The Motivation of L 2 Learners : Does It Decrease with Age ?

This study investigated the motivation of a heterogeneous group of students studying English as a foreign language at the International School in Tripoli area. The aim of the study was to find out the extent to which various factors affect students’ motivation and achievement in second/foreign language learning particularly as they enter the senior high school. The research also looked into the temporal dimension of L2 motivation to see if the students’ motivation changes as they enter the senior high school. One hundred and forty four students from thirty five nationalities learning English and five teachers participated in the completion of the questionnaire surveys. Twenty students and three teachers took part in the semi-structured interviews. Data were drawn from students’ examination results and a combined quantitative-qualitative approach in which student and teacher questionnaire surveys were followed by a round of student and teacher interviews. The results of the ‘Student’s Motivation Questionnaire’ show that L2 motivation in the sample decreases with age: The results of one-way analyses of variance across the five age groups investigated show that the older learners tend to score significantly lower on the motivational scales and the interviews data gives further support to this finding. There are a number of influential factors that affect learners’ motivation: in particular the role of the teacher was seen fundamental in determining the attitude to the language and in supplying motivation. Other external factors include aspects related to the learning context.


Introduction
It has been commonly accepted that the learners' achievement in learning a second/foreign language is related to their level of motivation to learn the language.Motivation is a kind of internal drive that encourages a learner to pursue a course of action and is responsible for initiating the learning and later the driving force to sustain the learning process over the long and arduous years it takes to learn a language.It is believed that without sufficient motivation no other factor on its own can ensure student achievement (Dörnyei, 2001).
The first three decades of L2 motivation research saw a considerable amount of empirical investigations which were mostly inspired by Robert Gardner and his associates in Canada applying versions of a standardised motivation test.The results of this research have demonstrated that attitudes and motivation are related to how well individuals learn a second/foreign language.By the early 1990s the study of motivation took a turning point following a call to arms by Crookes & Schmidt (1991) to explore various directions in which the social psychological construct of L2 motivation could be further developed.As a result of this, the 1990s saw an influx of L2 research that extended and covered a variety of issues, particularly cognitive and situation-specific variables.
Amongst some of the researchers who have made an invaluable contribution to our understanding of L2 motivation are Williams & Burden (1997).These authors reviewed a substantial number of general motivational theories as well as some recent research on L2 motivation.The different aspects of this research have been presented in the form of a framework of motivational factors.
Similarly, Dörnyei (1994) attempted to integrate the various components of motivation and at the same time focus on the components that would be applicable to foreign language learning contexts as opposed to second language learning contexts.He drew up an extended motivational framework which was similar in nature but broader to that of Crookes & Schmidt's (1991) approach.The tripartite division of the framework was also based on the empirical results of Clément, Dörnyei & Noels, (1994) classroom study in Hungary in which a tripartite L2 motivation construct emerged comprising integrativeness, linguistic self-confidence and the appraisal of the classroom environment.Using this as the basis, Dörnyei developed a more general framework of L2 motivation.This framework consists of three relatively distinct levels.
The first level is The Language Level which comprises the Integrative Motivational Subsystem and the Instrumental Motivational Subsystem.The second level of this motivational construct is The Learner Level, which involves various cognitive aspects of motivation which form part of the 'baggage' that a person brings to the learning process.The third level of motivation is the Learning Situation Level which involves three sub-categories of motivational components.
A review of the literature on motivation in an educational context reveals that even though research has been carried out on student motivation, only a few studies have been conducted analysing the dynamics of L2 motivational change in educational institutions (Chambers, 1999;Williams & Burden, 1999;Williams, Burden & Lanvers, 2002;Tachibaba, Matsukawa & Zhong, 1996;Gardner, Masgoret, Tennant & Mihic, 2004) despite the fact that the learners' interest needs to be sustained over the many years it takes to learn a language.It appears logical therefore, that research on the temporal dimension of L2 motivation is important to our understanding of the different influential factors that affect learners throughout the lengthy process of their study.
Since the results of the above studies suggest that the motivation of learners in school contexts declines with age and that it is influenced by external factors related to the teacher and course-specific motivational components outlined in Dörnyei's (1994) framework of L2 motivation, the objectives of the current study were to find out: (a) the extent in which various factors affect students' motivation and achievement in second/foreign language learning particularly as they enter the senior high school; (b) to carry out a cross-comparison of the results obtained by the questionnaire with those of the interviews and (c) to obtain additional information on how students motivation can be enhanced.

