STUDENT’S AFFECTIVE FILTERS AT A SUBURB AREA IN JEMBER

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the prevalence of the affective filter faced by students at suburb area in Jember, and thereby recommends some change to improve the situation. This study focuses on the causes of affective filter and how it interferes students’ language learning. The term affective filters are first introduced by Dulay and Burt in 1977 then developed by Krashen in 1985 as one of his five input hypothesis, people acquire second language if they obtain comprehensible input and their affective filters are low enough to allow the input in (Krashen, 2009). The affective filters itself refer to the barriers which block or filtrate the input in the learner’s brain. It is a mental wall which hampered the learners’ in acquiring the language. In other words, the learners with lower affective filters will allow more input into their language acquisition device than the learners with the high affective filters. Affective filters embraces motivation, self-confidence, and anxiety. According to the interview, this study notices that from 10 students who are interviewed most of them (8 of 10 students) have low motivation in learning English. Only one student has high self-confidence while the rest of the participants do not believe in their own ability. And 9 of the participants show that they are anxious English learners. Based on the finding and discussion, there are 8 of 10 students have low motivation. For most of them learning English is only about passing the English test and following the rule of the curriculum and teacher.