CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
Language is a very important phenomenon in the life of every individual. On daily basis, we communicate our ideas, feelings, desires, likes, dislikes, etc to people in community through language (spoken, written or signed).
O’Grady (2011:1) highlights and affirms the usefulness of language by saying:
Language is at the heart of all things human. We use it when we are taking, thinking, reading, writing and listening. It is part of the social structure of our communities, it forges the emotional bond between parent and a child; it is the vehicle for literature and poetry. Language is not just a part of us; language defines us.
From the foregoing, it is important to state categorically, that language encompasses all human activities. It is an indispensable tool used by members of a speech community to communicate their thoughts to one another. Nnamdi-Eruchalu (2012:1) rightly states that man cannot relate with the world around him without language.
Accordingly, Edward Sapir (1921:8) in Lyons (2009:3) stresses “that language is purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of voluntarily produced symbols”. This implies that every normal human being is endowed with the innate ability to acquire language. This natural (innate) ability according to Noam Chomsky (1975) quoted in Agbedo (2009:20), and Nnamdi (2012:19) is called the Language Acquisition Device (LAD). Similarly, Oates (1972:127) cited in Ajisafe (2009:1) notes the importance of language and avers that “the acquisition of the ability to use language is one of the most impressive pieces of learning that an individual achieves in the course of his life”.
Issues bothering on language have attracted the attention of scholars from disciplines such as linguistics, psychology, sociology, philosophy, rhetoric, literary criticism, etc. Among these disciplines, we will limit our discussion in this work to linguistics. Nnamdi-Eruchalu (2012:8) opines that linguistics is interested in the historical study of written language, and the study of spoken language and its description as it is at a given point in time. This aspect of linguistics is referred to as “historical linguistics”. This discipline (linguistics) covers areas such as phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics (otherwise known as micro linguistics), and the macro linguistics which include applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, comparative linguistics, etc. Among these, we shall limit our discussion in this research to an aspect of the micro linguistics — “phonetics”.
This research work is set to harness the role of motivation in the acquisition of phonetic sounds — a case study of the Ebonyi State University Students, Abakaliki. Ebonyi State, Nigeria.
1.1   BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY
Ajisafe (2009:2) opines that “motivation is an important psychological construct that initiates and affects learning and performance and so is very necessary in language learning and acquisition”. Subsequently, Ajisafe (2009) sees motivation as one of the major similarities and differences between how a First Language (L1) and a Second Language (L2) or additional languages are learnt in which the difference lies in the level or degree of motivation. Ajisafe (2009) further notes that it is a condition that determines how fast or how well a language is learned/acquired. Umaru (2008:31) draws a distinction between “acquisition” and “learning”. Acquisition according to Umaru (2008) refers to the “non conscious incorporation of the target language structure resulting from exposure to and interaction with target language speakers in genuine communicative contexts”. Learning, on the other hand, involves the “conscious incorporation of target language rules and is facilitated by explicit presentation of these rules compiled with feedback in the form of error correction”. Yule (1996:191) in Agbedo (2009:74) also stated that in acquisition, the process is “sub-conscious and effortless”; in learning, the process is “conscious and effortful”.
Although the distinction exist as can be seen above, but we will consider both (acquisition and learning) to mean the same, hence the use of language learning/acquisition in this work.
The usefulness of motivation cannot be left unsaid as Morgan, King, Weisz and Schopler (1993:303) opine that “motivation refers to the driving and pulling forces which results in persistent behaviour directed toward particular goals”. From the foregoing, one can deduce that motivation brings about recurrent/repeated behaviour. Hockenbury and Hockenbury (2000:306) concur with the view of Morgan et al (1993) as they posit that “Motivation refers to the forces acting on or within an organism to initiate and direct behaviour”. Motivation can be either internal or external in nature. It is internal, if the behaviour emanates from the inside (within) of an individual, and external if the desire/behaviour is coming from outside/acting upon the individual.