Participants
The participants in this study were students and teachers from the 'International School of the Martyrs' in the Tripoli area.One hundred and forty four students from thirty five nationalities learning English participated in the questionnaire survey.The participants were selected from five different levels: Grades 6 -10 (See Table 1).All the participants in these levels who were present on the days the questionnaire was administered took part in the completion of this instrument.The students' grades, gender and language proficiency level are summarised in Table 1.
In all, five teachers participated in the completion of the 'Teacher's Evaluation of Student's Motivation Questionnaire', two from the elementary school and three from the high school.The teachers are from three ethnic backgrounds: European, North American and Indian.There were twenty students (8 males and 12 females) that took part in the semi-structured interviews.They constitute four ethnic backgrounds: Europeans (6); Asians (1); Arabs (11) and Africans (2).Eight students were selected from Grade 8, six from Grade 9 and six from Grade 10.Students were chosen according to the following criteria: • They had completed the student questionnaire.
• They were sufficiently talkative to allow for the gathering of rich data.
• They were available at the time of the interviews.Three teachers participated in the semi-structured interviews.They were from three ethnic backgrounds: European, North American and Indian.The criteria that was used for teacher selection was based on which levels the teachers had taught.

Instruments
Data were collected using both quantitative and qualitative methods.In all a total of four research instruments were devised for this study: a questionnaire for students, a questionnaire for teachers, one round of semi-structured interviews for students and a semi-structured interview for teachers.In addition to this the achievement scores of the first-term examination were provided by each class teacher.

Procedures
The investigation consisted of four stages.For the initial stage a Student's Motivation Questionnaire was administered to all students in Grades 6-10 during their regular class time.The questionnaire consisted of 101 statements, questions and bipolar adjectives, which required the students to respond to the items by simply evaluating a statement/question on a five-point Likert scale or marking their responses on seven-point semantic differential scales.In addition, two open-ended statements provided the students with the opportunity to include their own ideas on ways which they thought could help them learn these languages.The questionnaire also sought to obtain background information about the students.The main part of the questionnaire consisted of 101 items about the learning of English, representing 19 motivational variables.The number of items for each variable varied from two to fourteen.Table 2 presents the main variables that were used in this study and number of items that addressed them.
For the second stage of data elicitation the 'Teacher's Evaluation of Student's Motivation Questionnaire' was devised for the teachers who taught the classes that took part in this study.This instrument consisted of three items which focused on the teachers' perception of (a) the motivation of the students to learn these languages; (b) how active they were in class; (c) how conscientious they were towards their homework assignments.For each item the teachers were asked to respond by marking an option on a 7 point-semantic differential scale.The aim of this instrument was to collect performance data about the students and, based on this, to select students to participate in the subsequent interview sessions.
For the third and fourth stages of data collection, semi-structured interview techniques were used for students and teachers.It was believed that the data collected by this method would enable the students to elaborate on the issues raised in an exploratory manner and allow the researchers to explore the underlying patterns of thinking that go beyond the surface level answers on questionnaires.
The interviews were conducted with the students and teachers during the regular school time.The interview questions for students and teachers are as follows:

Students 1)
. How important is it for you to study English?
2).Has your motivation to learn English changed over the years, if so why?
3).What can the school do to enhance your motivation? 4).How can teachers help increase your motivation? 5).What other things would help increase your motivation?2.3.2Teachers 1).Do you think there is a change in students' motivation as they grow older, if so why do you think this is?
2).What do you think the school can do to enhance student motivation?
3).What can teachers do to help increase student motivation?

Data analysis
The data obtained from the Student's Motivation Questionnaire was computer coded and processed with the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 9.2.The negatively worded statements were recoded before calculating the composite scale scores.The 'Teacher's Evaluation of Student's Motivation Questionnaire' and the Achievement scores were also analysed using the SPSS.
The analytical procedure consisted of four phases.Firstly, in order to check if the scales in our 'Student's Motivation Questionnaire' were reliable, the researcher computed for each scale the Cronbach Alpha internal consistency reliability coefficient.Items which reduced the internal consistency of a scale were omitted from the scales before further analytical procedures were carried out.As can be seen in Table 3 most figures meet acceptable levels of reliability.
Secondly, a correlational analysis using Pearson Product-Moment Correlations was conducted to identify the interrelationship between the motivational variables and to examine the relationship between those factors and effort, motivated behaviour and achievement scores.Thirdly, a One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was performed to compare the mean scores of the motivational variables, effort and motivated behaviour across the various age groups.Fourthly, Post-hoc tests were conducted to find out which groups were significantly different to each other.
The semi-structured interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed.The data were content analysed in two groups, Grade 8 and Grades 9 and 10 in order to look for patterns and relationships within the text and compare responses between the different age groups.Notes were taken of student's answers and were listed in specific descriptive phrases that could be presented and read in a clear and comprehensible fashion.At the end of the analysis there was one complete table illustrating the responses to the questions.As with the students' interviews the tape-recorded interviews of the teachers were analysed in a similar fashion to that of the students.

