Difficulties in Learning English As a Second Or Foreign Language

instrumental
motivation drives learners to succeed in order to improve their life, or to 
meet their needs or goals in life. An example of this was when Ching spent several 
months laboriously learning specific English content in order to pass the examination for 
U.S. citizenship. While this effort was successful, it failed to generate long term 
momentum for this learner, either in fluency or in literacy.
The fourth type of motivation is intrinsic, which reflects “the arousal and 
maintenance of curiosity” in learning activities themselves by learners (Ellis, 1997).
Intrinsically motivated learners simply enjoy the process of second language learning 
and thrive in the environment of the second language classroom as well as in the 
target language learning environment. Perhaps for Ching, who was already keenly 
aware of her lack of English ability, the only English activities that were intrinsically 
motivating were those that were entertaining. She enjoyed stories immensely, 
especially love stories, whether in simple ESL lessons or in movies or television, but 
they could not provide the solid foundation or necessary practice for effective English 
learning. 

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First Language 
Every learner of a foreign language is bound to experience some level of first 
language interference, or negative transfer as it is referred to, and defined by Ellis 
(1997) as “the influence that the learner’s L1 (first language) exerts over the 
acquisition of an L2 (second language)” (p. 51). However, for some FL learners,
negative transfer is only one of many problems related to the first language.
The findings showed that the learner had a weak and almost ambiguous first 
language and early education experience, first learning her local language orally and 
then developing her first literacy learning her second language in the classroom from 
teachers unskilled in the process of teaching second language. Thus, she was not 
literate in her first language; she was preliterate, as defined by Huntley (1992, as cited 
in Burt & Peyton, 2003). Her first literacy began relatively late in her childhood 
development, setting the stage for a weak first language learning experience and a 
less than ideal early education.
Since FL learning is the learning of language and skills in the native language 
provide the foundation for FL learning (Ganschow, Sparks, & Javorsky, 1998), this 
learner might have been doomed to language learning difficulty early in life. In learning 
ESL, learners draw on the skills they used to learn their first language (Coady, 1979, as 
cited in Holm & Dodd, 1996). Ching’s first language and first literacy learning skills 
were not well developed and were based mostly on memorization. That language 
learning background did very little to prepare her for the study of English.
English is an alphabetic language with phonological (i.e., letter/sound) and 
orthographic (i.e., letter/spelling) rules that do not exist in nonalphabetic languages, so 

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ESL learners whose first language was nonalphabetic and who learned their native 
language without the use of phonological and orthographic rules might have a much 
lower phonological awareness than ESL learners who learned their first language with 
an alphabetic system or whose first language is alphabetic. Learners of ESL whose first 
language is not alphabetical and who did not learn their first language in an 
alphabetically coded manner will have particular difficulty in learning English 
(Ganschow et al., 1998; Holm & Dodd, 1996; Krug et al., 2002). Further, Campbell and 
Butterworth (1985, as cited in Holm & Dodd) established that phonological awareness is 
an important skill for the processing of unknown words in English. 
Other authors (Goswami & Bryant, 1990; Mann, 1986; Read, Zhang, Nie, & 
Ding, 1986; all cited in Holm & Dodd, 1996) have shown that phonological 
awareness is developed only through acquisition of an alphabetic orthography and 
that people with specific reading disability in English usually show deficits in 
phonological processing. Neither the participant’s first oral language nor her first 
literacy was taught with the aid of phonemic coding. Oral Taiwanese was learned by 
mimicking and Chinese, a logographic written form, was taught by a look and say 
method. Thus, when the learner was exposed to English, first in middle school and 
later in more demanding situations as an adult learner, she was not versed in or 
otherwise prepared to approach the sound and spelling or phonological/orthographic 
rules system of the alphabetic English language.
Even as an adult ESL learner, she had never been exposed to that way of 
language learning, nor had she been taught the phonological and orthographic rules 
necessary to the efficient study of English as a second language. Like the similarly 

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taught Hong Kong-Chinese ESL learners in the Holm and Dodd (1996) study, Ching 
had limited phonological awareness, and her ability to learn new words in English 
suffered from that limitation. 
While some of these deficits might reflect aptitude weaknesses in phonemic 
coding ability or grammatical sensitivity, for example, screening data regarding the