The Factors that Affect Qatari College Students’ Motivation and Attitudes to Learn English

Abstract

This qualitative study investigated the factors that affected the motivation and receptivity of English as a second language of female students who enrolled in the English Language center of the Foundation Program in the Community College of Qatar in the academic year 2015/2016. Besides, the study attempted to identify the mechanisms that are used by families, teachers, college administrators, and classmates that motivate or demotivate the students. Finally, the study tried to identify how the classroom environment impacted students’ motivation. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 8 students in different ESL levels in which the participants were asked different questions related to the impact of five dimensions on the respondents’ motivation to learn English. These dimensions are concerned about family impact, teachers’ impact, administrators’ impact, classmates’ impact, and impact of the respondents’ willingness and goals to learn the target language. The questions were validated by a jury of five specialists in teaching and educational psychology prior to the interviews. The interviews were recorded, transliterated, and analyzed manually and by Atlas.it software. Codes and categories were established based on the interviews. Frequencies of words, verbs and adjectives used by the respondents in their talk, were calculated. Results showed that students’ were affected by all the above-mentioned dimensions at different proportions. The results also depicted the importance of the necessity to provide help, encouragement and emotional support to students by their socio-cultural relationships with their families, teachers, administrators and classmates.

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