Reliability of the student's motivation questionnaire
By grouping items that measured the same target area it was possible to obtain multi-item scales and compute total scale scores for them.Based on theoretical considerations and a series of reliability analyses, seventeen such scales were produced from the 101 items contained in the student's questionnaire and the three items from the teacher's questionnaire -the scales are described in Table 3.The internal consistency reliability of each of these subscales was measured by the Cronbach's Alpha coefficient.These coefficients ranged from .57to .88 with a mean coefficient of .72.Generally the more items a category contains, the higher the reliability estimate.Therefore, given the relative shortness of the scales, most of these estimates are acceptably high.

The whole sample
Following the reliability analysis, a correlation analysis was conducted to identify the interrelationship of the motivational variables and to examine the relationship of those factors with effort, motivated behaviour and achievement scores.The motivated behaviour scores were obtained from the 'Teacher's Evaluation of Student's Motivation Questionnaire'.The achievement scores were based on the first term examination marks of the school year.
The correlations for the whole sample (n=144) can be found in Table 4.As can be seen many coefficients are significant -there are a total of twenty three in all.Most significant correlations emerged with 'Effort'.This was to be expected because effort in this study was operationalised as 'intended effort' and was measured with the same item format and item type as the motivational variables.It is quite remarkable that as many as eight motivational variables correlated significantly with the 'Examination results'.This shows that motivation did play an important role in the students' learning outcomes.Although most of the motivational variables have a significant positive correlation with the criterion measure 'Effort', it is only 'Attitudes towards the English lessons' that has shown a highly significant positive relationship (i.e.significant at the p < .01level) with all the three criterion measures: 'Effort', 'Motivated behaviour' and 'Examination results'.This confirms the situation-specific emphasis of motivational studies.Further confirmation of this trend was obtained by the fact that no other variables have a correlation of over 0.5, and only three other scales, 'Satisfaction', 'Expectations of English' and 'Attitudes towards the textbook' have a correlation over 0.4 with the learning context, which is made up of components related to the lessons and textbook, together with satisfaction and expectations are major determinants of effort to do well in English classes.The impact of the learning context is also reflected by the correlation between 'Attitudes towards studying English' and 'Effort'.Thus, the above findings emphasise the importance of the learning situation level of student motivation, particularly the course-specific motivational components comprising the syllabus, materials, teaching method and tasks as outlined in Dörnyei's (1994) framework of L2 motivation.The results therefore give empirical support to Dörnyei's hypothetical construct.Further evidence to support this important finding can be found in eight studies conducted in different parts of the world.(Chambers, 1998(Chambers, , 1999;;Clément et al 1994;Donitsa-Schmidt et al 2004;Inbar et al 1999Inbar et al , 2001;;Mihaljević, 1996;Nikolov, 1999, Ozek & Williams 1999).These scholars have been cited in the introduction.In addition to this, Gardner's (1985) socio-educational model also includes attitudes towards the learning situation, which is related to evaluation of the teacher and course and is regarded as one of the main components of the integrative motive.This implies that the teacher and L2 course are directly linked to the L2 group, whereas in this study, the presence of significant correlations between integrative orientation and attitudes towards the lessons with effort lacks sufficient evidence to support a direct relationship to the L2 community.Rather integrative motivation and attitudes towards the English lessons are regarded as two separate constituents of L2 motivation.
Besides the teachers, parents are also influential figures in helping their children acquire an L2, as indicated by the significant positive correlation between 'External influences of parents' and 'Effort'.This is in agreement with a study carried out by MacIntyre, Baker, Clément & Conrod (2001), where results indicated a particularly salient parental influence.

