If on one hand, attitudes and motivation are believed to the primary source of success and may cause the success, and on the other hand, the reverse is also true, then to what extend do attitudes and motivation contribute to the success of language learning?
Are attitudes and motivation really the most important factors in determining success in SLA as Gardner assumed or are other factors equally important? Although most teachers believe that attitudes and motivation are the most important factors in language learning and that attitudes and motivation determine success of language learning, there is some other evidence that success is also dependent on other factors and that success may precede positive attitudes and high motivation.
This paper, then, tries to review the relationship between attitudes and motivation and success in SLA. What Are Attitudes and Motivation? What are Attitudes? Gardner and Lambert and Lightbown and Spada , for example, always use these two terms simultaneously.
According to Gardner , there are two types of attitudes in language learning: attitude toward learning the language, which are relevant to educational attitudes, and attitudes towards the language community, which are relevant to social attitudes. Educational attitudes include attitudes toward the teacher, the course, and learning the language.
Social attitudes, on the other hand, focus on the cultural implication of SLA, such as attitudes toward French Canadians and ethnocentrism. Gardner believes that these two types of attitudes influence the achievement in second language learning. However, he claims that attitudes towards learning the language are more closely related with achievement than attitudes toward the second language community.
What is Motivation? Motivation in language learning is the combination of effort and desire in achieving the goals of learning a language. In addition, Ortega defines motivation in L2 learning as the desire to learn a second language followed by the effort to sustain the initiation. Integrative orientation refers to the reasons suggesting that the learners learn the language in order to learn about, to interact with or to get involved to the community. Therefore, a learner can be said to be integratively motivated if the learner wants to know another culture or language community.
For example, someone may learn Bahasa Indonesia because he or she wants to know Indonesian culture better. Instrumental motivation, on the other hand, refers to the desire to learn the second language for a specific goal or reason such as a reason to get a degree or a job, or to improve social status. Therefore, a learner can be said to be instrumentally motivated when the learner studies the language because of any of those reasons.
Both instrumental and integrative motivations play roles in determining success or failure in language learning, but Gardner and Lambert strongly believe that it is the integrative orientation which is most influential to success in SLA. Attitudes and motivation are measured by using questionnaires administered to the subjects.
This test was first introduced by Gardner The result of this test allows researchers to give a description of what kind of attitudes a particular learner is likely to have and what type of motivation a learner is likely to posses. Another instrument used to measure attitudes and motivation is a questionnaire given by Schmidt, Boraie and Kassabgy Affective Survey measures attitudes and motivation in terms of extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, self-efficacy, and anxiety.
From a number of instruments that may be used to measure attitudes and motivation, AMTB is most widely used by researchers who are interested in investigating the role of attitudes and motivation in language learning, especially those who write their dissertations.
Measuring language proficiency or language achievement is still a problematic issue. There is no standardized language proficiency test that can be used to cover all levels of language proficiency and all aspects of language. Lightbown and Spada state that one problem that make it difficult to reach conclusions about the relationship between motivation and second language learning is the difficulty to define and measure language proficiency because language proficiency tests do not all measure the same kind of knowledge.
Some test may measure oral communication skills, some others may focus on grammatical structure of the language, and some others may measure written communication skills. These tests are prepared for more advanced learners. In the previous discussion, it has been stated that generally most people believe that attitudes and motivation have important roles in facilitating language learning.
This is anecdotal evidence about the effect of attitudes and motivation in language learning. He believes that attitudes and motivation are the most important factors in determining success and failure in SLL. However, this argument has invited a lot of reactions which lead this issue to be controversial over time.
This idea is supported by Lightbown and Spada who state that the way motivation affects learning cannot be precisely indicated by research because it is difficult to identify whether success in SLA is the result of motivation or motivation is enhanced by successful learning.
According to the motivational hypothesis, lack of motivation or interest in knowing any foreign culture will result in linguistic deficiency. This hypothesis may not accept the interrelationship or interdependence between attitudes or motivation and the success or the failure in the SLA process. A lot of learners who have high motivation and positive attitudes display low language proficiency.
In her research, Hermann found that children who have very low achievement, in fact, show positive attitudes and high level of interest. This finding does not support the motivational hypothesis. In this case, it is proven that those who have high level of motivation and positive attitudes toward the language does not necessarily means that they will have high level of proficiency in that language. It means that motivation is not the cause of the success or the failure of language learning.
