English Language Teaching Department Students' Identity Changes Associated With English Language Learning

Abstract

English is regarded as an international language and because of that, most Indonesian students must learn English as foreign language (EFL). Considerably, learning any languages, including English is not only a matter of the language itself. It is also related to its culture‘s behavioral norms, and culture values that commonly determine self-identity of its users. This quantitative study investigated English Language Teaching Department students‘ identity changes associated with English language learning. The subjects were 85 English Language Teaching Department students of Satya Wacana Christian University, obtained from a purposive sampling. The instrument of the research was a closed-ended questionnaire about six categories of self-identity changes based on a study conducted by Gao Yihong, Cheng Ying, ZhaoYuan, and Zhou Yan (2005). According to literature of bilinguals‘ identities, those six categories of identity changes are: self-confidence, subtractive bilingualism change, additive bilingualism change, productive bilingualism change, identity split change, and the last one is zero change. The results showed that in the English Language Teaching Department of Satya Wacana Christian University EFL context, the most prominent identity changes type occurred on the learners was self-confidence.