Grades 7, 8 and 9, 10 combined
The results of the correlational analysis for Grades 7, 8 and 9, 10 are shown in Table 5.By splitting the sample into two sub-groups there are fewer significant correlations which are partly due to the reduced sample sizes.However, as can be seen in the table, another reason for the less clear cut picture is the difference between the two age groups.
Motivation does not seem to play a very salient role in junior high school in determining outcomes whereas it does in senior high school, and the changes are the combined function of two reasons: 1) As we will see later, motivation has been found to decrease significantly in the higher years.This means that in junior high school there is an overall level of motivation with far less variance than in senior high school, which depresses correlation coefficients in general.2) A second, more speculative, explanation is that as students mature their motivational perspectives become clearer: those who feel motivated and responded accordingly in the questionnaire really mean it, whereas in others demotivation has also been established by that stage.

The whole sample
The results of the correlation analyses indicate that there are differences between the motivational dispositions of various subgroups in the whole sample.This warranted performing a one-way between group analysis of variance (ANOVA) to compare the mean scores of the motivational variables and criterion measures (effort and motivated behaviour) across these sub-groups.
The scores across each of the five class groups are shown in Table 6.The ANOVA results reveal highly significant differences with regard to a number of key motivational variables.Following the analysis, a post-hoc comparison was performed to see which groups differed significantly from one another (See Table 7).Looking at the results (Table 7), a very consistent pattern emerges as the variables that show age difference are always characterised by a decline with age particularly amongst the older learners (Grades 9 and 10).This powerful and consistent trend, which has parallels in the literature (See the introduction of this paper), is one of the most important findings of this study, and it will be further examined in the following analyses.Also, the follow-up interviews will look into the broader issue of motivational change.

Grades 7, 8 and 9, 10 combined
The combination of Grades 7, 8 and 9, 10 was believed to be of particular importance in this analysis as it reflects the junior and senior high school division.In addition, it enabled the researcher to compare these results with that of other empirical studies which found that motivation towards learning a foreign language declines with age.
The results of this analysis reveal significant findings for Grades 7, 8 and 9, 10 (See Table 8).The consistent pattern that has been found shows that the lower grades (7 & 8) have received significantly higher mean scores for seven of the motivational variables and the criterion measure effort.These findings unambiguously confirm what has already been shown earlier that motivation decreases with age.Interestingly, these findings mirror those of Williams et al (2002) recent study and that of Chambers (1999).These authors found a decrease in motivation to learn French and German between Grades 7 and 9.In addition, Palicz (1994) also found that certain aspects of L2 motivation and the related activities of the learner seem to change in the course of time.Although some of the drops are greater than others -and particularly the 'Attitudes towards the coursebook' worsened -the negative shift appears to be a consistent characteristic of the sample.In order to shed more light on the reasons behind this powerful declining tendency, a round of qualitative interviews for students and teachers was conducted, the results of which will be reported below.

How important is it for you to study English?
From the analysis of the interviews, it is evident that all learners regard English as being an important language for them to study.This is particularly clear in their unanimous responses to Question 1.A typical learner response was as follows: "Very important because English is a language which is used in most countries and like for my studies and reading, watching television."

Changes in motivation
As was mentioned earlier, the main objective of the semi-structured interviews was to try to obtain a more in depth explanation as to why the motivation of the older learners' in particular towards learning a second/foreign language decreases with age as they enter the senior high school.
The results of the interviews appear to be in accordance with those of the quantitative comparisons based on the questionnaire data as all the interviewed students mentioned that they were motivated to some degree to learn English in the lower grades (Grades 6,7,& 8).The emerging patterns for Question 2 of the semi-structured interview indicate that the majority of learners' motivation decreased in the higher grades (Grades 9 and 10).One high school teacher highlights this by saying: "It's getting worse by the year.The loss of motivation is increasing." This finding casts more light on the temporal dimension of motivation and is in accordance with the findings of the post-hoc comparisons which revealed that age difference was always characterised by a decline with age, particularly amongst the older learners.
Students attributed their decrease in motivation mostly to the teachers and aspects related to the lessons.The teachers' findings are in accordance with the students as they also mentioned factors related to the teachers, such as, making classes interesting and explaining lessons clearly.This finding emphasises the importance of external factors related to the teacher and course-specific motivational components outlined in Dörnyei's (1994) framework of L2 motivation.

The school's motivational influence
Since students' motivation can be strongly affected by external and uncontrollable factors such as the school and the teachers' influence, Questions 3 and 4 attempted to elicit what students think the school and teachers can do to enhance their motivation.The results for the former question reveal that the majority of Grade 9 and 10 learners mentioned that the school should employ native-speaking and good teachers.