Skehan presents a model of relationship between attitudes and motivation and success in language learning. The model suggests that positive attitudes work because of the incorporation of more extensive framework, including the classroom events, materials, and general educational reward framework.
Skehan believes that attractiveness of teaching materials, amount of variety in classroom works, the nature of the classroom organization, the nature of teacher-students relationship influence the motivation of students.
He claims that motivation may be caused by the satisfaction of doing well. Therefore, like Herman, who says that success precedes and causes motivation, Skehan also proposes that motivation does not cause success, but motivation follows success.
Another interesting study concerning with whether the successful learning precedes motivation or motivation causes successful learning is that of Strong He investigated the relationship between integrative motivation and acquired language proficiency of Spanish- speaking kindergarten students in a US classroom.
He found that the attitudes of the children are a result of second language acquisition rather than a cause.
They find some limitation regarding the integrative motive hypothesis and the causality hypothesis. First, the hypothesis that integrative motivation is superior is not clearly supported by the empirical evidence. Second, the correlation between attitudes and success in SLA tends to disappear when other factors such as age are controlled statistically.
Crookes and Schmidt consider that the integrative hypothesis is no longer relevant to attitudes toward the second language group and is not relevant to a score on the AMTB.
There are some other researchers who are interested in investigating the role of attitudes and motivation in second language learning. For example, Katesi studied some strategies and processes which involved in learning Bulgarian as a foreign language. He found that attitudes and motivation were significant factors in determining success and failure in language learning. When the students were not using the familiar strategies, their motivation did not significantly influence their success.
This implies that success the students achieved in learning Bulgarian was not simply dependent on their positive attitudes and their high motivation in learning the language, but much more dependent on the strategies used by the students in learning the language. This finding again proves that attitudes and motivation are not the main factors that influence the success and failure of language learning.
Kim also did a research to investigate the role of attitudes and motivation of Korean students who learned Korean as a second language. Attitudes and motivation did not have power in predicting their Korean proficiency.
The two studies of a language other than English have shown that attitudes and motivation may not be independent in predicting success or failure in language learning. Some other variables may cause students to have positive attitudes and high motivation which may lead them to achieve success in learning. This argument is also supported by Skehan who suggests that positive attitudes work because of incorporation of more extensive framework, including the classroom events, materials, and general educational reward framework.
These variables may precede motivation. With respect to the orientation in motivation, Gardner hypothesizes that integrative motivation is more powerful than instrumental motivation in determining successful language learning.
Nevertheless, some studies did not support this argument. Cheng did a study to the cadets in Chinese Military Academy, Taiwan. It was found that there was no significant difference in English Achievement among those who were instrumentally motivated, integratively motivated and those who were balanced between the two types of motivation.
However, the result of the language test showed that females, who were instrumentally motivated, were more successful in language learning because they had greater use of memory, cognitive, and metacognitive strategy.
Therefore, integrative motivation offered for language learning does not have to be the case of all language learning conditions. Another study that shows the importance of instrumental orientation in language learning is the work of Dornyei He claims that instrumental motivation might be more important than integrative motivation for foreign language learners.
It is surprising that Gardner in his further study conducted in collaboration with MacInntyre appears to support the idea that instrumental orientation also contributes to successful language learning.
They found that instrumentally motivated learners did better on vocabulary test than non-instrumentally motivated students. Although they claim that there must be a special condition for the instrumentally motivated students to be successful in language learning, this instrumental orientation need to be taken into account because it has a powerful effect in language learning.
Conclusion There may be a number of other studies on the relationship between attitudes and motivation and success in language learning. The studies may reveal contradicting findings that make the discussion of this issue never come to a fixed conclusion. The questions of whether attitudes and motivation causes success or prior success makes learners motivated and have positive attitudes and what attitudes and motivation facilitate what kinds or what aspects of language proficiency or language achievement.
First is that certain variables in attitudes and motivation may cause success in certain aspects, but not in other aspects of language learning. In other words, the correlation between attitudes and motivation and successful language learning cannot be taken as evidence of causal relationship.
Thus, the same students would show if there were any changes in their motivation and attitudes related to their achievement in foreign language learning. References: Brown, H. Principles of language learning and teaching 4th Ed. New York: Longman. Brown, H. The target language teaching program was aimed at teaching all of the language learning abilities in detail. The questionnaire was a Motivation Scale prepared for this study, based on Costello and Entwisle , which has been used in previous research and was adapted for this study.
