Measuring Language Learners’ Success Oriented Motivation

Abstract

Turkish language learners’ motivation is affected by a number of internal and external factors such as the reasons why they learn a language, when and how long they learn it and what happens if they fail to learn it well enough to pass the required tests in a specific time. In Turkey, most university students (if they are not proficient) have to learn a foreign language for at least one year in language schools of the universities they are admitted to. Some of these students receive this language education voluntarily, whereas the others have a compulsory language education; therefore, motivation of the learners towards language learning is highly critical. In this study, success-oriented motivation of students at a language school was investigated in terms of their gender, language levels, faculties, achievement scores, university choice rankings and their willingness to learn a foreign language. 678 students from 10 different faculties of two state universities in Eskişehir participated in this study. The students' motivation of success was measured with "Success Oriented Motivation Scale" and the results revealed that there is a positive and significant relationship between success-oriented motivation and language proficiency scores. find out if there was a relationship between language learners’ success-oriented motivation levels and their language achievement scores and to investigate if the success-oriented motivation levels of language learners differed according to a number of independent variables such as gender, language level, faculty, language learning preference and university choice. The data collection tool of this study was developed by Semerci (2010) as a Likert scale which had response codes ranging from 1-5 (1: totally disagree, 5: totally agree) and 4 factors (External Effects, Internal Effects, Target Extension, Self-consciousness). The findings revealed that participants had mostly high motivation levels especially in “external effects” and “target extension” sub-dimensions in the motivation scale. The highest mean scores among all the factors were taken from “External effects” and item 36 (“A warm atmosphere in the class increases my success.”) and item 34 (“I am positively affected if the teacher is eager to teach.”) had the highest mean scores among the other items in the same factor. The findings proved the importance of a positive classroom environment and an encouraging teacher manner in language teaching & learning process. The lowest mean scores in all sub-categories was observed in “Internal effects” and item 13 (“I prepare before going to the language classes.”) and 20 (“I like studying”) were calculated as the lowest ones. As it was mentioned before, university students take this language education immediately after they start university, and this brings many washback effects including weariness and an uncontrolled relaxation after passing a tough test which might negatively influence language learning and teaching. It has also been determined that there is a positive and significant relationship between success-oriented motivation and language proficiency scores. Thus, it is possible to conclude that as the mean scores obtained from any sub-dimension of the success-oriented motivation scale increase, the average language proficiency scores of the learner’s increases.