Significant demotivating factors affecting Saudi EFL students: An investigative study with PYP students
Background: Motivation has long been seen as a deciding factor in the learning of a foreign language and in ensuring success for the learners. As a corollary to this, demotivation adversely affects learning success and negatively influences learning outcomes. The present study examines the factors that negatively affect Saudi EFL learners.
Methods: The study subjects are 45 male and 35 female learners, and the data were collected using a 50-item questionnaire. The factors under study are course instructor, course-content and facilities, attitude towards EFL and socio-cultural factors. Data have been analyzed using the SPSS software.
Results: Results show that the factors around socio-cultural, and course instructor (M=4.06, 3.67) respectively were the most influential in aggravating the student’s demotivation. Furthermore, experience of failure is at play as a moderate factor (M=2.84) whereas the course content and facilities and attitude towards EFL factors, (M=2.57; M=1.83) are perceived as less influential factors in demotivating the EFL students. Findings also show a marginal non-significant difference between male and female participants regarding perceptions of the demotivating factors (males = 5.30, females= 5.70); the difference is not significant, P=, .834.
Conclusions: It is presumed that the findings of this study might be helpful for EFL learners and instructors of Saudi Arabia in devising coping strategies to overcome demotivation.
Corresponding author: Fahd Hamad Alqasham
Grant information: The author(s) declared that no grants were involved in supporting this work.
Copyright: © 2022 Alqasham FH. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
How to cite: Alqasham FH. Significant demotivating factors affecting Saudi EFL students: An investigative study with PYP students [version 1; peer review: awaiting peer review]. F1000Research 2022, 11:1459 (https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.125764.1)