The results of the questionnaire were sorted according to the three motivation types. Questions 1, 3, 4, 7, 9, 10, and 15 were about integrative motivation, questions 5, 12, 13, 16, 17, 18, and 19 were about instrumental motivation, and questions 2, 6, 8, 11, 14, 20, and 21 were about the work avoidance motivation.
Results were evaluated in terms of percentage rates and analysis of variance ANOVA according to gender, age, and which of the two classes the participants belonged to. RESULTS The results of this study confirm the importance of the integrative, instrumental, and work avoidance motivations in second language learning. Data collected were as follows: Both the males and females had enough integrative motivation to learn new behaviors in regard to the target second language.
The ages of the students ranged from 17 to It was found that those aged 17 and 21 were slightly keener to learn a foreign language than those aged 18 to On the other hand, it may be said that all were quite eager to learn the chosen target language. That eagerness is also a variable in integrative motivation. This difference arises from the different integrative motivation levels and periods.
Namely, at the age of seventeen the students were so keen to learn that this enabled them to attain higher marks. Both classes A and B had the same level of willingness and eagerness with regard to integrative motivation because they had the same — or similar — environmental experiences, cultural beliefs, and values.
According to our investigation, the instrumental motivation levels of the male and female students were the same. All of the students from both classes had the same goal of attaining higher marks and being successful in learning the target second language.
Students from both classes shared the belief that instrumental motivation is very important for their success in learning, especially in learning a foreign language. Males and females shared very similar ideas about work avoidance motivation.
Age was not found to have a significant impact as related to gender. According to the results of our study, both classes were hesitant about work avoidance motivation, but this was more pronounced with group B.
The results are similar to those of other integrative and instrumental motivation studies. Group B were found to participate more than group A, although the difference was not significant. Both sexes gained relatively high marks of eight or more points on the achievement test. Females gained slightly higher scores overall, although this result may have been influenced by the larger number of female participants as compared to males.
According to the data, all students were successful in learning a second language. This was especially true for those aged According to the other tables, students aged 17, 18, 19, 20, and 21 received eight or more points on the achievement test. This may be accounted for by the fact that they have acquired new knowledge. Both classes had very similar examination results. Therefore, it is likely that both classes had similar skill levels when learning a second language.
The distribution of the motivation ratios according to the options that we gave to the students is divided into three stages. The students particularly complained about the class being limited to a certain size. This is due in part to the fact that these ideas are contrary to their points of view regarding their second language learning achievement. In the fourth stage of the distribution, there was agreement among the students, but also some hesitation about the three kinds of motivation types.
This may be due to the students of the English Language Department being aware of the importance of learning their second language and being very accomplished. The students did not agree with this idea because they want to learn a foreign language for their own reasons, not because their family want them to.
The students were aware of their goals, and formed their achievement criteria to meet these goals. As far as they were concerned, there was no benefit to be gained by learning the second language if they were only doing so because their parents were making them. This indicates that they do not have any motivation to avoid studying the target foreign language. Thus it is assumed that the students create their own personal criteria for goals they set for learning the second language.
These are achieved by putting in extra effort in their coursework. They have opposing variables in that this attitude does not encourage an interest in succeeding. This particularly affects their achievement with regard to learning a foreign language. This awareness creates a desire to learn one or more foreign languages and as a result produces and develops integrative and instrumental motivation.
The more integrative and instrumental motivation a person has, the less likely he or she is to experience work avoidance motivation. It is, therefore, very important for foreign language teachers to provide their students with enough integrative and instrumental motivation.
This would be facilitated by understanding how the student is motivated. Teachers can utilize learning tools focusing on positive motivation types and less on work avoidance motivation. In addition, it is also evident that the more positive motivation types the students possess, the more they are able to benefit from their learning activities.
If students are aware of the expectations of learning the second language and if they have adequate information about the importance of understanding, speaking, writing, and reading the chosen international foreign language, it will facilitate their achieving of success in all their endeavors. They need to be encouraged to understand that they must learn all the facets of the chosen foreign language or languages in order to advance in their careers.
As with previous investigations in this area, in the present study close relationships were found between success in learning a second language and the three motivation types that were explored in the study. Two scales to measure achievement motivation. Journal of Psychology, 66, Engin, A.
The indirect speech method approach and the variables which affect learning success in developing foreign language speaking abilities. Ekev Academy Journal, 28, Erzurum, Turkey. To dispel fantasies about fantasy-based measures of achievement motivation.
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