Individual Learning Management Determines the Success of EFL Mastery

Before I explore my opinion in detail, this opinion-based essay besides is aimed at exploring a sort of summary constructed from my prior related experiences and knowledge pertinent to EFL learning investment, it is also aimed at encouraging you, my students in IAIN Curup, either you taking EFL education as your major or you from other majors, who are going to be the prospective teachers, academicians, and professionals, wherein your professionalism-related community in the future will be looking forward to your sufficient EFL skills in addition to other pedagogical skills as well as professionalism-oriented skills. The following viewpoints are presented to cast light on several ideas vis-a-vis EFL individual learning management on account of EFL skills per se that are of importance to you from any major. The ideas as such entail: 1) an analogy drawing on EFL individual learning which is in a similar way to doing business, 2) the means of executing EFL individual learning processes pursuant to proper functions of management, and 3) the conception embedding the importance of lifelong learning as the nature of mankind.

The sense of learning is at some degree similar to doing business. In business world, there are three elements that are always addressed. They are comprised of capital, effort, and success. In this regard, the extent of capital and effort will determine the degree of success. A small amount of capital will drive a businessman to tediously make a harder effort so that he can attain a particular level of temporary success as well as gain some income to be invested into the capital for its greater amount. The greater the capital becomes, the more obvious the paths for his efforts are, the greater plausibility of success he can achieve. In the aspect of individual learning, it is nonetheless also oriented towards the three elements nuanced in doing business but construed in several different terms. The first element, capital, in the context of learning, encompasses willingness, ambition, and imagined communities. These are the sub-elements which trigger your learning effort. Hence, if coming into a specific notion of EFL individual learning, embedding positive willingness to learn EFL, setting high ambition which is targeted as the horizon of EFL mastery, and imagining the communities of practice whereby EFL will be ideally used will thoroughly determine how great the extent of learning efforts you are going to make. The learning effort in situ when grounded in its practical ways needs a good management which eventually leads to some varieties of chosen learning strategies conforming to a learner’s individuality or personality trait. Learning efforts without a proper system of management will incline to result in less success compared to those driven by an ideal management mechanism.

The major functions of management in the aspect of EFL individual learning fall into the following categories: 1) to plan a series of individual learning activities that conceivably contribute to the mastery of your EFL skills; 2) to organize the ideal EFL learning activities to be individually carried out for short term milestones and those in the long run; 3) to lead yourselves to constantly be motivated insofar as you are confronted with dynamic challenges while learning individually; and 4) to control by means of comparing the current success to the expected achievement that should be attained at present, thus this way can lead you to find a gap of the problem to be solved by yourselves for the sake of further improvement. In the application, when you implement the aforementioned four functions of management, it is also necessary for you to sufficiently deal with some essential variables with respect to English language per se, and those variables should be the oriented aspects of your individual learning activities for each of the management functions. Amid those variables, the first set of variables encompass EFL vocabularies and grammar given that without vocabularies you can communicate nothing, and without grammar you can merely communicate inadequately few points. Accordingly, those variables are of paramount importance to be considered in your learning management. The second set of variables subsume listening, speaking, reading, and writing as the skills to be taken into account anytime you are applying EFL learning management. Furthermore, the third set of variables incorporate the issues of discourse, sociolinguistic, and intercultural competences. Especially for you who are reading this article at the moment, please do not feel confused about the last variables! Simply speaking, discourse competence portrays your ability to maintain your communication (in both spoken and written mode) within an appropriate ideational cohesion and textual coherence. Sociolinguistic competence refers to your ability to communicate within the general social convention that you and your interlocutor perceive. Intercultural competence extends to your attitude, knowledge, interactive skills, and awareness needed to be positively broaden when using EFL to interact with people from diverse cultures.

In order to help make you continuously motivated, you need to embed in your self-concept that the essence of learning is actually lifelong. Learning is the nature of human inasmuch as we, humans, were born with the efficacy to manage to adapt to any kind of new environment, to make an effort to understand things around us, and also to construct our own knowledge or perception as regards the things that we observe. With its nature, learning for humans can even be parallel to breathing. Breathing will stop when the death comes, and so will learning. In light of learning as the nature of humans, as an individual who does the action of learning, you have to keep in your mind that you certainly have no reasons for not to learn daily and continuously. In the context of EFL mastery, you will definitely gain increasing improvements if you sustainably maintain to undertake the functions of learning management across the overall English variables as introduced in prior along with the embodiment of lifelong learning.

Individual learning management really has an impact on the success of EFL mastery. Someone who is knowledgeable and skillful at his major, in this regard let us say English education, is not by virtue of the institution where he is studying his major but because of how he dedicates his maximal effort to apply individual learning in deepening and widening his ability, insights, and competences vis-a-vis that major. Thus, as the last words for you, keep learning on and on!