Students' Motivation and Attitude towards Learning Foreign Languages: A Case Study of Moroccans' Learners of English, German, and Spanish

Abstract

This paper attempts to investigate the types of motivation that influence Moroccan students' choice of learning a foreign language and their attitudes towards this language. Also, it aims at looking at these students' attitude toward the language type, learning environment, teaching pedagogy and content, as well as theirself-assessment of the four skills and their self-ranking in class. Ninety-one university Moroccan students enrolled in English, German, and Spanish languages took part in this study. Data were collected summer of 20 14 in Morocco through a survey questionnaire. Findings reveal that for English and Spanish learners integrative and personal orientations were predictors of their motivation to learn these languages. For German learners, on the other hand, instrumental motivation was preferred over integrative and personal motivations. One-way Anova analysis shows that there are no statistically significant differences in motivation within groups or between groups of learners of these three foreign languages. It was also found that only English learners hold a positive attitude towards the language of study and its level of difficulty, and one-way Anova indicates that is a statistically significant difference in opinion between the three groups of learners. In addition, only English learners manifest favorable attitude towards the practicality of the foreign language, its use in higher education especially in Science and technology, and its future increase in Moroccan society. With regard to the learning environment, content, teacher's pedagogical approach, and types of activities used in the class, all the three group of learners expressed negative attitudes and did not approve of the ways these foreign languages are taught. The findings of the present study have important implications for teachers of foreign languages because of the lack of motivation and negative attitude most of these learners' manifest.