishment by being able to converse in the target language which will result in a high orientation rate.Hence, this study has identified the differences in orientation among students in order to allow better learning to take place.

Table 1 : Demography of sample
As shown in Table2below, majority of the participants who are currently studying English have resided in Malaysia for 1-3 months with a percentage of 46.1%.26.1% have resided in Malaysia for 4-6 months, 13% between 7-11 months and 14.8% have resided in Malaysia for a year or more.Majority of the students agreed that the reason they are residing in Malaysia to study English was to further their studies.

Table 11 : Level of orientation to learn English at private higher educational institutions in Malaysia
Students from Iran, Kazakhstan, and Maldives were more inclined towards integrative orientation.It is interesting to note that the instrumentally oriented groups are the groups who are usually more passive and reserved in class while the groups who are more inclined towards integrative orientation are more active in speaking and