Listening to our learners' voices: what demotivates Japanese high school students?

Abstract

Interview guides and a questionnaire were developed in order to find what f actors demotivated students in Japanese high school English classrooms. Five college students who were attending two private universities and one public university shared their views about demotivation in the interviews. Forty-two students at a public university responded to a questionnaire consisting of mainly open-ended response questions. Through qualitative analysis five factors were found: (1) individual teacher behavior in classroom; (2) the grammar—translation method used in instruction; (3) tests and university entrance examinations; (4) the memorization nature of vocabulary learning; and (5) textbook/reference book-related issues. It is hoped that these learners’ stories will help Japanese and other teachers to realize what pitfalls to avoid in their instruction.

A Questionnaire-based Study on Chinese University Students’ Demotivation to Learn English

“…Therefore, Factor 1 is named as "teaching material, teaching content and teaching process". This echoes Kikuchi (2009) that the teaching mode is the inducement of demotivation.…”

Turkish Students' Demotivation to Study English: A Scale Development / Demotiviranost turskih učenika za učenje engleskoga jezika: razvijanje mjerne skale

“…Moreover, when the results of the studies done in other countries were compared with this study, factors such as "interference of another foreign language being studied" (Dörnyei, 1998, "punishments" , "grammar-translation" (Falout et al, 2009;Kikuchi, 2009), "simultaneous learning of other languages" (Alavania & Sehat, 2012), "focus on difficult grammar" and "attitudes towards English speaking community" (Dörnyei, 1998Falaut & Maruyama, 2004;Kaivanpanah & Ghasemi, 2011 ) were not seen in this study. This may be attributed to the fact that these factors can be peculiar to the English-language learning context in the countries (and even in the very schools) the studies were conducted .…”

“…Zbog toga da bi učenici bili uspješni u učenju ciljnoga jezika, ključno je da su visoko motivirani. Međutim, motivacija učenika podložna je mnogim negativnim utjecajima dok traje proces učenja ciljnoga jezika (Dörnyei i Ushioda, 2011;Falout, Elwood, i Hood, 2009;Falout i Maruyama, 2004;Kikuchi, 2009;Kikuchi i Sakai, 2009). Ti utjecaji umanjuju njihovu motivaciju na početku procesa učenja jezika.…”

“…For this reason, it is vital that students be highly motivated to be successful in learning the target language. However, students' motivation is subject to many negative influences during the process of target language learning Falout, Elwood, & Hood, 2009;Falout & Maruyama, 2004;Kikuchi, 2009;. These influences diminish their motivation at the beginning of their target language learning process in time.…”

Emerged challenges for English education in Japan

“…Perhaps students feel a "permanent sense of crisis" (Ryan, 2009, p. 407) because of the dissonances and tension between English for tests and English for communication. Recent studies on de-motivation conducted in Japan reported that English classes often cause students to lose motivation (Hasegawa, 2004;Ikeno, 2002;Kikuchi, 2009). It is thought that these de-motivated students bring pain and negative feeling into new classrooms.…”