Abstract:
Demotivation is a relatively new topic in the field of second or foreign language acquisition which is in need of more rigorous research. In this regard, the present study was an attempt to investigate university students’ perceptions of seven demotivating factors in learning English as a foreign language across educational levels and fields of study in an Iranian context. To this end, three hundred and eighty two Persian learners of English were selected through stratified clustering sampling procedure to participate in this mixed method study. The data was collected through a 40-item Likert type questionnaire and a follow-up interview. The results of the study revealed that postgraduate students were significantly different from undergraduate students regarding their perception of inadequate facilities, lack of purpose to study English and class characteristics. The comparisons of four groups of field of study including social sciences, basic sciences, engineering, and medicine showed significant differences with respect to inadequate facilities, teaching methods, and reduced self-confidence. The findings had important pedagogical implications for curriculum planning and teaching English in tertiary education since diagnosing differences in perceptions of demotivating factors in learning EFL across educational levels and fields of study could pave the way in the procedure of removing and preventing such detrimental features.
Machine summary:
Dornyei (2001a) presented the following nine factors as demotivators: a) teachers’ personalities, commitment, competence, and teaching methods, b) inadequate school facilities (very big group, not the right level, or frequent change of teachers), c) reduced self-confidence due to experience of failure or lack of success, d) negative attitude toward the foreign language, e) compulsory nature of the foreign language, f) interference of another foreign language that pupils are studying, g) negative attitude toward the community of the foreign language spoken, h) attitudes of group members, and i) course books used in class.
However, in a follow-up study considering both internal and external factors, different components were extracted: a) learning content, b) teacher competence and teaching style, c) inadequate school facilities, d) lack of intrinsic motivation, and e) test scores (Sakai & Kikuchi, 2009).
In a recent study of university students, Hosseinpour and Heidari (2013) extracted seven factors including a) inadequate facilities b) reduced self-confidence, c) class characteristics, d) lack of purpose to study English, e) teaching methods, f) teachers and teaching styles, and g) negative attitudes toward English and the culture of English-speaking countries as demotivators.
2. Instruments The demotivation questionnaire (see Appendix) designed by Hosseinpour and Heidari Tabrizi (2013) which consisted of forty, 5-point Likert type, items was applied to assess students’ perceptions of seven demotivating factors including a) inadequate facilities b) reduced self- confidence, c) class characteristics, d) lack of purpose to study English, e) teaching methods, f) teachers and teaching styles, and g) negative attitudes toward English and the culture of English- speaking countries.