The teacher's motivational influence
To shed more light on the teacher's motivational influence, the responses to Question 4 showed that the majority of the older learners (Grades 9 and 10) mentioned that teachers should possess certain qualities amongst them are: (a) to make the lessons fun/interesting and also the teacher should be more interesting, too; (b) to explain well/more; (c) to be friendly/nice/kind and (d) to encourage students to study.The teacher's behaviour and lack of consideration towards the needs of the students can result in their low levels of motivation.This student says: "I think that my motivation is very low when I ask a question that I don't know and the teacher just totally just looks at me as if I'm stupid or something for not knowing this thing, but the teacher is there to teach you and you're trying to learn and they're trying to bring you down, so I feel very low about myself when like they just bring you down like that."This is how one student referred to the teacher's method of teaching: "When teachers aren't in the mood for explaining which is a lot of the time they just pass through everything because they have to and that just makes us feel like it's boring." This student expresses the importance for teachers to vary the lessons."Grammar is useful, but people need a change." Interestingly, the teachers' findings also concur with the results of the learners as students claim that their motivation can be enhanced by teacher-related factors such as encouraging students to study.One teacher explains how this can be done: "I think it will need to be a sort of collective effort on the part of the teachers, sort of encouraged by the administration, but excellence and good work could be rewarded openly, so there could be a school policy for rewarding good work." In accordance with these findings, Cheng & Dörnyei's (2007) study on Taiwanese teachers also found that teachers placed a high value on promoting student effort.
The results of this question confirmed the earlier findings that motivational change is to a large extent caused by the students' perception of the teacher.In agreement with these findings Chamber's (1999) study also found that of all the factors which may contribute to students' positive or negative evaluation of L2 learning, the teacher comes out on top for all cohorts surveyed.

Other influential factors
Question 5 sought to find out other factors that would help increase student motivation.The results for this question demonstrate that friends' positive comments can motivate them whereas negative comments can have a devastating affect on motivation.The majority of older learners stated that their friends' negative attitudes and comments about the teacher, lessons and school do strongly influence them.This student explains how his friend's negative comments affect his motivation: "Sometimes my friends when they say it's so boring and I have to like support them because I am bored, too.Sometimes when I'm not bored they say they're bored, I have to say I'm bored, too because I'll be an outcast from them, say they'll start making jokes out of me and stuff like that, so I have to agree with them all.It certainly decreases my motivation a lot.Always like everyday they say it once so I have to say it once and I start believing it's boring, start believing those words."

Conclusion
The current study was aimed at finding out the extent in which various factors affect students' motivation and achievement in foreign language learning particularly as they enter the senior high school and whether motivation decreases with age.The results of the quantitative data and qualitative interviews give further support to the findings of empirical research conducted in different parts of the world which found that motivation does decline with age.It was hypothesised at the outset that factors related to the learning context would have the greatest effect on the students' language learning due to the students' lack of exposure to native-speaking people.The findings confirm this hyposthesis as there are a number of different factors that can have a motivational influence on students' during the course of their studies.In the eyes of the learners, the teacher is seen to be the key figure in determining the attitude to the language and in shaping motivation.Therefore, the teacher has the complex task of generating initial student motivation and helping students maintain it.The teacher's support, enthusiasm, positive approach in providing a learning experience which is interesting is an important motivational component.The above findings provide further evidence of the importance of the Learning Situation Level including Teacher-Specific and Course-Specific Components outlined in Dörnyei's (1994)

Table 1 .
framework of L2 motivation.Grades, gender and language proficiency level of students included in the present study

Table 2 .
The main variables in the questionnaire and the number of items for each

Table 3 .
Number of items, reliability coefficients and sample items for all scales

Table 4 .
Pearson product-moment correlations between measures of motivational variables, effort, motivated behaviour and examinations results for the whole sample (Grades 6-10)

Table 5 .
Pearson product-moment correlations between measures of motivational variables, effort, motivated behaviour and examinations results for Grades 7, 8 and 9, 10

Table 6 .
The results of the one-way analysis of variance of the motivational variables and the criterion measures (effort and motivated behaviour) among Grades 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10

Table 7 .
Post-hoc comparison of the motivational variables and criterion measures among Grades 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 that showed a significance between-group difference in the ANOVA Least significant difference.Numbers refer to students grades; numbers in the same line indicate non-significant mean differences a